THE CALIFORNIA GOLD. RUSH From Sutter's Mill to Statehood
Par :Formats :
Disponible dans votre compte client Decitre ou Furet du Nord dès validation de votre commande. Le format ePub est :
- Compatible avec une lecture sur My Vivlio (smartphone, tablette, ordinateur)
- Compatible avec une lecture sur liseuses Vivlio
- Pour les liseuses autres que Vivlio, vous devez utiliser le logiciel Adobe Digital Edition. Non compatible avec la lecture sur les liseuses Kindle, Remarkable et Sony
, qui est-ce ?Notre partenaire de plateforme de lecture numérique où vous retrouverez l'ensemble de vos ebooks gratuitement
Pour en savoir plus sur nos ebooks, consultez notre aide en ligne ici
C'est si simple ! Lisez votre ebook avec l'app Vivlio sur votre tablette, mobile ou ordinateur :
- FormatePub
- ISBN8905160271
- EAN9798905160271
- Date de parution30/05/2026
- Protection num.Digital Watermarking
- Taille154 Ko
- Infos supplémentairesepub
- ÉditeurChiify
Résumé
On January 24, 1848, a carpenter named James Marshall spotted a metal flake in a millrace on the American River. Within months, the word had spread from California to Chile, China, Cornwall, and New South Wales. Within a year, ninety thousand forty-niners were headed west. The Gold Rush that followed was the largest voluntary mass migration in human history - and one of the most destructive episodes in American history, depending on whose history you are reading.
James R.
Whitfield's narrative holds both of those truths simultaneously. On one side: the transformation of California from a remote Mexican territory of fourteen thousand non-Native settlers to an American state of nearly four hundred thousand in little over a decade. San Francisco's explosive rise from a small port to a global commercial city. The $2 billion in nineteenth-century gold that financed the Transcontinental Railroad and reshaped American capitalism.
The boomtowns - Coloma, Hangtown, Mokelumne Hill - with their French and German newspapers, their canvas saloons, and the two hundred named camps whose traces have nearly vanished from the landscape. On the other side: the deliberate destruction of California's Indigenous population, which fell from 150, 000 to under 30, 000 in twelve years, through state-legislature-approved killing campaigns whose budgets Whitfield documents in full.
The Chinese miners who answered the call of "Gold Mountain, " built communities in the diggings, and were rewarded with the Foreign Miners' Tax, expulsion, and erasure from the official story. And John Sutter himself - the man on whose land the discovery was made - who died broke in Washington in 1880, still petitioning Congress for restitution, his workers gone, his wheat rotted, his land titles in permanent litigation. The environmental reckoning came later but was equally severe.
Hydraulic mining - water cannons dismantling entire Sierra Nevada hillsides - sent 1.5 billion cubic yards of debris down the Sacramento River system, destroying farmland, choking waterways, and producing America's first major environmental court ruling in 1884, when a federal judge ordered the monitors shut down. The half-pea-sized flake Marshall picked from the tailrace is in the Smithsonian today.
Whitfield's history is an account of everything it set in motion - the economy it built, the civilization it destroyed, and the environmental damage it left behind that California's rivers still carry.
Whitfield's narrative holds both of those truths simultaneously. On one side: the transformation of California from a remote Mexican territory of fourteen thousand non-Native settlers to an American state of nearly four hundred thousand in little over a decade. San Francisco's explosive rise from a small port to a global commercial city. The $2 billion in nineteenth-century gold that financed the Transcontinental Railroad and reshaped American capitalism.
The boomtowns - Coloma, Hangtown, Mokelumne Hill - with their French and German newspapers, their canvas saloons, and the two hundred named camps whose traces have nearly vanished from the landscape. On the other side: the deliberate destruction of California's Indigenous population, which fell from 150, 000 to under 30, 000 in twelve years, through state-legislature-approved killing campaigns whose budgets Whitfield documents in full.
The Chinese miners who answered the call of "Gold Mountain, " built communities in the diggings, and were rewarded with the Foreign Miners' Tax, expulsion, and erasure from the official story. And John Sutter himself - the man on whose land the discovery was made - who died broke in Washington in 1880, still petitioning Congress for restitution, his workers gone, his wheat rotted, his land titles in permanent litigation. The environmental reckoning came later but was equally severe.
Hydraulic mining - water cannons dismantling entire Sierra Nevada hillsides - sent 1.5 billion cubic yards of debris down the Sacramento River system, destroying farmland, choking waterways, and producing America's first major environmental court ruling in 1884, when a federal judge ordered the monitors shut down. The half-pea-sized flake Marshall picked from the tailrace is in the Smithsonian today.
Whitfield's history is an account of everything it set in motion - the economy it built, the civilization it destroyed, and the environmental damage it left behind that California's rivers still carry.
