FORTY-NINERS (340 pp.)—Archer Butler Hulbert—Little, Brown ($4).
GOLD RUSH ALBUM (239 pp.)—Edited by Joseph Henry Jackson—Scribner ($10).
The year of discovery was 1848. The cry of "Gold!—gold on the American River!" roused the California towns. But it took months for the news to reach the Atlantic seaboard, spread to Europe and the remote Pacific. Then, 100 years ago this winter, the rush began.
Within four years, drowsing California was to grow from 20,000 people (excluding the Indians nobody ever bothered to count) to more than 200,000; some $200 million worth of gold was to be scooped and strained from stream beds and hillsides, and California itself was to enter the Union (in 1850) as the 31st state.
Thousands of Argonauts found bitter disappointment in California; other thousands died without ever getting there. Those who chose the long trip around Cape Horn (best time: 89 days) risked storms and shipwreck; on the land-and-water route via the Isthmus of Panama (33 to 35 days), the perils included yellow fever and cholera. By the Overland and Santa Fe Trails, over which 50,000 traveled in 1849 alone, the trip could take all spring and all summer—and the gold seeker, plodding onward beyond the alkali desert in the Humboldt Valley, thought himself lucky to get across the Sierras* before the first snows.
Ignorant & Unbeatable. The 100th anniversary of the gold rush has been celebrated in an armful of volumes so far this year, and at least two of them are outstanding. Gold Rush Album is a handsome collection of pictures, cartoons, handbills and newspaper facsimiles from the great days of the rush. Forty-Niners is a new edition of what is now almost a classic work of research by Author Hulbert into the daily life of those who traveled overland. Together they give an unforgettable impression of a mighty movement of people, unorganized and yet queerly efficient, undisciplined and yet tenacious, unbeatable, ignorant, misled, unprepared, unaided, persisting despite almost every obstacle.
The news of Gold Rush Album is that such superb pictorial records of the migration were kept. Editor Jackson's collection begins with pastoral glimpses of California, includes the early accounts of the discovery of gold, and scenes along the various routes—the Lassen Road, the Salt Lake-Los Angeles road, the southwestern route through Santa Fe, Tucson and Fort Yuma, the route across the Isthmus, the voyages around the Cape. It includes as well such unexpected items as eleven pages of the work of two Cuban artists, Augusto Ferran and Jose Baturone, whose quaintly bearded, drunken and belligerent miners, drawn from life in San Francisco, bear a vague resemblance to the Seven Dwarfs.
Among the best is a series of drawings from official documents of the 29th-34th Congresses, by unidentified artists: scenes of camps and deserts, with the exquisite finish and the unearthliness of Dali's early work—a train of mules vanishing, single file, into the haze of the desert, ridden by grave, top-hatted emigrants; a mirage of tall minareted cities, floating on the horizon.