The Gold Rush

First published in 1850 as Six Months in the Gold Mines, this is Edward Gould Buffum's first-person account of California after the 1848 find. A former New York Volunteer, he describes San Francisco and Sacramento at inflated prices, then life in the diggings: staking claims, washing gravel, claim jumping, winter weather, and the mix of Americans, Europeans, and others at the creeks. He notes law as miners made it and the gap between rumour of fortunes and daily yield. The book is a contemporary prospecting narrative, not a later history of the state and not a biography of the forty-niners as a group.

Bound in blue cloth, illustrative yellow cover-label. Blue-grey slipcase.