
With the exception of the call to arms in the North and South in 1861, no moment of nineteenth-century America was more electrifying than the shout, "GOLD ON THE AMERICAN RIVER!" first heard in San Francisco in the spring of 1848. Within a year, tens of thousands of dreamers...

"Gold Gold on the American River " This declaration, shouted in the streets of San Francisco in the spring of 1848, electrified the nation, and its echo was heard in the farthest corners of the globe. In the five years that followed, tens of thousands of hopeful argonauts made...