'Rush for Riches' chronicles first California gold rush
November 30, 1999
With the financial miracles in Silicon Valley producing 30-something millionaires by the boatload, a modern-day "gold rush" is occurring in California. Somewhat forgotten in the '90s rush to the bank is the original California Gold Rush, which 150 years ago offered the ambitious great wealth and set the stage for the economic growth of California.
Some, however, refuse to ignore the past.
Working from his tranquil studio in Carmel, Calif., J.S. Holliday, a 75-year-old
author and former executive director of both the Oakland Museum of
California and the California Historical Society, chooses to nurture his
creations using an electric typewriter, typing and retyping and typing
again his compositions, page by page. This process, he explains, sparks
his creativity in a way that electronic cutting and pasting cannot.
After four years of arduous banging on his antiquated writing tool,
Holliday has produced "Rush for Riches: Gold Fever and the Making of
California," his second historical treatise recounting the tale of
California's gold rush.
Employing the active voice along with frequent passages from miners'
diaries and letters, and period newspaper articles — ranging from stories doubting the existence of gold to editorials chastising
mining townspeople for their lack of morals — Holliday breathes life
and humor into the narrative.
'Quarreling and cheating
form
the employments,
drinking and gambling the
amusements, making the
largest
pile of gold
the only ambition of
the inhabitants.'
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Holliday steps back to 1849 — the year the intrepid
49ers rushed into California — to tell of gold's role, not
as an isolated historical event, but an innovative dynamic that shaped the
future of a state.
"In California," says Holliday, "there's a freedom that allows people to
be inventive and creative and risk-taking.
"California has projected an image into the world consciousness that was first projected during the gold rush, the image of
immediate opportunity to make a fortune, or at worst, a living."
Beginning in the late 1700s with the establishment of the Catholic
missions in the California territory, Holliday sets the stage of a land languishing under distracted Spanish and Mexican
rule. The indifference toward the
California "wasteland" made the territory ripe pickings for the resourceful
"yanquis" once James Marshall scooped the first flecks of
yellow metal from the American River in 1848.
By the summer of 1849, the rush was in full swing. California became a
territory of the United States that same year and a state the next. But
the fledgling government had neither the manpower nor the resources to
check the fortune-seeking hordes. The gold rush was a free-for-all.
Holliday paints California as a place to escape the tedium of routine and
discover a new life. The gold rush represented freedom to farm boys in
Kansas or clerks in Boston, who reveled in the Wild West lawless
experience where drinking, gambling and houses of ill repute - as well as
the not infrequent murder or lynching - were part of everyday life. Young
men, away from the eyes of family and church, were "free from the 19th
century for awhile," says Holliday.
As one New York clergymen visiting Sacramento in 1849 observes in a diary
entry appearing in Holliday's book, "The present of this city is under
canvas and the future on paper. Everything is new except the ground and
trees and the stars beneath which we sleep. Quarreling and cheating form
the employments, drinking and gambling the amusements, making the largest
pile of gold the only ambition of the inhabitants."
Fueled by what Holliday describes as an "enormous contagion of optimism"
and "changing opportunity," the gold rush mentality also drove other important industries in the state,
including timber, oil and agriculture, and even Hollywood and Silicon
Valley today.
"The inventiveness of these people," remarks Holliday. "They came here
with nothing, they didn't have a god damn thing but this wonderful
entrepreneurial drive. They were making money in so many ways. The result
is that California had become a place of daring enterprises."
Holliday's first book concerning the gold rush, "The World Rushed In: The
California Gold Rush Experience," was published in 1981 and is considered a
landmark account of the gold rush years. In fact, the San Francisco
Chronicle pegged "The World Rushed In" at the No. 22 spot on its "Western
100" list of the 20th century's 100 most important books about American
Western culture.
Co-published by the Oakland Museum of California and the University of
California Press, "Rush to Riches" serves as a major literary
commemorative to the state's sesquicentennial.
Laurel Chesky
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