Art Of The Gold Rush

"Art of the Gold Rush" features drawings and oil paintings of images of the scenery, people, and activity surrounding the 80,000 travelers to California in search of golden nuggets.

In 1858, some 30,000 gold seekers stampeded to the Fraser River. Scores perished during the gruelling journey, but some made their fortune and many pressed on northwards to the creeks of the Cariboo. Originally compiled by Art Downs, founder of Heritage House, this is a vivid and detailed account of the first gold strikes, the miners who made them and the incredible efforts to establish transportation routes and build roads to the Cariboo goldfields. Here are the stories of the legendary Williams Creek diggings, which yielded a golden harvest of over $2.6 million in 1862, and creeks with names like Lightning, Jack of Clubs and Last Chance. Also included are excerpts from the journals of Lord Milton and Walter B. Cheadle, who became the first tourists to the Cariboo in 1863. Richly descriptive and touched with humour, their first-hand account is a fascinating window into Cariboo history.

Matthew Solomon's study of Chaplin's The Gold Rush (1925) provides an in-depth discussion of the film's production and reception history, placing it in the context of the turn-of-the-century Alaska Klondike gold rush, and analyses the film's narrative and formal features, particularly its references to music-hall performance styles and tropes.

A newly revised and updated edition of the classic pictorial account of the Cariboo Gold Rush trail. First published in 1960, Wagon Road North is the quintessential popular history book chronicling gold-rush-era BC. Focusing on the Cariboo Wagon Road—the crucial transportation route stretching from Fort Yale to Barkerville that made it possible for tens of thousands of prospectors to make their way to the Cariboo goldfields in the 1860s—this newly updated, expanded, and re-designed edition brings to life the adventures, hardships, and blind ambitions of the men and women who risked everything in the quest for gold. Packed with more than one hundred archival photos, many of them rarely seen, as well as maps and contemporary images of historical sites, this fascinating book is a visual celebration of a pivotal chapter in early BC history.

In January of 1848, James Marshall discovered gold at Sutter's Mill in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. For a year afterward, news of this discovery spread outward from California and started a mass migration to the gold fields. Thousands of people from the East Coast aspiring to start new lives in California financed their journey West on the assumption that they would be able to find wealth. Some were successful, many were not, but they all permanently changed the face of the American West. In this text, Mark Eifler examines the experiences of the miners, demonstrates how the gold rush affected the United States, and traces the development of California and the American West in the second half of the nineteenth century. This migration dramatically shifted transportation systems in the US, led to a more powerful federal role in the West, and brought about mining regulation that lasted well into the twentieth century. Primary sources from the era and web materials help readers comprehend what it was like for these nineteenth-century Americans who gambled everything on the pursuit of gold.

Traces the history of the California Gold Rush from 1849 through 1884 when a court decision forced the shut down of the hydraulic mining operations, bringing decades of careless freedom to an end.