The Log of a Forty-niner


Book Description




The Diary of a Forty-niner


Book Description

Chauncey de Leon Canfield (1843-1909) first published "The diary of a forty-niner" in 1906, and 1,200 of the 2,000 copies in that edition were burned. Joseph Gaer's Bibliography of California literature describes this book as written in the form of a diary, but fictional. The diary of a forty-niner (1920) reprints Canfield's 1906 publication. It purports to be the diary of Alfred T. Jackson, of Litchfield County, Connecticut, during his days as a gold prospector, 1850-1852. Jackson offers first-hand accounts of Nevada City and neighboring Rock Creek; descriptions of Grass Valley, North and South Yuba Valleys, and the Sierra Mountains; details of gold mining with accounts of pioneer overland crossings, and foreign mineworkers (including Chinese). Entries concerning Jackson's personal life include details of his courtship of a French woman in the camps.




Forty-niners 'round the Horn


Book Description

Drawing upon more than one hundred unpublished diaries, Schultz profiles the individuals who embarked on these journeys and demonstrates how markedly the gold rush voyages differed from general commercial trading and whaling ventures."--BOOK JACKET.







The Hell-roarin' Forty-niners


Book Description

Stories of gold mining in the Sierras and the miners and townspeople, rough groups.




Top 10


Book Description

The massive, multilayered city of Neopolis, built shortly after World War II, was designed as a home for the expanding population of science-heroes, heroines and villains that had ballooned into existence in the previous decade. In 1985 the city accepted jurisdiction by a police force covering many alternate Earths, headquartered on the world known as Grand Central. Our own outpost of this network, Precinct Ten (known affectionately as Top 10), recruits its members from Neopolis and its environs, working much like Earth’s other police precincts, with one major exception: Like the citizens of the city, the officers of Top 10 have the abilities needed to deal with Neopolis’s exotic denizens. Rookie cop Robyn Slinger, alter ego “Toybox,” hits the streets for the first time along with a colorful crew of fellow officers, each having the required training to deal with science-villains and super-crimes, as well as the common misdemeanors of city life. You’ll never look at powers, or police work, the same way again! From Alan Moore, the writer of WATCHMEN and V FOR VENDETTA, and artists Gene Ha (JUSTICE LEAGUE) and Zander Cannon (Transformers), the Eisner award-winning series TOP 10 is collected here in its entirety!







Recollections of a '49er


Book Description

From the preface: Such a work as Edward McIlhany's is most valuable because it gives an insight into the life and struggles of the "days of '49" that the ordinary history, embellished as it may be, must needs lack.




American Alchemy


Book Description

California during the gold rush was a place of disputed claims, shoot-outs, gambling halls, and prostitution; a place populated by that rough and rebellious figure, the forty-niner; in short, a place that seems utterly unconnected to middle-class culture. In American Alchemy, however, Brian Roberts offers a surprising challenge to this assumption. Roberts points to a long-neglected truth of the gold rush: many of the northeastern forty-niners who ventured westward were in fact middle-class in origin, status, and values. Tracing the experiences and adventures both of these men and of the "unseen" forty-niners--women who stayed back East while their husbands went out West--he shows that, whatever else the gold seekers abandoned on the road to California, they did not simply turn their backs on middle-class culture. Ultimately, Roberts argues, the story told here reveals an overlooked chapter in the history of the formation of the middle class. While the acquisition of respectability reflects one stage in this history, he says, the gold rush constitutes a second stage--a rebellion against standards of respectability.