Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

An exploration of the California Gold Rush, linking it with attempts to join the state to the Confederacy. It all began at Sutter’s Mill, the mini-empire of “a failed clothier who’d abandoned his wife and five children in Switzerland and sailed to America.” John Sutter went as far as he dared in the remoteness of Mexican California to found “a private kingdom in the wilderness,” one staffed by enslaved Indigenous peoples, their numbers augmented by vigilante raids on neighboring villages, with Sutter trafficking captured women and children. In this account by Phibrick (In the Heart of the Sea, 2000;Travels With George, 2021, etc.), this theme of enslavement and violence defined California up to the Civil War and beyond, with white supremacy a constant. Indeed, California legislators worked to pass laws banning Black people from entering the state, while later railroad magnates attempted unsuccessfully to restrict transcontinental travel to whites only. Against this backdrop, an early senator, William Gwin, attempted to unite Southern California with the Confederacy, complete with importing enslaved Black people, but, on realizing that the northern part of the state had all the gold, he suggested that “the state should declare its independence as part of a Pacific Republic extending all the way east to the Rocky Mountains.” To his credit, a senior military officer stationed in California, the future Confederate general Albert Sidney Johnston, told his officers that should they wish to join the secessionist cause, they should go home to do so, saying, “Strife here would be civil war—not North against South—but neighbor against neighbor; and no one can imagine the horrors that would ensue.” All the same, vigilante violence was so extensive that California provided a “dress rehearsal” for the dissolution of the Union, even if the statehood conferred on California in 1850 admitted it as a free state. As ever, Philbrick untangles this complex story and makes of it an elegant narrative. A lucid, lively melding of economic and political history that casts new light on the Golden State. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

Award-winning, prolific historian Philbrick (Travels with George, 2021) presents a panoramic look at the California gold rush, California and the Civil War, and how they shaped the modern world. The main story, chronologically told with more than 80 illustrations, maps, and the Ghirardelli Chocolate origin story, is followed by a notes section where almost every informative entry is essay-length. Americans who flooded the gold fields, Philbrick reports, knew nothing about mining gold and needed help from Mexicans and Chileans; once they were successful, they turned on their teachers. Before becoming progressive, Californians had a penchant for solving problems with dueling, violence, lynching, and vigilantes, including street battles between supporters of the North and South before and during the Civil War. Philbrick unearths the crucial role that San Francisco freedwoman Mary Ellen Pleasant played in supporting John Brown. Philbrick’s history often has an elegiac side. For example, John Muir met Ralph Waldo Emerson in Yosemite, but settlers had driven the native Ahwahnechee from the valley. Philbrick also offers vivid and noteworthy accounts of clipper ships, pre-Panama Canal travel, and the remarkabale work done by the Chinese men who built the transcontinental railroad. The book ends deftly, tracing a throughline from the free-wheeling prospectors and their world to today’s tech bros.

Publishers Weekly
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This sweeping study from historian Philbrick (Travels with George) details how the California Gold Rush gave birth to modern America. Only nine days after gold was struck on January 24, 1848, the U.S. signed the treaty in which Mexico ceded California. The promise of gold lured men from across the newly expanded country: a “seething impatience gripped the American people that hasn’t let go of us yet.” The titular “rush” is the touchstone of the narrative, referring to a hurry-scurry imperative to gain wealth and power. In Philbrick’s expansive telling, the “rush” had a deleterious effect on everything from the lives of immigrants and Native peoples to the integrity of America’s legal and judicial systems, and even hastened the nation’s descent into civil war. But it was also a catalyst for astonishing technological advancements, from the transatlantic railroad to motion pictures. Tracing stories as varied as those of white supremacists vying for control of San Francisco, Chilean miners persecuted despite admiration for their expertise, and Leland Stanford’s consolidation of power as a railroad executive, Philbrick traces how various tenets of modern American life found their beginning in the Gold Rush, from capitalism’s stranglehold on democracy to xenophobia’s weaponization by nativists to Americans’ confidence in innovation. It’s a gripping account of the California dreaming that propelled America forward, for better or worse. (Oct.)