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Jackson California Gold Rush Album

Book Name: California Gold Rush Album

Author: Jackson

Published: 1949

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Jackson California Gold Rush Album

Charles Scribner's Sons, 1949 Profusely illustrated. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1949. First edition. Published in commemoration of its centennial anniversary, this pictorial history of the California Gold Rush incorporates 352 authentic sketches, paintings, and photographs, most of which are contemporary, and frequently by the 49ers themselves. Black cloth binding, with gilt lettering. Some faint strips of offsetting to the flyleaves. The dust jacket is edgeworn and a bit rubbed, with a lengthy tear to the bottom half of the front spine fold, chipping along the top edge of the rear panel, and some tape reinforcement to the verso.

The beginning of the year 1849 one topic was uppermost in men's minds everywhere-the gold fields of California. There was reason enough for this. America was fidgety, for one thing. Young men, only a generation away from the excitements of their country's pioneering beginnings, were growing weary of the counting-house, the rocky New England farms, the dawn-to-dark hard labor of making a living on the new lands their fathers had broken to the plow on what was then thought to be the extreme rontier. The Mexican War was over, too, and had left a new spirit of restlessness in its rake. Now, providentially, here was a fresh adventure. In California a man might pick up is everlasting fortune for no more than the trouble of the bending over. Gold, as it has lways been, was a powerful word, a charm to unlock who knew how many gates. As the year began, the New York Herald described the state of affairs accurately in he circumlocutory journalese of the day: