Susan Lee JohnsonRoaring CampThe Social World of the California GoldrushWith the alchemy of great history, Susan Johnson transforms the familiar story of the Gold Rush into one that is sparkling and new. 
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You know about the Gold Rush: out West, sometime around '49, unshaven men named Stumpy and Kentuck raising hell and panning for gold. Stories like Bret Harte's "The Luck of Roaring Camp" set the mold. But that's not it, at least not all of it. Harte's Roaring Camp also features characters named French Pete and Cherokee Sal, hinting at a social vortex, multiracial, multiethnic, often homosocial, in which French men live alongside Anglos from the east and Cherokee women from Indian territory. Susan Johnson's Roaring Camp explores the dynamic social world created by the Gold Rush in the Sierra Nevada foothills around Stockton. In it we find Mexican families like the Murrietas who worked the mines, did the wash, and rose up against Anglo rule. There are the Miwok Indians who tried to maintain their traditions even while constructing the sawmill at Sutter's fort where gold was discovered in 1848. We enter the all-male households of the diggings, the mines where the men worked, the fandango houses where they played. With a keen eye for character and story, Johnson shows us how this peculiar world evolved into a more stable society, and how our cultural memory of the Gold Rush took root. Susan Lee Johnson is professor of history at the University of Colorado, Boulder. 2000 / cloth / ISBN 0-393-04812-8 / 6 1/8" X 9 1/4" / 15 photographs and one map / 352 pages / HISTORY/UNITED STATES | |||||
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