The sequel to Lead Me Home takes place during the California Gold Rush and the development of California as a state. Some scenes are set in Monterey, California, during the Constitutional Convention of 1849. That convention was full of early California luminaries—delegates included John C. Frémont and Lansford Hasting, both […]
My Gold Rush posts this year have traced the spread of the news, from the discovery of gold in January 1848 until the knowledge reached distant corners of the earth. Although Johann Sutter wanted to keep the discovery secret, he could not contain news of such import, as we have […]
As Black History Month (February) winds to an end, I decided to post a bit of Californian history about African Americans and about my African American characters. I’ve posted before about African American history in the Oregon Territory. California was marginally more receptive to Blacks in that era, but not […]
Most of my historical posts this year have been about the Oregon Trail, because I’m working on another novel about an emigrant wagon train to Oregon. But this post is about the Gold Rush, the subject of my last novel, Now I’m Found. In April 2016, I wrote a post […]
Writers of historical fiction look for first-hand accounts of the time to give their stories depth and verisimilitude. I wrote an earlier post about a book purportedly by a Gold Rush prospector, California: Four Months Among the Gold-Finders in California; Being the Diary of an Expedition from San Francisco to […]
One of the problems I’ve had to deal with in my soon-to-be-published novel, Now I’m Found, is how gold was transported in California in 1848-50. The gold flakes and nuggets had to get from the mines where they were panned from the water or dug from the ground to the […]
As I continue to research and edit my work-in-progress about the early years of the California Gold Rush, I recently found some interesting first-person accounts in A Year of Mud and Gold: San Francisco in Letters and Diaries, 1849-1850, edited by William Benemann (1999). Some of the more fascinating information […]
I’ve blogged about some boring topics related to my research for my Oregon Trail and Gold Rush novels, but this post may discuss the most boring—banking. Yet one of the biggest problems I had in plotting my novel was how my protagonist could move money from the East Coast to […]
I’ve written about panning for gold and rockers and Long Toms. Inevitably, as the search for gold during the California Gold Rush, the miners developed more sophisticated methods of extracting gold. Sluicing was the next development after Long Toms. While some consider Long Toms to be primitive sluices, the difference […]
It wasn’t until December 1848 that President James Polk acknowledged that gold had been found in California. President Polk was a strong supporter of western expansion. He had worked to acquire Oregon south of the 49th parallel for the United States in 1846. The Mexican-American War which President Polk supported left […]
