3 June 2011 GOLD! GOLD FROM THE AMERICAN RIVER!: JANUARY 24, 1848, THE DAY THE GOLD RUSH BEGAN by Don Brown, February 2011, Roaring Brook/Flashpoint, 64p., ISBN: 978-1-59643-223-9

Gold's a hot commodity today (as it's been for thousands of years).  Walking through the mall the other day, there were two different kiosks where you could get top dollar for any gold you've recently dug up.

In reflecting upon Don Brown's fabulously engaging illustrated introduction to the California Gold Rush, I began wondering how California today might be a far different place had the 1849 California Gold Rush never taken place.  Some questions that come to mind are:

What would they have called the forty-niners if gold had, instead, been discovered in 1850 or 1851?Would California still be home to twelve percent of the US population?Would the state capital still have become Sacramento?

Would the Giants and the Dodgers still have come west?

Would there still have been the Beach Boys and the Grateful Dead and the Beverly Hillbillies?

Would Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan still have become President?

What would I have been wearing over the past four decades instead of Levi's?

Would I still have moved to California?

As a kid on Long Island, I learned all about the California Gold Rush by reading Sid Fleischman's BY THE GREAT HORN SPOON.  (I still highly recommend it.)  Here in California, we study the California Gold Rush as part of the fourth grade year of exploring California history.  Like the proverbial plague of locusts, swarms of northern California fourth grade classes head over to Sutter's Fort in Sacramento to check out where the action began. 

Having made that trek a decade ago, with my youngest son's fourth grade class, I have to say that you won't miss much if you're from Minnesota or Tennessee and you never get to see Sutter's Fort. 

But if you want to find out about and be entertained by a colorful and pivotal episode in US history, Don Brown's action-packed picturebook chronicle of the Gold Rush is just the ticket.  Brown has made great use of the first-hand accounts of the California Gold Rush from the Library of Congress's online exhibit, and has once again employed his trademark pen and ink illustrations to bring all of the action to life.    

"'I have now spent four months and one half in this place and worked hard and been diligent...and live...as I would hardly ask a dog to live,' said Hiram Pierce, a blacksmith from New York.

"'After all our preparations and hopes, our toil early and late, toil of the most laborious kind, digging, down in the...river till the water was up to our knees, giving ourselves barely time to eat, we have made but $4 each,' another miner complained.

"Worn down, one of every five forty-niners died from disease or accident within the first six months of arriving in California."

The California Gold Rush is a tale of danger and greed and adventure and I just love the action and drama that saturate Brown's illustrations: the guy with the backpack tramping his way through the jungles of Panama; the litterbugs tossing furniture out of their covered wagons to make the loads lighter; the horses rearing up as they strain to drag the wagons through the mud; the Forty-Niner holding his empty pockets turned inside out.

And the hauntingly ugly illustration of what was done to the California Indians.

"In the days of old, in the days of gold

How oft'times I repine for the days of old

When we dug up the gold, in the days of '49."

-- Traditional

I wonder whether there is still some gold around here to dig up...

Richie Partington, MLIS
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