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The dirt under your fingernails puts a smile on your face.
That soil represents a lot for you: a project finished or a problem solved, future flowers or dinner, a treasure hunt or a fun day with the kids just digging in the soil. You never know what you'll find beneath the sod.
As in the new book "The Rush" (Viking, $38, 464 pages) by Nathaniel Phlbrick, the right discovery could change the world.
At first, a place called "California" was just an imagined thing, the fabrication of a novelist in 1510. His story included brave knights and lots of gold, and Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes' men dreamed about it while they were plundering the riches of Mexico.
Did carpenter James Marshall know of the legend? Philbrick doesn't say, but he tells the story of Marshall, who was working one summer day in 1844, finishing the construction of John Sutter's mill, when he bent down to peer at something flashing on the ground. He found just "a teaspoon" of tiny, shiny flakes, but it was enough to set off a nationwide obsession.
It didn't take long for word to travel east, or for would-be treasure hunters to fill San Francisco, Sacramento, or surrounding areas. The vast majority were men who brought guns, a disdain for the Indigenous people there, an overwhelming mania to get rich quick and sometimes, they brought slaves.
When William Gwin arrived in San Francisco in the summer of 1849, he was a rarity: he wasn't interested in gold. A Southern Democrat from Tennessee, he told everyone who'd listen that he was more focused on "obtaining and maintaining political power." That power, and a hand in determining California as a free state or a slave state, was what mattered to Gwin.
Says Philbrick, the War Between the States was years away, but arguments over slavery roiled the San Francisco area then. And so, "in a very real sense," he says, what was brewing in California during the gold rush was the earliest beginning of the Civil War...
So you say you like bright, shiny things? Add some excitement to the rings on your fingers and the bells on your toes by reading "The Rush."
If it's been a minute since you've had a history lesson, pull up a chair. Author Nathaniel Philbrick has a lot of surprises for you here, in the form of gorgeous descriptions, wild exploits, and threads crisscrossing from east to west. Where they occurred, though seemingly random, still means something today. Indeed, the gold rush wasn't just about gold or prospecting or even about a major city that burned every few months of its early existence. It was about racism, nativism, uprisings, bandits, hangings, land theft, politics, and espionage, in a sometimes-rollicking tale that pulls history together cohesively, and that'll make you see California in a whole new way.
Lovers of a good western will enjoy this book, as will history buffs and political watchers. Or if you'd simply like an all-true tale of Au, action, adventure, and abolition, "The Rush" nails it.