The Gold Rush Writers

There is plenty of real historical value in the writers who emerged during the California goldrush -and plenty of human meaning which existed in the rough camps, along the rivers and creeks.

As fate would have it, the author once lived near the San Juan Ridge, near Moonshine Creek & Bullard’s Bar, rich with goldrush history. The Sierra Nevada foothills had attracted a new breed of residents, including modern creatives such as Terry Riley, & Gary Snyder To add another layer of California resonance the author is a 7th generation Californian, whose ancestors lived in the Northern Redwoods during the gold rush.

San Francisco and the Gold Rush produced a small, overlapping set of writers whose published work permanently altered which correlations about the camps, the city, and the decade remained available to later readers. The principal ones, in roughly the order their records entered circulation, are these:

These writers did not agree. Harte’s temporary order, Twain’s exposed fraud, Miller’s heroic pose, Coolbrith’s quieter continuity, and Bierce’s later scorn are mutually incompatible descriptions of overlapping ground. What they share is that each configuration became part of the permanent record. Later agents could consult more than one of them; none of them erased the others.

The records available about the Gold Rush camps and early San Francisco were not fixed by the events themselves. Bret Harte’s Overland Monthly stories made one set of correlations stable: temporary order could appear around an infant or a code. Mark Twain’s sketches and “Jumping Frog” made a second set stable: the same camps could be recorded as arenas of transparent fraud and failed seriousness. Joaquin Miller added the self-dramatizing heroic pose; Ina Coolbrith and Charles Warren Stoddard kept quieter, domestic, and affectionate correlations in circulation; Ambrose Bierce later supplied the corrosive refusal of all of them.

These configurations contradict one another. They do not cancel one another. What a later historian can know about that decade is the set of correlations that remain reconstructible, not a single trajectory the decade was required to follow.

It is up to us, as the historians who now reconstruct the gold rush from our vantage point, whether we select to designate Bierce’s story as preternaturally quantum in character. The way in which it leaves the reader with a character both alive and dead would indicate such a modern apprehension.

When added to the collection of writers we already have assembled the historical point of view reveals that perceptions of history, as it happens, are individually perceived, and decidedly parallax identity in character.

Encoded in the language is a very old ancient story about what it means to be human and how the thread of pale blue fire is woven solidly into our literary history.