You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
In 1808 the Sv. Nikolai, owned by the Russian American Company, set sail from New Arkhangel (modern-day Sitka, Alaska) to explore and identify a site for a permanent Russian fur trading post on the mainland south of Vancouver Island. Heavy seas drove the ship aground in late December, forcing twenty-two crew members ashore, including Anna Petrovna Bulygin, the wife of ship captain Nikolai Isaakovich Bulygin. Over the next several months the shipwrecked crew clashed with Hohs, Quileutes, and Makahs, but with little knowledge of the country, the castaways soon found themselves owing their lives to the very tribes they had fought with upon arrival. The tribes captured and enslaved several of th...
In 1862 Edwin Ruthven Purple seized the chance to strike it rich in the newly discovered goldfields of the northern Rocky Mountains. With an introduction and thorough annotations by Kenneth N. Owens, Perilous Passage offers Purple's never-before-published, first-person narrative. On hand for the crimes that led to vigilante justice, Purple chronicled the story of a raucous, sometimes murderous life among bonanza miners.
Combines narrative history and firsthand Mormon accounts that cast light on the presence of Latter-day Saints in California during the Gold Rush in the middle 1840s. Reprint.
An event of international significance, the California gold rush created a more diverse, metropolitan society than the world had ever known. In Riches for All, leading scholars reexamine the gold rush, evaluating its trajectory and legacy within a global context of religion and race, economics, technology, law, and culture. The opportunity for instant wealth directly influenced a dynamic range of peoples, including Mormon military veterans, California Indian workers, both slave and free African Americans, Chinese village farmers, skilled Mexican miners, and Chilean merchants. Riches for All gives attention to the varying motivations and experiences of these groups and to their struggles with both racial and religious bigotry. Emphasizing gold rush social history, some contributors examine the roles and influence of women, workers, law-breakers, and law-enforcers. Others consider the long-term impact of this episode on California and the American West and on subsequent gold rushes in Pacific Rim countries and the Klondike. With lively and incisive strokes, these historians sketch the most broadly contextualized and nuanced portrait of the California gold rush to date.
A dramatic history of a group of families in post-gold rush California who turned to agriculture when mining failed. “It is a glorious country,” exclaimed Stephen J. Field, the future U.S. Supreme Court justice, upon arriving in California in 1849. Field’s pronouncement was more than just an expression of exuberance. For an electrifying moment, he and another 100,000 hopeful gold miners found themselves face-to-face with something commensurate to their capacity to dream. Most failed to hit pay dirt in gold. Thereafter, one illustrative group of them struggled to make a living in wheat, livestock, and fruit along Putah Creek in the lower Sacramento Valley. Like Field, they never forgot ...
A fully revised and updated new edition of the classic history of western America The newly revised second edition of this concise, engaging, and unorthodox history of America’s West has been updated to incorporate new research, including recent scholarship on Native American lives and cultures. An ideal text for course work, it presents the West as both frontier and region, examining the clashing of different cultures and ethnic groups that occurred in the western territories from the first Columbian contacts between Native Americans and Europeans up to the end of the twentieth century.