Book Notes

(from the California HISTORIAN)

Rooted in Barbarous Soil: People, Culture, and Community in Gold  Rush California
Kevin Starr and Richard J. Orsi, Editors
University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 2000, Published in association with the California Historical Society, 346 pages

Reviewed by Lynn Downey
Historian, Levi Strauss & Co.

The Gold Rush is the Energizer bunny of California history. Just when you think it is about to run out of steam and topple over from sheer inertia, it revives and emerges as strong as ever.

The latest evidence of this phenomenon is the stream of books that appeared during and just following the 150th anniversary of the gold discovery in 1998. The book under consideration here is the third volume in the California Historical Society's “California History Sesquicentennial Series.” In his Introduction, Kevin Starr says that the purpose of the book (and of the series as a whole) is to memorialize and make sense of the gold rush experience. This particular volume is devoted to showing how Americans took their Gold Rush experience and fashioned it into community, popular culture and art.

I have to admit that I am not a big fan of Gold Rush histories. Perhaps this is because everything I read (or was asked to read, as a fourth grader in the 1960s) has been concerned with the surface story, as if I could understand the Gold Rush by simply knowing how placer mining worked, or how rough life was in the diggings. The Argonauts were paper cutouts, not made of flesh and blood, and for this, they lost my interest.

I was therefore surprised and delighted to discover that the purpose of Rooted in Barbarous Soil was to plant the Gold Rush into real life. The essays in the book, each written by a variety of scholars of the West, are devoted to the migration experience, ethnicity and race, urbanism, women, art, literature, education, religion, popular culture and sex. If there is a collection of topics better suited to expressing the transforming experience of a major historical event, I'd like to hear about it.

Starr's introduction gets us ready for the essays by stating that the research that went into their creation is both unsentimental and revisionist. The essays are meant to act as a mirror to the present and show us for what we were, as painful as that sometimes is. The essays on settlement and race are especially unsparing, yet all of the authors manage to make their points without losing the reader to either guilt or ennui. What the volume does as a whole is strike a balance between atrocity and art and I finished the book with a greater understanding of this extraordinary period.

Out of all the essays, the image that stayed with me was a description of San Francisco at night, written by Bayard Taylor in 1850. The evocation of light in the midst of total darkness seems an apt metaphor for the way in which many writers have dealt with those who rushed for gold: they were either hardy Argonauts or venal opportunists. Rooted in Barbarous Soil shows us that these black and white characterizations have no place in a modern understanding of the era which gave birth to the Golden State.

“The appearance of San Francisco at night, from the water, is unlike anything I ever beheld. The houses are mostly of canvas, which is made transparent by the lamps within, and transforms them, in the darkness, to dwellings of solid light. Seated on the slopes of its three hills, the tents pitched among the chaparral to the very summits, it gleams like an amphitheatre of fire...” (p. 210).