Here are the letters and diaries of ordinary men and women caught up in the rapid transformation of San Francisco during its gold rush heyday, 1849-50. Together these accounts render a rich mosaic of San Francisco's metamorphosis from a small Mexican outpost into a rough-and-tumble boomtown filled with gamblers and prostitutes, evangelists and entrepreneurs - men, women, and children from all parts of the country, arriving in California with the dream of striking it rich. The correspondents come from a variety of economic and social backgrounds. Some are barely literate, while others craft prose on par with the finest nineteenth-century travel literature. Their writings address a broad range of concerns, from business prospects and consumer prices to social mores and popular amusements. The letters and diaries also hold clues to processes central to frontier history: the Americanization of Hispanic California, the stresses that migration placed on individuals and families, the fluidity of boomtown economies, and the nature of gender and race relations in an urban population of immigrants.
William Benemann is head of technical services at Boalt Hall Law School Library and a former librarian at the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley.
- ISBN10 0803212933
- ISBN13 9780803212930
- Publish Date 1 September 1999
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 11 July 2009
- Publish Country US
- Imprint University of Nebraska Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 241
- Language English