| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 40.1

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| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 40.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Hard Road West: History and Geology along the Gold Rush Trail. By Keith Heyer Meldahl. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. xxi + 329 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $25.00, £16.00.)

In Hard Road West, Keith Heyer Meldahl considers the gold rush migration from a scientific perspective, reconstructing the physical environment confronted by those who traveled west in the mid-nineteenth century. Meldahl's book is presented as a journey, or, rather, two journeys. First, he uses emigrant diaries, letters, and reminiscences to chart the overland journey from Missouri to California. The book is interspersed with examples of the hopes held, not to mention the hardships endured, by those Americans moved to seek out the gold discovered at Sutter's sawmill in January 1848. The primary sources emphasize the monotonous and frequently dangerous reality of transcontinental travel by wagon, across often inhospitable terrain. But scholars of the human dimension of the gold rush migration will not learn anything new here. Emigrant writings invoke, for Meldahl, the concept of Manifest Destiny and "the simple allure of new beginnings in an expansionist age" (p. 72). But these travel accounts are used as counterpoints to a second, parallel narrative rather than to explore in detail the subtleties of intra-American migration.

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