| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

After the Gold Rush: Tarnished Dreams in the Sacramento Valley. By David Vaught. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. xiv, 310 pp. $55.00, ISBN 978-0-8018-8497-9.)
David Vaught set himself the goal of writing a "new" rural history of California, examining the state's wheat farmers in their social and cultural contexts. In After the Gold Rush, he achieves his goal admirably, rendering moot the question he posed earlier in an article in Agricultural History, "State of the Art—Rural History, or, Why Is There No Rural History of California?" (Fall 2000).	1
Using documents from county archives (normally the precinct of genealogists), state and federal court records, and a wealth of individual family sources, Vaught rescues from obscurity the miners-turned-farmers who were pioneer agriculturalists in the lower Sacramento Valley during the latter half of the nineteenth century. He focuses on five families around Putah Creek, tracing their trajectory from their midwestern roots through the vortex of the gold rush to their determined efforts to succeed as farmers. Vaught argues that the gold rush was the defining experience of their lives, leaving them with a profound sense of personal failure. "The sheer excitement, supreme optimism, and high drama of the gold rush both motivated and haunted them for the rest of their lives" (p. 7). Indeed, that is Vaught's interpretive theme: their failure as miners lent an "intensity of expectation" to all their subsequent enterprises (p. 17).	. . .

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