| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 32.3

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| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 32.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

American Alchemy: The California Gold Rush and Middle-Class Culture. By Brian Roberts. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. xii + 328 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. $49.95, cloth; $19.95, paper.)

Gold: The California Story. By Mary Hill. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. xi + 306 pp. Illustrations, maps, appendix, bibliography, index. £27.50, UK; $45.00, US.)

In this exploration of the meaning of the gold rush to the middle class, Brian Roberts branches off from the trail blazed by Malcolm Rohrbough in Days of Gold (Berkeley, 1997). Roberts's sample is more limited, 150 middle-class argonauts from among the 80,000 or so Americans who made the journey, but the theories he spins from their writings are original and often fascinating. At some junctures, however, the theories become weightier than the evidence can bear. To classify clubbing sea lions to death and taking the female part in shipboard dances under the rubric of "utopian alternatives to the marketplace" seems a bit of a stretch (p. 117). The evidence on the role of women, to which Roberts devotes considerable attention, also seems rather slight. Roberts argues that the women left behind gained autonomy in the absence of men. Although this appears likely, it is not clear whether the autonomy was anything more than temporary, and some comparisons to the effects of mass male departures in wartime might have been illuminating. Given the structure of the book, it seems doubtful that Eliza Farnsworth, who attempted to bring a shipment of proper brides to California and who serves as the author's principle example of prudery, merits an entire chapter. . . .

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