| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 33.2

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| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 33.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Rooted in Barbarous Soil: People, Culture, and Community in Gold Rush California. Edited by Kevin Starr and Richard J. Orsi. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. x + 364 pp. Illustrations, tables, notes, index. $60, £38, cloth; $14.95, £15.95, paper.)

In this third volume of the California Historical Society's Sesquicentennial Series, twelve noted scholars challenge traditional assumptions about the California Gold Rush. In place of the image of rough, unshaven, lone, (white) American miners panning for gold, these essays describe immigrants and women in the Gold Rush, its cultured, urban character, and its place in the history of California's racial and ethnic relations. These essays also explore the complex meanings and relationships that argonauts forged from their experiences. 1

Kevin Starr and Malcolm Rohrbough effectively set the stage in their respective essays. Starr argues that Gold-Rush California became "an American place with a difference," while Rohrbough captures the excitement, appeal, strangeness, and disruption of the early Gold Rush (p. 83). Sucheng Chan and James Sandos examine questions of nativism, ethnicity, and racism in Gold-Rush California and the extent to which Indians, Californios, and non-American immigrants resisted the sometimes devastating consequences of competition for land and wealth. Nancy Taniguchi points out that women were important Gold-Rush actors who, like non-white men, took advantage of new opportunities while being pushed into more traditionally acceptable roles. . . .

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