The World Rushed In

When The World Rushed In was first published in 1981, the Washington Post predicted, “It seems unlikely that anyone will write a more comprehensive book about the Gold Rush.” Twenty years later, no one has emerged to contradict that judgment, and the book has gained recognition as a classic. As the San Francisco Examiner noted, “It is not often that a work of history can be said to supplant every book on the same subject that has gone before it.”

Through the diary and letters of William Swain--augmented by interpolations from more than five hundred other gold seekers and by letters sent to Swain from his wife and brother back home--the complete cycle of the gold rush is recreated: the overland migration of over thirty thousand men, the struggle to “strike it rich” in the mining camps of the Sierra Nevadas, and the return home through the jungles of the Isthmus of Panama.

In a new preface, the author reappraises our continuing fascination with the “gold rush experience” as a defining epoch in western--indeed, American--history.

• Lewis and Clark and the Indian Country: The Native American Perspective
• California: A History (Modern Library Chronicles)
• The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream (Search and Recover)
• They Saw the Elephant
• Where Wagons Could Go: Narcissa Whitman and Eliza Spaulding
• Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush
• The Gathering of Zion: The Story of the Mormon Trail
• Rush for Riches: Gold Fever and the Making of California
• Rush for Riches: Gold Fever and the Making of California
• John Sutter: A Life on the North American Frontier