Golden Oldies

In “The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream,” H.W. Brands, a wonderfully skilled narrative historian, retells oft-told stories with such verve that he makes it easy to understand why they were told in first place.

But his exuberant retelling of episodes about mid-19th century California also brings problems: Brands gilds these tales with extraordinary claims of significance. He is not alone. Much of popular history about the West these days couples familiar stories with grand claims that they caused history to veer from its accustomed tracks.

The Civil War was a turning point in American history, but the Pacific Railroad and the Gold Rush, let alone the Lewis and Clark Expedition, do not rise to this standard. By attaching a plethora of turning points to one section of the country during one part of a century, popular history spins and staggers like a drunk. It’s time to sober up.

Brands concentrates not so much on the Gold Rush as on various figures who appeared, sometimes quite briefly, in California from 1849 through the early 1850s. They are an interesting, and familiar, crew. He gets John C. Fremont from Allan Nevins’ 1928 biography, Fremont’s memoirs and the writings of Fremont’s much smarter wife, Jessie. William Swain comes from J.S. Holliday’s bestselling “The World Rushed In.” Holliday pretty much owns Swain, and the Gold Rush, for that matter.

Brands also makes extensive use of diaries and memoirs made familiar in other recent histories. Like Patricia Limerick, Brands gives a detailed account of William Manly’s trip through Death Valley, and like Susan Lee Johnson he uses Jean-Nicolas Perlot, Vicente Perez Rosales and the real (and legendary) Joaquin Murieta. The net effect is like watching a good lounge band do covers of golden oldies. There is not much new, but the book is entertaining, lively and reassuringly familiar.

That the retelling of familiar stories about familiar people has become the stock in trade of bestselling histories forces even an academic historian such as Brands--whose profession rewards the new--to conform to popular standards. Although he acknowledges the recent burst of scholarship on the work on the Gold Rush and California that accompanied the sesquicentennial, he has no intention of following the new directions it took: Brands doesn’t go near the questions of race, sexuality and gender that Johnson explored.

Here, good stories matter above all else. Manly’s struggle through Death Valley was dramatic, as were Fremont’s often disastrous travels. Brands is relatively easy on Fremont, who had a tendency to get lost. His men had a tendency to get hungry, and sometimes, according to rumors, ate each other. But the price of good stories is sometimes a lack of context: Most overland migrants neither got lost nor ate each other. They just walked a very long way, and what they recorded was tedium.

Brands spends roughly as many pages getting his various characters to and from California as he spends detailing what they did while they were there. The last section of the book follows the later careers of people such as Fremont, as well as William Tecumseh Sherman and Samuel Clemens. California sometimes seems to function simply as a plot device to keep disparate stories about disparate people together in a single volume.

“The Age of Gold” has a multicultural lineup (only Indians are given short shrift) with women migrants as well as men, but they take their place in familiar plot lines: Sutter discovers gold; the world rushes in by sea and land; San Francisco develops and the vigilantes appear. Then follows the denouement: the Civil War and the railroads, and, in a great leap, Silicon Valley. Brands hopes to create a kind of Gold Rush mosaic--a whole larger than the attractive pieces. Instead, we get more of a Rorschach test to which Brands attributes certain meanings.

The stories are so nicely told that it seems caviling to harp on analytical shortcomings. Brands attempts to make his case that the Gold Rush was a turning point in modern American history through a series of breathless assertions and impressive free-associating. But these assertions don’t even attempt to grapple with some seemingly obvious counter-arguments.

The Gold Rush, Brands writes, marks the point where Americans abandoned old ambitions of patiently acquiring a simple sufficiency and became entranced with instant wealth. Except that, as Malcolm Rohrbough has revealed through his study of miners’ letters and diaries, the argonauts came to California not for instant wealth but because California promised them a shortcut to the farm or small business--the independence and sufficiency--that they, like their parents, desired. There was no sharp break.

Though Brands suggests that California was central to the crisis that brought on the Civil War, it was Kansas and the controversy there over the expansion of slavery that served as the kindling.

Brands also suggests that California gold was critical to the Union victory, but it would be more accurate to say that greenbacks--which were not secured by gold--and massive borrowing through a new bond market were the key to the Union’s financial advantage. And though California was part of the new national market that fueled American industrialism, it was only a small part. California did not grow that much in the years following the Gold Rush, and the new national markets were really formed through the union of the East and the Midwest.

This entertaining book by an accomplished writer ends with the Silicon Valley, and this may be fitting in a different way than Brands intended. Silicon Valley, too, built a world of hype and grandiose claims that it could not sustain. But it sure did make for a good story.