Three hundred thousand people in seven years — the largest migration of the age, and catastrophe for Native California.
Placer gold thinned by 1855; California urbanized, statehood came in 1850 — and the Native population fell from ~150,000 to ~30,000 by 1873.
A sweeping narrative history of the California Gold Rush and the migration it set off.
Context for the catastrophe the rush meant for Native California (broad context).
Detailed account of California's state-sanctioned extermination campaigns; the Modoc War and the Lava Beds resistance are part of this broader catastrophe.
The defining short story of California Gold Rush mining-camp life, written contemporaneously with the era it depicts; a story rather than a novel but the work everyone names for the Gold Rush camps.