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Page: of 436
$21.50
Gold Diggers and Camp Followers
by David Allan Comstock
In this first volume of the long-awaited Nevada
County Chronicles you are introduced to a group
of young pioneering Americans who came to
California during the gold rush years. Some
were gold diggers and others were camp followers (the printers, lawyers, doctors, merchants, gamblers, bankers, innkeepers, officeseekers and loafers who came to share the
wealth), but most were both, experimenting first
with one occupation before going on to another.
Although this book reads like a novel, the characters and events it portrays are genuine. This is
a saga of early newspapers and frontier politics;
of Mormon struggles and migrations; of tragic
confrontations between Indians and trespassers
on their ancient lands, and of the first clumsy efforts to build a new society.
To write it required years of research in old
records, newspapers, diaries, and letters. The
most exciting find was a marvelous collection of
letters, the Rensselaerville California Correspondence, published here for the first time.
Carefully preserved for more than 130 years, it
is probably the finest private collection of family
letters about the California adventure. Descriptive, revealing, humorous, lively, and heartwarming, they remain to this day outstanding
models for the composition of letters to faraway
friends.
Through them you will get to know young
Niles Searls, a Canadian schoolmaster in the
winter, a scholar himself in the summer, attending the Rensselaerville Academy in a small
New York village with his pretty cousins, Cornelia and Mary Niles. Anxious for western
adventure, after completing law school he went
to the frontier settlements of Missouri. In 1849,
he was joined by Charley Mulford, also a cousin
of the Niles sisters, a former schoolmate of Niles
Searls. Together they crossed the plains to
California, mined, sold vegetables, operated an