.png)
"The Rush" | Reviewed by Bill Schwab
It all began with John Sutter, “a failed clothier who’d abandoned his wife and five children in Switzerland and sailed to America.” Sutter sought out a remote area of Mexican California to found “a private kingdom in the wilderness,” worked by enslaved Indigenous peoples, captives seized by vigilante raids on nearby villages, and Sutter, who trafficked women and children. Enslavement and violence were common in California in the years preceding the Civil War and beyond. White supremacy was a constant.
As Californians considered statehood, a tug-of-war emerged between those who wanted to join the Confederacy and those who wanted to become a free state. White supremacy was supported by California legislators who passed laws that banned Black people from entering the state. Early senator William Gwin unsuccessfully tried to convince the legislators to endorse slavery and join the South.
Against this backdrop of hundreds of thousands of migrants racing west to seek their fortunes and disputes over the enslavement of Black people, John Sutter hired James Marshall, a 37-year-old carpenter from New Jersey, to build a sawmill on the American River. The water-powered mill needed a tailrace, a shallow ditch, to return water to the river after it drove the wheel. On Monday, January 24th, 1848, Marshall was inspecting the ditch when a fleck of something flashed at him and, “about half an hour later, he crawled out of the tailrace, cradling his hat to his chest like a hurt child” and crying out, “I have found it!”
Marshall eventually uncovered “a snake-like vein of quartz-encapsulated gold that extended for more than 150 miles along the western edge of the Sierra Nevada.” A typical gold concentration is 5 parts per billion, but along this vein it was 100 million parts per billion. Marshall discovered the doorway to the Mother Lode, sparking the greatest voluntary migration in US history.
Philbrick skillfully weaves together the Gold Rush and the white supremacy movement. He depicts how those in pursuit of wealth tried to ban Blacks from gaining power. Politically, this conflict was played out between the pro-slavery bloc and the Free-Soil Party as Californians determined whether to become a pro-slavery or a free state.
Philbrick has a remarkable ability to simplify complex history and present it in a refined, fast-paced, readable form. In this single book, the author captures issues that have haunted the United States since its origins: democracy versus private power, enslavement versus freedom, capitalism versus socialism.
I found “The Rush” engaging, informative, and hard to put down. It is not only an outstanding history of mid-19th-century events but also a commentary on the same mega issues that still plague the United States.
Viking Press published this 464-page book, which includes portraits of key historical figures alongside their relevant narratives, plus other images, an extensive bibliography, and a thorough index.
About the author: Nathaniel Philbrick has written 8 New York Times bestselling books on United States’ history, including “In the Heart of the Sea,” a 2000 National Book Award winner and the basis for the 2015 film of the same title, directed by Ron Howard. “Mayflower” a finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in History. Philbrick’s writing inspired Ken Burns’ “The American Revolution” on PBS. In addition, the author has been widely published in magazines and interviewed on several television shows.
