Shortly after large chunks of the West was stolen from Mexico a flood of fortune seekers flocked out towards California to seek gold and reports of people striking it rich overnight. Many bored office workers and clerks made the venture tired of their dead end jobs and hoping to win and be the few who were able to become wealthy from extracting gold from dirt. The Mining craze predates casinos out West as hopeless saps actually thought they could easily become fabulously wealthy. Hundreds of thousands mostly men moved out and left their families to go to remote areas as they had no other prospects in life of attaining anything aside from prospecting for gold rocks. This book by Edward Dolnick covers the era of this time period and recounts the fatiguing journey of these miners as they trekked from St Joseph, Missouri all the way through Central California. Dolnick does a good job of researching these gold-seekers lives through various journals these migrants made of their difficult travels through protracted travels through intensely inhospitable parts of this country that are still thinly populated. The current migration of fracking jobs and young men having to take these high paying but dirty jobs in remote areas with no entertainment. The few miners who actual did strike it rich often squandered their money as quickly often being reduced to the poverty as they began their journey. Many of these miners were of avaricious spirits who would stab one in the back for a fifty dollar gold scrape and theft, murder, and general lawlessness were rampant in the American West and especially the areas these miners operated.
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