1. Diary of Henry William Bigler, January 24, 1848, Society of California Pioneers, San Francisco.

2. Quoted in California Heritage: An Anthology of History and Literature , ed. and comp. John and LaRee Caughey (Itasca, Ill.: F. E. Peacock Publishers, 1971), 191.

3. Hubert Howe Bancroft, History of California , vol. 6 (San Francisco: The History Company, 1886), 33-35. See also the discussion in James J. Rawls, "Gold Diggers: Indian Miners in the California Gold Rush," California Historical Quarterly 40 (Spring 1976): 28-45.

4. Rodman W. Patti, The California Gold Discovery: Sources, Documents, Accounts, and Memoirs Relating to the Discovery of Gold at Sutter's Mill (Georgetown, Calif.: Talisman Press, 1966), 18.

5. See John McPhee, Assembling California (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1993).

6. An excerpt appears in Caughey, California Heritage , 49-50.

7. John Francis Bannon, Robert Ryal Miller, and Peter Masten Dunne, Latin America (Encino, Calif.: Glencoe Press, 2977), 170-71.

8. See Ralph P. Bieber, "California Gold Mania," Mississippi Valley Historical Review 35 (June 1948): 3-28.

9. Quoted in Caughey, California Heritage , 195.

10. Rawls, "Gold Diggers," 31.

11. Leonard Pitt, The Decline of the Californios: A Social History of the Spanish-Speaking Californians, 1846-1890 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 50.

12. See Edwin A. Beilharz and Carlos U. Lopez, We Were 49ers! Chilean Accounts of the California Gold Rush (Pasadena, Calif.: Ward Ritchie Press, 1976), and Jay Monaghan, Chile, Peru, and the California Gold Rush of 1849 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973).

13. James J. Rawls and Walton Bean, California: An Interpretive History , 7th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1998), 130.

14. Erwin G. Gudde, California Place Names: The Origin and Etymology of Current Geographical Names (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 161. See also John E. Baur, "When Royalty Came to California," California History 67 (December 1988): 244-65.

15. See Jay Monaghan, Australians and the Gold Rush: California and Down Under, 1849-1854 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), and David Goodman, Gold Seeking: Victoria and California in the 1850s (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994).

16. Sucheng Chan, Asian Californians (San Francisco: Boyd & Fraser, 1991), 5-6, 27-28. See also Rodman W. Paul, Mining Frontiers of the Far West, 1848-1880 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963), 35.

17. Rawls and Bean, California , 141. See also Rudolph M. Lapp, Blacks in Gold Rush California (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977).

18. Louis B. Wright, Culture on the Moving Frontier (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1955), 128.

19. Quoted in Oscar Lewis, Sea Routes to the Gold Fields: The Migration by Water to California in 1849-1852 (New York: Ballantine Books, 1971), 64.

20. David Morris Potter, ed., Trail to California: The Overland Journal of Vincent Geiger and Wakeman Bryarly (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), 231.

21. Quoted in JoAnn Levy, They Saw the Elephant: Women in the California Gold Rush (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 17.

22. Robert W. Carter, "'Sometimes When I Hear the Winds Sigh': Mortality on the Overland Trail," California History 74 (Summer 1995): 146, 152, 155.

23. Quoted in ibid., 155.

24. Thomas D. Clark, ed., Off at Sunrise: The Overland Journal of Charles Glass Gray (San Marino, Calif.: Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, 1976), 154, 157.

25. Rodman W. Paul, California Gold: The Beginning of Mining in the Far West (1947; reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967), 345.

26. Ibid., 349; Malcolm J. Rohrbough, Days of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the American Nation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 3.

27. Andrew Rolle, California: A History (New York: Thomas Crowell, 1969), 229-30.

28. "Bill of Fare," 1849, Wells Fargo Bank History Room, San Francisco.

29. Rawls and Bean, California , 101.

30. Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe, The Shirley Letters: Being Letters Written in 1851-1852 from the California Mines (Berkeley, Calif.: Heyday Books, 1998), 113.

31. Lewis, Sea Routes to the Gold Fields , 229.

32. Rolle, California , 225; Rawls and Bean, California , 103.

33. An 1868 edition of the Songster is in the California State Archives, Sacramento. See also Richard A. Dwyer and Richard E. Lingenfelter, eds., The Songs of the Gold Rush (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964), 155.

34. Sherburne F. Cook, "The American Invasion, 1848-1870," in his The Conflict Between the California Indian and White Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 5-13, 111. See also James J. Rawls, Indians of California: The Changing Image (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1984), 171-202.

35. San Francisco Alta California (April 26, 1849), quoted in Rawls, Indians of California , 177.

36. Silas Weston, Four Months in the Mines of California: Or, Life in the Mountains (Providence, R.I.: Benjamin T. Albro, 1854), 8-10, quoted in Rawls, Indians of California , 178.

37. Quoted in Pitt, Decline of the Californios , 60.

38. Rawls and Bean, California , 130, 135-36.

39. Rohrbough, Days of Gold , 283.

40. Josiah Royce, California, from the Conquest in 1846 to the Second Vigilance Committee in San Francisco: A Study of American Character (1886; reprint, New York: Knopf, 1948), 175.

41. J. S. Holliday, The World Rushed In: The California Gold Rush Experience (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981), quoted in James J. Rawls, "Great Expectations: William Swain, J. S. Holliday & The World Rushed In ," California History 41 (Fall 1982): 167.

42. See the discussion in Paul, California Gold , 334-35, and John Walton Caughey, The California Gold Rush (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 288-89; originally published as Gold Is the Cornerstone .

43. M. Guy Bishop, ed., "'Many Wanted to Know Which Was Mr. Bigler: Henry Bigler's Account of the 1898 California Golden Jubilee," California History 49 (Fall 1990): 284-92.

44. Charles Howard Shinn, Mining Camps: A Study of American Frontier Government (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 105, 125, 176.

45. Quoted in Kevin Starr, Americans and the California Dream, 1850-1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 156, 162.

46. Paul, California Gold , 337, 341.

47. Caughey, California Gold Rush , 293.

48. Ralph Mann, "Frontier Opportunity and the New Social History," Pacific Historical Review 53 (November 1984): 463-91, and also his "The Decade After the Gold Rush: Social Structure in Grass Valley and Nevada City, California, 1850-1860," Pacific Historical Review 46 (November 1972): 484-504.

49. David Rich Lewis, "Argonauts and the Overland Trail Experience: Method and Theory," Western Historical Quarterly 16 (July 1985): 285-306.

50. See, for instance, Julie Roy Jeffrey, Frontier Women: The Trans-Mississippi West, 1840-1880 (New York: Hill &Wang, 1979); Joan M. Jensen and Darlis Miller, "The Gentle Tamers Revisited: New Approaches to the History of Women in the American West," Pacific Historical Review 49 (May 1980): 173-212; Sandra L. Myers, ed., Ho for California! Women's Overland Diaries from the Huntington Library (San Marino: Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, 1980); Sandra L. Myers, Westering Women and the Frontier Experience 1800-1915 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982); Linda Peavy and Ursula Smith, Women in Waiting in the Westward Movement (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994); Glenda Riley, "Women on the Panama Trail to California, 1849-1869," Pacific Historical Review 55 (November 1986): 531-48.

51. Levy, They Saw the Elephant , 91-107.

52. Jacqueline Baker Barnhart, The Fair but Frail: Prostitution in San Francisco, 1849-1900 (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1986), 25-39. Similar conclusions appear in Marion S. Goldman, Gold Diggers and Silver Miners: Prostitutes and Social Life on the Comstock Lode (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981).

53. San Francisco Alta California (September 23, 1851), quoted in Paul, California Gold , 66.