What the Gold Rush Migrants Didn't Know

This book juxtaposes the history and the geology of the California Trail, segment by segment and chapter by chapter. The history comes from Gold-Rush migrants' memoirs and diaries, supplemented by standard secondary works such as those by John Mack Faragher and John D. Unruh, Jr., on the crossing; Elliott West on the Great Plains; and J. S. Holliday, Malcolm Rohrbough, and H. W. Brands on the Gold Rush itself.1 Only a few concluding pages tell of what the migrants met once they arrived in the Mother Lode country on the western slope of the Sierras. The bibliography provides two lists of sources, one historical, the other geological. The histories hold few if any surprises for historians and teachers of the nineteenth-century American West; the listing of both primary sources and secondary literature is selective rather than exhaustive, but it is sufficient for the purpose.

The geology rests on a rather longer list of books and articles in that field, with which this reviewer (and surely most historians) has been previously unacquainted. Keith Heyer Meldahl is a professor of geology and oceanography at Mira Costa College near San Diego, and I must take it on faith that he represents accurately the state of the field regarding plate tectonics, orogenesis (mountain formation), and other fundamental geological phenomena. The geology is presumably as well known to geologists as the Overland Trail historiography is to historians of the West. Meldahl provides a glossary of geological terms, which is useful, although his explanations of them as the text proceeds are so lucid that one almost never needs to flip to the glossary.

The contribution of the book is to combine history and geology into a readable account of what the migrants experienced and where their passing landscape ultimately came from. In this, the author succeeds very well. At several points, he takes pains to lay out the majority view of earth scientists while also explaining significant or recent dissident views. This strategy builds the reader's confidence in his geological explanations.

The preface explains, accurately, that "this book tells [two] stories—one, the story of the overland emigrant journey, and the other, the tale of the land itself: of rocks, rivers, mountains, and deserts, and how they came to be" (p. xiv). Its "central argument is that North America's geologic history—the multimillion-year history of a continent heading west—guided the course of America's own history of westward migration" (p. 276). The continent heading west? This mystifying phrase is clearly explained along the way: it is the direction of continental drift based on shifting tectonic plates.

Nearly all of the book's fourteen chapters each describe one segment of the Overland Trail to California as seen by migrants from the 1840s to 1869, when the transcontinental railroad suddenly rendered cross-country wagon trains obsolete. Most of the diaries and memoirs consulted by Meldahl come from the Gold Rush years (1849–53) when the migration was heaviest, involving around a quarter-million people. Around 20,000 perished along the way, or about 8.5 percent—from contagions, bad water, accidents, starvation, poisoning, or other causes. (Indian attacks, according to Unruh's estimate, which Meldahl accepts, accounted for fewer than 500; and whites killed more Indians than that.) The migration was dangerous and debilitating, and in this account of it, largely depressing, although the migrants (and Meldahl) did pause in a few places to appreciate scenes of overwhelming natural beauty. The author does not reflect on the political or cultural context very often, and only rarely mentions the Indians whom the migrants met along the way—once noting, in Nebraska, where the village-dwelling Pawnees gave way to the buffalo-chasing Sioux and Cheyennes; and once around Humboldt Wells in Nevada, where lived the people the migrants called the "Diggers" (actually Western Shoshones and Northern Paiutes). Otherwise, no Indians. But...