After the Gold Rush: Tarnished Dreams in the Sacramento Valley (review)

While historians have paid a great deal of attention to the miners who flocked to California during the Gold Rush, they have generally ignored those Argonauts who failed to strike it rich, but nevertheless remained in the regions surrounding the goldfields. In his ambitious, richly detailed, but ultimately uneven community history, David Vaught directs his attention to those neglected failures, specifically migrants drawn from eastern and Midwestern farm communities, pointing out that "[f]ar from vanishing into the landscape, these farmers, still in the prime of their lives, helped transform the landscape into one of the most productive agricultural regions in the world" (6). Vaught argues that California's "miners-turned-farmers" refused to relinquish their golden dreams, and by the 1860s had embraced wheat farming and won for their adopted state the reputation of "the granary of the world" (6–7). When the wheat boom went bust, they deftly changed with the times extending the entrepreneurial spirit that had lured them to the region in the first place to embrace new crops, new markets, and new technologies, and by the 1880s had reinvented themselves as "orchardists" and "vineyardists" (205). Moreover, and contrary to a raft of recent histories that have characterized western agriculture as an industrial enterprise with all of mass industry's attendant social, economic, political, and cultural consequences, Vaught contends that in the process of pursuing their fortunes the miners-turned-farmers of California's Central Valley "commit[ ed] themselves not only to materialistic goals but to community life as well" (7). Vaught adds that "[t]he fact that a community of any sort emerged" among those who settled into farming and ranching "defies conventional wisdom about rural California, which has emphasized 'wheat kings,' 'land barons,' and 'farm factories.'" (220). "The gold rush did not turn farmers into capitalists," he concludes, "nor did it undermine their agrarian principles" (7).

Vaught begins his narrative with brief biographical sketches of four of the farmers and ranchers who settled in the lower Sacramento Valley around Putah Creek, the future site of Davisville, now Davis, California. These men and their families represent several broad, and at times very mutable, categories of settlers for the author—some arriving for quick riches, some in order to establish economic empires, and still others to establish a competency. The natural advantages and hospitable climate of the region "seduced" all of them, a rather vague and capricious engine of history that seems to move historical actors throughout Vaught's narrative, giving them "a second chance to strike it rich in California" (28). Over the course of his book the two more entrepreneurial of Vaught's initial protagonists, one of them Jerome C. Davis whose once-spectacular Davis Ranch gave its name to the fledgling community, quickly fall by the wayside as a result of their financial daring while the other two, more modest in their ambitions, persist and help to found an enduring community. Tempted and tested by wheat bonanzas and market crashes, suspect titles to the land, natural disasters, the vagaries of global commodities markets, political and economic radicalism, and the changing tastes of fickle consumers, the sturdy yeomen persisted, indeed flourished, as a result of their "potent combination of entrepreneurial relentlessness and agrarian virtue," and ultimately "created a rural culture unlike any in American history" (7).

Throughout the book, the author seems intent on combining the best features of local and regional history, its attentiveness to detail and local color, with those of scholarly history. He achieves mixed results, though, at best—there does not seem to be an anecdote too insignificant for inclusion and Vaught's admirable sensitivity to the many individual stories that comprise the history of the region often threatens to submerge the master narrative he wishes to impose. Taking his cues from perhaps too many diverse disciplines of history, however, Vaught also offers a confusing collection of competing narratives that tend to defy a...