Spreading the Word: A History of Information in the California Gold Rush (review)

The discovery of gold in California in January 1848 created the largest internal migration in U.S. history. Derived from the author’s dissertation in history at Johns Hopkins University, Spreading the Word is a case study of the impact of information availability and assessment on eastern Americans as they moved from being completely ignorant of California to becoming informed travelers to the state from 1848 to 1851. News of the discovery of gold reached New York newspapers in the fall of 1848, and the overland journey had to begin by March or April of 1849 if the mountains were to be crossed before snowfall. The emigrants’ formidable information search required an assessment of the availability of the gold and the best route to travel as well as informed advice on how to outfit, provision, and manage the journey and how to mine the mineral.

Chapters on the print resources, newspapers, guidebooks, and maps identify major problems with the reliability and availability of printed material. Other chapters follow the route of the travelers as printed information sources were gradually replaced by firsthand information from mountain men, and handwritten waybills were consulted instead of maps. Stillson offers an explanation of how the credibility and authority of information changed with the move west.

The initial chapter focuses on twelve newspapers and their coverage of California in the months preceding the departure of what Stillson calls the goldrushers. A table of those newspapers with circulation figures and a count of articles provided by each would have been useful. The most important information source by far seems to have been the penny newspaper edited by James Gordon Bennett, the New York Herald. Bennett had “the most extensive network of reporters and correspondents of any newspaper in the nation” (15) and a California correspondent who enabled him to be the first in New York to print the news of the gold strike. Stillson traces developments from Bennett’s skeptical reception of that news in September to the publication of a special edition, the California Herald, on December 24, 1848, that actually had a discussion of routes and a map. Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune sent a paid reporter to California via Panama, arriving in August 1849, to send back eyewitness reports for four months, in time for the even larger group of emigrants of 1850. Discussion of New England, midwestern, and southern newspapers is limited.

In the next and most successful chapter Stillson examines titles read by gold-rushers by analyzing published studies of their diaries. Stillson shows how much of the content of guides and maps relied on information on the West that preceded the gold rush itself (e.g., in the reports of Fremont and Bryant) and gradually grew to include practical advice for emigrants. Newspaper publishers sought to capitalize on the market for information by assigning authors to compile available information and maps for goldrushers. Stillson pointed out that one of the best guides was written by an easterner who had been to California, T. H. Jefferson. (The gatekeeper function of the publishing industry kept Jefferson out; since his book had to be privately published, it was not advertised or included in booksellers’ catalogs.)

Stillson analyzes the records of five companies of emigrants, with notes on four more, to examine nonprint communication. Since the heads of these emigrant groups included newspaper editors and authors who planned to publish their writings, these are far from typical accounts. They reveal the anxieties of the travelers as they made expensive decisions about creating the companies, outfitting and provisioning them, and choosing routes. Once en route, these highly literate emigrants relied less on the published guidebooks and maps they had purchased and more on reports in midwestern newspapers, the advice of guides, and word of mouth. After they crossed the Missouri River there were no more newspapers, guidebooks, maps, or...