Inventing the Dream: California Through the Progressive Era by Kevin Starr (review)

Reviews 271 Gold Seeker: Adventures of a Belgian Argonaut during the Gold Rush Years. By Jean-Nicolas Perlot. Translated by Helen Harding Bretnor. Edited by Howard R. Lamar. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985. 451 pages, $29.95.) In 1850, Jean-Nicolas Perlot, a 26-year-old Belgian, left Europe in search of adventure and gold, and for the next twenty years worked in the mines of California and the gardens of Portland. In 1898, two years before his death, Perlot published his reminiscences of that period for friends and family in Belgium. His account of life in the southern California mines was lost to American scholars until now, because of its small foreign publication. Gold Seeker is a heavily-edited English translation of Perlot’s book, presented here as an example of the experience of foreign miners in the California gold rush. Perlot’s reminiscence is captivating, lively, and extremely detailed, although often conversational and rambling. It covershis trip to California via Cape Horn, his struggles and success in the Mariposa gold fields, his dealings with the Miwok and Yokut Indians, the opening of Yosemite Valley, and his horticultural enterprise in the growing city of Portland. His wide-ranging experience illustrates many of the themes of the larger gold rush and foreign immigrant experience, yet his success and accomplishments set him apart from the norm. While Perlot’s narrative merits literary and historical attention, the edit­ ing leaves something to be desired. Lamar treats this as a journal instead of as a reminiscence removed temporally and spatially from the events described. He accepts much of what Perlot recalled in his later life without warning of the inevitable selection and embellishment a story undergoes in the retelling. His introductory essays and footnotes are helpful in providing some additional and corrective information, yet lack careful criticism of the text as a historical source. Despite this weakness, Gold Seeker will be of interest to both scholars and general readers of the gold rush experience. DAVID RICH LEWIS American West Center, Salt Lake City Inventing the Dream: California Through the Progressive Era. By Kevin Starr. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. 364 pages, $19.95.) The Golden State remains an enigma, even to Californians, and Kevin Starr has embarked on the monumental task of interpreting that complex of regions and societies gathered within arbitrary boundaries. As his first volume on the subject, Americans and the California Dream, 1850-1915, focused largely on the San Francisco Bay area, Inventing the Dream concentrates on Southern California, which could easily be a separate state, or nation. If readers learn only how distinct those two regions are, they will have garnered an important lesson. 272 Western American Literature Perhaps the most significant difference between the author’s earlier vol­ ume and this one is the lack of an apotheosis, a Josiah Royce, in the current book; Southern California, abundantly populated by interesting folks such as Charles Fletcher Lummis, Helen Hunt Jackson, Harrison Gray Otis, and Edward Fitzgerald Beale, had no towering intellectual center. What it did have was a fascinating, crazy-quilt culture featuring, among other things, Spanish longing, mission myths, Mediterranean analogies, Yankee entreprenuerism and Protestant ethics promoted effectively. Little wonder that this volume in places seems poorly focused: life down there has been poorly focused. Starr traces the four stages of Americanization of the region: Hispanic reconsolidation prior to 1870; Americans gaining landgrant ranchos during the next decade; many ranchos “subdivided and sold as residential property” in the 1880s; “In the 1890s these subdivisions grew into towns and cities.” The writer also acknowledges the coast’s lost cattle kingdom, especially the almost-fabled Rancho Tejon where the two cultures blended: “For thirty years and more, Beale kept vital on the Tejon an American recapitulation of the previous social order.” Regional development was fueled in no small measure by myth—em­ bodied in Jackson’s novel Ramona—for California has always been as much state of mind as state of the union. Starr acknowledges the “Dream”—some­ times called Fantasy California—an absolutely essential ingredient if the Southland is to be understood, since it is where myth and reality have most obviously abutted. Blending those two...