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foreword: all that glitters William Cronon the great gold rushes of the nineteenth century are certainly among the most dramatic episodes of American western history. Their story typically begins with John Marshall’s finding of a nugget in John Sutter’s millrace near Sacramento, California, on January 24, 1848. Although Sutter tried desperately to prevent word of the discovery from leaking out, the newsspreadrapidlytoSanFranciscoandprovedsoelectrifyingthatanastonishing portion of the male population headed for the hills. In the harbor, sailors decided almost instantly to trade their maritime work for mining, with the result that abandoned, rotting ships would clog the city’s wharves foryearstocome.WhenthenewsfinallyreachedtheEastCoastafewmonths later, the phenomenon repeated itself constantly: with remarkable speed, an amazing number of people abandoned their former jobs and homes to head west in search of fortune. Prospectors fanned out across the Sierra Nevada, intent on striking it rich by finding a telltale streak of yellow in the gray gravel of a river bed, or perhaps even by locating the fabled mother lode itself. Camps and towns sprang up almost overnight, launching the cycles of boom and bust that would so characterize the mining West for the rest of the century and beyond. This is the stuª of which legends are made, and western history has been marked by romantic narratives of gold and glory ever since. What happened in California in 1848–49 would happen at places whose names are famous today mainly because of the “rushes” that once swept over them: Pike’s Peak, ix the Comstock, Cripple Creek, Leadville, Tombstone, and—the final chapter that closes out the nineteenth-century story with the most flamboyant episode of all—the Klondike. There, George Washington Carmack found gold in the Klondike River in 1896, prompting tens of thousands of wouldbe prospectors from all across the United States and Canada to race into the wilds of the Yukon, woefully unprepared for one of the most hostile environments one could ever imagine for such a migration. We know their stories today not just because their hardships were so severe, but because their tales were told by writers skilled enough to leave a permanent literary mark on our collective consciousness: Rex Beach, Robert Service, and Jack London . Although it should by rights be more a Canadian story than an American one—the Klondike is, after all, in Yukon Territory—the movement of U.S. citizens into the Canadian Far North was so enormous that history books usually commit a temporary act of narrative imperialism by annexing the Yukon to the United States just long enough to tell this story. These gold rushes are so familiar that it’s easy to take them for granted. On the one hand, they can seem like colorful happenings from a long-ago time when gullible people proved surprisingly susceptible to dreams that in most cases never came true. From such a perspective, they look simultaneously quaint and exotic. On the other hand, the motives that led people to dash oª in search of easy wealth can seem so transparently obvious that they don’t require much thought or analysis. Who wouldn’t head oª to the gold fields if there was a reasonable chance to become a millionaire and permanently change one’s life by doing so? What could be more natural? The trouble with both such reactions is their either/or quality, discouraging us from seeing that the most valuable historical lessons come when we juxtapose these perspectives and hold them in our minds simultaneously. Only then can we see both how truly strange the mining gold rushes were, and also how much they tell us about the cultural values and political-economic institutions that made them possible—values and institutions that are still very much a part of our own day-to-day lives. The challenge is to experience both the weirdness and ordinariness of a gold rush at the same time. The special virtue of Kathryn Morse’s The Nature of Gold is that it meets this challenge head-on, thereby yielding rich insights not just into the Klondike Gold Rush, but into the history of much larger ideas about wealth and risk and opportunity, to say nothing of the human place in nature. Morse’s chief goal is to explore the diªerent contexts—historical, economic, x / Foreword cultural, natural—that made a nineteenth-century gold rush possible. Her starting point is the assumption that the desire for gold is not quite so selfevident as our histories and myths...

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