SOURCE: “The Americanization of Arcadia: Images of Hispanic and Gold Rush California,” in American Studies, Vol. 19, No. 1, Spring, 1978, pp. 5-19.

In the following essay, Mann argues that writings about both Hispanic California and gold rush California utilize three types of imagery: wilderness, paradisiacal, and pastoral.

During the 1840s and 1850s California's landscape and inhabitants enjoyed a literary reputation as the geography and people of an earthly paradise, or a Romantic wilderness, or a peaceful, pastoral Arcadia, where fantasies of wealth, ease, sensual release and personal independence could be realized. At the same time, Americans in California reestablished with rapidity all the institutions and values of the urban East, the very social forces from which the myth offered an escape. The popular images of Hispanic California and of gold camp life, as expressed in the travelogues and personal narratives that gave Americans their initial impressions of these societies, contribute...