SOURCE: “Epilogue: Telling Tales,” in Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush, W. W. Norton & Company, 2000, pp. 315-44.

In the following essay, Johnson focuses on the Southern Mines of California, suggesting that because of such factors as the ethnic diversity of the region and its “unruly history” (which did not coincide with typical American tales of success), the Southern Mines have been virtually forgotten by twentieth-century society.

In the 1990s, a travel writer for the New York Times encouraged readers to visit the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. Her article, “Exploring the Mother Lode,” begins with a spare but serviceable two-sentence history of the California Gold Rush:

In 1848, a carpenter named James Marshall noticed flecks of gold shining in the tailrace of the sawmill he was building for John Sutter on the American River in California. Though the discovery did neither Marshall nor Sutter any...