Description: The World of the Gold Rush that comes down to us through fiction and film -- of unshaven men named Stumpy and Kentuck raising hell and panning for gold -- is one of half-truths. In this brilliant work of social history, Susan Johnson enters the well-worked diggings of Gold Rush history and strikes a rich lode. She finds a dynamic social world in which the conventions of identity -- ethnic, national, and sexual -- were reshaped in surprising ways. She gives us the all-male households of the diggings, the mines where the men worked, and the fandango houses where they played. With a keen eye for character and story, Johnson restores the particular social world that issued in the Gold Rush myths we still cherish.

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