The Gold Rush Widows of Little Falls

The Gold Rush Widows of Little Falls PDF Author: Linda S. Peavy
Publisher: Minnesota Historical Society Press
ISBN: 9780873512503
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
Moving personal account of frontier women left behind in Minnesota when their husbands went west to prospect for gold in Colorado and Montana in the mid-1800s.

The Gold Rush Widows of Little Falls

The Gold Rush Widows of Little Falls PDF Author: Linda S. Peavy
Publisher: Minnesota Historical Society Press
ISBN: 9780873512503
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
Moving personal account of frontier women left behind in Minnesota when their husbands went west to prospect for gold in Colorado and Montana in the mid-1800s.

Fortune's Frenzy

Fortune's Frenzy PDF Author: Eilene Lyon
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 149307007X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
The road to hell is paved with good intentions…and gold dust. When Henry Jenkins’s sawmill business goes bust and his family loses their Indiana farm to foreclosure, he sees gold as the answer to his financial woes. Joining a company of younger men, Jenkins and the other prospective miners sign fraudulent promissory notes to borrow from a ruthless businessman, Allen Makepeace, to reach the gold mines. They sail the risky route via Panama to the mines in 1851. But gold is not so easy to find by then. Making enough to survive and get home will be difficult; repaying Makepeace could be impossible. As Henry Jenkins becomes mired in mining, his wife, Abby, struggles to meet the needs of her large family amidst crop failures, waves of deadly disease, and harassment by Henry’s creditors. When Henry’s sons-in-law follow in his wake, they find themselves on a notorious death ship, stranded in the vast Pacific. Will any of these frantic men make it home to their distressed families? Fortune’s Frenzy reveals the plight of miners who borrowed at extortionate rates to get to California, and explores the dangerous and deadly sea routes to the west coast that killed roughly 10 percent of those who risked the journey. Alternating between the miners’ trials and terrors, and the challenges for the wives, children, and mothers left behind, Fortune’s Frenzy delves into the country’s pressing social, economic, and nationalist issues in the pre-Civil War decades. The theme is age-old, and still relevant: desperate people falling for get-rich-quick schemes. They fail to consider the sacrifices they will have to make and the dismal odds of their success.

Women in Waiting in the Westward Movement

Women in Waiting in the Westward Movement PDF Author: Linda S. Peavy
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 9780806126197
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
Looks at the lives of the homebound wives of Western pioneers

The American West

The American West PDF Author: Robert V. Hine
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300078331
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 628

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Book Description
Two historians, Robert V. Hine and John Mack Faragher, present the American West as both frontier and region, real and imagined, old and new, and they show how men and women of all ethnic groups were affected when different cultures met and clashed. Their concise and engaging survey of frontier history traces the story from the first Columbian contacts between Indians and Europeans to the multicultural encounters of the modern Southwest. Profusely illustrated with contemporary drawings, posters, and photographs and written in lively and accessible prose, the book not only presents a panoramic view of historical events and characters but also provides fascinating details about such topics as western landscapes, environmental movements, literature, visual arts, and film.

Covered Wagon Women: 1850

Covered Wagon Women: 1850 PDF Author: Kenneth L. Holmes
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803272743
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
The women who traveled west in covered wagons during the 1840s speak through these letters and diaries. Here are the voices of Tamsen Donner and young Virginia Reed, members of the ill-fated Donner party; Patty Sessions, the Mormon midwife who delivered five babies on the trail between Omaha and Salt Lake City; Rachel Fisher, who buried both her husband and her little girl before reaching Oregon. Still others make themselves heard, starting out from different places and recording details along the way, from the mundane to the soul-shattering and spirit-lifting.

Covered Wagon Women, Volume 2

Covered Wagon Women, Volume 2 PDF Author: Kenneth L. Holmes
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496225562
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
The women who traveled west in covered wagons during the 1840s speak through these letters and diaries. Here are the voices of Tamsen Donner and young Virginia Reed, members of the ill-fated Donner party; Patty Sessions, the Mormon midwife who delivered five babies on the trail between Omaha and Salt Lake City; Rachel Fisher, who buried both her husband and her little girl before reaching Oregon. Still others make themselves heard, starting out from different places and recording details along the way, from the mundane to the soul-shattering and spirit-lifting.

Precious Dust

Precious Dust PDF Author: Paula Mitchell Marks
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803282476
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 460

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Book Description
Material culled from letters, diaries, and other firsthand accounts reconstructs the experiences of people involved in the Gold Rush, showing not only what propelled them westward, but how they met the challenges of their journey

A Decent, Orderly Lynching

A Decent, Orderly Lynching PDF Author: Frederick Allen
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806179570
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 449

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Book Description
The deadliest campaign of vigilante justice in American history erupted in the Rocky Mountains during the Civil War when a private army hanged twenty-one troublemakers. Hailed as great heroes at the time, the Montana vigilantes are still revered as founding fathers. Combing through original sources, including eye-witness accounts never before published, Frederick Allen concludes that the vigilantes were justified in their early actions, as they fought violent crime in a remote corner beyond the reach of government. But Allen has uncovered evidence that the vigilantes refused to disband after territorial courts were in place. Remaining active for six years, they lynched more than fifty men without trials. Reliance on mob rule in Montana became so ingrained that in 1883, a Helena newspaper editor advocated a return to “decent, orderly lynching” as a legitimate tool of social control. Allen’s sharply drawn characters, illustrated by dozens of photographs, are woven into a masterfully written narrative that will change textbook accounts of Montana’s early days—and challenge our thinking on the essence of justice.

American Alchemy

American Alchemy PDF Author: Brian Roberts
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 080786093X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
California during the gold rush was a place of disputed claims, shoot-outs, gambling halls, and prostitution; a place populated by that rough and rebellious figure, the forty-niner; in short, a place that seems utterly unconnected to middle-class culture. In American Alchemy, however, Brian Roberts offers a surprising challenge to this assumption. Roberts points to a long-neglected truth of the gold rush: many of the northeastern forty-niners who ventured westward were in fact middle-class in origin, status, and values. Tracing the experiences and adventures both of these men and of the "unseen" forty-niners--women who stayed back East while their husbands went out West--he shows that, whatever else the gold seekers abandoned on the road to California, they did not simply turn their backs on middle-class culture. Ultimately, Roberts argues, the story told here reveals an overlooked chapter in the history of the formation of the middle class. While the acquisition of respectability reflects one stage in this history, he says, the gold rush constitutes a second stage--a rebellion against standards of respectability.

All that Glitters

All that Glitters PDF Author: Elizabeth Jameson
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252066900
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 406

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Book Description
Not a poor man's camp -- Staking the claims -- In union there is strength -- Sirs and brothers -- Imperfect unions -- A white man's camp -- Class-conscious lines -- As if we lived in free America -- Look away over Jordan.