A Year of Mud and Gold: San Francisco in Letters and Diaries, 1849-1850

A Year of Mud and Gold is a collection of over two hundred excerpts from letters and diaries of ordinary men and women caught up in the rapid transformation of San Francisco during its gold rush heyday, 1849-50. Together these accounts render a rich mosaic of San Francisco's metamorphosis from a small Mexican outpost into a rough-and-tumble boomtown filled with gamblers and prostitutes, evangelists and entrepreneurs-men, women, and children from all parts of the world, arriving in Californi...