Gold Rush Manliness: Race and Gender on the Pacific Slope

The mid-nineteenth-century gold rushes bring to mind raucous mining camps and slapped-together cities populated by carousing miners, gamblers, and prostitutes. Yet many of the white men who went to the gold fields were products of the Victorian era: educated men who valued morality and order. Examining the closely linked gold rushes in California and British Columbia, historian Christopher Herbert shows that these men worried about the meaning of their manhood in the near-anarchic, ethnical...