Plotting the Golden West: American Literature and the Rhetoric of the California Trail

This book focuses on the experience of the Californian Gold Rush of 1849–1850, not in terms of what happened (a subject much covered by historians) but in terms of how people of various levels of sophistication wrote about it. Drawing on a variety of sources - diaries, journals, letters, and contemporary journalism - Dr Fender explores how both amateur and professional writers attempted to come to terms with the physical wilderness of the transcontinental landscape and the social wilderness...