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With Golden Visions Bright Before Them: Trails to the Mining West, 1849–1852 (Volume 2)
During the mid-nineteenth century, a quarter of a million travelers—men, women, and children—followed the “road across the plains” to gold rush California. This magnificent chronicle—the second installment of Will Bagley’s sweeping Overland West series—captures the danger, excitement, and heartbreak of America’s first great rush for riches and its enduring consequences. With narrative scope and detail unmatched by earlier histories, With Golden Visions Bright Before Them retells this classic American saga through the voices of the people whose eyewitness testimonies vividly evoke the most dramatic era of westward migration.
Traditional histories of the overland roads paint the gold rush migration as a heroic epic of progress that opened new lands and a continental treasure house for the advancement of civilization. Yet, according to Bagley, the transformation of the American West during this period is more complex and contentious than legend pretends. The gold rush epoch witnessed untold suffering and sacrifice, and the trails and their trials were enough to make many people turn back. For America’s Native peoples, the effect of the massive migration was no less than ruinous. The impact that tens of thousands of intruders had on Native peoples and their homelands is at the center of this story, not on its margins.
Beautifully written and richly illustrated with photographs and maps, With Golden Visions Bright Before Them continues the saga that began with Bagley’s highly acclaimed, award-winning So Rugged and Mountainous: Blazing the Trails to Oregon and California, 1812–1848, hailed by critics as a classic of western history.
Traditional histories of the overland roads paint the gold rush migration as a heroic epic of progress that opened new lands and a continental treasure house for the advancement of civilization. Yet, according to Bagley, the transformation of the American West during this period is more complex and contentious than legend pretends. The gold rush epoch witnessed untold suffering and sacrifice, and the trails and their trials were enough to make many people turn back. For America’s Native peoples, the effect of the massive migration was no less than ruinous. The impact that tens of thousands of intruders had on Native peoples and their homelands is at the center of this story, not on its margins.
Beautifully written and richly illustrated with photographs and maps, With Golden Visions Bright Before Them continues the saga that began with Bagley’s highly acclaimed, award-winning So Rugged and Mountainous: Blazing the Trails to Oregon and California, 1812–1848, hailed by critics as a classic of western history.
448 pages, Leather Bound
First published September 28, 2012
1 person is currently reading
45 people want to read
About the author
Will Bagley
45 books18 followersWilliam Grant Bagley was a historian specializing in the history of the Western United States and the American Old West. Bagley wrote about the fur trade, overland emigration, American Indians, military history, frontier violence, railroads, mining, and Utah and the Mormons.
From the age of nine he was raised in Oceanside, California, where his father was a long-serving mayor in the 1980s. His younger brother Pat Bagley became the notable Salt Lake Tribune editorial cartoonist.
Bagley attended Brigham Young University in 1967–68, and then he transferred to University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC), where he obtained his B.A. in History in 1971. At Santa Cruz Bagley studied writing with Page Stegner and history with John Dizikes. He graduated from UCSC between Richard White and Patty Limerick, two of the leading lights of the "New Western History." He considered an integral part of his education a trip he took in 1969, on a homemade raft built of framing lumber and barrels, down the Mississippi River from Rock Island, Illinois to New Orleans. After graduation he spent three years in North Carolina studying the local Bluegrass music and culture, and playing in bands.
After college, Bagley worked as a laborer, carpenter, cabinet maker, and country musician for more than a decade. In 1979 he founded Groundhog Records to release his long playing record, "The Legend of Jesse James." In 1982 he abandoned music and hard labor to take a writing position at Evans & Sutherland, a pioneering computer graphics firm. He worked in various high-tech ventures until 1995, when he started his career as a professional historian. He has written more than twenty books, and in 2008 historian David Roberts dubbed him the "sharpest of all thorns in the side of the Mormon historical establishment."
Although he was raised as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church), Bagley was no longer a member. He has publicly stated that he "never believed the theology since [he] was old enough to think about it." However, he was friends with believers and considered himself a "heritage Mormon," valuing his pioneer lineage.
In September 2014, the Utah State Historical Society granted Bagley its most prestigious honor as a Fellow, joining "the ranks of such luminaries as Dale Morgan, Wallace Stegner, Juanita Brooks, and Leonard Arrington." Western Writers of America gave Bagley its 2019 Owen Wister Award for Lifetime Contributions to Western Literature in 2019. He said it was "an expression of affection from my WWA friends that is appreciated and humbling, for it calls to mind the words 'I am not worthy!'
Bagley lived and worked in Salt Lake City, Utah until his death in 2021.
Abridged from Wikipedia
From the age of nine he was raised in Oceanside, California, where his father was a long-serving mayor in the 1980s. His younger brother Pat Bagley became the notable Salt Lake Tribune editorial cartoonist.
Bagley attended Brigham Young University in 1967–68, and then he transferred to University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC), where he obtained his B.A. in History in 1971. At Santa Cruz Bagley studied writing with Page Stegner and history with John Dizikes. He graduated from UCSC between Richard White and Patty Limerick, two of the leading lights of the "New Western History." He considered an integral part of his education a trip he took in 1969, on a homemade raft built of framing lumber and barrels, down the Mississippi River from Rock Island, Illinois to New Orleans. After graduation he spent three years in North Carolina studying the local Bluegrass music and culture, and playing in bands.
After college, Bagley worked as a laborer, carpenter, cabinet maker, and country musician for more than a decade. In 1979 he founded Groundhog Records to release his long playing record, "The Legend of Jesse James." In 1982 he abandoned music and hard labor to take a writing position at Evans & Sutherland, a pioneering computer graphics firm. He worked in various high-tech ventures until 1995, when he started his career as a professional historian. He has written more than twenty books, and in 2008 historian David Roberts dubbed him the "sharpest of all thorns in the side of the Mormon historical establishment."
Although he was raised as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church), Bagley was no longer a member. He has publicly stated that he "never believed the theology since [he] was old enough to think about it." However, he was friends with believers and considered himself a "heritage Mormon," valuing his pioneer lineage.
In September 2014, the Utah State Historical Society granted Bagley its most prestigious honor as a Fellow, joining "the ranks of such luminaries as Dale Morgan, Wallace Stegner, Juanita Brooks, and Leonard Arrington." Western Writers of America gave Bagley its 2019 Owen Wister Award for Lifetime Contributions to Western Literature in 2019. He said it was "an expression of affection from my WWA friends that is appreciated and humbling, for it calls to mind the words 'I am not worthy!'
Bagley lived and worked in Salt Lake City, Utah until his death in 2021.
Abridged from Wikipedia
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
August 28, 2024
The entry written by my 5th cousin once removed, in 1856 while she was on a wagon train headed to Oregon was amazing. Based on her original diary written over a years' time as she traveled across a wild uncharted country. Astounding. First hand accounts are the absolute best reads.
Now I want to find the original diary and purchase my own copy of this book.
Now I want to find the original diary and purchase my own copy of this book.
May 6, 2014
Bagley, Will. With Golden Visions Bright Before Them: Trails to the Mining West, 1849-1852, Volume 2, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 2013 (480pp. $45)
That there was placer gold in California’s Sierra Nevada was secret to many. Californios had found it in San Feliciano Canyon during 1842. Even the sight of a glittering nugget of the stuff in the trail race of a sawmill James Marshall was building in January 1848, was nothing new either, and nothing much happened about it until a wily trader named Samuel Brannan charged up Montgomery Street in San Francisco on May 10 that year, waving a bottle of gold dust above his head and shouting, “Gold! Gold from the American River!”
Then, when Colonel Richard Mason, military governor of California under American dominion sent a tea caddy containing 230 ounces of gold (more than 14 pounds!) to the War Department in Washington, rumors were confirmed that gold in California would pay for the Mexican War more than a hundred times over. Feisty, imperial President James K. Polk exulted in the news.
“The Mississippi,” he said “so lately the frontier of our country, is now only the center.” American went gold crazy, and the rush was on.
Brilliantly told with an abundance of extraordinary detail, “With Golden Visions Bright Before Them” builds on Will Bagley’s magnificent first volume of the Overland West Series, to bring readers an unparalleled heroic epic more complex, challenging and contentious than simple legend has ever had it.
Bagley’s access to primary source materials is itself heroic. The author consulted kore than 500 new personal letters, journals, government documents, newspaper reports and folk accounts, and apparently examined a horde of paintings, drawings and renderings, many in private collections never seen.
To capture a sense of the journey and its terrain, main trails, side trails, cut-offs and dead-ends, Bagley follows the western trek of Forty-niners and Oregon-bound soldiers and settlers in a mile-by-mile account of exhilaration, suffering, sacrifice and often death.
The Gold Rush began a new era in overland trail history, which saw nearly a quarter million people undertake the journey, most of them during 1849-52, going to California via the Humboldt River, then up and over the Sierras at Donner or Carson passes. Most of the sojourners were men, many of them footloose vagabonds, younger sons with no hope of inheriting property, avaricious no-goods, brigands, even downright thieves and cutthroats.
Others, a significant number, were professional men like lawyers and physicians. Tradesmen of every kind joined the rush for gold, including carpenters, chemists, blacksmiths, wagon-makers and merchants.
Most traveled in “companies” of a dozen wagons or more, usually organized in military-stuyle with leaders and scouts, though this organizational structure often broke down on account of intemperance, sour luck or disease. Even then, a cholera epidemic was sweeping up the Mississippi River Valley in 1848.
Three months after he left office, President Polk was dead in Tennessee, and the disease that killed him crept up the valley, killing thousands in the unhealthy river towns. Cholera also swept through the hordes of gold seekers, who carried it to the Plains Indian Tribes. Of the 100,000 or so who crossed to California to find gold, perhaps 5,000 died of disease.
Bagley’s grand work is eloquent. “Going to see the elephant!” became synonymous with going to California (some saw only the tail and some didn’t like the elephant when they saw it). No aspect of trail life escapes Bagley’s sharp eye---clothes, equipment, wagons (wagons were colorfully decorated in pink, red, green and blue paint, most with slogans sloshed on the canvas), family life, music, religion, disease, hardship, trading, Indian encounters, thievery, and a multitude of other topics.
Bagley’s deeply enjoyable history is thus tinged with horrific disaster, wherein the American Deram for the first time comes to include the idea that it is our birthright to get rich quick.
As Bagley writes, “The notion that anyone ever learns anything from history is dubious, but that does not prevent the past from lighting the way toa more just, tolerant and sustainable future.”
That’s one elephant Americans haven’t seen yet.
That there was placer gold in California’s Sierra Nevada was secret to many. Californios had found it in San Feliciano Canyon during 1842. Even the sight of a glittering nugget of the stuff in the trail race of a sawmill James Marshall was building in January 1848, was nothing new either, and nothing much happened about it until a wily trader named Samuel Brannan charged up Montgomery Street in San Francisco on May 10 that year, waving a bottle of gold dust above his head and shouting, “Gold! Gold from the American River!”
Then, when Colonel Richard Mason, military governor of California under American dominion sent a tea caddy containing 230 ounces of gold (more than 14 pounds!) to the War Department in Washington, rumors were confirmed that gold in California would pay for the Mexican War more than a hundred times over. Feisty, imperial President James K. Polk exulted in the news.
“The Mississippi,” he said “so lately the frontier of our country, is now only the center.” American went gold crazy, and the rush was on.
Brilliantly told with an abundance of extraordinary detail, “With Golden Visions Bright Before Them” builds on Will Bagley’s magnificent first volume of the Overland West Series, to bring readers an unparalleled heroic epic more complex, challenging and contentious than simple legend has ever had it.
Bagley’s access to primary source materials is itself heroic. The author consulted kore than 500 new personal letters, journals, government documents, newspaper reports and folk accounts, and apparently examined a horde of paintings, drawings and renderings, many in private collections never seen.
To capture a sense of the journey and its terrain, main trails, side trails, cut-offs and dead-ends, Bagley follows the western trek of Forty-niners and Oregon-bound soldiers and settlers in a mile-by-mile account of exhilaration, suffering, sacrifice and often death.
The Gold Rush began a new era in overland trail history, which saw nearly a quarter million people undertake the journey, most of them during 1849-52, going to California via the Humboldt River, then up and over the Sierras at Donner or Carson passes. Most of the sojourners were men, many of them footloose vagabonds, younger sons with no hope of inheriting property, avaricious no-goods, brigands, even downright thieves and cutthroats.
Others, a significant number, were professional men like lawyers and physicians. Tradesmen of every kind joined the rush for gold, including carpenters, chemists, blacksmiths, wagon-makers and merchants.
Most traveled in “companies” of a dozen wagons or more, usually organized in military-stuyle with leaders and scouts, though this organizational structure often broke down on account of intemperance, sour luck or disease. Even then, a cholera epidemic was sweeping up the Mississippi River Valley in 1848.
Three months after he left office, President Polk was dead in Tennessee, and the disease that killed him crept up the valley, killing thousands in the unhealthy river towns. Cholera also swept through the hordes of gold seekers, who carried it to the Plains Indian Tribes. Of the 100,000 or so who crossed to California to find gold, perhaps 5,000 died of disease.
Bagley’s grand work is eloquent. “Going to see the elephant!” became synonymous with going to California (some saw only the tail and some didn’t like the elephant when they saw it). No aspect of trail life escapes Bagley’s sharp eye---clothes, equipment, wagons (wagons were colorfully decorated in pink, red, green and blue paint, most with slogans sloshed on the canvas), family life, music, religion, disease, hardship, trading, Indian encounters, thievery, and a multitude of other topics.
Bagley’s deeply enjoyable history is thus tinged with horrific disaster, wherein the American Deram for the first time comes to include the idea that it is our birthright to get rich quick.
As Bagley writes, “The notion that anyone ever learns anything from history is dubious, but that does not prevent the past from lighting the way toa more just, tolerant and sustainable future.”
That’s one elephant Americans haven’t seen yet.
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October 4, 2013304.80978 B146 2012
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews