this one narrows the field of vision considerably, cutting short as it does the intimate—and, no doubt in some cases, erotic—ties between men that the Gold Rush fostered. Indeed, no historical silence is so deafening as that which surrounds the intimacies among men who spent a night, or a lifetime, together in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. Groveland was not Greenwich Village, to be sure. But neither was it a land of lonely hearts.
