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 California with the dream of striking it rich. The
correspondents come from a variety of economic and social backgrounds.
Some are barely literate, while others write as well as the finest
authors of nineteenth-century travel literature. Their writings address
a broad range of concerns, from business prospects and consumer prices
to social mores and popular amusements. The letters and diaries also
hold clues to processes central to frontier history: the Americanization
of Hispanic California, the stresses that migration placed on
individuals and families, the fluidity of boomtown economies, and the
nature of gender and race relations in an urban population of
immigrants. William Benemann is the archivist for Boalt Hall Law School
Library and a former librarian at the Bancroft Library at the University
of California, Berkeley.
