Based on diaries, journals, travelogues, and accounts of the California gold rush of the late 1840s and early 1850s. . . . It depicts the spread of gold mania throughout the United States and abroad; the great trek of some 80,000 forty-niners (and of a larger number of 1850 emigrants) by land and sea to the new El Dorado; and life in the mining camps and associated boomtowns. Christ Sci Monit
