California gold and filthy lucre -- Gold fever as a cure -- Husbands and wives -- Numberless highways to fairy grottos -- A great perverse paradise -- California is a humbug -- Widows and helpmates -- A wild, free, disorderly, grotesque society -- The prude fails -- The end of the flush times.
Summary
California during the gold rush was a place of disputed claims, shoot-outs, gambling halls, and prostitution; a place populated by that rough and rebellious figure, the forty-niner; in short, a place that seems utterly unconnected to middle-class culture. In American Alchemy, however, Brian Roberts offers a surprising challenge to this assumption.
