Eight pages into “The Rush: California Gold, the Civil Warfare, and the Making of the Fashionable World” (Viking), Nathaniel Philbrick tells us why he wrote it. Philbrick, who’s seventy years outdated, has lived for the previous 4 a long time on Nantucket, a house that has doubled because the wellspring of his profession. After publishing two books about its historical past—“Away Off Shore: Nantucket Island and Its Folks, 1602-1890” and “Abram’s Eyes: The Native American Legacy of Nantucket Island”—he turned his consideration to one of many numerous whaling ships that sailed forth from the island within the nineteenth century. This was the Essex, which weighed anchor there in 1819 and was subsequently destroyed by a sperm whale in the course of the Pacific Ocean, stranding its steadily dwindling variety of crew members at sea for 3 horror-filled months and provoking Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick.”
Philbrick’s personal gripping narrative of the destiny of the Essex, “Within the Coronary heart of the Sea,” marked a turning level in his profession. It received a Nationwide Ebook Award, in 2000, spent forty weeks on the New York Instances best-seller listing, was tailored right into a Hollywood film, and made its writer an eminence within the area of Dad Historical past. Philbrick’s subsequent books embody popular-in-both-senses accounts of the Mayflower, the Battle of Bunker Hill, and the Battle of Yorktown. With one exception, a guide concerning the Battle of the Little Bighorn, they’ve been set on the East Coast or on the ocean or each, pure sufficient contexts for a person who has spent most of his life on an island off the coast of New England.
So why California rapidly? As a result of, Philbrick tells us, so many Nantucketers earlier than him developed an abrupt curiosity in it, too. After gold was found within the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, males who had been born and raised to make their dwelling from the ocean sailed their whaleships fourteen thousand miles to San Francisco, deserted them within the harbor, and rushed inland to attempt to make their dwelling from the bottom as a substitute. “Over the course of 9 months in 1849,” Philbrick writes, “Nantucket, as soon as the whaling capital of the world, misplaced 1 / 4 of its voting inhabitants to the goldfields.” That may be a staggering truth, one which drags behind it a complete ghost guide about what occurred to Nantucket and numerous different locations throughout the nation after so lots of their residents left to attempt to strike it wealthy in California.
This isn’t Philbrick’s topic, however nearly every part else is. “The Rush” is a sprawling guide, characters and tales spilling out in all places, as dense with claims because the goldfields it describes. Of those, two emerge as dominant. The primary, which is woven all through the guide—albeit within the strict sense that it retains showing and disappearing—is that the invention of gold in California set off a mad scramble for wealth, land, labor, and energy that contributed to the onset of the Civil Warfare after which helped decide its end result. The second is that what mattered most concerning the gold rush was not the gold however the rush. The headlong haste with which these Nantucket whalers picked up their lives and went West was consultant, Philbrick argues, of a brand new and distinctly American urge for food for pace, novelty, and transformation, one which has outlined our character and formed our future from the time of the forty-niners to the deliberate Anthropic I.P.O.
“Any person wants to inform him we are able to all try this.”
Cartoon by Will Kiley Santino
“The Rush” just isn’t notably convincing about both of those claims. That is partly as a result of each are a little bit rickety and partly as a result of they’re too totally different to comfortably coexist in a single guide: one is about historical past and causality, the opposite is about psychology and tradition. Principally, although, it’s as a result of Philbrick retains veering off into a bigger, messier, much less instrumentalized account of the gold rush and its aftermath. A greater title for his guide could be “A Historical past of California, 1848-1878.” Lest that strike you as boring, think about that these are three of probably the most thrilling, harrowing, and action-packed a long time for the reason that founding of our nation. In a way, then, the tacit query “The Rush” asks just isn’t concerning the historical past it covers however about historical past typically: Does the previous want to elucidate the current to be worthy of our consideration?
