“In “The Rush,” Nathaniel Philbrick paints a portrait of the treasure seekers, prospectors and conniving politicians who shaped the destiny of the United States.
THE RUSH: California Gold, the Civil War, and the Making of the Modern World, by Nathaniel Philbrick
The gold rush has always been my weak spot. Even today, reading about the coincidental discovery of an enormous gold deposit in California at almost the exact moment of its annexation to the United States in 1848 is nearly enough to turn this otherwise fairly critical observer of American life into an ardent believer in Manifest Destiny, if only for one pleasingly unreflective moment.
As Nathaniel Philbrick argues in “The Rush,” his compulsively readable saga of the period, the feverish scramble for riches in an unfamiliar place seems to offer a compressed version of the national story, encapsulating the idea that reinvention, for individuals and perhaps for the country at large, is always just one lucky strike away.
“The Rush” complicates the familiar account of hopeful panners and canny outfitters, pairing the romance with the reality and drawing more characters into the story. Philbrick, a seasoned and popular chronicler of the American past, is equally concerned with those who got trampled by the rush as with those who rode it to astonishing heights of wealth and influence. He is especially interested in the political fallout. “I began to realize that the discovery of gold in California was part of a much larger — and ultimately more consequential — rush: the rush to the Civil War,” he writes.
The book opens with an evocative description of San Francisco in the months after a carpenter spied some shimmering flakes in the Sierra foothills in January 1848: the cavalcade of treasure seekers from all corners of the world, mammoth fortunes made and lost in minutes. “The very air is pregnant with the magnetism of bold, spirited, unwearied action,” one journalist observed.
Chasing rumors, sailors left hundreds of ships abandoned in the harbor. Shrewd businessmen hauled the vessels to shore and claimed the nailed-together derelicts as salable land. Six times in 18 months, fires devastated the town, yet its leaders did little to stop the infernos, since they stood to profit from the destruction.
Philbrick reminds us that Americans from the Eastern United States were not the first to arrive in California in search of gold: “The Rush” depicts the early days through the eyes of Vicente Rosales, a restless Chilean journalist and horse smuggler. Many of his coastal countrymen had heard the news of the discovery before most of the world and they hurried to take advantage.
When white Americans from Massachusetts and New York finally showed up — it took about six months to sail to San Francisco from Boston — they were eager to draw on the Chileans’ expertise. Their gratitude was short-lived. “With peculiar bad taste and ungenerous feeling,” as Rosales put it, these “envious gringos” organized armed posses to run their benefactors off.
Racial violence also exploded against local Indigenous bands. In 1851, California’s first governor announced that the state was engaged in a “war of extermination” against Native peoples. Later that year, though the state government had largely retreated from this extreme position, white militiamen invaded what is now called the Yosemite Valley to hunt down its inhabitants. Some were so enthusiastic about their mission they failed to notice the scenery. “If I’d known that the valley was going to be so famous,” one later said on his way to drive out the Ahwahnechee, “I’d have looked at it.”
Philbrick, who has spent much of the past two decades writing about George Washington and his time, is drawn to the stories of those who went to California looking not for gold but for power, and most of the power struggles in the soon-to-be state revolved around the future of human bondage. The former Mississippi congressman William Gwin left his 200 enslaved servants back home when he came west in 1849. He led “the Chivalry,” a pro-slavery political machine that sought to move California into the Southern orbit, even if that meant breaking it in two.
Gwin’s humble-born opponent, David Broderick, led “the Shovelry,” a generally pro-Northern faction of miners and laborers. Influence in California often ran through the federal legislature, and Broderick once said he would “consent to be roasted in a slow fire” for the privilege of sitting in the Senate for a day. He realized his dream for two and a half years before being killed in a duel in 1859.
In describing these battles and others like them, Philbrick brings the era’s gritty political dramas to life with compelling detail and an admirable faith in his readers’ willingness to follow the shifting factions and alliances. Yet compared with his more tightly focused books on the Mayflower and the true story behind “Moby-Dick,” “The Rush” feels somewhat sprawling and uncentered.
It’s not always clear why we’re hearing certain stories rather than others. Philbrick calls the book “at once intimate and panoramic,” which it is, but it’s also more a cut-and-paste compendium of interlocking tales than a coherent narrative. An epilogue traces the post-gold-rush lives and misfortunes of no fewer than 34 people.
The book still works, however, because Philbrick is a richly talented raconteur and a master of the cinematic vignette. We meet people so strange and vivid they threaten to steal the show, such as Mary Ellen Pleasant, a formerly enslaved entrepreneur, Underground Railroad conductor and supposed voodoo sorceress who took her California fortune and filled the coffers of the abolitionist John Brown to fund his 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry.
Stories like hers serve as the building blocks of a larger claim. Sometime around 1849, Philbrick suggests, American character changed. This is the final meaning of the rush: a galloping transition from physical, material reality to something more fluid and abstract, from the world of hard metal to a more “ethereal realm” in which we still dwell.
Philbrick traces a somewhat meandering thread from the gold in the foothills to Leland Stanford, the railroad baron and California governor whose Palo Alto estate became Stanford University and the birthplace of Silicon Valley, and whose bankrolling of early motion-picture experiments in the 1870s Philbrick reads as the moment modernity took hold.
After the gold rush, he writes, “failure was the cost of innovation. You moved fast. You broke things. You tried again. And when it worked, the results were transformative.”
Intriguing rather than fully convincing, the case might have been made stronger with more analysis and argument than Philbrick’s light authorial touch tends to allow. Sticking to the one-damn-thing-after-another approach, the author risks duplicating the same trick Stanford and his fellow tycoons tried to pull off, laundering all the fraud, violence and plunder of the gold rush into something shinier and easier to sell as national mythology.
After each fire in the late ’40s and early ’50s, Philbrick writes, San Franciscans barely paused before rebuilding atop “the still-smoking remains of their former city, too obsessed with chasing profit to take the precautions that might prevent another disaster.” Bringing his story up to the present, Philbrick is struck by the enduring capacity of Californians, and all Americans, to dream up new illusions while living on the brink of destruction.
Some of his sources, however, were a little less sanguine. “I often wonder if this great people will revert altogether to barbarism,” one foreign-born fortune seeker mused around 1851. “The whole town stinks of degradation.”
THE RUSH: California Gold, the Civil War, and the Making of the Modern World | By Nathaniel Philbrick | Viking | 452 pp. | $38” [1]
1. How the Gold Rush Broke America: Nonfiction. Kreitner, Richard. New York Times (Online) New York Times Company. Oct 4, 2026.
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