Roaring camp : the social world of the California gold rush

Our collective memory "knows" about the Gold Rush: the mid-19th century Wild West where unshaven men named Stumpy and Kentuck raised hell and panned for gold.

But this is not the whole story; which tells of a social vortex - multiracial, multiethnic, often homosocial - in which Frenchmen live alongside Anglos and Cherokee women. "Roaring Camp" explores the dynamic social world created by the Gold Rush in the Sierra Nevada foothills.

In it we find Mexican families who worked the mines, did the wash and rose up against Anglo rule.

There are the Miwok Indians who tried to maintain their traditions even while constructing the sawmill at Sutter's fort.

We enter the all-male households of the diggings, the mines where the men worked and the fandango houses where they played.

Johnson shows how this peculiar world evolved and how what we now know as the history of the Gold Rush took root.