Three years in California
Subtitle: William Perkins' journal of life at Sonora, 1849-1852.
By: With an introd. and annotations by Dale L. Morgan & James R. Scobie.
Contributors: Morgan, Dale Lowell, 1914-1971.; Scobie, James R., 1929-1981.
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 1964
Place of publication: Berkeley
Language: eng
Number of pages: 424
Subjects: Frontier and pioneer life -- California; California -- Description and travel; California -- Gold discoveries
Description: "William Perkins was a young Canadian who became an Argonaut early in 1849 when he boarded a steamboat at Cincinnati, and descended the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, past New Orleans, to Brazos Santiago in Texas. There he disembarked to journey across Mexico to Mazatlan on the Pacific coast, where he found passage on another vessel bound for the Golden Gate. Pausing briefly in San Francisco, he went on to the southern gold fields around Sonora, where he worked first as a miner and later as a storekeeper and merchant before returning to New Orleans in 1852. Perkins' journal is a unique document in the literature of western America. His thoughtful but lively account of life in Sonora presents the California Gold Rush from a perspective not commonly encountered--that of a non-Yankee who developed strong Latin American sympathies and affiliations. Further, he had a sharp eye for the details of local color and change in a community that was evolving from a rude mining camp into an organized town. His writing provides the contemporary reader with an insight and appreciation of social and economic factors of the time that seldom are found in the surviving accounts of other forty-niners."--Book jacket.
Notes: Published in Spanish in 1937 under title: El Campo de los sonoraenses; tres años de residencia en California, 1849-1851.