History: On a cold January morning in 1848, James Marshall - a bit of an adventurer - was checking out the flow of water he was diverting in order to build a water mill in the Sacramento Valley, in a place named Coloma by the local Native Americans.
The winter sunshine gleamed on the icy water but a few flashes of extra brightness got the better of his curiosity and he fished out what he thought must be quartz until he discovered that by beating the pieces between two chunks of rock he could bend - but not break - the gleaming metal.
"I have found it," he told his business partner, thus marking the start of that turbulent period of history known as the Gold Rush.
In his fascinating and detailed narrative HW Brands charts the amazing story of the development of the state of California, the hardship of the long treks across deserts and over mountains, the perilous sea journeys, the fate of those who arrived from China, Australia and Europe to seek their fortune, the appropriation of Native American land and the seismic changes that were taking place in a country that was starting to evolve into the super power it is today.
Against the backdrop of the Mexican War, the tensions between pro- and anti-slavery states, the speed wars between rival clipper ship companies and the burgeoning network of railroads, Brands tells the stories of the people both at the bottom and the top of this pile of newfound gold.
The headlong rush was defined by the huge distances which had to be covered and the mode of transport used. Although it was easier to sail from San Francisco to Sydney than to New York, the Forty-niners had, in fact, three choices: they could make the dangerous sea journey around Cape Horn, the shorter one through the isthmus of Panama or the long arduous trek across the desert, traversing the area of the Salt Lakes, over the sierras and down into the Sacramento Valley.
Many tended towards the overland trek because though tough, it was cheaper. The hardy Sarah Royce, originally from Shakespeare's birthplace, spent five months with her husband and small child making her way from Iowa to the Sacramento Valley, dealing with cholera and angry Native Americans on the way, starting off with oxen and carts but dispensing with everything except mules and oxen in order to get across the snow-covered sierras. Fortunes and political careers were made and lost. The service industries, including prostitution, thrived for it was sometimes possible to make more money out of miners than mining.
Some people became entangled in the gold rush though sheer misfortune. There is the wretched Italian shanghaied on board a sailing ship so swiftly that he arrived bereft of shoes and despite getting frostbite and not understanding a word of English was still forced to climb the riggings. Some came, learned and went home again. Edward Hargreaves returned from California to his native New South Wales, trekked over the Blue Mountains behind Sydney, noted the similarities among the mineral rocks - and in 1851 found gold.
And of course there were the many Native American tribes, their lands taken, their homes burned, their stores of acorns, pine nuts and dried insects destroyed, their whole lifestyle undermined, with those on the borderlands driven back and then attacked by other tribes on whose land they had been forced to trespass. In another excellent book, A People's History of the United States, Howard Zinn focuses in particular on our old friends the Choctaws, weakened by whiskey and military attacks, betrayed by broken treaties when gold was discovered on their lands a decade earlier.
The Age of Gold comes with an extensive bibliography and some excellent photographs though it is short on maps. Brands occasionally uses such phrases as "one surmises" which are not usually found in the vocabulary of historians of his calibre; he is Professor of History at the University of Texas. Nevertheless, he is a fount of factual information ranging from how the US evolved to the best method to make sure you've found gold. (You use the Archimedes method of weighing the metal under water.)
Reading this fascinating book, it is tempting to substitute Iraq for California and oil for gold and to look at the common marauding principles which powered both incursions into lands owned by others.
That was then, however, and The Age of Gold will best be read as a chapter of American history in which, for some, it was the best of times and for others, the worst of times.
Mary Russell is a journalist and author