Streams of Gold — Robert M. Johnson

In the year 1849, an American migration took place, bringing a hundred thousand people from the lands of Eastern America to the far West of California. Some of these gold pilgrims came from other countries as far away as England and Australia, some by land, some by sea. They were all following a vision, a dream of riches that you could just pull from the earth, the shiny metal, malleable and bright, gold. Just like the boom that took place when the fur trade of the Rocky Mountains exploded with the harvesting of thousands and thousands of beavers, the gold rush to California brought with it large numbers of people and their problems. The story outlined in this book is that of one of these fur trappers, a man who had done well by himself as a fur trapper and later became a scout an important part of what would become known as the Mexican War. The treaty with Mexico was signed in 1848 and California became another territory of the United Colonies of America. It is often said that timing is everything, and for Jeremiah Warner, the Mountain Man, the warlock, he had been among the first Americans to enter California and knew about the gold discoveries long before they became common knowledge in the East. He had seen a section of the American River quite a distance from Sacramento that he had said to himself, if he ever came back to California, that's where he would want to settle. He loved the river and he knew that in several other places around that area, rivers like this one had produced gold findings. In this volume he makes his way with his wife Cheyenne woman, Flying Dove back to Sacramento and back to the gold rush that was just beginning.