With the alchemy of great history, Susan Johnson transforms the familiar story of the Gold Rush into one that is sparkling and new. You know about the Gold Rush: out West, sometime around '49, unshaven men named Stumpy and Kentuck raising hell and panning for gold. Stories like Bret Harte's "The Luck of Roaring Camp" set the mold. But that's not it, at least not all of it. Harte's Roaring Camp also features characters named French Pete and Cherokee Sal, hinting at a social vortex, multiracial, multiethnic, often homosocial, in which French men live alongside Anglos from the east and Cherokee women from Indian territory. Susan Johnson's Roaring Camp explores the dynamic social world created by the Gold Rush in the Sierra Nevada foothills around Stockton. In it we find Mexican families like the Murrietas 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 where gold was disco
