They Saw the Elephant: Women in the California Gold Rush

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University of Oklahoma Press, 1992 - Biography & Autobiography - 265 pages

"The phrase ’seeing the elephant’ symbolized for ’49 gold rushers the exotic, the mythical, the once-in-a-lifetime adventure, unequaled anywhere else but in the journey to the promised land of fortune: California. Most western myths . . . generally depict an exclusively male gold rush. Levy’s book debunks that myth. Here a variety of women travel, work, and write their way across the pages of western migrant history."-Choice

"One of the best and most comprehensive accounts of gold rush life to date"ˆ–San Francisco Chronicle

 

Contents

Over the Plains
1
Across the Sea
30
Home Sweet Home
53
Ashes to Ashes
71
Working Women
91
Free to Be
108
All the Worlds a Stage
126
Improper Society
149
Love and Marriage
173
Weaving the Social Fabric
193
Postscript
217
Acknowledgments
237
Index
253
Copyright

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About the author (1992)

JoAnn Levy is a free-lance writer born and raised in California. She lives in Los Angeles, but is most at home in a mountainside cabin near the Old Okum mine in the Sierra Nevada Mother Lode.

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