Describes adventures and disasters in the lives of people who rushed to the gold mines of California in 1848 and explains how this event sparked the state's development.

In the spring of 1851 San Francisco is booming. 12-year-old Amelia Forrester has just arrived with her family and they are eager to make a new life in Phoenix City. But the mostly male town is not that hospitable to females and Amelia decides she will earn more money as a boy. Cutting her hair and donning a cap, she joins a gang of newsboys, selling Eastern newspapers for a fortune.

"In 1848, carpenter James Marshall made a chance discovery that would change the face of the American West. That discovery: a few shiny flakes-of gold in a riverbed he was digging. Within a year 800,000 gold-seekers from all over the world were on their way to California, and the Gold Rush was on. This book covers the entire period of the boom-and-bust of one of the greatest expansion periods in US history-from the dangers of the journey, to the rough...

Tells the little-known story of this exploratory mission and reveals how it set the stage for the climactic Battle of the Little Bighorn two years later. What is the significance of this obscure foray into the Black Hills? The short answer, as the author explains, is that Custer found gold. This discovery in the context of the worst economic depression the country had yet experienced spurred a gold rush that brought hordes of white prospectors to...