Gold was discovered in California by the carpenter James Marshall on a fork of the American River in January 1848. The effect of the discovery was electric, triggering a stampede of miners from around the world headed to California to find instant wealth. What made the California gold rush a significant social—and literary—event was not simply the $400 million in gold extracted by miners between 1849 and 1855. It was the carnivalesque atmosphere of swagger, heightened expectation, and boomtown hokum that characterized the tens of thousands of young, self-styled "Argonauts" who poured into a remote Pacific maritime province recently wrested from Mexico in the Mexican-American War. The gold rush inspired more written documents than any other nineteenth-century historical event except the Civil War. The bibliographer Gary Kurutz has cataloged over seven hundred individual documents published in the five years from 1848 to 1853. Gold rush...