SOURCE: “Some Notes on California Gold Rush Fiction Before 1870,” in Quarterly News-Letter, Vol. 30, No. 4, Fall, 1965, pp. 75-81.

In the following essay, Swingle reviews the portrayal of the California gold rush in early fiction, chronicling U.S. as well as foreign works.

The California Gold Rush had an appeal, immediate, monetary, and lasting, to the imaginations of many writers, good, bad, and indifferent. Almost from the moment of the first news from Sutter's Mill, books with a background of the Gold Rush began to turn up in the literary placers.

In 1849 appeared a fantastical pastiche entitled Aurifodina; or, Adventures In The Gold Region, by Cantell A. Bigly, which pseudonym masked the author's real name of George Washington Peck, and lightly concealed the statement: Can Tell A Big Lie.

The narrator in this tale is a mountain man (“I led a hunter's life up and down the wild region between...