ABSTRACT
For a good many men who went to California after 1848, the notion of a “social” history of the Gold Rush would have been a contradiction in terms. For them, “society” was one of the very things the diggings lacked. Angus Mclsaac said it well on Christmas Day in 1852 when he lamented, “This day I … thought of my situation here in this wild mountain hamlet and the very few pleasures it is adapted to afford deprived of social society & of mingling with … tender hearted friends.” Other men modified “society” differently: “good society,” “congenial society,” the “sweets of society,” the “pleasures of home and its society,” “quiet home comfort and the society of friends.” 1 But however they modified it, they found it missing in the Sierra Nevada foothills and themselves the poorer for its absence.
