Mad Dust Country: The Memoir of a Forty-Niner

A cultured but misanthropic Englishman joins the 1849 Gold Rush with romantic hopes for the New World in its golden age. But he is soon recording - with his own combination of wistful idealism and satirical bile - the decline of the diggings from utopian optimism into racist violence. A critical period of the young country's development in wealth, power and the mythology of freedom is seen here from an Old World perspective, and the result is a fable for every American century.