A novel of the California Gold Rush, aka 49ers
Ulysses McQueen is the son of a prosperous Iowa farmer. He is a newlywed and his wife, Susannah, is pregnant with their first child. But it is 1849 and gold has been discovered in California. Talk is of easy money, gold nuggets so easy to get you can just pick them off the ground. And McQueen has gold fever. So he packs up and heads off to western Iowa to join the hopeful men headed to try their luck mining for gold. Never mind the fertile farm he is leaving behind. Never mind the young wife preparing to become a mom. Never mind the disapproval of his parents and siblings. Off he goes, gonna get rich in California.
But things don't go quite to plan. McQueen joins up with another man, Asa Wall, a professional gambler. But their livestock get stolen and they have to join up with another group who doesn't like McQueen and makes life very hard for him until he becomes ill and collapses.
Despite the struggles, McQueen makes it to California only to find that about a 40,000 men got there before him and all the best sites were taken. He joins a small group of miners and they manage to get quite a bit of gold. McQueen gets tired of mining and set out on his own only to lose everything to his old trail companion, Asa Wall, the gambler. Meanwhile, back home things are not going well either.
Susannah gives birth and gets into a disagreement with McQueens family. In spite, they evict her and the baby from the farm that they had let their son work. So she decides to head to California with her baby and track down her missing husband. She doesn't take the land route, she travels by boat instead.
Before all that, in 1848, Stephen Jarvis in California, is a recently discharged soldier. He meets a young California woman, Rita Estrada, and they fall instantly in love. But he is a penniless soldier and she is the daughter of strict and old-fashioned Mexican rancher. Jarvis ends up at Sutter's Mill just before gold is discovered and he becomes one of the first miners to strike it rich. But mining is hard work and the more people who show up to mine, the more uncertain things become. Jarvis takes his gold and sets up in business instead, supplying food and necessities to the miners. Turns out he has a knack for business, knowing what people need and want and how to acquire it at a reasonable price. His plan is to return to Rita and show her family that he is a successful business man and ask permission to marry her. But Rita is no longer available. Due to family pressure, Rita married a local man instead of waiting for Jarvis. Jarvis is devastated.
This was a pretty long book and I got rather bored with it in the last quarter of the story. The author keeps throwing road blocks in the young peoples' way and I found it rather tiring, the endless hard times. Here's another thing, I didn't really like the characters much. Only Jarvis, really. The young husband McQueen walks away from a good life without a second thought about his wife and the child she is bearing. He fails to respond to her letters and she often doesn't know if he is dead or alive. And Susannah, after being kicked out of the home she shared with her husband, and instead of staying with her loving parents, heads out with her baby on a dangerous trip to track down McQueen. It doesn't end well. And Rita, who loves Jarvis but lets her family browbeat her into marriage with a man she barely knows and who she doesn't love instead of standing up to their disapproval of her desire to wed a non-Mexican. I just found McQueen, Susannah, and Rita foolish and unappealing.
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