Gold Rush Stories

A Sierra Nevada native and current resident, Gary Noy has taught history at Sierra College from 1987 until the present. He founded the Sierra College Center for Sierra Nevada Studies and served as its director until 2012. His previous titles include Sierra Stories: Tales of Dreamers, Schemers, Bigots, and Rogues (Heyday, 2014), which won the Gold Medal for Best Regional Nonfiction from the Next Generation Indie Book Awards, The Illuminated Landscape: A Sierra Nevada Anthology (Heyday, 2010), which he coedited, and Distant Horizon: Documents from the 19th Century American West (University of Nebraska Press, 1999). Visit his website at garynoy.com.

"Excitement, surprise, and revelation in every chapter." —Goldfields Books"Seamlessly fuses academic rigor, original reporting and emotional intensity into one meditation on an era. If the task of the historian is to be faithful to lost truths, then Noy's latest exploration succeeds on every level, and does so in a way that will keep readers wanting to dig deeper into the past." —Sierra Lodestar"Gary Noy’s collection of standalone, standout nonfiction stories of the Gold Rush underscores once again the continuing role of this epoch as a catalyst for good writing. Again and again, we Californians return to this era to rediscover the breeder-reactor of literary energy set in motion by the first decade of American California. Noy has the ability to make old stories seem new and new stories seem like they have always been part of the Gold Rush canon." —Kevin Starr, professor of history at the University of Southern California; California State Librarian emeritus; and author of the multivolume Americans and the California Dream"What a remarkable collection! An original and lively look at all the usual suspects, plus bears, weather, women, Joaquín, disappointment and dissipation, a veritable glory hole of highly polished nuggets from life on the frontier. Exhaustively researched and highly entertaining." —JoAnn Levy, author of They Saw the Elephant: Women in the California Gold Rush"This fascinating book offers readers something new. Gary Noy brings together, appropriately enough, 49 tales drawn from familiar and unfamiliar sources, each rich with something compelling and memorable. A satisfying representation of California’s Gold Rush, complex, unruly, appalling, uplifting, and, as we come to understand, ultimately never quite what we thought it was." —Terry Beers, Professor of English and American Literature, Santa Clara University