Four Months among the Gold-Finders in Alta California
Being the Diary of an Expedition from San Francisco to the Gold Districts

This fictitious diary about the Californian Gold Rush was widely accepted as genuine, and was a bestseller in 1849.

J. Tyrwhitt Brooks (Author)

9781108033381, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 22 September 2011

232 pages, 1 map
21.6 x 14 x 1.3 cm, 0.3 kg

J. Tyrwhitt Brooks was a pseudonym of the nineteenth-century publisher and journalist, Henry Vizetelly (1820–94). Born in London, Vizetelly was apprenticed to a wood engraver as a young child. He entered the printing business and helped found two successful but short-lived newspapers, the Pictorial Times and the Illustrated Times. His Four Months among the Gold-Finders, published in 1849, was a commercial and critical success on both sides of the Atlantic. It purported to be a genuine diary about the Californian Gold Rush, and was widely accepted as such. However, he admits in his 1893 autobiography, Glances Back Through Seventy Years (also reissued in the Cambridge Library Collection) that it was an elaborate hoax. The supposed author was a doctor (whose testimony would be considered reliable) who had found and then lost a fortune. The Times reviewed it enthusiastically and at length as a morality tale for its time.

1. Clearing the Faranolles
2. Start for Monterey
3. An arrival at San Francisco from the gold district
4. The party leave San Francisco
5. Encampment for the night
6. The journey delayed
7. Captain Sutter's account of the first discovery of the gold
8. The author and his friends leave Sutter's Ford
9. Two horses stray away
10. Digging and washing, with a few reflections
11. The proceedings of the week
12. The party leave the Mormon diggings
13. The party again shift their quarters
14. Smoking and sleeping
15. The party determine to start for Bear River
16. A rest
17. A rich mine of gold discovered
18. Where McPhail was last seen
19. The party strengthen their defences
20. The author inclined to return to the coast
21. The party start for the coast
22. The stock of gold remaining weighed and shared
23. The gold district
24. The author and his friends part company
25. Letter from the author to his brother in England.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF]