In 1886, a young professor of philosophy, Josiah Royce, published a history of the California Gold Rush and its aftermath. In California: A Study of American Character from the Conquest in 1846 to the Second Vigilance Committee in San Francisco, Royce depicted a set of “irresponsible strangers” stumbling from a state of nature toward law and order. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Josiah Royce makes more than one appearance in Andrea G. McDowell's We the Miners: Self-Government in the California Gold Rush. Although separated by more than a century, both authors are similarly preoccupied with white American Gold Rushers’ capacity for self-organization. Writing in the Gilded Age, Royce was unfettered by professional standards of evidence-based scholarship and made the California Gold Rush what he wanted it to be: a morality play for his own time. We the Miners lacks the moral clarity of California as it contends with the methods and...
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