People went a little nuts during the Gold Rush in California. The prospect of finding a shiny rock or two and getting rich was too powerful a pull to resist.
In general, the flood of people was a flood of white faces, but further historical research shows that Black men did some of the hard work of digging for gold, too.
Mark Oliver has been researching and publicizing his findings on the subject for years; now he's out with a book of essays he edited, Voices of the Golden Ghosts – African Americans in the California Gold Rush.
Much of the work focuses on Siskiyou County, which was the second Mother Lode of the Gold Rush. We visit with the author about the many sources he's used to piece together the story.