Mining Mormon Gold | J. Kenneth Davies, Mormon Gold: The Story of California’s Mormon Argonauts

This book is as much a history of the Mormon Church in California during the 1847-57 decade as it is a history of Mormon gold mining. The author gives a plethora of detail concerning both subjects, based on numerous diaries, journals, tithing records, and other important documents. In somewhat chronological fashion, he ex amines Mormon efforts at gold digging from the first strike at Sutter’s mill to the final withdrawal of the Saints from California as a result of Brigham Young’s order to return to Utah when Albert Sidney Johnson’s Army approached the territory in 1857. Some good maps identify various mining camps and settlements frequented by Mormon gold-seekers and proselyters during these years. Attractive early pencil drawings and selected pictures of California scenes are interesting illustrations. The text is readable and written with clarity. 

The author’s main point, earlier re searched by Leonard J. Arrington and Eu gene E. Campbell, among others, is Brig ham Young’s double-edged policy of publicly discouraging his Saints from deserting the valleys of Utah for the golden flesh pots of California while secretly dispatch ing “gold missions” to the diggings to ac quire the liquid capital necessary for the economic establishment of the Mormon Church in Salt Lake Valley. Davies’s research is so comprehensive and carefully done that the reader is left with little doubt about Young’s intentions in California. In fact, any reader must be impressed that so much could be found out about the hundreds of individuals, plus their origins and family relationships, who participated in the California rush. The book is a genealogist’s gold mine of information; the Index of Personal Names is a valuable addition to the Subject Index. The book seems intended for a mostly Mormon audience, as the author assumes that the reader will understand his incidental references to events in Utah history and to such LDS practices as the Word of Wisdom. 

The chief defect of the book is in its haphazard organization and repetitive references. The reader must deal with a kaleidescope of events and people in Davies’s rather topical approach set in a rough chronology. A conclusion sums up the author’s analysis and major objective, but some summaries and transitional para graphs at the end of each chapter would have offered some guideposts to keep the reader on a clearly marked path. An additional package of 63 pages of appendices is offered by an order blank inserted in the book, but nowhere is there a description of the contents of the appendices. 

Mormon Gold will be a must for anyone interested in the activities of the Mormon people in California from the discovery of gold to 1857, and especially for scholars working in the field. Though it lacks continuity as a narrative, it is a whole library packed with information.

Mormon Gold: The Story of California’s Mormon Argonauts, by J. Kenneth Davies. (Salt Lake City: Olympus Publishing Company, 1984)+429 pp. $12.95.