Angela Hawk, “Going ‘Mad’ in Gold Country: Migrant Populations and the Problem of Containment in Pacific Mining Boom Regions,” Pacific Historical Review 80 (Feb. 2011): 64-96.

In this prize-winning article, historian Angela Hawk analyzes the issue of insanity in relationship to not only the California gold rush, but also the subsequent gold rushes in British Columbia and Australia. Many young men left home and hearth to strike it rich in the gold fields, and some of them showed signs of mental instability, chronic drunkenness, and violent behavior. “Gold Fever,” as it was sometimes called, seemed to affect many young men in the heady days of the gold rush. In response to this problem, the California legislature created the state’s first insane asylum in Stockton in 1853. Professor Hawk describes the experiences of one young man in particular who was known by the name “Scotty.”

David Igler, “Alta California, The Pacific, and International Commerce Before the Gold Rush,” in Deverell and Igler (eds.), A Companion to California History (Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), 116-126.

In this essay historian David Igler argues that California was a destination for international trade vessels long before the gold rush. California was one of many regions in the Pacific Ocean that witnessed increased trade in the early 19^th century; other common centers of trade included Peru, Hawaii, Canton, and the northwest coast of North America. Igler’s work draws on a database of almost 1,000 European and American ships that entered the Pacific prior to the gold rush, and studies the vessels’ destinations, cargos, and nationalities. The California gold rush sparked a new era of trade in the Pacific Ocean, and California became the primary destination of migrants in the 1850s.