Gold Rush Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Nach dem Sacramento, the title under which Carl Meyer published his book in German in Aarau, in 1855, is a collection of Reisebilder, or travel pictures. The book is a narrative depiction of Meyer’s travels in California from 1849 to 1852. I chose this text in large part because Meyer hailed from roughly the same part of Switzerland as my family, and because like Meyer, my parents traveled to California, albeit 130 years later. The locations and landscape that Meyer describes both when talking about California and Switzerland are familiar to me. I have hiked, camped in, visited, or passed through, most of the places that Meyer describes, which made the experience of reading his descriptions all the more vivid. Meyer’s original 1855 text is written in Old German script, but for ease of use, I chose to annotate the 1938 English translation by Ruth Frey Axe that is held in the Watzek Library Special Collections. The 1938 version, titled Bound for Sacramento: travel-pictures of a returned wanderer, is a hardcover first edition text limited to 450 copies. I began my annotations working with the physical copy in the Special Collections room, but as the semester moved online I completed my research using my transcription of that text. The physical copy of my text was 282 pages long and included reproductions of the front and back paper covers and title page of the original 1855 edition. My transcription of the 1938 edition is limited to a brief excerpt of Meyers’s total work and covers Meyers’s journey from Monterey, California to San Joaquin California. I intentionally chose to cut out the large sections at the beginning and end of Meyer’s text that describes his lengthy sea voyages to and from California. These sections are largely devoted to Meyer's arduous voyage and add little new information to the historical record. Unfortunately for the sake of brevity I also had cut most of Meyer’s overland travels in California because although fascinating and vivid, they largely cover topics that are already well documented in the historical literature. Meyer’s accounts of Sacramento, New Helvetia, San Francisco, the Mariposa Gold Mines, Trinidad, and Mormon Island all had to be cut. I chose instead to focus on a section of the book that begins just after Meyer’s arrival by ship in Monterey in July of 1849 and ends with his arrival in the San Joaquin Valley in the late summer of that year. In this section, Meyer and his companion travel with a Mexican caravan from Sonora through present-day San Benito County, over the Pacheco Pass, and along the Diablo mountain range to the San Joaquin River near present-day Tracy, California. His travels with the caravan are arguably the most historically significant portion of his account, since to the best of my knowledge there are no other first-hand accounts of caravan life from this period that rival Meyer’s detailed and perceptive description.