Kirjahaku

When The World Rushed In was first published in 1981, the Washington Post predicted, ""It seems unlikely that anyone will write a more comprehensive book about the Gold Rush."" Twenty years later, no one has emerged to contradict that judgment, and the book has gained recognition as a classic. As the San Francisco Examiner noted, ""It is not often that a work of history can be said to supplant every book on the same subject that has gone before it.""Through the diary and letters of William Swain--augmented by interpolations from more than five hundred other gold seekers and by letters sent to Swain from his wife and brother back home--the complete cycle of the gold rush is recreated: the overland migration of over thirty thousand men, the struggle to ""strike it rich"" in the mining camps of the Sierra Nevadas, and the return home through the jungles of the Isthmus of Panama. In a new preface, the author reappraises our continuing fascination with the ""gold rush experience"" as a defining epoch in western--indeed, American--history.

Any account of Wells Fargo & Company involves a history of the more dramatic aspects of the Old West. From 1852 to 1918, the company's operations bisected almost all social, cultural, and economic activities in the Trans-Mississippi West and were conducted in diverse physical landscapes. Its early history illuminates the booms and busts of gold and silver mining rushes, the collection and distribution of mail, the rise and fall of banks, the Pony Express, overland staging, the building of the transcontinental railroad, the Civil War and Indian wars, the violence of robbers and gunfighters, the development of agriculture, the rise of capitalist entrepreneurs, the regulation and disbanding of monopolies, and the return of the entrepreneurs with deregulation. In January 1848, Wells Fargo's agents in California's gold regions provided basic banking and safe express transport services of gold and letters for thousands of miners, using Concord stagecoaches, 'built stout' to withstand the rigours of Western travel. Along with the nostalgic appeal of its Old West identity, readers will discover that speed, security, and connectivity have been constants in the company's long history, themes that remain more important than ever in modern banking today, from credit cards to cashpoint machines.