The Rush by Edward Dolnick

Author:Edward Dolnick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History / United States / 19th Century, History / United States / General
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2014-08-11T16:00:00+00:00

High in the mountains, mission nearly accomplished, the gold-seekers paused for breath. Langworthy was drunk on scenery and accomplishment. “Bewildered and lost amidst the boundless expanse,” he gazed in awe at mountains that receded into infinity and trees that soared out of view. Trees a dozen feet in diameter and too tall to measure loomed over his campsite. “By the side of such a grove, the stateliest pine forests in the eastern States would appear like humble shrubbery.”

Eleazer Ingalls waxed philosophical. “It does not take much to make man happy after all,” he mused. He and his companions had managed to shoot three woodchucks, and life had taken a definite upturn. “Here we have been starving along for the last month, crossing deserts, drinking rotten, alkali or salt water, or deprived entirely, and now we’ve got to the top of the Nevadas, around our campfire amid snow drifts, with plenty of good water and three woodchucks for three of us, and we are the happiest mortals alive.”

Luzena Wilson, as brisk and practical as ever, had no inclination to sing hymns to the trees or to ponder human nature. The climb up and over the mountains, almost from the moment she completed it, had begun fading into history. And Wilson, an American to the marrow of her bones, viewed “history” in the American sense: it meant not the essential background needed to understand a story but excess baggage that only bogged a person down. “Already we began to forget the trials and hardships of the past,” Wilson wrote, “and to look forward with renewed hope to the future.”

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