San Antonio College Library

The Little Tramp searches for gold and love in the Klondike. Includes both a restored version of the original 1925 silent film, and the 1942 re-issue, the latter featuring a new score and narration written and spoken by Charles Chaplin.

In 1896, in a valley so remote it hadn't even been named, a lone prospector scooped up a glimmer of yellow from a shallow creek bed and started one of the last great frontier adventures. There was treasure in the land of the Northern Lights and it belonged only to the wolf and the caribou. Most Americans hadn't the vaguest idea where the Yukon Territories lay, but within a year the word Klondike would race across the world like a fever. The Canadian...

"When thousands of stampeders raced to claim their share of the Klondike, reports already circulated that the Canadian gold fields were 'all filled up' and the gold-seekers faced a choice : work for wages at someone else's Klondike mine or search for gold on the American side of the international boundary. Those who chose the Koyukuk River came from as far away as Illinois, Michigan, and New York, and most were woefully unprepared for life above the...

Hill's letters recount the Mt. Pleasant Mining Company (from Iowa) moving across country to California in 1849, and life in the mining camps. He described economic information, labor conditions, commodity prices, early exhaustion of the placer mines, and transition to quartz mining. After three years, he returned to Iowa without wealth.

The California Gold Rush began in 1848 and incited many?wagons west.? However, only half of the 300,000 gold seekers traveled by land. The other half traveled by sea. And it?s the story of this second group that interests Malcolm Rohrbough in his authoritative new book, The Rush to Gold. He examines the California Gold Rush through the eyes of 30,000 French participants. In so doing, he offers a completely original analysis of an important?but previously...

Harvey Wood (1828-1895), a young clerk in a New Jersey store, joined the Kit Carson Association of would-be California miners that set out from New York in February 1849, sailing to Texas and crossing Mexico overland to find passage north to San Diego. Wood reached the Southern Mines in July 1849, spending the next seven years searching for gold on the Merced and Stanislas Rivers. In 1856 he purchased an interest in Robinsons Ferry across the Stanislas...

In the two years after the discovery of gold as Sutter's Mill in 1848, one hundred thousand persons made the difficult trek to California in search of quick wealth. One thousand of them were blacks. By 1860 there were five thousand. They formed the largest voluntary migration of American blacks before the Civil War. Yet few whites then or now have been aware of the part that blacks played in America's epic adventure. Most black Forty-niners went west...