Information was produced quickly as newspapers, publishers, and businessmen hastened to cash in on gold fever, but much of it was unreliable, contradictory, and changed frequently. Richard T. Stillson follows several gold rush companies across the country, gleaning from their letters and diaries a sense of how they obtained information and evaluated its constantly changing sources, how they attempted to learn where gold was, and what they wrote home, thus providing information to the next wave of gold seekers. As the companies gained experience, they reassessed knowledge and developed new modes of determining the credibility of new information.
By providing a historical context for assessing information and by viewing communication strategies as a core element of the gold rush itself, Stillson reveals a connection between media, myth, and reality in the formative years of the nation’s most volatile region.