Golden dreams /

A relatively brief, folksy account of the California gold rush--setting also of novelist Bristow's last historical romance, Calico Palace (1970). Thoroughly outweighed and outclassed as history by Donald Dale Jackson's recent Gold Dust (p. 419), this is a modest affair per se, strung on small incidents and single episodes that, as people used to write (and Bristow still does), ""changed history."" Jenny Wimmer, from Georgia hill country, knew how to tell grains of gold from grains of sand; so when one of the men at Sutter's Fort found some shiny bits of metal, she could authoritatively announce, ""It's gold, boys."" Jenny had a gabby youngster who was also, she insisted, truthful; so when little Martin Wimmer boasted about ""bagfuls of gold,"" his hearer believed him and Sutter's secret was out. Also present are Sam Brannan, whose ""noisy run down the street in San Francisco"" touched off the rush to the gold fields; ""a naval officer named Edward Beale. . . and an army officer named Lucien Loeser,"" who, carrying the news East, ""started the Forty-Niners on their way to California""; and various individuals who reached the West in various interesting ways--most notably, sometime-prison-warden Eliza Farnham, whose plan to shepherd a party of penniless, marriageable women went awry (a story that takes a few chapters), and the Bidwell-Kelsey overland party, a sorely-tried group that demonstrated--prior to 1848--""that crossing the continent to California could be done not just by hunters and trappers"" but by ordinary folks. (Even ""a family could make the journey together."") Other bits and pieces turn up too--from the first mention of California gold"" in Hakluyt to the territory's much-contested admission as a state--but they don't add up to more than a mildly colorful, slightly antiquarian conglomerate, a treasury of tour-guide patter. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.