Life on the Plains and among the Diggings

During the California gold rush, 300,000 prospectors flocked to California in the hopes of making it rich. Among them was Alonzo Delano, who set out alone at the age of forty-two, leaving his family behind in Illinois, both to seek out new opportunity and because of a doctor’s prescription for a western climate to help cure a lung ailment. He was, in his words, both seized by a “fever of the body” as well as a “fever of mind for gold,” and his hope was to cure both. Unlike many of the other gold