Category: San Francisco

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What Is Gold Rush 2.0?

gold flakes in bottle or fool's gold?

With gold trading at more than $4,000 an ounce, a new gold rush is on. It’s caused a renewed interest in gold mining in the California hills. This recent gold rush has been dubbed Gold Rush 2.0 to differentiate it from the first gold rush in 1849 that attracted thousands of prospectors — Argonauts — from all over the world to San Francisco and the California gold diggings.

When I lived in California, the Gold Country was a major vacation spot for long weekends in summer and ski trips in winter. It still is. My family visited many gold rush towns over the years — Nevada City, Placerville, Sutter Creek, Angels Camp, Mokelumne Hill, Coulterville, and others. The town of Columbia, part of the Columbia National Historic Park, was a favorite. This preserved, nineteenth-century mining town had a wooden rocker or cradle set up so kids could search for gold flakes as sand, dirt, and water was sluiced down the rocker’s long chute.

gold flakes in pendant

In 1849, gold mining was a rough, dirty business, hard on the body. Early in the gold rush days, miners squatted at the edge of cold mountain streams or stood almost knee deep in them, in the scorching sun. Most used round pans with sloping sides that Chilean miners brought to shovel dirt in, swirl in the running water, and hope to see the glint of gold as the lighter particles of dirt washed out. You can still buy versions of these pans in Gold Country hardware or dry goods stores.

In 1849, when the onslaught of gold-crazed prospectors, those now known as Forty-Niners, arrived, merchants raked in more money than the miners by charging eye-watering prices for food, drink, tools, clothes, and transportation. Ghirardelli was there, selling the miners chocolate. In 1854, Levi Strauss landed in San Francisco and sold work pants and tents. Captain William A. Richardson and his son Esteban made their money by transporting miners to and from the goldfields, as well as by supplying prime beef, produce, and fresh water to the hotels and tent kitchens in San Francisco. I am writing about these wild days in my next book.

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Stimulating Book Talk with P.E.O. Members!

Book talk display

Last month, I had a great time presenting my novel Dancing on the Brink of the World to the Philanthropic Educational Organization, Chapter GJ. What a fine group of interesting women involved in helping young women succeed in this world through scholarships, grants, and loans. The theme we focused on was women’s roles and duties in the past and their difficult, laborious lives. I set up on a table visuals, including a map from my novel and a steel engraving print of Yerba Buena Cove, to help my audience go back in time to the 1820s.

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In love with bookstores and libraries

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”

—Jorge Luis Borges

Since childhood, once I learned to read, books and libraries were a magnet for me. I rode my bike three miles to our local library when I was ten and would stay for hours dipping into any book that caught my attention. When I moved to San Francisco, the first thing I did was get a library card, after getting my driver’s license. When I moved to Sausalito, I joined the library.

After my husband and I bought a house in Larkspur, I joined the local library board, serving for fifteen years. During those years, the Board began research on a purpose-built library building. I’m thrilled the new library, now under construction, is scheduled to open in 2026, and I plan to visit it when I travel there to see old friends.

I always visit bookstores and libraries on my vacations. I adored walking around Blackwells in Oxford and Shakespeare & Company in Paris, and bought many books to take home. Libraries in European castles, monasteries, universities, and mansions store so many treasured books. The scholarship, human insights, adventures, and experiences locked in these homes for books remind me of the saying, “Knowledge is power.” Those depositories of knowledge had sometimes spread ideas that overturned the balance of history. I hope you use and support and treasure your local library.

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Dancing on the Brink of the World Publishing Update

Novel preview

My ARCs have arrived!! Nope, not ships like Noah’s. “ARC” is publishing shorthand for  Advanced Readers’ Copy. 

These books resemble the final published book, scheduled for release on January 13, 2026. My book will be on bookstore shelves in just five months! I can’t wait for you to read about William Richardson’s sailing life in Alta California in the 1800s. And all the rough life and times during rancho and Spanish mission days.

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When will Dancing on the Brink of the World be published?

The official publication date is January 13, 2026. Three cheers! My novel is now available for pre-order online. You can find it listed on Simon & Schuster,  Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, Bookshop, and Indigo. Be sure to look for my pen name – Marianne T. Rafter.

In author Tamim Ansary’s review of my novel, he wrote, “Rafter’s novel feels as solidly real as my world, because she takes me into it with such a wealth of historical details, I feel up close to the everyday life of these people, in this time and this place.” I hope you will order my book, and as you read it, be absorbed into Captain Richardson’s time, too.

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Who Hasn’t Left Their Heart in San Francisco?

Three-masted sailing ship on San Francisco Bay with the city in the background

Tony Bennett, who died last month, made that song famous. It was my mother’s favorite song, especially after she visited the city and I moved there. Its history continues to fascinate me through my research about its early founder, Captain William A. Richardson. After the dinosaurs disappeared, the Miwoks and Ohlone people, the Spanish, the Mexicans, the Russians, the British, and finally the Americans wanted a piece of the place. With the 1849 Gold Rush, the world surged through the bay’s gateway to get to the “diggings” in the mountains. The city by the bay, in fact, all of California, still attracts people from around the world to visit or live there. But many are also leaving. They cherish the city and the state or at least their memory of them, but can no longer afford to live there.

José Vadi wrote in his essay collection Inter State: Essays from California, that he fears former Californians are becoming modern-day Okies, displaced by a new demographic, Californians with deep pockets. I joined the ranks of those modern-day Okies when I moved to the state of Washington a few years ago. But I have great affection for the years I lived in California and love to visit.

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What is the connection between California’s US Route 101 and El Camino Real?

US Route 101 trails along the California coastline from San Diego and beyond the northern California border. As far as San Francisco, it follows much of the same route that the Spanish explorer (conquistador) General Gaspar de Portolá traveled from 1769-1770, when he led an expedition for the Spanish king. The path was labeled El Camino Real, the Royal Road. Franciscan friars trudged along hundreds of miles with the Spanish expedition and started to build a chain of missions in Alta California along El Camino Real, which stretched from Mexico City to the San Francisco Bay. The Royal Road sprouted branches leading east over mountains and desert to Santa Fe, which was also Spanish territory. Spanish and Mexican soldiers, settlers, fur trappers and traders, messengers, Native Americans, and the Richardson family rode along El Camino Real.

Today, Californians and tourists drive US Route 101, never realizing that a good portion lies on the route along which General Portolá guided his expedition. During his explorations, Portolá established the California cities of San Diego and Monterey. He also served as the first governor of Alta California. Of the twenty-one Spanish missions constructed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, some have disintegrated, but many people visit those that have been preserved and are still places of worship today.

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Where did all the sea otters go?

I read recently that sea otters are being reintroduced into places where they once thrived. Thousands had swarmed around the coves and shoreline of San Francisco Bay where they were hunted for their thick luxurious fur. The indigenous people first took the furs for their winter clothing. When Spain ruled Alta California, the Spanish agreed to allow the Russian navy to anchor in the Bay in winter and bring Aleut hunters from Sitka to trap the animals. The pelts brought high prices and were sought by wealthy Russians for fur coats. Spain and later the Mexican government collected a hefty tax for each pelt. Tax collection for these furs evolved into one of Captain William A. Richardson’s duties.

Sea otters are now protected wildlife. Because their numbers were so reduced, their favorite food, sea urchins, overpopulated the kelp forests along the western North American coast. Without their otter predators, sea urchins devastate their environment and create what biologists label an urchin barren. In Canada, along the coast of British Columbia, sea otters are increasing and so the coastal ecosystem has improved significantly. The kelp forests are rebounding. Otters are now re-entering the Oregon and California coast, not in numbers as they were in the 1800s, but enough to help the ecosystem recuperate.

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Who built the first white man’s residence in San Francisco and where was it?

Plaque marking the Richardson residence in Yerba Buena, 1835

In earlier years, there was much debate about who built the first dwelling in San Francisco, but the City of San Francisco finally decided the honor belonged to Captain William A. Richardson. In the 1800s, the city of San Francisco was known as Yerba Buena. The Republic of Mexico governed Alta California, and its governor José Figueroa asked Richardson to establish a pueblo at Yerba Buena. In 1835 he built a tent-shanty in which he and his family lived for four months. Richardson then built a wood plank house on a lot that he purchased from the Mexican government for $25. The California Historical Society confirmed that the lot was on the corner of the San Francisco streets of Grant and Clay. The pictured plaque that hangs on the current house says: “The Birthplace of a Great City — Here, June 25, 1835, William A. Richardson, founder of Yerba Buena (later San Francisco) erected its first habitation, a tent dwelling, replacing it in October, 1835, by the first wooden house, and on this ground in 1836, he erected the large adobe building, known as ‘Casa Grande.’ This tablet was placed under the auspices of the Northern Federation of Civic Organizations of San Francisco.” I want to thank my friend Stephanie Sigue for photographing this plaque for me. For a marker of such a momentous event, it is hard to find and obscured from casual viewing, but look carefully and you will find it.

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What diseases caused epidemics in nineteenth-century California?

Highly contagious diseases such as smallpox, syphilis, mumps, influenza, and measles were prevalent in California during the 1800s. Europeans were learning to control outbreaks of the deadly disease smallpox by vaccinating. However, when the Spanish and Mexican soldiers mixed with the Native Americans in California, epidemics of smallpox and measles spread rapidly through the native population. The people had no immunity to these European diseases, and though some survived, many died within days after contracting them. Captain Richardson helped the Franciscan friars vaccinate for smallpox among many of the neophytes who had been at the California missions, but smallpox and other diseases returned, again and again, to cause havoc among the coastal people, resulting in severe suffering and death. In the Franciscan Mission Dolores (located in San Francisco), where on average 1,000 neophytes lived and worked, more than 300 might die in one year due to these diseases.