Eldorado: Or, Adventures in the Path of Empire

I stumbled across this book by accident one day and it has turned out to be my find of 2001 -- one of the most enjoyable books I have read in ages. Taylor, a youthful New York journalist and poet, was sent out to California to file back dispatches on this wild, gold-filled, lush place in the seminal gold rush year of 1849, when California was a sprawling region, and not yet a state. And what a fabulous job he does -- this reads more like an engaging adventure narrative than non-fiction, and I could not put it down -- a reader is completely transported into another place and time. One cannot fail to be fascinated by the bustling, energetic, multi-ethnic, can-do place that was the west coast. If you know California, especially the San Francisco, Monterey and Sacramento areas, Taylor's descriptions of their still-untamed landscapes will be both familiar and strange, but always utterly lovely. His reports of the gold rush regions are extraordinary, as is his walk -- yes, *walk* -- from San Francisco to Monterey... this at a time when a galloping horse could get from San Jose to San Francisco in perhaps seven *hours*. Taylor is funny, honest, generally very clear-eyed and unsentimental, and his writing is of very high calibre. Kudos to Heyday Press for bringing this wonderful book to a new audience. I am giving it to everybody as a gift this year.

Bayard Taylor, with the eye of the photographer for detail and composition and the writing talent of the professional journalist Horace Greely so willingly paid, provides the reader with a fantastic look at California of the mid-1800's. His vivid descriptions of the people, the events, and perhaps most importantly, the pre-development beauty of California's wild mountains, seacoasts, and valleys, made this reviewer (a native Californian) long for a time machine to allow visits to the wondrous collection of experiences described by Taylor. From his many travels across the land, to his viewing of the first California constitutional convention, his words allow the reader to feel the wind in one's hair as the California-bred horses fly at top speed across the valleys and through the washes, or to become a fly on the wall as the convention delegates reach compromises which shaped and prepared the State for its Golden future. The pictures he paints of the natural environment of early California are so dramatic that they must could certainly be used to support any attempts to preserve the tragically few remaining expanses of California wilderness. This is a book for Californians (and those who love the state) who wish to return, if only for a few brief moments, to the sounds and the sights of it's birth: raw, chaotic, beautiful, yet with a rich Spanish/Mexican heritage and social codes that provided a useable framework to maintain law and order. Taylor describes it all, allowing us to understand not only what was happening, but also why. It's a great book.