The Georgia Gold Rush: Twenty-Niners, Cherokees, and Gold Fever

As a Georgia native and an amateur historian, I was shocked by my own level of ignorance about the history of Georgia Gold Rush. While there has been a great deal of literary and historical attention given to the forced removal of the Cherokee nation from Georgia and the tragic journey of the Trail of Tears, there has been relatively little recent scholarship devoted to the historical events that precipitated that exile and the utter disregard shown to the Cherokee people as well as their private property by speculators, the state of Georgia and the Federal government in concert. I highly recommend this volume for the general reader of US and southern regional history as well as for Georgians who are willing to develop a more complex appreciation of their state's history.

Mr. Williams documents the Georgia gold rush in an interesting and uncompromising style. So many myths surround this time frame in north Georgia's history. For example, Benjamin Parks is frequently credited with the first modern discovery of gold in Georgia, mostly because he claimed it to an Atlanta reporter fifty years later. Williams quickly disproves virtually all of Park's claims. In the chapters titled "Gold Fever and the Great Intrusion" and "The Cherokee Nation Abandoned," Williams gives one of if not the most accurate concise histories of Cherokee Removal I have ever read. Additional chapters review a miner's life, the people who made money (most weren't miners), and the end of the Georgia gold era in 1849.