Eldorado: Adventures in the Path of Empire - Couverture souple

The year is 1849 and Bayard Taylor sets out for California in the early years of the gold rush to record the world around him.

Step back in time and take a journey of over three thousand miles across land and sea.

Eldorado is a series of brief glimpses into a world both haunting and beautiful.

Bayard Taylor takes the reader from New York to Panama, around Mexico and up to California and in that time he seems to see the whole spectrum of human existence.

Sometimes he seems barely to believe what he is seeing, and the novel has a continuous sense of wonder to it.

Although gold is everywhere - in the dirt, drifting in the streams, always changing hands, shaping the landscapes and the people that it touches – it seems that Bayard can see past that precious metal to the land and the lives beneath it.

As his journey takes us beyond California and down into South America it becomes a celebration of the world as Taylor found it.

Taylor collects both stories and songs on his travels, determined to chronicle the changing world around him.

Eldorado is a bible of the American frontier: filled with lush descriptions and fascinating stories as Barnard Taylor drifts through America like a ghost, chronicling a vast and changing continent.

There is a newness to everything in Eldorado – a sense that maybe Taylor could be standing where no one has stood before.

Could California ever have been the Eldorado it was promised to be or will humans always demand the impossible?

''With his keen eye and penchant for details, Taylor bestowed upon these tumultuous and anarchistic times an almost cinematic quality. Writing as he traveled, he managed to combine a sense of the poetic with straightforward historical documentation, underpinned with a wry sense of humor.... Widely regarded as a classic of western literature, Taylor's lively chronicle of the birth of modern California has lost nothing in terms of its initial freshness and vitality in the interim.'' Rain Taxi Review of Books

''Of all books written about the Gold Rush and the Forty-Niners, Eldorado is one of the most compelling narratives....A California version of the Federalist Papers.'' The San Francisco Chronicle

Bayard Taylor (1825-1878) was born in Pennsylvania. A relentless writer, he began reading at age four and writing poems at seven. After an apprenticeship with a printer, Taylor approached Horace Greeley of the New-York Tribune and proposed that the newspaper finance his trip to Europe in return for travel letters, which he would later publish as Views A-Foot (1846). After the publication of Eldorado in 1850, Taylor continued to travel the world, becoming secretary of the US delegation in Russia. A few months after being appointed American Minister to Germany, he died at the age of 53 in Berlin, Germany.

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A journalist’s eyewitness account of the explosive 1849 California gold rush and his travels through Mexico.

In 1849, a young, wide-eyed reporter from New York ventured West not to seek riches, but to report on the madness and exuberance of the California gold rush. Sent by Horace Greeley, a highly respected New-York Tribune editor, twenty-four-year-old Bayard Taylor traveled through Panama to reach his final destination, San Francisco, which he described as an amphitheatre of fire” in the night, gleaming with the promise of gold and progress.

In his enthralling and robust narrative, Bayard brings the reader into the wild, lush world of early California, reporting on the nearly overnight growth of townships and infrastructure after the gold rush. During his adventures, Bayard walked one hundred miles from San Francisco to Monterey, and later returned to New York via Mexico by foot, mule, and coach. Bayard describes the characters he met with an honest curiosity heady gold miners who had once been doctors and lawyers, hospitable Mexicans from all classes of society, and even a highway robber who made off with his books.

Eldorado, which borrows its title from the South American Spanish legend of a hidden land of gold, is a magnificent tale about the birth of California from a deserted land to a modern city sprawl. At once an account of history and of one man’s thrilling adventures, Eldorado transports the reader to the beginning of an era, with all its gold, glitz, and glamour.

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