With a budget into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, Dwight Manley and the California Gold Marketing Group commissioned Dave Bowers to create a book that would not only include the S.S. Central America saga, but, far beyond that, would encompass one of the most dynamic, most memorable eras in American history—the California Gold Rush.

The California Gold Rush began on January 24, 1848, when a succession of events was set into motion that forever changed the map of America. By 1857, when the S.S. Central America and its treasure were lost in a hurricane, the boundaries extended from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and the West as we know it became defined.

While the romance and legends of the Wild West have been told many times, and while the Gold Rush has furnished the subject for many books, films, and exhibits, it was Bowers' objective to create something vastly different: a narrative that would focus on precious gold metal itself, how it was mined, refined, made into ingots, and struck into coins. In the book you will “visit” mines, private mints, and assay offices, you will “be there” when the San Francisco Mint opens for business in 1854, and, you will also see how the coins were used—first person accounts of $50 “slugs” being spent in gambling halls in the mining camps, brilliant double eagles being exchanged for goods and services, and more.

Bowers describes this American epic in chronological order as it happened—from the discovery of gold to the travels of the Forty Niners by land and sea, to the Vigilantes who took the law into their own hands, to the triumphs and tragedies of miners in the gold fields.