In 1849, Ralph Buckingham, a younger son of a youngest son of New England Pilgrim stock, went to California from his small-town Connecticut home. Landless, with no inheritance or trade of his own, Ralph sailed around the Horn, then traveled overland from San Francisco to gold country in the Trinity Mountains. He spent four years in northern California, struggling daily to earn enough to build a future. Sixty years later, back home in Connecticut, Ralph writes his story at the behest of the Newtown Bee newspaper man. Well-schooled in spite of his relative poverty, Ralph Buckingham quotes...