Catherine McMorrow

I never knew too much about the gold rush until reading "Gold Fever!". I knew the gold rush existed, but I didn't know too much about it. The book goes into detail about what happened and who it happened to." Gold Fever" talks about how people found the gold in California, how people such as doctors,lawyers, and people from all kinds of occupations quit their jobs just to hunt for gold, and it also talks about the forty-niners. The forty-niners are much more than a football team. These are the people that lived all around America and risked their lives to come to California to work for gold. A lot of the forty-niners died trying to get there. The book also goes into how the gold ran out and people had to go back to their normal jobs.The gold rush put California on the map. No one lived there before it happened and now California is one of the biggest states in America population wise. Once the gold rush was over the book ends on a high note stating that people started to find silver. I really enjoyed this book and I think it can be really informative to children.… (mehr)

"Gold Fever" by Catherine McMorrow is a very good nonfiction book about the California Gold Rush. McMorrow includes most of the important facts in this fairly easy chapter book including the discovery of gold by James Marshall at John Sutter's sawmill, the impossible quest to keep the discovery a secret, the routes prospective miners took to California, and the hardships the miners encountered at the mines. McMorrow also wrote about the huge impact the search for gold had on the growth of California. "When gold was first discovered, San Francisco was a sleepy village. Two years later, 25,000 people lived and worked there". One aspect of history that McMorrow neglected to address was the tremendous effect the Gold Rush had on both native people and the "Californios" who had been living in California before gold was discovered. There are great pictures by popular illustrator Michael Eagle and a funny ending... "Then one day, someone found a lot of blue stuff in the Comstock lode in Nevada...'Silver' the cry went up...'Silver!'". Fourth graders will painlessly learn about the California Gold Rush of 1849 by reading this entertaining and informative book.… (mehr)