Author Sal Manna did not expect his January presentation about the Civil War at the Calaveras County Historical Society to eventually lead to making even more history. But Mike and Patti McCombs of Mountain Ranch were there to show him a Gold Rush journal left to them many years ago by late friend and neighbor Dorothy Nelson. Now, the publication of To The Land Of Promise: The Extraordinary California Gold Rush Journal of Lewis Meyer (Calaveras History Publishing) marks one of the last, if not the last, major first-person contributions to the history of the Gold Rush.

Nelson, Meyer’s great-granddaughter, and the McCombses, had safeguarded the account of Meyer’s 1849 voyage from New York, around Cape Horn, to San Francisco, and the following months in the goldfields, in their homes. It had never been published, in part or in whole, or made available for research purposes. 

To The Land Of Promise is a rarity, one enhanced by Manna’s addition of biographies of the Panama’s passengers and crew. Shipmates included a famous lawman who would nab stage robber Black Bart, two founders of the city of Oakland (including its first mayor), two San Francisco pioneer printers, a well-known actor who strode the same stage with the legendary Edwin Booth, the first artist to sketch the Yosemite Valley, the architect who designed the state capitol, an Italian musician who helped give singer Lotta Crabtree her start, and the brother of the man who would become one of the most heinous serial killers in American history. There were four women too, including a different sort of California “golddigger.”

To The Land Of Promise, available through online retailers or by contacting Calaveras History Publishing at [email protected], gives readers a personal, often fascinating, and perhaps final original glimpse into the world of a ‘49er.