From Isabelle Allende, comes a passionate tale of one young woman's quest to save her lover set against the chaos of the 1849 California Gold Rush. Orphaned at birth, Eliza Sommers is raised in the British colony of Valparaíso, Chile, by the well-intentioned Victorian spinster Miss Rose and her more rigid brother Jeremy. Just as she meets and falls in love with the wildly inappropriate Joaquín Andieta, a lowly clerk who works for Jeremy, gold is...

Presents the story of James Macklin Chance, an indigent Pennsylvanian who ascends from poverty to affluence when he moves to San Francisco and makes a fortune after striking oil and becoming an orange grower.

Mark Twain's legendary insight and wit shine throughout this new selection of his writings, the first to focus on California. As a young man, the celebrated author of Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, and other classics spent the mid-1860s in California. In this collection of essays, newspaper articles, fiction, speeches, and letters, Twain presents his notoriously unconventional views on a state booming in the wake of the gold rush. His wry humor and...

Lee Westfall, a young woman with the magical ability to sense the presence of gold, must flee her home to avoid people who would abuse her powers, so when her best friend Jefferson heads out across Gold Rush-era America to stake his claim, she disguises herself as a boy and sets out on her own dangerous journey.

Determined to find his nineteen-year-old uncle and best friend, Jesse, who left for Colorado to find enough gold to pay the mortgage and save the family's Iowa farm, twelve-year-old Early Whittcomb joins up with a barber, his wife, and his daughter on a wagon train heading for the gold fields near Pike's Peak in 1858.

After her harrowing journey west to California, Lee Westfall has finally found a new home, one rich in gold, thanks to her magical power, a power that seems to be changing every day. But this home is rich in other ways, too: with friends who are searching for a place to be themselves, just as she is, and with love. Jefferson, her longtime best friend, hasn't stopped trying to win her heart. And Lee is more and more tempted to say yes. But her uncle...

Reluctant to admit that he suffers from claustrophobia and anxious not to alienate his friends, Rudy tries to find a way to distract them from pursuing their plan of exploring an abandoned gold mine.

On a camping trip to Arizona with their grandfather, the Alden children search for a lost gold mine.

Anya Seton's Foxfire makes the desert Southwest of the Great Depression come alive in all its rich strangeness and passion-filled glory. Amanda Lawrence, a charming, sheltered New York socialite, falls in love with Jonathan Dartland, a part-Apache mining engineer who belongs to the vastness of the Arizona desert. Amanda responds to his strength and self-reliance, but has nothing and nobody to guide her when she follows him to the grim town of Lodestone....

When a dangerous billionaire intends to use Lee, her fiancée Jefferson, and their magical friends for his own nefarious ends, they decide to fight back before the landscape of California can be altered forever.