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 Boswell, Shakespeare, Dickens, Byron, and Sir Walter Scott as he describes the agonies and antics of men sluicing for gold amidst rattlesnakes and mosquitoes where Western civilization had not yet asserted itself. Recounting his adventures and the colorful-and later, famous-characters he met, Ralph describes in lively detail the geography and natural history of the lands where he traveled and worked.

The newspaper columns from 1910-originally titled "Memories of a Forty-Niner"-were preserved by family members for a century, handed down through generations. These Newtown Bee articles, now transcribed and edited, tell the story of a young man who went into the wilds with a sharp eye and a sharp mind, and then returned to tell those who stayed safely at home how it was to dig for gold when the West was still untamed.