William Swain’s letter to his wife Sabrina

William Swain’s letter to his wife Sabrina

Gold Rush
California

Swain left his New York State family in 1849 to make his fortune in the Californian gold fields. In 1951 he returned home disillusioned and exhausted. Swain is remembered for the journal that he kept throughout his journey west and for his subsequent regular letters home to his wife and his brother. In letters to his brother Swain is open about the privations of the journey and the hardness of a prospector’s life but - as the manuscript shows - when writing to his wife he underplays his sufferings to reduce her worries. Author J S Holliday used Swain’s journals and letters, augmented by those of other ‘forty-niners’, to write a comprehensive account of the complete cycle of the gold rush: the journey west, the struggle to strike it rich and the tortuous journey home which for Swain, as for many, was via the jungles of the Isthmus of Panama.

William Swain at Fort Laramie, Wyoming, en route to California

A photograph of the manuscript is included in the documentary material published by the American not-for-profit broadcaster PBS to support their eight-part documentary series ‘The West’ shown in September 1996. https://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/resources/archives/three/63_05.htmA transcript of the manuscript can be found in J.S Holliday’s The World Rushed In (New York, 1983) pp. 168-170.

July 4, 1849

Margaret Minchin

J.S. Holliday Research Collection on the William Swain family in the Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

English

Text - manuscript

19th century California