Engraving of a pack train en route to a mining camp

Engraving of a pack train en route to a mining camp

Gold Rush
California
Transport

The source is a reproduction of an engraving (by an unknown engraver) of a design by Charles Nahl, a prolific illustrator of the Californian gold rush. At the start of the gold rush Nahl was an artist working in New York. He travelled to San Francisco arriving in 1851. Failing to achieve his aim of striking it rich he stayed in California but resumed work as an artist. The picture shows a pack train carrying mining supplies making its way through a snow storm to a mining camp. It illustrates the hazards presented by both the terrain and winter weather. Earlier stages in such journeys might have been made on waterways by steamboat but the last arduous overland section was usually unavoidable. When a winter storm caught a similar pack train crossing between Grass Valley and Onion Valley only three of the forty five mules survived the journey.

The designer of the scene shown in the engraving is Charles Nahl.
The design was produced in California.

University of California Press

https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?brand=ucpress&chunk.id=d0e10615&docId=ft758007r3&toc.id=d0e10615

Precise date unknown but Nahl’s gold rush scenes were produced between 1851 and his death in 1878.

Margaret Minchin

California History Society, FN-30968

N/A

Visual - engraving

19th century California