Mr. Williams documents the Georgia gold rush in an interesting and uncompromising style. So many myths surround this time frame in north Georgia's history. For example, Benjamin Parks is frequently credited with the first modern discovery of gold in Georgia, mostly because he claimed it to an Atlanta reporter fifty years later. Williams quickly disproves virtually all of Park's claims.
In the chapters titled "Gold Fever and the Great Intrusion" and "The Cherokee Nation Abandoned," Williams gives one of if not the most accurate concise histories of Cherokee Removal I have ever read.
Additional chapters review a miner's life, the people who made money (most weren't miners), and the end of the Georgia gold era in 1849.
The gold rush era survived the Cherokees in Georgia by only a few years. The early 1840s saw a dramatic decline in the fortunes of the southern gold region. When word of a new gold strike in California reached the miners, they wasted no time in following the banished Indians westward. In fact, many Georgia twenty-niners became some of the first California forty-niners.
Georgia?s gold rush is now almost two centuries past, but the gold fever continues. Many residents still pan for gold, and every October during Gold Rush Days hundreds of latter-day prospectors relive the excitement of Georgia?s great antebellum gold rush as they throng to the small mountain town of Dahlonega.