J. S. Holliday: Quotes about people

J. S. Holliday was American historian. Explore interesting quotes on people.

J. S. Holliday: 28 quotes0 likes

“The men who traveled to California in the Gold Rush years had a conscious sense of the need to organize. There are rules. For instance, no swearing -- literally! They have constitutions, they have these rules and orders: No swearing. No drinking. We will observe the Sabbath. Many a company broke up over the argument of whether or not to observe the Sabbath. 'How can we observe the Sabbath? Here it is the middle of June, we're already behind. These people are passing us on Sunday, they're rolling. How can we sit here?' So they have arguments about it, and companies split up over the moral question of whether to observe the Sabbath or not.”

The West (1996)

“The tremendous success of that summer of 1848 spread by way of letters and government reports. The President in his State of the Union speech announces that the astonishing news from Sacramento is true. So the news is coming not only from the President, but most of all from these people who are writing these vivid reports. A guy writes home and he says, he says, 'You remember Dickson? He used to work for Ebeneezer?' He says, 'He has dug enough gold to weigh down a mule.”

Now, that means something to people. A mule.
The West (1996)

“What they had expected was the image that they had received in November, December of 1848, and the story of digging up gold, and all the people succeeding. They were stunned, shocked, dismayed. The realism that struck them above all else was there're so damn many miners. There were forty thousand miners in the mining camps and the mining regions of California by the fall of 1849…. These are people who've been coming… overland… as early as August. They've been coming by ships since December. They've been coming from Hawaii, from Oregon, from Chile, from Sonora. They've been pouring in. The world rushed into California.”

The West (1996)

“The gold rush changed California, it changed the whole west, and it changed America's sense of itself because for the first time the United States of America, in the minds of the American people, fulfilled the dream of Jefferson, which was a continental nation from the Atlantic to the Pacific. No one thought about America stretching from Chesapeake Bay to San Francisco Bay until fathers and sons and uncles and brothers and fiances were out there.”

The West (1996)

“Pride is a powerful force. The pride that kept so many men in California. They want to go home. But I can't go until I've got something to prove my success. They've been reading about success back home. I know, says the miner, how many people are failing. Failure is the most common fact of life in California. They don't know that. How can I go home a failure, when they expect me to come home a success? So they stay.”

On the Predicament of the Miners
The West (1996)

“As mining became more difficult, as the claims became more difficult to find because there were more miners than there were workable claims, everyone competing and fighting for his smaller and smaller opportunity to strike it rich, you became, therefore… desirous of finding an excuse for your failure, or desirous of finding a way to get an advantage. Well one of the ways was to say, I'm an American; What are the Mexicans doing here? What are the Indians? We don't need the Indians, we can certainly get rid of them. What are the Chinese doing here? Those people shouldn't be here… This isn't their land, this is my land! This belongs to us!”

The West (1996)