She was, in her Cali-girl vocabulary, “bummed.” She was 36. She had two young children, a husband and a little house in the hills above this picturesque wine-making region.

In 2008, probably like everybody in the civilized world, I was reading reports in newspapers of a mini-gold rush when the price of gold went above $1,000 an ounce for the first time.

By Mr. Whitekeys; Mr. Whitekeys’ Fly By Night Club, 2022; 304 pages; $44.95. The Koyukuk River doesn’t loom large in Gold Rush era histories of Alaska, though not for lack of effort.

Colorado was founded on gold. In 1859, some 100,000 people joined the rush to the Rockies, and in a couple of years, they had filed nearly 15,000 claims. Those gold-seekers are long gone, of course.

In her acclaimed debut novel, "How Much of These Hills Is Gold" (Riverhead Books), C. Pam Zhang tells an epic story, set in the Gold Rush days of the American West, of two orphaned children of ...

Whatever we imagine, according to a new book by Eilene Lyon, the reality was much worse. “Fortune’s Frenzy” traces the path of Henry Jenkins, an Indiana farmer who left for California in 1851.

Gold prices are soaring. Cue the gold rush, and with it, more challenges for Brazil and efforts to protect the world's largest tropical forest, write Robert Muggah and Mac Margolis.

Even so, in "The Rush" Edward Dolnick unearths some fresh nuggets. After gold was discovered in January 1848, some 50 miles northeast of present-day Sacramento, the reports were too fantastical to ...