Detour to the California Gold Rush: Eugene Ring's Travels in South America, California, and Mexico, 1848-1850

Twenty-one-year-old Eugene Ring departed New York City on November 8, 1848 on a long sea voyage to the west coast of South America to regain his health after a long illness. While transiting the Strait of Magellan, he first heard the news of the great California gold rush from a passing ship. Thus begins Eugene's incredible unplanned adventure....... Follow Eugene's memoir as he describes his fascinating life at sea; his dangerous passage through the Strait of Magellan; his forays in the South American towns of Valparaiso, Callao, Lima and Guayaquil; his stopover in Central America's Panama City; his unplanned journey to San Francisco; his life there initially as a bookkeeper among the gold-crazy, exploding population; his horrifying and heroic experiences in the great Sacramento flood; the lure of gold and his adventures in the mines...... Continue the story with Eugene's decision to spend the winter of 1850 in Panama, before returning to the gold fields the next spring; his ten-man foraging party's abandonment on the west coast of southern Mexico, while ashore looking for food and water for his becalmed ship; and finally his exhausting, cholera-laced trek across the jungles and mountains of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec to Veracruz on the east coast of Mexico, where only five survivors from the original foraging party, catch a salvation ship to New Orleans....... Eugene Ring provides an enthralling account of his activities, descriptions of what he saw, the places he went, the people he met, and how he felt about things – a truly remarkable record of a remarkable experience