Taming the Forty-Niner by Elisabeth Margo - 1955

New York: Rinehart & Company, Inc., 1955. First Edition, First Printing. 1/4 cloth. Near Fine/near fine. Near fine, first edition in very good dust jacket. Dust jacket is price-clipped. Marbled vellum-style paper cover with red quarter cloth covering spine. Near fine dust jacket now protected in a clear, removable, archival cover. 244 pp. Small octavo, 5 3/4 x 8 1/4 in tall. An examination of that "vast natural experiment in social psychology which historians call the gold rush" sights along a new line -- the lack of women. Their absence was the cause of the "spree of the century" which was strictly stag, for the gold- seekers were conditioned to keep the female adventurers and glamour girls in a separate compartment from the sweethearts and wives for whom they had a worshipful homesickness. Here are the two years, 1849-1851, in which the men gambled, drank, horsed around, fought, made money, went broke, got sick and generally kicked over the traces, in contrast to the eventual infiltration of "civilization's fifth column" -- the respectable woman -- when sunbonnets and hearthsides vitally changed the moral climate -- and in turn were somewhat altered by customs that would not be abandoned. An entertaining backward look that catalogs the before and after sharply." --Kirkus