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Other than the Civil War, no single event of the nineteenth century affected so many Americans as did the California Gold Rush of 1849. Responding with the same enthusiasm shown by the Mexican War volunteers, Tennessee gold seekers rushed to be among the first from the South to reach the California mines.

In Volunteer Forty-Niners, Walter T. Durham provides the first comprehensive examination of the role Tennessee and Tennesseans played in creating a new state and a new society on the West Coast. Drawing from such archival sources and personal narratives in letters and diaries, public records, and newspaper reports, Durham has woven a wealth of information into his recounting of their adventures. He follows many of the emigrants into the mines and details the activities of others in commerce and government. In the process, he shows that Tennesseans made an enormous contribution to the beginnings of government in California. Among the many offices they held were governor, assemblyman, sheriff, state senator, secretary of state, state treasurer, controller, U.S. senator, U.S. marshal, U.S. surveyor general and Indian commissioner.
 

In the harsh winter of 1779, as the leader of a flotilla of settlers, John Donelson loaded his family and thirty slaves into a forty-foot flatboat at the present site of Kingsport, Tennessee. Their journey into the wilderness led to the founding of a settlement now known as Nashville—over one thousand river miles away. In the fall of 2016, photographer John Guider retraced the Donelson party’s journey in his hand-built 14½' motorless rowing sailboat while making a visual documentation of the river as it currently exists 240 years later.

This photo book contains more than 120 striking images from the course of the journey, allowing the reader to see how much has changed and how much has remained untouched in the two and a half centuries since Donelson first took to the water. Equally significant, the essays include long-ignored contemporary histories of both the Cherokee whom Donelson encountered and the slaves he brought with him, some of whom did not survive the journey.

Guider, a professional photographer, has created images of every point in the thousand-mile trip from a platform just a few feet above the waterline of three of Tennessee’s most notable rivers.