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Chapter 1 provides the basic motivation for the book, which is to understand the origins of California water law and the development and use of water as a central part of how gold mining is done. It begins by describing the state of present scholarly understanding of these origins, as well as the gap in our understanding. It goes on to outline the basic theoretical approach taken, which is to apply a number of notions of the determinants of institutional change taken from the New Institutional Economics. Finally, it describes a number of scholarly threads in Gold Rush historiography, focusing mostly on work done by economic historians on Gold Rush institutions, and it describes the contribution of the research to this literature.

In 1851, Pratt became the leader of Mormon missionary activities in the Pacific Basin, including northern California, Hawaii, the Society Islands, and Australia. Traveling with a small group of missionary to gold rush San Francisco, Pratt then personally visited Chile, becoming the first Mormon missionary in South America, along with his wife Phoebe and missionary companion Rufus Allen. They spent the winter of 1851-1852 in Chile, but their proselytizing efforts were hampered by language barriers, a revolution in Chile, religious restrictions on non-Catholic religions, and financial difficulties. Nevertheless, Pratt saw a future for Mormonism in Latin America and hoped to translate the Book of Mormon into Spanish upon his return.

This chapter examines seemingly contradictory positions—where Latinos are objects of both racial violence and municipal protection—analyzing their emergence from within the story of the California Gold Rush. Indeed, the multinational and panethnic features of Latinos in San Francisco have their roots in these tumultuous times. The lure of gold motivated the movement of Latin Americans as early as 1848. Chileans, Mexicans, and Peruvians, in particular, benefited from proximity as well as preexisting networks of communication and travel between their ports and the Golden Gate. In turn, those networks played significant roles in the city's dynamic economic transformation during the period.

Miwok Indians from the Central Valley and Piute Indians from east of the Sierra Nevada were the first peoples to inhabit the Hetch Hetchy Valley. They were transient inhabitants, spending the summer and fall hunting and fishing, and harvesting acorns and grasses. The first Euro-Americans to see the valley were associated with the California Gold Rush. They found no gold, but a rather lush, long meadow useful for sheep grazing. But the beauty of the valley attracted naturalists such as John Muir, painters, and explorers. However, compared to its sister valley, Yosemite, in 1900 Hetch Hetchy was virtually unknown.

Chapter 5 considers the broader values with which Americans, including nonlawyers, came to invest adversarial procedure. Troubled by the radical economic transformations of the era (including the emergence of a growing class of dispossessed laborers), many Americans—and especially those influenced by then prevalent religious revivalism and utopian fervor—argued for the adoption of European-style conciliation courts as a means of tempering market excesses. Largely ignored in the scholarly literature, the ensuing debates in Florida, California, and New York were part of a transnational discussion launched by Jeremy Bentham, who coined the term “conciliation court” based on an institution created by the French Revolutionaries and exported throughout much of Europe (and its colonies). In the United States, these debates resulted in the enactment of state constitutional provisions authorizing legislatures to establish conciliation courts and legislation that did so. But the courts themselves failed to take meaningful root in the antebellum period. Their ultimately triumphant opponents rejected them as paternalistic institutions, suited only to feudal or despotic European nations. A nation that was so distinctively liberty-oriented and market-based, they argued, necessarily employed a distinctively adversarial approach to social, economic, and (perhaps especially) labor relations—and thus to legal procedure as well.

From the Gold Rush to World War II, Latinos have considered themselves to be American by virtue of their belief in and support of the universalistic ideals of equality, freedom, and democracy. During that same period, nativists have refused to consider Latinos as Americans because they were not members of the core national ethnic group: white, English-speaking Anglo-Saxon Protestants. These two competing definitions of American—universalistic versus nativist—have clashed repeatedly in the political arena.

This chapter tells the story of the earliest Chinese immigrants to America, citing the California Gold Rush of 1849 as the primary factor that brought the first large wave of Chinese to the West Coast. It considers how the first wave of Chinese immigrants settled in San Francisco before they began to look for better opportunities elsewhere, particularly in Los Angeles. It also discusses the importance of family to the first Chinese who came to America, along with the development of the first Chinatown in Los Angeles. In addition, the chapter looks at some of the early Chinese trailblazers in Los Angeles, including John Tambolin and Chun Chick, and how the laundry business gave the earliest Chinese immigrants their first foothold in the city. Finally, it examines the Chinese' reliance on the local judiciary to redress the wrongs committed against them.

This chapter addresses the following problem: while one may concede Royce's view of loyalty as necessary for becoming a self, and indeed, a moral self, one may doubt that loyalty is required or even relevant in critiquing or overhauling the conditions under which one's being–moral or otherwise–is sustained. In the face of such exigencies as oppression or violence, the need of loyalty may be marginalized or removed altogether, if questioning the basis for the existence of one's community undermines one's loyal to that very community. It is argued that Royce is keenly aware of the burdened nature of the virtue of loyalty, as illustrated in his analyses of California gold mining communities and Christian community, and his distinction between wise and unwise provincialism. For Royce, while loyalty may exist without this burden, it is in the presence of burden that loyalty, and loyalty to loyalty, are most needed and thus most important. This aspect of Royce's thought is brought to bear on contemporary feminist scholarship on loyalty and community, suggesting the viability of a “loyal traitor,” who is at once disloyal and loyal to loyalty.