4 ms·
I'm a third of the way through this at the moment. It might be of some interest to the West Coast crowd on HN to read about just how uninhabited California was
by mauvehaus 11y ago
I'm a third of the way through this at the moment. It might be of some interest to the West Coast crowd on HN to read about just how uninhabited California was at the time. The ship Dana was on, Pilgrim, spent time trading goods up and down the coast.
Dana went ashore in several places either to land goods or on liberty and the change between the pictures he paints and the present day is astonishing.
- matthewmcg 11y agoDana was astonished by the change in his own lifetime (which spanned the gold-rush period). Some editions of the book include "Twenty-Four Years After." This is an epilogue written after Dana revisited many of the sites featured in the book. He finds flourishing cities where there were once lone missions and empty beaches.