Scènes de la vie californienne

Friedrich Gerstäcker (1816-1872), a native of Hamburg, left Germany in 1837 for a six-year stay in New York. On his return to Germany, he published two travel memoirs, and the Frankfurt government subsidized his return to America in 1849 to collect information for prospective emigrants to California. On his return home, he published several books dealing with his travels. Scenes of life in California (1942) is the English translation of Californische skizzen, published in Germany in 1856. Here Gerstc̃ker describes his westward voyage in 1849, stops at Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires, crossing the Andes to reach Valparaiso, and his sea journey to San Francisco. He next recalls his fourteen months in California, September 1849-November 1850, which saw him prospect for gold and keep store at Feather River, Murphy's New Diggings, and Mosquito Gulch. Several of the incidents described at length in these scenes are touched on briefly in his longer work Gerstc̃ker's travels (1854), which also describes his stays in San Francisco and his voyage from that port to Honolulu, Australia, and the Dutch East Indies on his way back to Germany.