Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Girl of the Golden West: An Opera in Three Acts From the Drama by David Belasco
The action takes place in that period of Californian history which follows immediately upon the discovery made by the miner Marshall of the first nugget of gold, at Coloma, in January, 1848. An unbridled greed, an upheaval of all social order, a restless anarchy followed upon the news of this discovery. The United States, which in the same year, 1848, had annexed California, were engaged in internal wars: and as yet undisturbed by the abnormal state of things, they were practically outside everything that occurred in the period of our work the presence of their sheriff indicates a mere show of supremacy and political control. An early history of California, quoted by Belasco, says of this period In those strange days, people coming from God knows where, joined forces in that far Western land, and, according to the rude custom of the camp, their very names were soon lost and unrecorded, and here they struggled, laughed, gambled, cursed, killed, loved, and worked out their strange destinies in a manner incredible to us of to-day. Of one thing only we are sure - they lived! And here we have the atmosphere in which is evolved the drama of the three leading characters. The camp of the goldseekers in the valley, and the Sierra mountains the inhabitants of the spot coming down from the mountains, joining the goldseekers who come from every part of America, making common cause with them, sharing the same passions; round this mixed and lawless folk a conglomeration of thieving and murderous gangs has sprung up as a natural outcome of this same lust Of gold, and infests the highways, robbing the foreign gold seekers as well as those from the mountains; from the strenuous con?ict between these two parties arises the application of a primitive justice of cruelty and rapacity.
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