In 1849, in the middle of the Gold Rush hype, Felix Paul Wierzbicki — a Polish November Uprising veteran turned physician — published a blunt, practical guide from California itself: illness, exhaustion, inflated prices, bad alcohol, and the basic math that stopped working once the crowds arrived. It’s among the earliest English-language books printed in California — and it reads like a field report.
Short write-up (in Polish) about Wierzbicki and his book: Feliks Wierzbicki, a Pole who was the first to cool down the gold fever
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Posted by PolacyPozaMapa
2 Comments
I’d love to read that. Is there a scanned version?
Sounds about right from that period in California history. Poles have always been adventurous and have contributed a lot to America. I wonder if he traveled back to Poland. It’s still remarkable to me that some of my relatives traveled between Poland and USA by ship countless times.