They Saw the Elephant Audiobook By JoAnn Levy cover art

They Saw the Elephant

Women in the California Gold Rush

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"The phrase 'seeing the elephant' symbolized for ’49 gold rushers the exotic, the mythical, the once-in-a-lifetime adventure, unequaled anywhere else but in the journey to the promised land of fortune: California. Most western myths...generally depict an exclusively male gold rush. Levy’s book debunks that myth. Here a variety of women travel, work, and write their way across the pages of western migrant history." (Choice)

Many of the women shared the same eagerness for adventure as the men (in contrast to the conventional image of the long-suffering martyr accompanying her husband). Levy intersperses her text with excerpts from diaries and journals and concludes with brief biographies of 17 women participants.

The book is published by University of Oklahoma Press.

©1990 JoAnn Levy (P)2018 Redwood Audiobooks United States Biographies & Memoirs State & Local Women Americas

Critic reviews

“One of the best and most comprehensive accounts of gold rush life to date.” (San Francisco Chronicle)

"Makes a significant contribution to the scholarship of women's studies.... Devotees of Californiana will enjoy this adventure story." (Library Journal)

“They Saw the Elephant is beautiful, brilliant, funny and brave. It's hard to read this book without laughing out loud - or choking back tears.” (Carolyn See, author of Golden Days)
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The book is great. However, the terribly forced fake accents throughout the book are very distracting.

Terrible reading

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The narrator with all of her different voices and inflections was so annoying to listen to that I could not even finish listening to the book! She really ruined it for me. The book was also quite choppy and giving so little information about each person that I was left with wanting more information. This book would have been so much better if the author just told each persons story individually instead of just a few sentences here and there. Very frustrating.

The narrator made it impossible to finish listening to this book!

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