Posted by Annie in Outdoors on July 11, 2010
“Whoever called it ‘the gold rush’ was wrong,” says Sam Sackett, author of “Sweet Betsy from Pike,” a novel about the gold seekers who swarmed to California in 1849-1850. “There wasn’t anything like a ‘rush’ about it.
Sackett’s point is that travel in those days was very slow. “Today you could go from St. Louis to San Francisco in a few hours by plane,” he says. “But in a covered wagon pulled by oxen the trip took months.” The heroine of his novel started from Pike County, MO, in August 1849 and arrived at tghe Hangtown mining camp the next spring. “Covering 25 miles a day was good time,” according to Sackett.
The “Sweet Betsy” of Sackett’s novel is a minister’s daughter, 18 and pregnant. To escape the shame, she and her lover join a wagon train for the Hangtown gold fields. Her experiences help her grow into a strong, independent woman. The story is based on the folk ballad of the same name, which is reproduced in Sackett’s book.
Sackett is a retired university professor and a former president of the Kansas Folklore Society. His nonfiction books include “Kansas Folklore” and a children’s book, “Cowboys and the Songs They Sang.” Most of his fiction appeared in science-fiction magazines.
When the Rev. Elias Potter refuses to let his eighteen-year-old daughter, Betsy, marry nineteen-year-old Ike McNab, the two young lovers take matters into their own hands. With a baby on the way, the two decide to leave Louisiana, Missouri, in 1849 and journey to California to join the Gold Rush.
Betsy and Ike have no idea what the passage will entail, and it is not an easy one. Joining a wagon train, the two face danger and hardship as they climb mountains, cross the desert, and ford rivers on the long and arduous journey to California. Betsy and Ike must not only survive the passage itself, but must learn to eke out a living in the rough-and-tumble gold mining camp of Hangtown.
An epic poem in prose, Sweet Betsy from Pike follows the famous frontier ballad of the same name in tracing the story of a sweet girl who leaves Missouri and grows into a strong woman who learns to take charge of her own destiny.