Coverture, the legal doctrine whereby a married woman’s legal rights were entirely subsumed by her husband, was a real part of American history, though the specific laws varied by state and over time, in more complicated ways than I can cover here. One of the first goals of early feminists was to eliminate the doctrine of coverture. The Supreme Court finally struck down the last state law based on coverture in 1981, when I was eight years old.
Hampton’s kidnapping was inspired by several historical instances, in particular, the account of Stephen Hill, a free black man kidnapped by slave catchers, whose freedom papers were destroyed. Delilah Beasley’s The Negro Trail Blazers of California, originally published in 1919, is one of the earliest books to describe the many instances of free blacks who were held by slave catchers, as well as the black community’s efforts to free them. She also described former slaves, like Hampton, who mined gold to buy family members out of slavery.
The Charlotte, run aground and converted into a residence, is loosely based on accounts of the whaling ship Niantic, one of the finest hotels in the early days of San Francisco. The Apollo saloon was a real saloon in San Francisco that also started out as a grounded ship.
The land-fraud schemes attributed to Hardwick all took place in San Francisco during the Gold Rush. In particular, several fortunes were built by selling titles to “water lots” in the bay. The practice of sinking ships to claim lots and begin the landfill process was very common, especially during 1851 and 1852, and was more mechanized than I’ve described in this book.
Sheriff Purcell was inspired by two early sheriffs in San Francisco, William Landers and John C. Pulis, both of who came west during the Mexican War as part of the New York Volunteers military unit.
The attempted bank robbery and the hanging that followed was inspired by a contemporary account of John Jenkins, an Australian who stole an entire safe from a bank and was captured during his escape and executed by a vigilance committee without a trial.
I hope the reader can forgive me, because the hymn “O Sleepless Nights, O Cheerless Days,” from which the book’s title is taken, was not published until well after the Gold Rush. It was written by Helen Smith Arnold, who was born in 1849. Arnold wrote two other hymns, and died in 1873 at the age of twenty-three.
James Boisclair is one of the few historical figures to appear in these novels. After buying his freedom and opening a successful general store in Dahlonega, Georgia, Boisclair packed up and joined the Gold Rush to California. Very little is known about what happened after he arrived, only that he was shot and killed. One of the best historical accounts of Boisclair is found in “Georgia’s Forgotten Miners: African Americans and the Georgia Gold Rush of 1829,” by David Williams, published in Appalachians and Race: The Mountain South from Slavery to Segregation, edited by John C. Inscoe (University Press of Kentucky, 2001).
A special thank-you goes to Dr. Shirley Ann Wilson Moore, Professor Emerita of History at California State University, Sacramento, who reviewed this manuscript and applied her vast knowledge to the text. For further reading on this time period, I recommend her outstanding book, Sweet Freedom’s Plains: African Americans on the Overland Trails 1841–1869 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2016).
In telling Mary’s story, I was influenced by the historical accounts of Polly Bemis, a Chinese immigrant who came to San Francisco as a concubine, lived in the gold-mining camps of Idaho, and wedded Charlie Bemis, a white saloonkeeper, in a marriage of convenience. Her story can be found in The Poker Bride: The First Chinese in the Wild West, by Christopher Corbett (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2010). Mrs. Bemis remained independent throughout her life, controlling her own destiny. Though I didn’t use specific details about Mrs. Bemis’s life, I wanted Mary’s story to illustrate both the opportunities briefly available to nonwhite women during the early Gold Rush period, as well as the challenges they encountered that forced them to make hard choices.
Books are hard to write. Trilogies are harder. I couldn’t have written this one without my team, which includes my husband and researcher, C. C. Finlay; my indefatigable editor, Martha Mihalick; and my agent-cheerleader, Holly Root. I also owe a huge debt to my readers. Thank you for your tweets, your emails, your Facebook messages, and most of all for hanging out with me at events all over the country. You make this job the best in the world.