BooksRock.com - Kids Books At Amazing Low Prices!

Having just escaped from a Swiss debtor's prison, Sutter splashed into the mud-flat cove of Yerba Buena -- present-day San Francisco -- then rowed his way up the Sacramento River.

The 1848 discovery of gold at a mill Sutter was building sparked an era of immigration and progress unlike any previously seen in America. In two short years, California would become the Union's 31st state.

Best-selling author Irving Stone is one of the great chroniclers of this era. Recognized as among America's finest historical biographers (Lust for Life, The Agony and the Ecstasy), the late Stone loved his native state and wrote of it with eloquence and spirit.

With From Mud-Flat Cove to Gold to Statehood, Stone takes the reader on a journey that allows one to encounter the citizenry, experience the milestones and appraise the events that forged the nation's most-populated state. Stone explores the culture, the hardships and the greatness of men such as John Sutter, John Bidwell, Samuel Brannan, Thomas O. Larkin, the Reverend Walter Colton and the intrepid John Charles Fremont.

Stone's reader witnesses the terrible tragedy of the Donner Party and the long-battled-for successes of so many others; marvels at the speed gold fever transforms a sleepy trickle of immigration into the torrent of the Gold Rush; and follows the intrigue as the Russians, English, Mexicans, Californios and Americans vie for control of the territory.

Fiction could never match Stone's true story of those who braved the primitive West to launch a state.