Daniel James Brown

He briefly fought in the Mexican-American War in California.

Then he became a major in the Confederate Army.

And after the Civil War, he got the idea of creating a Confederate state in Brazil.

So he wrote The Emigrant's Guide to Brazil.

Don't go, folks.

Don't go.

He had a sort of checkered career and continued to be something of a scoundrel.

Just awful.

Yes, a number of them prospered from the gold rush.

But he prospered mostly from real estate transactions.

He became quite well-to-do, bought a great deal of land in San Jose.

The campus of San Jose State University is built on some of his land.

So among the survivors, he was one who prospered.

They did not all prosper, though.

Many of them had actually relatively short and tragic lives afterwards.

after the event.

The person I focus on in my book is this young woman named Sarah Grace Fosdick.

And she lost, as I say, she lost her husband and her father on the snowshoe party coming out.

She married one of her rescuers, a man named Richie,

And they settled in the Napa Valley.