"It is a glorious country," exclaimed Stephen J. Field, the future U.S. Supreme Court justice, upon arriving in California in 1849. Field's pronouncement was more than just an expression of exuberance. For an electrifying moment, he and another 100,000 hopeful gold miners found themselves face-to-face with something commensurate to their capacity to dream. Most failed to hit pay dirt in gold. Thereafter, one illustrative group of them struggled to make a living in wheat, livestock, and fruit along Putah Creek in the lower Sacramento Valley. Like Field, they never forgot that first "glorious" moment in California when anything seemed possible.

In "After the Gold Rush," David Vaught examines the hard-luck miners-turned-farmers--the Pierces, Greenes, Montgomerys, Careys, and others--who refused to admit a second failure, faced flood and drought, endured monumental disputes and confusion over land policy, and struggled to come to grips with the vagaries of local, national, and world markets.

Their dramatic story exposes the underside of the American dream and the haunting consequences of trying to strike it rich.

In "Cultivating California," David Vaught shows how fruit and nut growers were neither industrialists nor agrarians. From the very outset, he explains, these "horticulturists" saw themselves as guardians of California's unique culture-raising crops for market while self-consciously building healthy and prosperous communities. Every grower was not, in fact, like every other, Vaught argues, whether one examines their labor systems, recruiting methods, harvest needs, marketing strategies, farm size, or their relationships with their communities, unions, and the state. The hard work, foresight, and devotion to detail required to nurture an orchard or vineyard made them, they insisted, cultivators of a better society. Over time, however, labor relations, market imperatives, and changing political conditions undermined the growers' horticultural ideal.

Today, John Deere is remembered-some say mistakenly-as the inventor of the steel plow. Who was this legendary man and how did he create the internationally renowned company that still bears his name? He began as a debt-stricken blacksmith who, fleeing debt in New England in the 1830s, set up shop in a little town on the Illinois frontier. There, in response to farmers' struggles, he designed a new plow that cut through the impervious prairie sod and lay open the rich, heavy soil for planting. The demand for his polished steel plow convinced him to specialize in farm implements. In the decades before the Civil War, John Deere envisioned a company supplying midwestern farmers with reliable, affordable equipment. He used only high quality, imported steel and resisted pressure to raise prices. At the same time, he won respectful affection from his employees by working alongside them on the shop floor. Upon taking the helm in the 1860s, John's only surviving son, Charles, expanded the Moline factories to increase production, started branch houses in major midwestern cities to speed distribution, and began to transform the company into a modern corporation. The transformation didn't come without difficulties however: Charles found himself battling the Grange, facing threats of labor unions and strikes led by his own employees, and enduring patent suits and blatant thefts of product designs and advertising.