Prentice Mulford's Story: Life by Land and Sea

Prentice Mulford arrived in San Francisco with nothing but a restless heart and a vow to follow the day wherever it led. What follows is a memoir so vivid and funny you'd swear you were sitting across from the man himself, nursing a drink and swapping stories. He cooks for miners too cheap to pay. He signs onto a whaling ship and discovers the brutal poetry of the sea. He prospects for gold in streams that yield nothing but silence. He runs a schoolhouse. He dabbles in politics. Through it all, Mulford writes with the kind of wry, self-deprecating honesty that makes you forget this is a man writing about himself. Born in a Massachusetts whaling village, swept up in the gold rush fever that transformed a nation, Mulford captures something essential about the American character: the restless conviction that the next horizon holds something better, even when the present is already rich with adventure. This is memoir as portrait of an era and as a life fully, strangely, brilliantly lived.