Gary Noy

A Sierra Nevada native and the son and grandson of Cornish hardrock gold miners, Gary Noy has taught history at Sierra Community College in Rocklin, California, since 1987. A graduate of UC Berkeley and CSU Sacramento, he is the founder and former director of the Sierra College Center for Sierra Nevada Studies and the editor-in-chief emeritus of the Sierra College Press. In 2006, the Oregon-California Trails Association (OCTA), a national historical society, selected Noy as Educator of the Year. He is the author of Distant Horizon: Documents from the Nineteenth-Century American West (1999); the coeditor, with Rick Heide, of The Illuminated Landscape: A Sierra Nevada Anthology (2010); the author of Sierra Stories: Tales of Dreamers, Schemers, Bigots, and Rogues (2014); and the author of Gold Rush Stories: 49 Tales of Seekers, Scoundrels, Loss and Luck (Heyday Books and Sierra College Press, 2017). In 2016, Sierra Stories received the Gold Medal for Best Regional Non-Fiction from the Next Generation Indie Book Awards.

Gold Rush Stories features 49 stories of the Gold Rush focusing on aspects of this seminal event in world history. These stories include motivations, life in the diggings, transportation, violence, gambling, mining techniques, intriguing individuals, race relations, early government and law, grizzly bears, floods, fire and much more. These tales are told with a focus on the words of the participants, some of which have never been published previously.