Same Ground: Chasing Family Down the California Gold Rush Trail

Canadian journalist Wangersky’s (The Path of Most Resistance: Stories) latest work explores the meaning of home and community. Traveling with his wife, author Leslie Vryenhoek, he retraces the path his great-great-grandfather William Castle Dodge recorded in his 1849 “Gold Rush” diary. Leaving home at 16 to attend school in another province, Wangersky grew distant from his immediate family and thinks this journey could reconnect him to his relatives. While Dodge and Wangersky vividly describe their parallel journeys across the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains, listeners soak in the breathtaking scenery. Narrator Jeff Sinasac superbly captures the changes in Dodge’s initially buoyant tone to his wariness and eventual despair upon witnessing much hardship and death on the frontier. Wangersky is contemplative as he chronicles the beauty of the vast American landscape, the damage wrought by industrialization and capitalism, and the contemporary hardships faced by Americans, many of whom see each other as enemies, depending on their identity politics.