I returned to my desk and stared down at Isaac Snider. Snider was a Midwestern Jewish gold rush migrant and entrepreneur from St. Louis, the page read. Like many Jews in the California gold rush who opened stores, launched businesses, built Synagogues, and started schools, he helped establish Californian society as something beyond lean-tos and mining towns. He then became the editor of the largest newspaper in the Central Valley region. But I wasn’t looking at his biography. I was looking at his face. His eyebrows were thick and unruly, and his eyelashes girlishly long. His gaze was unsettled, as though he was sure some secret of his was about to be found out.

Snider, my ass. This dark motherfucker looked as Indian as samosas. I almost wanted to cry. I had found him—had I? Or someone like him. Someone enough like him. My gold digger—Isaac Snider. What if he had slunk not out of view, but right into the heart of American history? So what if he stole that gold the night the whites nearly killed him? What if stealing was the only way for him to make a home in this place?

July slipped by; I read as much of the Marysville Gold Star as possible, and slowly something invited me into the period. The paper had printed its fair share of anti-immigrant polemics, blather I was used to from years of studying the period. (In the wake of the frenzy of gold fever, is it not time for the Chinese and the Mexicans and all other foreigners to make their polite egress, so that the new Western states may go about settling into themselves?) But I noticed something. Toward the end of Isaac Snider’s tenure, the xenophobia abated and was replaced by some unbylined columns denouncing the British Raj. They were written with passion—even familiarity? (The brutish colonial presence recalls a period of American history now viewed in revolutionary light…)

More of those long drives down California’s endless highways, but nearly always meandering east now, through the Central Valley’s flat, breadbasket landscape. Orchards bearing matchstick tree limbs sprouted up by the highway, along with signs bearing Sikh politicians’ names—Singhs and Kaurs running for school boards. I’d stop for fresh apricots and drive with sticky fingers through neat town squares. And Marysville itself! It persisted—a couple of square blocks, a diner, antique shops, a set of swinging doors beneath a self-consciously styled sign reading SALLY’S SALOON. Behind the saloon rose a red Chinese structure labeled the HISTORIC BOK-KAI TAOIST TEMPLE, and a sign marking the Yuba River, where it met the Feather. Pacing here gave me a sense of being close to Snider, though the Marysville Gold Star had long ago shuttered and there was no evidence of him—no statue, no plaque. But all I had to do was wander the little downtown, and I felt certain I was walking where he once tread.