Jefferson drapes an arm across my shoulders. “We made it,” he says, gazing up at the walls. “We actually made it.”

I’m smiling, fit to burst. Feeling richer than a king, I say, “Let’s go find us some gold.”

Author’s Note

Eight years before the publication of this book, I moved from California to Ohio to marry the man of my dreams, a reverse migration, if you will. We loaded all my possessions into my car and drove across the United States, making the trip in six days—one day for every month it took a covered wagon to trek the same distance. The landscape we traveled was sometimes inspiring, sometimes tedious, always vast. I spent hours gazing out the window, already missing my home state desperately, even as I thrilled at the adventure of starting a new life in a new place.

It was then that the idea for Walk on Earth a Stranger germinated, but it would be years before I felt ready to write it. Sure enough, combining history and fiction is its own fraught adventure, and in order to best tell Lee’s story, I took a few minor liberties. For instance, Dr. M. F. Stephenson’s famous speech in Dahlonega’s town square really took place in the summer of 1849, not in early winter as portrayed in the book. And it’s likely that the real-life citizens of Dahlonega would have received word of gold’s discovery in California some months before Lee and Jefferson do. Occasionally, I allowed them to use words that probably hadn’t found popular usage in the eastern United States, such as “nugget” and “mother lode” and “palomino.”

Most significantly, I allowed Jefferson to propose to Lee when she was not yet sixteen, even though the average age of first marriage for women was twenty to twenty-two at that time. I allowed this because there is anecdotal evidence that women on the California trail married early, often out of necessity. Lee’s circumstances seem to me to qualify.

I wanted the flexibility of choosing and directing my own characters, so very few historical personages appear in Walk on Earth a Stranger, and then only in cameo roles. The one character I couldn’t resist, however, was James “Free Jim” Boisclair, an entrepreneur from Dahlonega, Georgia. Not much is known about him, though he probably set off for California in 1850, rather than 1849 as portrayed in the book. By all limited accounts, he was well respected, ambitious, and full of conviction. I hope I have done him justice.

Lee, Jefferson, and their contemporaries refer to Jim and other African-Americans as Negroes, as that was the polite term of the day. Likewise, they refer to Native Americans as Indians. I choose to use “African-American” and “Native American” in general conversation, but I will always honor someone’s personal preference when informed of it.