Leonard L. Richards' book The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War (2007) is not a book about the discovery of gold or the forty-niners which rushed to the west for quick wealth, nor is it a reference to the horrors of the Civil War. Richards book is about the politics, the shifts in power and the inequality between the Whites of the North and South, and ultimately it is the harsh reality for both that two opposing viewpoints on slavery within one nation filled with colored men and women would not exist coherently and that ultimately one would prevail over the other, which ultimately led to the Civil War of 1861. The book begins just two years before the Civil War, in 1859 with a duel between David S. Terry, chief judge of