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The French in Nevada County, California
by Michel Janicot
Paperback, 77 pages
Blue Dolphin Press, January 1, 1991
This is a story about early French pioneers who left their native soil for America in search of gold and riches. The overthrow of the Louis-Philippe monarchy in 1848 created a long period of disorders, riots, misery-even famine-aggravated by the recurrent fear of a cholera epidemic in Paris. France was more densely populated than any other European nation except Russia. A partial remedy to the problem was to send those undesirable emigrants to the French colonies of Algeria and the West Indies.
Many of these disillusioned, disenfranchised, and discontented sons of France joined the massive world-wide exodus to California. About 30,000 French men and women joined the Gold Rush between September 1849 and December 1853. But they were not the first French in California. Michel La Framboise had explored the Sacramento basin in 1829, and he led most of the Hudson Bay Company’s annual hunting expeditions into central California between 1834 and 1843. Other Frenchmen arrived during the years 1833-1848, and were well established when gold was found at Sutter’s Mill.
However, this is primarily the story of those French persons who, at one time or another, came to Nevada County, California and made important contributions of one kind or another. This book is based upon five years of interviews and intensive research by the author, and much of what is recorded in these pages has never been published before.
MICHEL JANICOT was born in France in 1938. He first became acquainted with Nevada County in 1956, living at North Bloomfield for a while, then returning as a teacher for several years. Janicot received his B.A. and M.S. degrees from San Jose State University, and taught in Africa with the Peace Corps. He has written extensively on a variety of California historical subjects for such publications as Western States Jewish History, the Penn Valley Villager, and the Nevada County Historical Society Bulletin. His first book, The Ladies of the Night, was published in 1986.