Backcountry Ghosts

“This gem of a book arises from a simple premise. Genocide and gold were the brutal conceivers of California, but it took another epic force to civilize the land. For Josh Sides it is Lincoln’s great land giveaway known as the Homestead Act that invents the state. Sides brings the act to vivid life on the backcountry roads where homesteaders go about their remaking of nature. Besotted with the dream, they know not their own bounds. They are ghosts, yes. But they are us.”—Mark Arax, author of The Dreamt Land: Chasing Water and Dust across California

“A surprising, engaging, and original book about homesteading in a state where homesteaders got pushed to the edges. Josh Sides tells gripping personal stories to reveal a much broader California history.”—Richard White, author of California Exposures: Envisioning Myth and History

“In this revelatory, beautifully honed, and finely researched work, Josh Sides reclaims a very significant yet little-known part of California and U.S. history by bringing forth the story of the thousands of homesteaders in the Golden State between 1863 and the late 1930s. Backcountry Ghosts moreover courageously engages, expands, and updates the Jeffersonian mythos of land ownership serving as liberty’s prerequisite.”—Anthea M. Hartig, Elizabeth MacMillan Director of the National Museum of American History

“Homesteading is at the very center of mythical American assumptions tying together nation and promise, land and purpose. This magnificent book jolts the idea and the practice off their perch of complacent caricatures of meaning and geography. Josh Sides lays one durable myth against another—California and homesteading—and what he discovers ought to reorient much of what we think about both.”—William Deverell, director of Huntington-University of Southern California Institute on California and the West