The Lakeside Press devoted their 1949 volume of The Lakeside Classics to a centennial celebration of the California gold rush. Instead of reprinting a single book, they selected extracts from some well-known contemporary accounts. This volume includes extracts from:

To California via Cape Horn, from The Land of Gold: Reality Versus Fiction by Hinton Rowan Helper

To California via Panama, from Three Years in California by J.D. Borthwick

To California via Mexico, from Sixteen Months at the Gold Diggings by Daniel B. Woods

California in 1848, from an anonymous letter to the editor published in the New York Herald

San Francisco in 1849 from Eldorado by Bayard Taylor

The News Comes to Monterey from The Land of Gold. Three Years in California, 1846-1849 by Rev. Walter Colton

Three Weeks in a Mining Camp, from a letter from Dame Shirley (Amelia Smith Clappe), published in the Pioneer, California's first literary magazine

How the Gold was Mined, from an article titled How We get Gold in California, published anonymously in Harper's New Monthly Magazine

Chinese, Mexicans, and Indians, from Borthwick, Three Years in California, and Life on the Plains and Among the Diggings by Alonzo T. Delano

Amusements of the Miners, from Helper, The Land of Gold: Reality Versus Fiction; Woods, Sixteen Months at the Gold Diggings; and Dame Shirley's Letters.

Argonaut Agreements and Mining Laws, from Woods, Sixteen Months at the Gold Diggings, and from an article by Professor John B. Parkinson, published 1921 in the Wisconsin Magazine of History