The American mining frontier burst on the scene with an undeniable frenzy in the spring of 1849. “No one,” Edward Dolnick writes, “could have imagined how quickly the West would change.” Shouts of “Gold!” would later be raised in such scattered locales as Bannack, Mont., Cripple Creek, Colo., and Nome, Alaska, but it all began in California near a place called Sutter’s Mill.

Had this first great gold rush occurred only a few years earlier, California might not have dropped so easily into the American orbit. Instead, a tidal wave of gold seekers propelled California to almost instant statehood, and anchored the United States on both coasts. The individual dreams and the myriad hardships they endured are the heart and soul of “The Rush.”

Dolnick, the author, most recently, of “The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World,” quite appropriately divides his narrative into three parts: “Hope,” “Journey” and “Reality.” In mid-19th-century America, when one’s path through life was relatively fixed by birth, gold for the taking offered the hope of something better. Those who went beyond idle fantasies and summoned the grit to journey thousands of miles found all routes to be perilous, whether overland by wagon train, through the jungles of Panama or round Cape Horn.

The final stage — stark reality — awaited all who survived the journey. Relatively few of the tens of thousands who streamed to California managed to pick a fortune from the earth. By the end of the rush, many of those who came away rich did so not from labor in the mines but by providing services to the miners — as hoteliers, prostitutes, merchants, bankers and more. They mined the miners as readily as the miners themselves worked the ground.