The Perpetual Pursuit: One Man's Odyssey on the Gold Trail

by Ernest R. Tufft

Following in the footsteps of this earlier intrepid disciple, Reverend William Mosher crossed the American continent three times in the last half of the nineteenth century as he pursued his unusual calling as a missionary evangelist to those struggling men on the gold trail. These were the years of the Gold Rush, and Mosher ministered to a motley collection of men drawn to that unforgiving lifestyle in forty-seven frontier towns and at thirty different gold mines in California. Despite a long string of poor choices that led him afield of his original vision and back to a series of congregations in Michigan, Western New York and even the unfriendly, post-war Georgia, Mosher held to his original purpose and kept returning to reach out to the rag tag men trying so desperately to claw their way out of the abject poverty of those California mining districts. Tuffts explanatory text augments the remarkable journal kept by Mosher himself, begun on January 1, 1854, when he began his journeys at the then older age of thirty-one. The Perpetual Pursuit is not only a fascinating look into one quiet and humble missionarys refusal to abandon his dream, no matter what, but it also provides a unique view of a burgeoning nineteenth century America and the ongoing rush to California that reflected the much more earthly dreams of so many others.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1432771884
• ISBN13: 9781432771881
• Release Date: November 2011
• Publisher: Outskirts Press
• Length: 162 Pages
• Weight: 0.43 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.5" x 8.5"