J.S. Holliday, 82; Wrote Classic History of the Gold Rush Era

J.S. Holliday, who wrote a masterly history of California’s Gold Rush based on journals and letters of the era uncovered during 30 years of painstaking research, died Aug. 31 at his Carmel home. He was 82.

The cause was pulmonary fibrosis, according to his son, T.A. Holliday of New Orleans.

A former museum director and university librarian as well as scholar, Holliday was known best for his book “The World Rushed In: The California Gold Rush Experience,” which has remained in print since its original publication in 1981. A classic of western history, it is notable for an innovative narrative style that blends the voices of the miners and the families they left behind with Holliday’s commentary and analysis.

“It is the great narrative history of the Gold Rush” based on firsthand accounts, said Gary Kurutz, a Gold Rush scholar and curator of special collections at the California State Library in Sacramento.

The book draws most heavily from the diaries and correspondence of William Swain, a farmer from Youngstown, N.Y., who traveled overland for seven months in 1849 to join the hordes of prospectors in gold-crazy California. Swain wrote thoughtfully and in great detail about his adventure, conveying his hopes for securing his family’s future, his fear of failure, and a nitty-gritty view of the everyday struggles of a ‘49er.

The result was what Kevin Starr, a California historian and former state librarian, calls an “inner history” of a defining period in the state’s history. “He was after the domestic, psychological experience,” said Starr, who described Holliday as a pioneer of the docudrama narrative.

Documentarian Ken Burns, who featured Holliday in his PBS series “The West,” called himself a “huge fan” of the Gold Rush expert. “No one writes better about California’s irresistible past,” Burns said several years ago.

Born Jaquelin Smith Holliday II in Indianapolis on June 10, 1924, Holliday preferred to go by his initials; friends called him Jim. His father, William, was a steel company executive who had a great interest in western Americana.

At Yale University, the younger Holliday majored in history, but his education was interrupted by World War II service in the Pacific as a second lieutenant in the Navy. He returned to Yale after the war and earned a bachelor’s degree in 1948.

That year, a rare-book dealer named Ed Eberstadt showed him Swain’s diary, which was in a collection owned by Yale. Holliday was not impressed at first, even though the dealer described it as the “most important” diary of the many written by those who had stampeded to California a century earlier. Still, he agreed to take on the job of preparing the diary for publication.

Not until Holliday began to read diaries left by other ‘49ers did he begin to appreciate the treasure trove that Swain’s represented. Most of the other diaries were “little more than daily recitations of miles traveled and weather conditions, with an occasional complaint or observation about food, dust or some other discomfort,” Holliday later wrote. Many of them stopped after the migrant reached California or were abandoned due to illness or other difficulty.

Swain, by comparison, not only made diary entries nearly every day during his journey, he also wrote long letters to his family during the arduous months in California and his eventual return home. Holliday soon realized that Eberstadt had been right and that Swain’s diary and correspondence were “so inclusive, so complete, as to be a rarity.”

The Swain material inspired Holliday to do more than just correct the spelling and add footnotes. He vowed to “read every available diary and letter of 1849 and 1850” written by other miners and use them to enrich Swain’s tale. He became a prospector himself, scouring libraries, newspaper archives and attics around the country for nuggets of Gold Rush history.

Starr noted that Holliday’s thoroughness and perfectionism were not the only reasons that his research consumed decades.

“Jim was too much of an entrepreneur to be a strictly cloistered scholar,” Starr said. “He believed in the transforming power of institutions like libraries, museums and historical societies.”

And Holliday spent much of his career running them.

Professor and Editor

After earning his doctorate in history at UC Berkeley in 1958, he served four years as assistant director of the university’s Bancroft Library. During the 1960s, he taught history as an associate professor at what is now San Francisco State University and was an editor at American West magazine.

He also was founding director of the Oakland Museum of California, but was fired less than two months before it opened in 1969 in a dispute with the facility’s governing commission. The disagreement stemmed largely from Holliday’s attempt to involve members of Oakland’s African American community in the governance of the museum, which is devoted to California art and history.

“I’m not surprised he tried to involve [ethnic] communities,” said Vartan Gregorian, a former colleague who is president of the grant-making Carnegie Corp. of New York. “He was an integrationist.... He believed that museums and libraries are people’s palaces.”

A few years after the museum brouhaha, Holliday invited controversy again. As executive director of the California Historical Society, he championed an exhibit on the World War II imprisonment of 110,000 Japanese Americans in the western United States called “Executive Order 9066.”

The show, which featured powerful photographs by Dorothea Lange and others, stirred memories of an episode that many Americans preferred to forget, and it was turned down by several institutions. It finally opened in 1972 at the De Young Museum in San Francisco, where it was viewed by 100,000 people during a six-week run. Thousands more saw it during a national tour that included a stop at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Starr said the exhibit “helped break the silence” surrounding the internment. It also shook up the staid world of historical societies, which tended to shy away from controversial and contemporary subjects.

By the 1970s, the manuscript for his Gold Rush book had become, by his own description, “more an encyclopedia than a readable narrative.” He spent much of that decade pruning the text and completed the revisions in 1980.

“The World Rushed In” earned admiring reviews when it was published the following year. “His narrative itself is a goldmine. Like the streambed of the Feather River before the ‘49ers arrived, it sparkles with nuggets, flashes of truth about American character and American dreams,” James D. Houston wrote in The Times in 1981.

Tall and Rambunctious

Tall, lean and ruggedly handsome, Holliday had a booming voice and a fondness for giving bear hugs. Former colleagues said he could be as rambunctious as the pioneers he wrote about and had a sense of humor that sometimes got him into trouble.

He is survived by his wife, Belinda Vidor Jones of Carmel, whose father was classic film director King Vidor. In addition to his son, he also leaves two other children from his first marriage to the former Nancy Adams: Martha Brett Holliday of West Hartford, Conn., and William Jaquelin Holliday of Menlo Park; a sister, Winston Holliday Dines of La Jolla; and three granddaughters.

His achievements included returning to the Oakland Museum three decades after his ouster to help organize an exhibition called “Gold Fever! The Lure and Legacy of the California Gold Rush.” The 1998 exhibition, which included the shiny nugget from Sutter’s Mill that launched the westward charge in 1848, was the largest show on the Gold Rush ever mounted.

He also wrote the exhibit catalog, published by the University of California Press in 1999 as “Rush for Riches: Gold Fever and the Making of California.”

“I came to California because of the Gold Rush just as clearly as William Swain did,” Holliday, speaking to the San Francisco Chronicle in 1998, said of the Yankee emigrant whose diary had plunged him into his own version of gold fever.

“It’s not a contrived metaphor. I came here for gold and found all the other ways of seeking success in California.”

elaine.woo@latimes.com