It has been nearly five decades since Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark into the unknown, and thirteen years of remembering the Alamo. On paper, the treaties are signed and the ink is dry. Texas is annexed, the Oregon territory is secured, and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo has officially ceded California to the United States.

Do not let the maps fool you. The West is not won. It is wild, ungoverned, and waiting to be carved apart by those bold or foolish enough to claim it. Out there, there is no law regarding property rights, and the ancestral homelands of Native tribes are about to be overrun by an unprecedented tide of travelers.

The days of the quiet, solitary pioneer are over. A new sickness has taken hold of the nation—a fever for wealth. Tens of thousands of desperate souls—the 'forty-niners'—are throwing their entire lives into covered wagons, braving cholera, starvation, and the unforgiving trail. The frontier isn't claimed. It's about to burst.

Welcome to the Gold Rush.