The Hidden Ships of the Gold Rush drains the streets of San Francisco, the Sacramento River and the icy wastes of the Klondike, northern Canada, to tell the true story of nineteenth-century gold mania. In the race to be first to the gold fields hundreds of thousands of people from across the world head West. Risks are run, countless men, women and children die, fortunes are made and lost - and amid it all, the modern-day United States is born.