How Much of These Hills Is Gold Themes

Truth, Lies, and History

How Much of These Hills is Gold follows young Lucy as she comes of age in 1860s California, at the tail end of the Gold Rush. As a little girl, Lucy believes the stories Ba tells her and Sam about the buffalo and the gold in the California hills, and how the family will someday be rich enough to buy a piece of land to call their own. Eventually, she outgrows these tall tales and…

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Civilization vs. Wilderness

Lucy and Sam grow up on the border between civilization and the wilderness of the hardscrabble American frontier, and their lives involve a constant negotiation between these forces. Ma and people like Teacher Leigh stand on the side of civilization, with their insistence on a good education, good manners, and making a good impression on others. One of the reasons Ma so captivates Teacher Leigh is her ability to maintain a civilized bearing despite the…

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Home

Lucy and Sam spend their childhoods on the move, first traveling from one prospecting camp to another and then chasing better wages and working conditions among the northern California coal mines. Each of these places feels like home, even when it’s as humble a place as an abandoned chicken coop. And although it takes Lucy a long time to understand how this can be, eventually she figures out that two things can make a place…

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Identity and Gender

One of the tasks of growing up that Sam and Lucy both face in How Much of These Hills Is Gold is crafting their own identities. Indeed, the book suggests that this is one of the most important tasks of a lifetime. It presents identities as the product of both circumstance and temperament. For instance, Sam is initially allowed to dress and act as a boy rather than a girl because of the family’s financial…

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Family

From the time they’re young, Ma and Ba drill into Lucy and Sam the idea that family is the most important thing of all. But as their family shrinks, Lucy starts to question what even makes a family a family. After she and Sam part ways on the banks of the Sweetwater River, she tries to recapture a sense of family in her friendship with Anna—part of which involves dressing identically and pretending to…

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Grief

When Ba dies in the night, Lucy wants to make sure that she and Sam bury him properly so that his ghost can’t haunt them or try to possess Sam. In many ways—some of which Lucy realizes, some of which she doesn’t—she and Sam are already haunted by the ghosts of the past by the time Ba dies. Sam is already very like Ba, and Lucy has been trying to fill Ma’s shoes since…

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