J. S. Holliday research collection on the William Swain family

J. S. Holliday's gold rush history, The World Rushed In: The California Gold Rush Experience (New York: Simon and Schuster, c1981), is based in large part on the experiences of forty-niner William Swain. Swain was born in Youngstown, New York in 1821, the second son of Isaac and Patience Swain. He taught school from 1844 to 1846, and married Sabrina Swain in 1847. Their first child, Lila Crandall Swain, was born in June 1848. When the gold discoveries in California were announced at the end of 1848, William decided to go to California. At Independence, Missouri, they joined a company of men from Marshall, Michigan, the Wolverine Rangers. In May 1849 they started on their overland journey, reaching California in November of that year. A year later, Swain started for home via Panama, reaching New York in February 1851.

J. S. Holliday was introduced to the William Swain journals and letters by Edward Eberstadt, the New York rare book and manuscript dealer who had acquired them from William Swain's daughter Sara Sabrina Swain. Eberstadt had intended to publish the journal and diary but had been unable to do so due to the press of business and ill health, and asked Holliday, a recent Yale graduate, to take over the project. Holliday did so, and met Sara Swain in 1948. Born in 1860, Sara was a school teacher and amateur historian of Niagara County, New York. Holliday discovered that she still held letters that her mother Sabrina and uncle George had sent to her father during the gold rush. Sara gave Holliday the letters, which form part of the present collection, in 1951. She died in 1953.

The Swain collection includes documents concerning William Swain's father, Isaac, who had first been married to Elizabeth Hall. Their daughter, Rebecca, married Frederick Granger Williams, who was a counselor to Joseph Smith. The Williams family followed Joseph Smith to Illinois and Missouri and made the overland journey to the Salt Lake Valley in 1847. Her grandson, Frederick Granger Williams, married Nancy Clement, who later corresponded with Sara Sabrina Swain.