This paper considers John Adams and director Peter Sellars’s opera Girls of the Golden West (2017) as a twenty-first-century rejoinder to Belasco. 9 of 15 10 of 15 A set in the world premiere of 'Girls of the Golden West' by John Adams and Peter Sellars. According to Sellars, "These true stories of the Forty-Niners are overwhelming in their heroism, passion and cruelty, telling tales of racial conflicts, colorful and humorous exploits, political strife and struggles to build anew a life and to decide what it would mean to be American." David Belasco’s melodrama The Girl of the Golden West (1905), adapted into a well-known opera by Giacomo Puccini (1910), paints a romanticized picture of life in the goldmines. On November 21, 1852, Louise Clappe, a New Englander who had spent a year. Adams wrote, "To be able to set to music the authentic voices of these people, whether from their letters or their songs or from newspaper accounts from their time, is a great privilege for me." Sellars, who also directed the opera, conceived the libretto while doing research for a production of Giacomo Puccini's 1910 opera La fanciulla del West (based on David Belasco's 1905 play The Girl of the Golden West), which also deals with the gold rush period. John Adams’s new opera, Girls of the Golden West, is an assault on American mythology. The libretto is also sourced from other literature of the period, including newspaper articles and the writings of Mark Twain. Clappe published the letters under the pen name Dame Shirley. The opera is inspired by the 1851/1852 letters of Louise Clappe, who lived for a year and a half in the mining settlement of Rich Bar (now Diamondville, California) during the California Gold Rush. The opera was premiered in San Francisco on November 21, 2017. The San Francisco Opera commissioned the work jointly with Dallas Opera, the Dutch National Opera (De Nationale Opera) and Teatro La Fenice in Venice. Girls of the Golden West is an opera in two acts with music by John Adams and a libretto by Peter Sellars.