Roaring Camp Read online

  For my father, Bud,

  in memory of rivers;

  For my mother, Jan,

  in honor of seasons;

  To my lover, Camille,

  for the wisdom of arroyos.

  It takes a long time to remember, it takes generations,

  sometimes nations, to make a story.

  —Betty Louise Bell, Faces in the Moon

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Preface

  Prologue

  Joaquín Murrieta and the Bandits

  Part I Rush

  Chapter 1 On the Eve of Emigration

  Part II Boom

  Chapter 2 Domestic Life in the Diggings

  Chapter 3 Bulls, Bears, and Dancing Boys

  Chapter 4 Mining Gold and Making War

  Part III Bust

  Chapter 5 Dreams That Died

  Chapter 6 The Last Fandango

  Epilogue

  Telling Tales

  Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  Index

  List of Illustrations

  Map: Gold Rush California

  Map: California’s Southern Mines

  Map of the Southern Mines, 1852

  Representation of Joaquín Murrieta, 1859

  Gold Rush–era Chilean sailor

  Gold Rush–era Chinese emigrant

  Jean-Nicolas Perlot, Belgian-born emigrant from France

  Lettersheet, “The Miners’ Lamentations”

  J. D. Borthwick’s drawing of a Chinese camp

  French miners at lunch

  John Hovey’s drawing of a Miwok hunter

  Lettersheet, “Hutching’s California Scenes—The California Indians”

  Lettersheet, “Miner’s Life—Illustrated”

  Sonora, California, 1852

  J. D. Borthwick’s drawing of a Gold Rush ball

  John B. Colton, the “Girl Miner”

  Californio, Indian, and Anglo American mining scene

  John Hovey’s drawing of Chilean War jail

  John Hovey’s drawing of camp with mules

  Tuolumne County Water Company certificate, 1854

  John C. and Jessie Benton Frémont home on Las Mariposas

  Miwok ranchería on Las Mariposas

  Armsted C. Brown, attorney at law

  Lettersheet, “Way-Side Scenes in California”

  Miwok dancers in Sonora, California

  Illustration from Two Eras in the Life of the Felon Grovenor Layton

  Cover of Murder of M. V. B. Griswold by Five Chinese Assassins, with Fou Sin

  Chou Yee, from Murder of M. V. B. Griswold by Five Chinese Assassins

  Coon You, from Murder of M. V. B. Griswold by Five Chinese Assassins

  John Chaffee and Jason Chamberlain in their seventies

  Preface

  Until about the twentieth of September, the Indians had worked constantly around us. All the companies let them go freely where it seemed good to them, even in our ditches, to gather the paydirt in their pans, carry it on their heads and go wash it at the river. The women especially did this work; however, I have never seen an Indian woman cede to her husband the gold she gathered, which made me suppose that each one worked for herself.

  —Jean-Nicolas Perlot, Gold Seeker: Adventures of

  a Belgian Argonaut during the Gold Rush Years

  FOR MANY OF US, thoughts of the California Gold Rush do not evoke scenes like the one described in this epigraph, in which French and Belgian men mine for gold side by side with Miwok Indian women. Since we do not envision such scenes, we also cannot ask why European miners might think of themselves as “letting” native peoples pan for gold in California, and why a Belgian man might conclude that Miwok women worked only for themselves. Our failure to consider such scenes and ask such questions is part of a larger problem of collective memory. After the decline of California’s surface diggings in the 1850s, the Gold Rush increasingly came to be remembered as the historical property of Anglo Americans, especially Anglo American men, and came to be associated in everyday language with facile notions of fast fortune. It is the task of this book both to interrogate and to dismantle the stories white Americans have told themselves about the California Gold Rush, and to offer instead a pastiche of tales that will help us think as complexly and critically about the conquest of history as we have begun to think about the history of conquest.

  To accomplish this task, I focus on the region that Gold Rush participants called the Southern Mines, or that area in the Sierra Nevada foothills drained by the San Joaquin River. The Southern Mines are particularly illuminating for my purposes because the region’s population was more diverse than that of the Northern Mines (the foothill area drained by the lower Sacramento River). Mexicans, Chileans, French, and Chinese were prominent in the southern region, and Miwok Indians maintained a strong presence there. African Americans, both enslaved and free, also worked alongside Anglo Americans in the Southern Mines. Indeed, the Gold Rush was not only among the most demographically male events in human history, it also—particularly as it transpired in the Southern Mines—was among the most multiracial, multiethnic, multinational events that had yet occurred within the boundaries of the United States. In addition, unlike the Northern Mines, the Southern Mines failed to follow what historians have described as the typical trajectory of industrialization for western mining, in which placer (surface, individualized) techniques gave way in an orderly fashion to hardrock (underground, industrialized) mining. Not surprisingly, then, the Southern Mines have constituted the area least studied by historians, though diggings in the far northwestern corner of California share with the southern region a history of neglect.

  The stories I tell about the Gold Rush have in common a concern with relations of difference and domination, relations frequently defined along lines of gender and race or ethnicity or nationality, and often made manifest in economic terms. In this, I have placed Anglo American men as squarely within social constructs of gender and race or ethnicity or nationality as, for example, women (of all races, ethnicities, and nationalities) and emigrants, white ethnics, and peoples of color (both women and men). And I have identified the pursuit of dominance on the part of some white American men in the diggings as a first step in the long discursive process by which whole pieces of California’s Gold Rush past fell by the wayside of history. Those pieces could not be reconfigured in memory until the wholesale transformation of the “subject” of history began over three decades ago, with the painstaking work of scholars of class, race, sexuality, and gender. In the end, it is the social movements that inspired such scholarship that have most deeply influenced my thinking in this book.

  The avid reader of mining histories may hear echoed in the title of this work the name of a fine book about mining in British Columbia, Jeremy Mouat’s Roaring Days: Rossland’s Mines and the History of British Columbia (1995). I don’t mean to be a claim jumper. My title actually comes from the famous Bret Harte story “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” which I analyze in the epilogue.

  Earlier, abbreviated versions of two chapters of this book have appeared in print elsewhere: “‘Domestic’ Life in the Diggings: The Southern Mines in the California Gold Rush,” in Over the Edge: Remapping the American West, ed. Valerie J. Matsumoto and Blake Allmendinger (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1999), and “Bulls, Bears, and Dancing Boys: Race, Gender, and Leisure in the California Gold Rush,” Radical History Review 60 (Fall 1994).

  Beyond my overriding debt to activists for race, gender, sexual, and economic justice—who first won my admiration when I was growing up during the 1960s in Madison, Wisconsin—I am obliged to a good number of individuals and institutions. This book began as a dissertation, for which I received
support from the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation (Whiting Fellowship in the Humanities); the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation (Charlotte W. Newcombe Dissertation Fellowship); the Huntington Library (Research Fellowship); and Yale University (John F. Enders Fellowship). At Yale, Florence Thomas cheerfully charted my progress through the graduate program. At the University of Michigan, both the Women’s Studies Program and the Department of History granted me funds for last-minute research assistance as I was finishing the dissertation. Staff in both units, particularly Judy Mackey and Janet Fisk, helped me manage these funds and navigate a new academic environment. They and their coworkers deserve raises, roses, and utmost respect.

  The journey from dissertation to book was long and full of detours, as matters of love and death kept me packing, unpacking, and repacking my things in an effort to live in accordance with what mattered most to me. In the meantime, I was fortunate to receive extraordinary support from the University of Michigan in the form of a Faculty Grant and Fellowship as well as a Michigan Faculty Fellowship at the Institute for the Humanities. I am most grateful not only for this material assistance but for the encouragement both fellowships offered me at a time when family matters weighed on my heart. I also have continued to benefit from the generosity of the Huntington Library, which gave me a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship that allowed me an entire academic year at that institution. It was during that year that I produced most of this book’s final two chapters as well as the epilogue. When I was in the final hours of finishing the book, I received a Dean’s Summer Research Fellowship at the University of Colorado at Boulder, which allowed me to return to California to gather illustrations. Thanks to Dianne Johnson for helping me manage those funds.

  Archivists, librarians, local historians, and other kind folks made sure I had access to the necessary materials for this study. George Miles at the Beinecke Library walked me through the closed stacks and explained the intricacies of cataloging there well before this project took shape as a dissertation, and then continued to be of tremendous assistance in the years that followed. Waverly Lowell gave me tips on California archival resources generally. Nicole Bouché helped me at the Bancroft Library, and, when I went back there to search for illustrations, Jack von Euw made sure I found what I needed in record time. During an early research trip to the Bancroft, I was fortunate to find a seat next to the Berkeley graduate student Michael González, now of the University of San Diego. Michael not only pointed me toward source materials but also helped me survive the 1989 earthquake. Another Berkeley graduate student, Judy Yung, now of the University of California, Santa Cruz, assisted me in all matters related to Chinese Gold Rush experiences, for which I will always be indebted. I am also grateful to Sally McCoy, who took me into her El Cerrito home while I was working at the Bancroft. The staff at the California State Library in Sacramento and the Holt-Atherton Center for Western Studies at the University of the Pacific at Stockton, especially Daryl Morrison, also gave me much aid.

  At the Huntington Library, Martin Ridge, Roy Ritchie, and Peter Blodgett all took interest in my work and helped me make good use of my time at that institution. For a model of curatorial expertise, collegiality, and basic human decency, one need look no farther than Peter Blodgett; I am proud to call him a friend. In 1998, as Peter’s energies increasingly were occupied by the Huntington’s Gold Rush exhibit, I was fortunate to be able to turn to Jennifer Martínez for able assistance. For additional help in acquiring illustrations from the Huntington, my thanks to Kristin Cooper, Lita García, Lisa Ann Libby, and Jennifer Watts. Indeed, there is probably no staff member at the Huntington who has not helped me at one time or another; to all, my deepest gratitude. I also benefited from conversations about my work with other readers at the Huntington, particularly Bill Deverell, Amelia Montes, Terri Snyder, and the late Wilbur Jacobs. And I am very thankful to Carol and Luther Luedtke of South Pasadena for opening their home to me both times I was in residence at the Huntington.

  For assistance in locating and gaining access to illustrations for this book, I am also grateful to Craig Bates, curator of ethnography for the National Park Service Museum at Yosemite National Park; the photographer Leroy Radanovich in Mariposa, California; and Aisha Ayers, Marcia Eymann, and Claudia Kishler at the Oakland Museum of California. Three private collectors, too, allowed me to use images reproduced herein; my gratitude to Stanley B. Burns, M.D., Matthew R. Isenburg, and Charles Schwartz.

  Up in the gold country, in the four counties that constitute the geographic focus of this study, I relied on a whole host of friendly people to direct me to everything from county court records to the nearest cup of coffee: Larry Cenotto, historian of Amador County, at the Amador County Museum and Archives; Sheldon Johnson, Amador County clerk and recorder; Lorrayne Kennedy at the Calaveras County Museum and Archives; Willard Fuller at the Calaveras County Historical Society; Judith Cunningham of Foothill Research Associates; Sharon Marovich at the Tuolumne County Historical Society; Carlo De Ferrari, historian of Tuolumne County, who literally unlocked the vaults for me at the Tuolumne County Courthouse; Muriel Powers at the Mariposa Museum and History Center; Scott Pinkerton, historian of Mariposa County; and Darden Gilbert in the County Clerk’s Office at the Mariposa County Courthouse. Though not in the business of history, one other person made my travels in the gold country memorable; Barbara Saunders, then manager of El Campo Casa Resort Motel in Jackson, went far beyond the call of duty in making my first shoestring-budget research trip more comfortable.

  My training as a historian began two decades ago, at Carthage College in Kenosha, Wisconsin. There, Angela Howard and Jonathan Zophy introduced me to the field of women’s history and John (Ben) Bailey to the American West. I am grateful to them for sending me down those trails, and for being such fine teachers. I also owe more than I can say to Jane Gronholm, Laurie Poklop, and Kären Schultz for growing up with me there, and especially for that train trip we took to Montana in 1976. Look where that led! And to Kim House, poet and fisherman, my belated gratitude.

  At Arizona State University in Tempe, where I pursued my master’s degree, I worked with a number of wonderful scholars. Over the years, my adviser there, Mary Rothschild, has continued to take interest in my work and well-being, for which I thank her. Likewise, Christine Marín, a fellow graduate student and head of the Chicano Studies Collection at Hayden Library, early on had a great influence on my work. I am also grateful for the continued support of Susie Sato, then of the Arizona Historical Foundation. And although Julia Velson (granddaughter of Clara Lemlich Shavelson, who called for the general strike vote in the Uprising of the Twenty Thousand) is a Californian, I first met her in Arizona. Since then, I’ve learned more from her about the way the world works than from most of the books I’ve read.

  In the early 1980s, I worked for the journal Signs at Stanford University and had the good fortune to know and learn from an extraordinary group of graduate students there, including David Gutiérrez, Valerie Matsumoto, and Peggy Pascoe. Dave, you are my model for intelligence, integrity, and irreverence, perfectly proportioned. Estelle Freedman and Barbara Gelpi also took time out of busy schedules to nurture my work and academic career. And it was at Stanford that I hooked up with Kath Weston, from whom I learned a good deal of what I know that’s worth knowing. There I also met Clare Novak, my coworker at Signs and now a friend for life. Stanford introduced me to Yukiko Hanawa as well, who early on prompted and influenced my thinking about issues of difference and domination. I continue to marvel at Yukiko’s breathtaking intellectual range, her keen sense of justice, and the integrity with which she conducts her life, and I offer her my deepest appreciation. It was in these years, too, that I had the great good fortune to meet a trio of scholars whose work on gender in the mining West has been an inspiration for my own; my gratitude to Elizabeth Jameson, Mary Murphy, and Marion Goldman.

  At Yale University, I was surrounded by friends, colleagues, and advisers who believed in the wo
rth of this project and in my ability to carry it out. My dissertation committee consisted of Nancy Cott, William Cronon, Ann Fabian, Howard Lamar, and David Montgomery, but other faculty members also took interest in me and my work. Of these, Emily Honig and Jonathan Spence offered assistance and support at key moments. It was Howard Lamar who first counseled me to study the Southern Mines. Thank heavens I took his sage advice. Generations of his students have filled their acknowledgments with paeans to his kindness and generosity, and I can but join the chorus. I only hope that this book, begun at his suggestion, will start to repay him for the many gifts he has given me. From the earliest stages of this project, Ann Fabian saw clearly in my work things that I could only dimly envision, and in several key places, the material that follows took shape as much in her hands as in mine. Her wisdom and quick wit not only saved me from numerous errors of interpretation; they made this a more graceful and nuanced work. Thank you, Ann. This book began as a seminar paper in a course David Montgomery taught in 1985–86 on industrialization, and the questions I learned to pose in that class are the most important questions I address herein—indeed, they may be the most important questions one can ask about social relations of difference and domination. I deeply appreciate his advice, his vision, and his integrity. Nancy Cott’s own early work in antebellum U.S. women’s history laid the foundations for much of what I have said about antebellum U.S. men, and her constant engagement with the ever-changing world of feminist scholarship has frequently saved me from reinventing the interpretive wheel. Throughout this project, she displayed that rare talent for offering nothing but constructive criticism when I strayed down dead-end roads, and lavish praise when I struck out in more promising directions. Many, many thanks. Last, but certainly not least, I thank Bill Cronon for caring about me and my work, and for providing a model of what it means to be a scholar engaged by the ethics of everyday life. We have different intellectual and political passions, but these differences have only helped me see more clearly how to live within such passions and remain true to what matters. I am also profoundly grateful to Bill for first telling our now mutual editor, Steve Forman, about my work. That act has made this a more daring and less dutiful book—which made it much more fun to write. There is no end to my gratitude.