Roaring Camp

by Johnson, Susan Lee

  Tales told in the decade or so after the California Gold Rush sounded more like the story of Grovenor Layton and the nameless Chileans than like the story of M. V. B. Griswold, Fou Sin, Chou Yee, and the rest. But the fiction of the 1860s and early 1870s also introduced a new comic twist. This fiction elaborated on—even celebrated—the moral ambiguity of Gold Rush social relations in a manner unlike the crime pamphlets of the 1850s. Had Grovenor Layton’s story been told by a Bret Harte or a Mark Twain, for instance, Grovenor would have been not only a fatally flawed but an infernally funny man, and the vigilantes who lynched him would have been pilloried as vainglorious prigs. No teller of such tales was more influential than Bret Harte, a native of New York State who emigrated to California when he was seventeen. Harte worked at a variety of jobs until he established himself as a writer and editor in the 1860s, with the help of no less a Gold Rush luminary than Jessie Benton Frémont.27 As one historian puts it, it was Harte who “fixed the Gold Rush into formula for the nation.”28 Harte’s oeuvre fills almost twenty volumes in all, but his reputation as storyteller of the Gold Rush rests on a handful of tales, the most famous of which include “Tennessee’s Partner” and “The Luck of Roaring Camp.” One can hardly overstate the impact these stories had in codifying collective memory of the Gold Rush for generations of Americans, for whom the event became one of colorful, unwashed, unshaven men who confront a moral vacuum in the mining camps, and who respond by struggling to build a new moral order appropriate to Gold Rush conditions. As late as 1969, when Joshua Logan and Alan Jay Lerner brought an unfortunate film version of Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s Broadway musical Paint Your Wagon to the screen, moviegoers saw in Clint Eastwood’s and Lee Marvin’s characters men after Harte’s own heart, albeit updated to 1960s sensibilities. Marvin’s grizzled ne’er-do-well and Eastwood’s innocent farm boy turned forty-niner could have stepped off the pages of any Harte story. To grasp the relationship between the Southern Mines and popular memory of the Gold Rush, then, one must attend to Harte’s fiction.

  First, consider “Tennessee’s Partner,” which was published in Harte’s own periodical, the Overland Monthly, in 1869. This tale of two white miners, one named Tennessee and the other called simply Tennessee’s Partner, opens in 1853, as Tennessee’s Partner decides to leave the diggings for San Francisco in search of a wife.29 He finds one closer to home, in Stockton, and brings her back to the cabin he shares with Tennessee in the mines. But Tennessee soon woos the woman away from his partner, and the lovers run off together. Then, however, the woman rids herself of Tennessee as well. So Tennessee returns to the old cabin, where his partner greets him “with affection.” All is well between the two friends, but the rest of the men in the camp turn against Tennessee, not only because he has stolen a wife but because he is, in general, a gambler and a thief. After one especially flagrant crime, Tennessee is finally arrested and tried in a makeshift miners’ court.

  During the course of the trial, Tennessee’s Partner appears, carrying a carpetbag filled with seventeen hundred dollars in gold, which he offers as payment for Tennessee’s crime. He also offers a wry rebuke to a question posed about Tennessee’s character:

  I come yar as Tennessee’s pardner—knowing him nigh on four year, off and on, wet and dry, in luck and out o’ luck. His ways ain’t aller my ways, but . . . there ain’t any liveliness as he’s been up to, as I don’t know. And you sez to me, sez you—confidential-like, and between man and man—sez you, “Do you know anything in his behalf?” and I sez to you, sez I—confidential-like, as between man and man—“What should a man know of his pardner?”

  Neither the gold nor the rebuke influences the court, and Tennessee is convicted and hanged. All his partner can do is gather up the body in a donkey cart, where he has laid a rough-hewn casket filled with fragrant pine needles. The cart itself is decorated with willow slips and buckeye blossoms, and in it Tennessee’s Partner wheels the body away. After burying his friend, however, Tennessee’s Partner falls desperately ill. Delirious on his deathbed, he feels himself walking up the hill near their cabin and looking for Tennessee, who he fears may be staggering home drunk. At the top of the hill, the two men spot each other, and Tennessee’s Partner sees that Tennessee is “all by himself, sober, and his face a-shining.” The story ends: “And so they met.”

  Harte’s story did indeed capture something of the homosocial ties—and tensions—of the California Gold Rush. The ties he breaks off suddenly in 1853, showing them to be overwhelmed by the tensions of man against man in the mines. Such ties can be sustained only in death, when Tennessee and his partner meet on the high hill of the afterlife. In the Southern Mines, of course, such ties were rendered anomalous primarily by the influx of white women from the eastern United States. And tensions there, while they arose often enough among white men, typically involved struggles for economic and cultural dominance defined in racial terms and dignified by the language of citizenship. Indeed, although Harte meant to represent the moral complexity of the mines, his stories represent a narrowing of the field of moral conflict, in which relations of power among various human communities, as opposed to those among individuals, rarely surface.

  But something else was lost in Harte’s vision. Acquaintances of Harte claimed that he had modeled the relationship between Tennessee and his partner on a story he had heard about two Tuolumne County miners, Jason Chamberlain and John Chaffee.30 Jason and John, too, believed that they had served as prototypes for the famous tale. In letters he wrote as he grew older, Jason often called himself “Tennessee” and John “Old Pard.”31 If there is even a shred of truth to the claimed connection between the actual and the fictional partners (and there is no reason to believe there is not), then the afterlife reunion of the devoted friends in “Tennessee’s Partner” is doubly ironic. For the decline of the Southern Mines brought no such tragedy in the lives of Jason and John. The Massachusetts artisans, in fact, lived together near the town of Groveland for over fifty years. Neither ever married, and the voluminous archive they left behind holds no trace of intimate female companions. John dug gold for the rest of his life, with little success. Jason turned to gardening and, in time, to keeping a way station for travelers headed up to Yosemite Valley, which, by 1890, was a national park.

  Jason had a guest book for the travelers who passed through on their way to the park, and some of the entries in that book suggest that his partnership with John was an intimate one indeed. One party quipped, “The artistic inclination of these gentlemen is quite apparent tho which one is the ‘ladies man’ we could not discover, each modestly declining the honor.” Another man wrote simply, “These are men after my own Heart.” A few days later, a visitor remarked on Groveland’s natural beauty, but noted that the most curious bond created “by the convulsions of nature” was that between “the wedded batchelors.” And yet another traveler, himself an old forty-niner, was even more explicit in his guest book entry:

  On Our Trip to the Yosemite Providence directed us to the Cheerful Cabin of Messrs Chamberlain and Chaffee Two Characteristic “49ers” whose attachment to each other has the true “Damon and Pythias” ring, that touches sentiments so welcome May their “Golden Wedding” to be celebrated in 1899 be a crowning event to their long history of Hospitality32

  Jason and John did make it to their “Golden Wedding.” In his diary for 1899, itself a gift from Overland Monthly editors, Jason wrote on the inside front cover, “This is the Jubilee Number or 50 Years Together.”33

  The partners would live with one another for four more years, until sickness forced John to travel down to the Bay Area for medical care in 1903. A guest book entry from this period indicates the toll John’s illness took on Jason: “His meditative, absent look, and day dreams indicate that his mind, thought, anxiety are in Chaffee while he lingers in the East Bay Sanitorium at Oakland. A love could not miss his sweetheart more.”34 John never returned to Groveland. He died on July 31, 1903. Jason puttered around their homestead for
a couple of months after John’s death, picking apples, walking to town for his mail, and looking after his own failing health (he was eighty-one, and suffered from painful prostate troubles). The journal Jason kept for over half a century ends abruptly on October 16, 1903, with the terse entry “went for mail picked apples.” Shortly thereafter, Jason Chamberlain put the barrel of a shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.35

  John Chaffee and Jason Chamberlain, hearthside, in their seventies, after living half a century together in Tuolumne County.

  Courtesy of the Bancroft Library.

  This story of illness and grief is not easily accommodated by collective memory of the Gold Rush, though Bret Harte’s tale prefigured the partners’ deaths and offered a culturally intelligible narrative in which to fit their passing. But like most dominant cultural memories of California’s rush for riches, this one narrows the field of vision considerably, cutting short as it does the intimate—and, no doubt in some cases, erotic—ties between men that the Gold Rush fostered. Indeed, no historical silence is so deafening as that which surrounds the intimacies among men who spent a night, or a lifetime, together in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. Groveland was not Greenwich Village, to be sure. But neither was it a land of lonely hearts.

  In the end, of course, the process of codifying collective memory of the California Gold Rush produced not one but many historical silences. Consider another of Bret Harte’s famous stories, “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” published in 1868.36 Harte sets the scene in this manner:

  There was commotion in Roaring Camp. It could not have been a fight, for in 1850, that was not novel enough to have called together the entire settlement. The ditches and claims were not only deserted, but “Tuttle’s grocery” had contributed its gamblers, who, it will be remembered, calmly continued their game the day that French Pete and Kanaka Joe shot each other to death over the bar in the front room.

  The commotion is created by a woman—a “very sinful woman” named Cherokee Sal—who is giving birth. She is not having an easy time of it, and the miners and gamblers occupy themselves by betting on the outcome: Will Sal live? Will the baby? If the baby lives, will it be a boy or a girl? What will be the color of the infant’s skin? It does not take much imagination to guess at Sal’s fate: such women rarely survive in nineteenth-century fiction. She dies in short order, but the baby, a boy, lives: “Mighty small specimen,” exclaims one miner; “Has n’t mor’n got the color,” observes another.

  The birth at Roaring Camp works a series of social miracles: first, the men file past the infant, who is wrapped in red flannel and lying in a candle box, bringing him the gifts of latter-day wise guys: a revolver, a slingshot, a golden spur, a diamond pin, and, then, a diamond ring (the giver remarking that he “saw that pin and went two diamonds better”). As time passes, the baby thrives on donkey’s milk and attentive father figures, and the camp thrives too—so much so that the men christen the boy “The Luck” for the prosperity he brings. Wholesale regeneration follows. Men start to bathe and wash their clothes, and they begin to refrain from profanity. The Luck’s cabin is whitewashed without and wallpapered within. Some even suggest inviting “one or two decent families” to live in Roaring Camp, so that The Luck can “profit from female companionship.”

  But this is where the new social order doubles back upon itself: to bring in married, white women (“decent” being an unsubtle code for white and married) is not to create something new but rather to install a familiar moral regime, in which white women assert moral influence and white men exercise self-control. Bret Harte knew this story. It was a story that middle-class Americans told about themselves through much of the nineteenth century. It was not a story that interested Harte. What interested him was a story for which there was no imaginable resolution—one in which white gold seekers create an alternative social order, every bit as moral as that presided over by white women in settled regions. When there is no imaginable resolution, however, death and destruction often ensue. Harte could not conceive of a world in which an unmarried Cherokee mother could live in harmony with non-native men—or else he thought his readers would not abide such a world. So Sal dies quickly, leaving behind her mixed-blood offspring. Destruction follows. It is winter, and the rivers that start in the Sierra Nevada are swelling their banks from snow in the mountains and rain in the foothills. A wall of water rushes into Roaring Camp, sweeping tents, trees, and tools in its wake, dumping them in the valley below. Among the debris is the whitewashed cabin, and with it goes “the pride, the hope, the joy, The Luck, of Roaring Camp.” The dead infant is found in the arms of a man who tried and failed to save The Luck and who himself is dying too. “Tell the boys I’ve got The Luck with me now” are his last words, and, as Harte puts it, “The strong man, clinging to the frail babe . . . drifted away into the shadowy river that flows forever to the unknown sea.”

  This, then, is another piece of the Gold Rush of collective memory: an amoral community of men confronts a baby’s birth and begins to build a world worthy of that child. It is an impossible social world, however, and it ends in sentimentalized destruction. But note too who lived in this world: not just characters named Sandy and Stumpy and Kentuck but ones named French Pete and Kanaka Joe and Cherokee Sal. Granted, these characters are all dead or dying; Pete and Joe have knocked each other off by the third sentence. Nonetheless, they represent a kind of shadow story that lurks around the edges of Harte’s tale, and that almost takes center stage in the baby who brings not just luck but regeneration to Roaring Camp. Recall the miners’ curiosity about the baby’s “complexion,” and the comment that the infant “has n’t mor’n got the color”? This phrase derives from miners’ habit of looking for “color”—that is, gold—in the dirt they washed out. Its use here tells us that, in the miners’ eyes, the baby is light-skinned but not “white.” The shadow story, then, is one about a multiracial, multiethnic social world, in which French men and Pacific Islanders live alongside Anglos from the eastern United States and Cherokee women from Indian Territory. Within a few pages, all that remains of this shadow world is a mixed-race child who becomes, momentarily, not the shame but The Luck of Roaring Camp.

  And then The Luck dies, and so does Roaring Camp. Unlike “Tennessee’s Partner,” “The Luck of Roaring Camp” cannot be linked to any particular persons, places, or events in the Southern Mines. That does not mean, however, that the tale cannot be used to illuminate the troubled connection between history and memory, between the lived past of the Southern Mines, on the one hand, and popular representations of the California Gold Rush, on the other. Indeed, most of Harte’s tales are not geographically specific; they represent a composite Gold Rush world. Roaring Camp, for example, is probably an imaginary mining community.37 Yet Harte’s stories, in their centering of Anglo American men as characters, draw more from the history of the Northern Mines than from that of the Southern Mines. Few readers have made or cared about this distinction, which may at first glance seem trivially historicist. Nonetheless, if one turns from sites of memory such as Harte’s stories to the historical record of social relations in the Southern Mines, one can easily tell tales that suggest how dominant cultural memory has refracted history, casting a halo on the most basic inequities, the most blatant practices of power. In “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” for example, a mixed-blood baby’s death brings the possibility of an alternative social world—even a moral universe—to an end. In the Southern Mines, actual infants perished, some of them the offspring of intimate interethnic and interracial ties. But such deaths suggest different stories with different morals: stories of power as well as sentiment, stories of women as well as men, stories that start not only north but also south of the equator, stories of complex human beings rather than rough-hewn heroes with hearts of gold.

  One last story, then—this one drawn from an inquest into the death of an unidentified infant, whose body was found in a mining shaft on Murphys Flat in Calaveras County in 1858. The entire record of
this human drama—in which a woman and man had sex and conceived, the woman carried the fetus to term and gave birth, and then someone, perhaps the woman herself, smothered the baby and threw the body down a mining shaft—consists of just three pieces of paper. The first is in the handwriting of a coroner. “Information having come to me . . . that the Body of [a] dead Infant had been found,” he writes, “I proceeded to the place where the Body lay.” The next is written by a doctor. He states that the fetus was carried to term and then smothered after birth. He notes that the deceased is female, and says that she looks like “a white child and from white parents,” although she “may be from a white father and [a] Chilano woman.” Finally, a jury summoned by the coroner renders its verdict: the deceased is female; she was born living; and she was smothered “by some person or persons unknown.”38 No strong men clinging to frail babes here; this child was not The Luck of Murphys Flat.

  Who was she? We cannot know for sure. But we can cast a wide net using the larger record of social relations in the Southern Mines to come up with a scenario that makes good historical sense. We know, for example, that the area jurors called Murphys Flat was a rich placer mining site as early as 1848. Miners used water from Angels Creek to wash gold-bearing dirt, looking for “color” in every pan, rocker, and sluice box. By 1858, when the body was found, the creek had proven insufficient, and a water company had built flumes and dug ditches to provide water to miners from the Stanislaus River.39 By then, Murphys was one of the most famous spots in the Southern Mines. The unfortunate infant was born in the vicinity of this town. According to the doctor who examined her, she appeared to be the offspring of two white parents or of a white father and a Chilean mother. Like The Luck of Roaring Camp, the baby from Murphys Flat was light-skinned, but the doctor thought she might not be “white.” His guess that it was the mother who may have been Chilean was no doubt based on social rather than somatic observations. First, Chileans had lived in and around Murphys since the Gold Rush began, and not all had left, even after the Chilean War and the imposition of the 1850 foreign miners’ tax. Second, the early history of the Southern Mines, when Anglo men socialized freely with non-Anglo women, had established a pattern of interethnic encounters that continued past the boom years. So it was not difficult for the doctor to imagine that an Anglo man and a Chilean woman had kept company.