Roaring Camp

by Johnson, Susan Lee

  114. Quoted in J. B. Frémont, Letters, 190, 246; and Herr, 319, 338.

  115. J. B. Frémont, Letters, 208–9.

  116. San Joaquin Republican, July 18, 1858.

  117. See, e.g., ibid., July 30, Aug. 13, Oct. 29, 1858. “The Fremont Outrage” described how Frémont men violently evicted a young fellow from a house he was “fitting . . . up to be used as a store.” See ibid., Dec. 1, 7, 1858.

  118. J. B. Frémont, Letters, 207.

  119. As early as the 1860s, hardrock miners on Nevada’s Comstock Lode kept in union halls “complete sets of prospecting gear for loan” to union men. See Lingenfelter, 53. And as late as the 1920s in Butte, Montana, “underground miners still roamed the nearby mountains in the summer, prospecting and staking claims in search of gold.” See Mary Murphy, Mining Cultures: Men, Women, and Leisure in Butte, 1914–41 (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1997), 19.

  Chapter 6: The Last Fandango

  1. John Robertson to Wade Johnston, Nov. 5, 1901, Effie Johnston Collection in Brame Papers, Holt-Atherton Center for Western Studies, Univ. of the Pacific, Stockton, Calif. (hereafter cited as Holt-Atherton Center). Effie Enfield Johnston, daughter of Wade Johnston, wrote down many of the stories her father told about his early years in Calaveras County, some of which have been reproduced in a series called “Wade Johnston Talks to His Daughter,” in Las Calaveras: Quarterly Bulletin of the Calaveras County Historical Society 17, no. 3 (April 1969); 18, no. 1 (Oct. 1969); 18, no. 3 (April 1970); 19, no. 1 (Oct. 1970); 19, no. 4 (July 1971); 20, no. 2 (Jan. 1972); 21, no. 1 (Oct. 1972).

  2. Robertson’s use of the term “civilized” had a particular meaning at the turn of the century, when, as Gail Bederman has shown, middle-class white people were reformulating ideas about manhood to incorporate a new emphasis on virility and racial superiority that came together in a discourse of “civilization.” See Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1995). To date, historians (including myself) have not sufficiently analyzed the extent to which the conquest of the North American West contributed to this discourse. I began to suggest this in “‘A Memory Sweet to Soldiers’: The Significance of Gender in the History of the ‘American West,’” Western Historical Quarterly 24, no. 4 (Nov. 1993): 495–517, reprinted in A New Significance: Re-Envisioning the American West, ed. Clyde Milner II (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996), 255–78.

  3. For a stunning counterexample about a different time and place—a model of regional history in which conflict is seen as central—see Katherine G. Morrissey, Mental Territories: Mapping the Inland Empire (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1997).

  4. San Joaquin Republican (Stockton), Sept. 25, 1852; The Golden Era (San Francisco), Sept. 17, 1854. See discussion of these two divergent accounts of change in chap. 5, “Dreams That Died.”

  5. I am grateful to Dorothy Fujita Rony (Asian American Studies, Univ. of California, Irvine) for sharing her early work on this topic. The quotation comes from her unpublished paper “The 1854 Chinese War of Weaverville, California,” Yale Univ., 1990, which focuses on a battle of this sort that took place in the Shasta-Trinity diggings of northwestern California.

  6. See Anthony Shay, “Fandangos and Bailes: Dancing and Dance Events in Early California,” Southern California Quarterly 64, no. 2 (Summer 1982): 99–113. A “fandango” was distinguished from the dance event among elite Spanish Mexicans called a “baile.” For men as patrons of early Gold Rush fandangos, see chap. 3, “Bulls, Bears, and Dancing Boys.”

  7. San Joaquin Republican, July 30, 1851 (from the Sonora Herald).

  8. Ibid.

  9. See, e.g., San Joaquin Republican, Aug. 9, Oct. 25, 1853, March 11, April 11, Nov. 22, Dec. 13, 1854, May 3, July 31, Nov. 20, 1855, Aug. 24, 1856.

  10. Ibid., July 28, 1852 (from the Sonora Herald). Copies of most issues of the Sonora Herald are no longer extant—hence my reliance on articles reprinted in Stockton papers.

  11. On these events, see chap. 4, “Mining Gold and Making War.”

  12. See U.S. Bureau of the Census, Seventh Census of the United States: 1850 (Washington, D.C., 1853), and Population of the United States in 1860; Compiled from . . . the Eighth Census (Washington, D.C., 1864) (hereafter cited as 1860 Census).

  13. On class making, see, e.g., Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981); and cf. Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1987).

  14. For background on Mary Harrison Newell, see chap. 1, “On the Eve of Emigration.”

  15. For the TCWC’s role in class formation in the Southern Mines, see chap. 5, “Dreams That Died.”

  16. William Newell to Mary Newell, April 24, 1853, PW 523; July 28, 1853, PW 524; and “Articles of Copartnership between B. M. Brainard and W. H. Newell,” April 25, 1853, PW 76, Joseph Pownall Papers, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif. (hereafter cited as Huntington Library).

  17. See, e.g., Journal entries, Oct. 20, 24, Dec. 17, 1853, Jan. 20, July 2, Aug. 26, Sept. 28, Dec. 10, 1854, Clementine H. Brainard Journal, Bancroft Library, Univ. of California, Berkeley (hereafter cited as Bancroft Library).

  18. For details on Pownall’s role in the miners’ strike against the TCWC, see chap. 5, “Dreams That Died.”

  19. Mary Newell to Benjamin and Lucy Harrison, Dec. 18, 1855, PW 793; Mary Newell to Lucy Harrison, April 17, 1856, PW 769; Benjamin Harrison to Lucy Harrison, April 18, 1856, PW 356; “Receipt from Hotel International, San Francisco,” March 17, 1857 (a receipt for Mary and Joseph Pownall’s honeymoon suite, for which Joseph paid $32 for a stay of four days), PW 146, Pownall Papers, Huntington Library. For Pownall’s status in the TCWC, see Minutes of Board Meetings, May 1856–Nov. 1859, Tuolumne County Water Company Correspondence and Papers, 1853–1905, vol. 2, Bancroft Library. For Pownall’s concerns about his marital status, see Pownall Journal and Letterbook, PW 553, passim, Pownall Papers; for the quotation, see the letter therein labeled Joseph Pownall to “dear Friend” [1854].

  20. For an overview of antebellum reform, see Ronald G. Walters, American Reformers, 1815–1860 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978). For an excellent account of the urban worlds of leisure that so incensed reformers in the East, see Timothy J. Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790–1920 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992). A helpful overview of reform efforts that impinged on sexual practices appears in John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, 2d ed. (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1997), esp. 139–45.

  21. See Lewis Perry, Childhood, Marriage, and Reform: Henry Clarke Wright, 1791–1870 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980), esp. 172–82; and Anna Lee Marston, ed., Records of a California Family: Journals and Letters of Lewis C. Gunn and Elizabeth Le Breton Gunn (San Diego: n.p., 1928), esp. 3–15.

  22. Marston, ed., 156–58, 170.

  23. See, e.g., Brainard’s support for temperance and Sabbatarianism expressed in Journal entries, Dec. 17, 18, 1853, July 4, Oct. 4, 1854.

  24. For these references to Lorena Hays, see chap. 5, “Dreams That Died.”

  25. Lorena L. Hays, To the Land of Gold and Wickedness: The 1848–59 Diary of Lorena L. Hays, ed. Jeanne Hamilton Watson (St. Louis: Patrice Press, 1988), 1–14, 198–229.

  26. Ibid., esp. 231–33, 235, 237–49, 252–57, 263–65, quotations on 238, 252, 255; The Golden Era (San Francisco), Sept. 17, 1854.

  27. Hays, esp. 249, 251, 253, 259–61, quotation on 261. On the murders and the subsequent siege of Spanish-speaking communities in Amador County, see Larry Cenotto, Logan’s Alley: Amador County Yesterdays in Picture and Prose, 2 vols. (Jackson, Calif.: Cenotto Publications, 1988), 1:159–73.

  28. For his part, James accused Chloe of sleeping with a man named John Burridge and of leaving home only �
�for the purpose of having adulterous intercourse” with Burridge. See James B. Cooper v. Chloe C. Cooper (1857–58), District Court, Amador County, Jackson, Calif. (hereafter cited as Amador County District Court Records).

  29. Mary Jane Anderson v. James W. Anderson (1857), Amador County District Court Records.

  30. Mary Ann Hayes v. Nicholas Hayes (1860), District Court, Tuolumne County, Sonora, Calif. (hereafter cited as Tuolumne County District Court Records).

  31. According to the 1860 Census, U.S. citizens constituted 45.55 percent of the population of the four counties that made up the Southern Mines in 1860: Amador, Calaveras, Tuolumne, and Mariposa. White U.S. citizens constituted 44.75 percent of the enumerated population (blacks, including those designated as “mulattos,” made up 1.8 percent of the U.S. population and .9 percent of the total population).

  32. Cf. Ralph Mann, After the Gold Rush: Society in Grass Valley and Nevada City, California, 1849–1870 (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1982), 56–59, who describes similar campaigns in the two major towns of the Northern Mines. Some references to such activities in the Southern Mines are quite brief. Writing to his wife from Mokelumne Hill in 1853, for example, the dentist John Baker noted, “There has been an endeavor in the part of some citizens to improve the state of society in this place recently. Two of the worst house in town were indicted at our court last week as nuiscences and one was fined $250, the other case was continued to the next term.” John Baker to Julia Ann Baker, Oct. 21, 1853, John W. H. Baker Correspondence, Holt-Atherton Center.

  33. Journal entry, Brainard Journal, Dec. 17, 1853.

  34. Hays, 258–59; cf. Journal entry, Brainard Journal, Dec. 18, 1853: “I do hope that merchants will decide soon to close their stores on the Sabbath and then we may hope for a reformation in Columbia.”

  35. San Joaquin Republican, Feb. 6, 1855, June 25, 1856 (the latter is reprinted from the Weekly Columbian); Volcano Weekly Ledger, Jan. 26, 1856.

  36. See Volcano Weekly Ledger, June 28, Dec. 13, 1856, Feb. 28, July 18, 1857; San Joaquin Republican, Oct. 16, 1857.

  37. Journal entries, March 21–24, 1854, Brainard Journal; [Phoebe] Quimby v. Z. M. Quimby (1852), Tuolumne County District Court Records. That this incident evoked increasing class tensions in Columbia is suggested by the fact that Thomas Cazneau, six months after this party, became a founding officer of the Columbia and Stanislaus River Water Company, the company that challenged the Tuolumne County Water Company by building the famed “Miners’ Ditch.” See chap. 5, “Dreams That Died.” He also managed the first theater in Columbia, which no doubt became a site of moral ambiguity—if not outright moral peril—to the emerging white middle class. See Hero Eugene Rensch, “Columbia, a Gold Camp of Old Tuolumne: Her Rise and Decline, Together with Some Mention of Her Social Life and Cultural Strivings” (Berkeley, 1936, for State of California, Department of Natural Resources, Division of Parks, under auspices of Works Progress Administration), 73; Edna Bryan Buckbee, The Saga of Old Tuolumne (New York: Press of the Pioneers, 1935), 96, 267.

  38. See Robert L. Griswold, Family and Divorce in California, 1850–1890: Victorian Illusions and Everyday Realities (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1982), esp. 76.

  39. Mary Ann Chick v. Alfred Chick (1859), District Court, Calaveras County, San Andreas, Calif. (hereafter cited as Calaveras County District Court Records); Emily Davis v. O. S. Davis (1860), Tuolumne County District Court Records.

  40. Sarah E. Philbrick v. William H. Philbrick (1860), Amador County District Court Records.

  41. Joseph L. Hall v. Celia E. Hall (1860), Tuolumne County District Court Records.

  42. For background, see chap. 3, “Bulls, Bears, and Dancing Boys,” and chap. 4, “Mining Gold and Making War.”

  43. The People v. French Mary (1857), Court of Sessions, Tuolumne County, Sonora, Calif. (hereafter cited as Tuolumne County Court of Sessions Records). Cf. The People v. John Doe and Richard Roe (1856), Tuolumne County Court of Sessions Records.

  44. The saloons of Clement and Follet are mentioned in Alfred Washburn v. Francis Williams (1855) and Alfred Washburn v. Sam Lord (1856), District Court, Mariposa County, Mariposa, Calif. (hereafter cited as Mariposa County District Court Records). Clement’s saloon is also mentioned in the San Joaquin Republican, Sept. 13, 1856 (reprinted from the Mariposa Democrat).

  45. S. R. Mills and James Vantine v. Madame Emilie Henry (1856), Mariposa County District Court Records.

  46. The 1852 state census lists a forty-year-old Chilean woman named Elibe Ortiz in Calaveras County, and this may be the Isabel Ortis (who also went by the names Elisa and Elizabeth) of the 1858 court records cited below. But, as we shall see, Ortis linked her property ownership in Amador County to the contested land grant of Californio Andrés Pico, suggesting familiarity with the disposition of Mexican land claims in California. Such familiarity might have been more likely for an ethnic Mexican than for a Chilean. Chilean names in the 1850 and 1860 federal census as well as the 1852 state census are indexed in Carlos U. López, Chilenos in California: A Study of the 1850, 1852 and 1860 Census (San Francisco: R and E Research Associates, 1973), see esp. 60.

  47. Inquest, Francisco [Arayo] (1858), Inquest Records, Calaveras County, Calaveras County Museum and Archives, San Andreas, Calif.

  48. Natividad Shermenhoof v. John Shermenhoof (1856) and Natividad Shermenhoof v. John Shermenhoof, W. W. Cope, and James F. Hubbard (1858), Amador County District Court Records. Another copy of the divorce record can be found in Amador County Legal Records, box 1370, folder 6, California State Library, Sacramento (hereafter cited as Amador County Legal Records). Natividad accused John of violence and of trying to compel her to “open a house of prostitution.” For his part, John accused Natividad of squandering his earnings in “riotous and dissipated living.” He claimed she left him only to place herself “in a better condition to carry on an uninterrupted illicit intercourse with one Frederick Schober.” Schober was a German butcher in Jackson, where a street still bears his name. See Cenotto, 2:223.

  49. A. C. Brown v. Isabel Ortis and John McKay (1858), Amador County District Court Records; John McKay v. His Creditors (1858), County Court, Amador County, Jackson, Calif. Documents for both cases can also be found in Amador County Legal Records, boxes 1368 and 1369.

  50. On Andrés Pico, see Leonard Pitt, The Decline of the Californios: A Social History of Spanish-Speaking Californians, 1846–1890 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1966), esp. 34–35, 139–40, 145.

  51. The literature on California land claims is vast. See, e.g., Pitt; and Albert Camarillo, Chicanos in a Changing Society: From Mexican Pueblos to American Barrios in Santa Barbara and Southern California, 1848–1930 (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1979). For another perspective, see Paul W. Gates, Land Law in California: Essays on Land Policies (Ames: Iowa State Univ. Press, 1991). On the meanings that Californios attached to dispossession, see Rosaura Sánchez, Telling Identities: The Californio testimonios (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1995).

  52. See, e.g., Volcano Weekly Ledger, June 7, 1856, in which an editor warns that if Pico continues to press his claim, he will face “the hard fisted yeomanry of the mountains,” whose insurgence will resemble the “Anti-Rent . . . troubles in New York.” Lorena Hays Bowmer’s husband, John—a merchant, not a yeoman—may have participated in the settlers’ league that organized in opposition to the Arroyo Seco grant. See Hays, 265, 417, n. 86. On the Mariposa Estate, see chap. 4, “Mining Gold and Making War.”

  53. I use “juridical” in both ordinary and academic senses of the word. In the first and most obvious sense, Ortis entered into the legal controversies over land tenure then underway in California. But the term “juridical” also has been used by Michel Foucault and scholars influenced by his work to refer to the ways in which systems of power (among them, legal systems) not only regulate or even prohibit certain kinds of people but actually produce and reproduce those kinds of people through the very practices that are assumed to constitute reg
ulation and prohibition. In this sense, then, Ortis was not simply a Mexican or Chilean woman who managed fandangos and who thereby ran afoul of Anglo American law. She was a person engaged in an economic activity who became, in part through the imposition of the law, a representative of a cultural category. On juridical power, see, e.g., Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (1975; New York: Vintage Books, 1979); Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).

  54. A. C. Brown v. Isabel Ortis and John McKay (1858), John McKay v. His Creditors (1858), and see Amador County Legal Records, box 1368, folders 12 and 13, and box 1369, folder 8. The quoted material is from documents in this latter folder.

  55. Cf. Deena J. González, “La Tules of Image and Reality: Euro-American Attitudes and Legend Formation on a Spanish-Mexican Frontier,” in Building with Our Hands: New Directions in Chicana Studies, ed. Adela de la Torre and Beatríz M. Pesquera (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1993), 75–90.

  56. This information about Armsted and Philippa Brown is drawn from the work of the Amador County historian Larry Cenotto (2:182–85). As for Philippa, she was actively engaged in efforts to supplant polyglot sites of heterosocial leisure with “respectable” gatherings. In early 1858, for example, she was among a group of women who planned a “Calico Party,” the proceeds of which were to go toward the building of a schoolhouse in Jackson. After the ball, the managers met at Philippa’s home and decided how the funds would be appropriated. The women appointed Armsted Brown to “receive the funds and pay out the same” for the schoolhouse. See Amador Weekly Ledger, Jan. 2, 16, 1858.