Roaring Camp
Page 10
The vast majority of Chinese emigrants to California were—like Fou Sin, Chou Yee, and Coon You—young men sent at least initially by families to augment household incomes in the Pearl River Delta. But a small minority were women. A handful of these were merchants’ wives or else servants, but many more were young women who contributed to family economies by working as prostitutes abroad. Their financial contributions generally took two forms: First, procurers paid parents a price for each daughter sold, and, second, remaining family members gained when there was one fewer mouth to feed. Most of these women ended up in San Francisco—recall that Fou Sin got into one of his fights at a Chinese brothel—or the supply centers of Sacramento and Stockton. But by 1860, census takers found over four hundred Chinese women in the Southern Mines.79 As in the case of French prostitutes who went to California, Chinese women who sold sex for cash left behind no first-person accounts that document their emigration experiences. But the work they did, the lives they lived, and the deaths they died would prove crucial to the evolution of social relations in the Southern Mines.
Finally, then, we return to the Sierra Nevada foothills, where Rosa Felíz de Murrieta, Vicente Pérez Rosales, Stephen Spencer Hill, Jason Chamberlain, Anne Lyons, and Fou Sin all were headed—and where native peoples braced themselves for change. It was a French-speaking man who left behind one of the richest accounts of Indian strategies for coping with rush of immigrants into Miwok gathering and hunting grounds. This Belgian-born gold seeker, Jean-Nicolas Perlot, had lived through the events of 1848 in Paris and had joined one of the California-bound companies there, arriving in the Southern Mines in 1851. Three years later, in the fall, when the salmon were running in the Merced River, Perlot met up with a young Miwok leader. Perlot thought that this man’s name was Scipiano and that he was a chief of the Yosemite band. Most likely this was the leader whom other immigrants called Cypriano, a leader of the Awal Miwoks. This Scipiano complained to Perlot about the changes the Gold Rush had wrought in the lives of his people. Scipiano had spent some time in a Spanish Mexican mission, and so he spoke to Perlot in both his native dialect and the Spanish language. As for Perlot, he had been learning Scipiano’s Miwok dialect and could understand some Spanish as well (he carried a Spanish dictionary with him in the mines), though he was a native speaker of French. By the time Perlot sat down to write his reminiscences years later, he recorded Scipiano’s complaints in French, with a few Miwok and Spanish words retained along with their French translations and a few potentially puzzling phrases explained parenthetically.80
One can only hope that something of what Scipiano was trying to say to Perlot in 1854 has survived these linguistic, cultural, and temporal leaps. According to Perlot, Scipiano explained that his people had to be allowed to come down from the mountains “to gather the acorns on their flats, where Nangoua (God) calls them, since he plants their food there.” The Miwok man, Scipiano said, “is not a hin-hin-mèti (bear) of the mountains, he is born in the plains and flats which you now take from him.” Before the Gold Rush, men like Scipiano never went to the mountains “except during the days of sun (summer) to refresh himself.” Now he was forced to take refuge there. Whether Scipiano indicated that he was speaking exclusively of native men or whether some of the gendered references entered in translation is unclear. But as Scipiano went on, he spoke specifically of native women: “Our women that Nangoua gave us so that we could remain without end (so that our race could perpetuate itself) have more trouble remaking us (giving us children).” This was because of the move into the mountains: “they have to give birth in the cold (the snow), and the piquini (the child) perishes.” Scipiano’s demand, then, was this: “Look for l’olo (gold) where you want, let the Ochà (Indian woman) seek her seeds where they are and Oualai Nang-à Blanco (and the Indian will be the friend of the White).”81
Jean-Nicolas Perlot, a Belgian-born emigrant from France. Perlot mined alongside Miwok Indians and learned something of their beliefs and cultural practices.
Courtesy of the Bancroft Library.
If Scipiano truly envisioned a way for his band to coexist with non-Indians in the Sierra Nevada foothills, perhaps it was because it had been only six years since Miwoks had held sway over much of the drainage of the San Joaquin River. To be sure, newcomers had already impinged upon the autonomy of these native peoples by 1848, and Miwoks had engineered uneasy strategies of interdependence with the interlopers, just as they had interacted with neighboring Indians in the past—Yokuts to the south, Nisenans to the north, and Monos and Paiutes on the “other side of the sky” (that is, east across the Sierra Nevada).82 But the Sierra Miwoks, unlike the linguistically related Bay and Plains Miwoks, had not been forced to forfeit control over their communities before the Gold Rush. By contrast, Bay Miwoks, who lived inland from the edge of the San Francisco Bay area east to the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta, were among the native peoples of California’s interior whom Franciscan missionaries sought as converts when disease and hard labor began to take its toll on coastal Indians; Bay Miwoks first appear in Mission San Francisco records in 1794. Likewise, Plains Miwoks, whose territory covered the valley lands of the lower Sacramento and the area where the Cosumnes and Mokelumne rivers empty into the San Joaquin, soon faced pressure from the Franciscan fathers; Mission San José began to record Plains Miwok baptisms in 1811. Following on the heels of missionization, malaria inadvertently introduced in the Central Valley by British Hudson’s Bay Company trappers in 1833 killed perhaps twenty thousand people, wiping out human habitation in parts of the valley, once the most densely populated area of native California.83
Both microbes and missionaries had a difficult time following the tributaries of the San Joaquin River above the valley into the Sierra Nevada foothills where Scipiano grew up. Indeed, some lowland Miwoks took refuge up-country when life in the valley—or in the missions—became untenable. Conversely, some Sierra Miwoks must have found their way down to the coastal settlements, because Scipiano’s brother Juan told Perlot that their family had spent at least a few months at a mission when the boys were very young. Scipiano himself had stayed longer, Juan explained, and so of the two brothers, Scipiano spoke the better Spanish. Scipiano’s father, José, was a chief, and, as his eldest son, Scipiano stood to inherit his father’s position; indeed, Juan told Perlot that Nangoua (Perlot’s rendition of a Miwok word for god), was so eager to produce an heir to the chief that Scipiano “had come into the world after seven moons.” Perhaps Scipiano’s parents, too, had high hopes for their son and thought a short stay at a mission where he could learn Spanish would serve the future leader well in a world where newcomers controlled the lands to the west. At any rate, the brief contact Scipiano’s family had with the Franciscans—so unlike the earlier missionization of Bay and Plains Miwoks—suggests that relations between Sierra Miwoks and Spanish Mexicans were not relations of dependence and domination before the Gold Rush.84
Actually, by the 1830s the distinctions scholars have drawn between Plains and Sierra Miwoks began to break down, as lowcountry bands were disrupted by solicitous missions and infectious disease. Those who survived both incursions headed up into the foothills and reconstituted their communities or joined up-country bands. By the time of the Gold Rush, then, the native peoples of the foothills were a mixed lot of valley Indians, mission Indians, and Sierra Miwoks.85 As newcomers joined up-country peoples, they brought with them a new subsistence strategy developed in the years since Spanish Mexican settlement began on the California coast in the late eighteenth century: horse raiding. Miwoks in the Central Valley had been stealing horses from padres and pobladores for decades, but the raids increased once the missionaries began to come into the interior in search of new converts. In 1833, the year of the malaria outbreak and the year Mexico secularized California missions, raiding briefly declined as valley residents succumbed to illness or fled to the hills. But within a year or two Miwoks started stealing horses again, now from the Californio rancheros, who were quic
kly gaining control of mission lands and labor. Indians used the horses to hunt elk and antelope, and they also grew fond of horsemeat as a supplement to their customary diet. Around the same time, however, a new use for Mexican horses emerged, as American fur trappers ranged into California and found there not only the beaver they sought but also Indians adept at rounding up livestock and willing to trade with these new intruders from the east. The mountain men, in turn, took the horses to the annual fur trade rendezvous, that riotous, multilingual gathering of trappers, company men, and Indians which disturbed the peace of some Rocky Mountain valley every summer from 1825 to 1840. In trading horses with American trappers coming west over the Sierra Nevada, Miwok men—for horse raiding had been assimilated to notions of male responsibility in native divisions of labor—were drawn into a global arena of market relations.86
Closer to the Miwoks’ home, immigrants were moving into California’s Central Valley, creating other tentative links between native and non-native economies and further blurring the boundaries between the two. These immigrants were taking advantage of the exodus of native peoples and the largesse of California officials, who, since the Mexican declaration of independence in 1821, had been trying to guard the fragile string of Spanish Mexican settlements along the Pacific from Indians to the east and from Russian, American, and British interests on the coast. The first non-Mexican to try ranching in the interior was the Massachusetts-born “Dr.” John Marsh, who had a habit of passing off his Harvard bachelor’s diploma as a medical degree. With the money he earned treating patients, he was able in 1838 to purchase a rancho in the San Joaquin Valley, where he lived and prospered until disgruntled Mexican workers killed him in 1856. A year after Marsh went into business on the San Joaquin, John Sutter, a German-Swiss immigrant who liked to tell people he was a French captain, approached California Governor Juan Bautista Alvarado for permission to start a colony on the Sacramento River. Alvarado agreed, eventually granting Sutter nearly fifty thousand acres and full civil authority in the valley. The governor hoped that Sutter’s settlement would end Indian horse raiding, frustrate the designs of American and other fur trappers, and check the ambitions of Alvarado’s uncle, Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, who was gaining power as a military commander to the north at Sonoma.87
Sutter’s New Helvetia colony indeed became a focal point of the interior in the 1840s, though it hardly had the effect Alvarado intended. Sutter welcomed Anglo Americans who had started to trickle into California via the Overland Trail, and his fort, at present-day Sacramento, began to serve as a magnet for emigrants. Marsh, too, encouraged Americans to make the journey by posting letters to eastern friends and newspapers extolling the virtues of his new homeland: the rich soils; the herds of wild horses, elk, and antelope; the local Indians who became “willing serfs” for white farmers. But it was Sutter, not Marsh, who knew the most about native labor, for in the decade during which he ruled the lower Sacramento Valley, Sutter became California’s premier employer of Indians. In this he adopted Spanish Mexican practices of using native workers, but forsook the incorporative style of conquest that had characterized Mexico’s northern frontier; Sutter had no interest in what Franciscans thought of as Indian souls.88
Native peoples, for their part, responded to Sutter’s presence in a variety of ways. When he first headed up the Sacramento to set up camp, Gualacomne Miwok men met Sutter at the delta and thoughtfully guided him north, out of Miwok country and into the gathering and hunting grounds of Nisenans. Indeed, Nisenans may have constituted a large proportion of Sutter’s Indian workforce. They had been hard hit by malaria and had not adopted the extensive horse raiding practices that kept Miwoks strong to the south. Many Nisenans and perhaps a smaller number of northern Miwoks saw employment at New Helvetia as a way to supplement their subsistence and to gain protection in what must have seemed an increasingly dangerous local world. Such Indians constituted Sutter’s entire labor force, save a handful of Hawaiians and a few overseers. They harvested wheat, washed and sewed clothes, distilled liquor, made hats and blankets, tanned leather, trapped beaver, killed deer, caught salmon, sailed goods up and down the Sacramento, constructed the buildings of New Helvetia, and served in Sutter’s militia. They helped build, but never quite finished, a sawmill in Nisenan country that looms large in collective memory of the Gold Rush; it was in the tailrace of Sutter’s mill that the overseer James Marshall discovered gold in January of 1848.89
Indians did not adjust smoothly to the work discipline Sutter tried to impose. Wheat was the colony’s main crop, and consequently the wheat harvest, which occurred in the summer and fall, required by far the largest number of native laborers. But it coincided with key moments in the seasonal subsistence patterns of Nisenans and Miwoks alike—when seeds ripened, when acorns dropped from the oak trees, when salmon swam up the tributaries of the Sacramento and San Joaquin. This native harvesttime provided much of the food Indians stored for winter months, when neither the Sierra foothills nor John Sutter could give much nourishment. So Indians employed at New Helvetia felt obliged to come and go at will during the very months when the colony needed them most. Sutter did what he could to get and keep workers, offering trade goods and extending credit whenever possible but also resorting to capturing Nisenan men and holding them under armed guard.90
Still other Indians, among them many Miwok bands that lived farther south, kept out of Sutter’s reach altogether and continued with their customary round of activities, which had long since included stealing horses. In fact, Sutter’s presence on the Sacramento gave some Miwoks a new target for their raids, which in turn inaugurated new patterns of warfare in the foothills, as Sutter sent his Indian militiamen out after the resourceful thieves. But even with all of these changes at work among the Miwoks, the rhythms of everyday life in the up-country drainage of the San Joaquin were largely familiar ones. Perhaps six or seven thousand Indians lived along the rivers of what came to be the Southern Mines—from north to south, the Cosumnes, Mokelumne, Calaveras, Stanislaus, Tuolumne, and Merced. They organized themselves into groups of perhaps one to three hundred people (such as the Awal Miwoks), who used a certain territory for gathering and hunting and honored a common leader (such as Scipiano’s father, José). If a chief did not have a son, the office might pass to his daughter, and so female leaders, while rare, were not unknown. Before the Gold Rush, the Awals probably counted as their own a few semipermanent settlements, which through Spanish contact came to be known as rancherías, and a number of seasonal campsites. Rancherías were often home to people of a particular lineage, which consisted of men related by blood, women who married into the kin group, and the children women bore.91
Just as native labor practices proved important in Sutter’s venture, so too would they influence Indian-immigrant relations during the Gold Rush. Miwok practices depended on the natural abundance of the foothills, an abundance immigrant miners often were hard-pressed to recognize. Starting in the spring, for example, Miwok women headed out from the ranchería to begin their annual round of gathering wild foods. First came the new greens from plants like columbine, milkweed, larkspur, and “miner’s lettuce.” Then, in May and throughout the hot, dry months of summer, women gathered a variety of seeds from balsam root, evening primrose, summer’s darling, farewell-to-spring, and countless other plants. In August, Miwoks set fire to the land to encourage the growth of seed-bearing annuals and to ensure forage for deer as well. Then women turned their attention to collecting digger pine nuts, until the foothill oaks began to yield their crop later in the fall. Acorns were far and away the most important staple in Miwok diets. Thus the quintessential image of autumn in California—dark green foliage of oak trees against parched golden hills—held for Miwok women and their menfolk a promise of winter comfort.92
Miwok men busied themselves with hunting, fishing, horse raiding, and, occasionally, warring—though most non-Indian observers insisted that the men were never as busy as the women.93 Still, hunting and particul
arly stealing horses could take Indian men farther away from rancherías and sometimes for longer stretches of time. Men of the foothills hunted deer most of all, using communal methods to surround the animals or more solitary tactics whereby individuals wearing deer’s head disguises stalked their prey. Men also fished for trout and salmon, using nets and spears of their own design (they made their own bows and arrows, too, just as women constructed baskets for gathering). And it was men who engaged the newcomers from the other side of the sky—no longer just Monos and Paiutes but now American trappers who brought trade goods to exchange for stolen horses. In all of this, Miwok men knew themselves to hold more power than their womenfolk, even as they acknowledged that men would soon perish if women stopped “remaking” them and gathering acorns below where Nangoua planted oak trees.94
Still, if the reminiscences of the Belgian miner Jean-Nicolas Perlot are even a remotely reliable guide to Indian ways, it seems likely that Miwoks saw their style of gender relations not so much as natural but as contingent. Just as important, Perlot’s recollections hint at Miwoks’ ability to imagine the most fundamental kinds of changes—an ability that would serve them well during the Gold Rush. One exchange between Perlot and Juan, brother of Scipiano and son of José, helps illustrate this. Juan had been trying to explain to Perlot why Miwoks tried to conceive their children so that they would be born between March and June: “It is . . . because the Spirit wishes it, and proof that he wishes it is that Ouatou [the sun] is climbing then.” Perlot was confused. Was the sun not climbing in January and February as well, after the winter solstice? Juan was patient: “at that time it is Commè [the moon] who rules, she is superior to Ouatou, but she makes nothing grow.” Perlot could not understand the relationship among Ouatou, the sun; Commè, the moon; and Nangoua, whom he took to be the Miwok god. So Juan went back to the beginning, as he might with a child. Nanguoa, whom Juan further characterized in both his own dialect and Spanish as “god thought of motion,” had created two suns and entrusted them with the task of “making and directing everything that moved.” One sun made a woman, while the other made a man, and the two suns argued with each another about the relative value of their creations. The sun who had made the man struck the sun who had made the woman, and the latter sun lost thousands and thousands of pieces of light that spread throughout the sky. That diminished sun is now the moon, and the stars are her missing pieces that she tries to gather to herself for fifteen days out of every month. But each time she collects her strength, Ouatou once again defeats her, shattering her reconstituted self sometimes with such force that one can actually see stars hurtling across the sky.95