Roaring Camp
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Elsewhere and at other times, immigrant observers saw different strategies. As Gerstäcker put it in 1853, “the gold discovery has altered [Indians’] mode of life materially.” On the one hand, he thought, “they have learned to want more necessaries,” while on the other “the means of subsistence diminishes.” More and more, Miwoks supplemented customary ways of getting food with gold mining in order to buy nourishment. Perlot recalled that in 1853 he regularly saw Indians traveling to Coulterville, in Mariposa County, and Garrote, in Tuolumne County, to purchase flour with gold they had dug.91 At Belt’s Ferry on the Merced River, where Sam Ward lived, the situation was different; there native people probably spent more time mining than they did gathering and hunting. Following an Indian-immigrant conflict in early 1851 known as the Mariposa War, the merchant George Belt received a federal license to trade with local Miwoks (and one Yokuts band) as well as a contract to furnish them with flour and beef in order to keep the peace. Ward watched over Belt’s Ferry between 1851 and 1853 and got to know native people who felt their best chance for survival lay in setting up camp near an Indian trader. Mining along the Merced kept the Indians supplied with gold, which they used to trade at the store. Still, problems multiplied in the government contract for provisions, and even goods for purchase failed to appear on the trader’s shelves. So Miwok women frequently fanned out in search of seeds and nuts, and Miwok men watched for salmon runs or headed down to the San Joaquin Valley to hunt for wild horses.92
The more things stayed the same, the more they changed. Miwok men watched for salmon, but found the fish had been waylaid by dams built downstream. Miwok women gathered, but just as their menfolk had added horse raiding to hunting duties decades before, so might women now pan for gold as often as they collected acorns. White men looked for women to wash their clothes, but instead of seemingly willing wives or mothers, they found a mart for laundry dominated by Chinese men and Mexican women. White women, few in number, set up housekeeping in California, and learned—to their delight or their dismay—that there were plenty of men for hire to help lighten the burdens of everyday life. African Americans who came to the mines enslaved worked as hard as ever making their masters and mistresses comfortable, but found, too, that the Gold Rush opened up new possibilities for freedom. Mexican women sold tortillas and frijoles on the street, just as they had in Sonoran towns and cities, but discovered that in California the market for their products seemed as if it could not be glutted. And thousands of Chilean, French, and Mexican men engaged in one more strategy to help themselves and their families out of precarious situations back home. Some of these men were not lucky enough to escape the diggings with their lives—for this was no utopia for those who were not white and English speaking. If they did, though, they learned that mining the white miners—with their incomparable nostalgia for “home comforts and home joys” and their sense of entitlement to the same—was both safer and more lucrative than washing gold-bearing dirt.
Still, as often as Anglo American men patronized a commercial domestic sphere peopled largely by non-Anglos, they also turned inward to create for themselves something of the comforts and joys of home. Some men reveled in the fellow-feeling—the floods, the gushes, the warm glows of friendship—that grew out of shared domestic tasks and intimate caretaking one for the other. Many more bemoaned the absence of women—for whom household chores increasingly were considered not only a responsibility but a natural vocation—and belittled their own, often manifest abilities to sustain and enhance life.93 Indeed, in the diggings, the process of idealizing the home and woman’s place in it was uncomplicated by the day-to-day tensions of actual family households. Thus, gold or no gold, newly married Moses Little could write confidently from his Calaveras County cabin that there were “riches far richer” awaiting him back east with his “companion in Domestic Happiness.” Benjamin Kendrick was similarly emphatic in his recommendation to would-be gold seekers: “I would not advise a single person that has a comfortable home in New England to leave its comforts and pleasures for any place such as California with all its gold mines.” But A. W. Genung went farthest in giving the gold country’s missing quality—domestic comfort—an explicit gender and, implicitly, a race. Acknowledging its advantageous physiography, fine climate, and economic potential, Genung nonetheless was adamant about California’s chief deficiency: “The country cannot be a great country nor the people a happy people unblessed by woman’s society and woman’s love.”94 The society of Miwok and Mexican women did not figure in Genung’s equation; the woman whose love California lacked was white. For men such as these, the more things changed, the more things stayed the same.
Was this utopia? Was it the isle of the blest? For many, the gold boom created what seemed an unnatural state of affairs—even so, a state of affairs to which they were ineluctably drawn. Benjamin Kendrick might not advise a single person (read “man”) to leave a comfortable eastern home for California, but he and thousands upon thousands of others did just that. And in spite of the tremendous diversity such men found among their neighbors in the diggings, it was striking how the dominant metaphor of domesticity—a metaphor specific to a particular people from a particular place—came to insinuate itself into the lives of all sorts of Gold Rush participants. Consider an episode Enos Christman recorded in his diary in 1852. One January night, two Mexican women happened by a group of Anglo miners who were settling into their blankets at Cherokee Camp, near Sonora. The traveling musicians produced guitars and a tambourine, and the men set aside their bedding, listened to the serenade, and then got up to dance with each other. As the night wore on, the music’s tempo slowed, until finally the women started strumming the chords of “Home, Sweet Home.” They did not intone the lyrics; these women had watched Anglo miners long enough to know that the familiar tune alone would evoke the desired reaction. The men responded apace: “Suddenly a sob was heard, followed by another, and yet another, and tears flowed freely down the cheeks of the gold diggers.”95 The musicians walked away, their tambourine filled with pieces of gold.
Chapter 3
Bulls, Bears, and Dancing Boys
For a good many men who went to California after 1848, the notion of a “social” history of the Gold Rush would have been a contradiction in terms. For them, “society,” like domestic comfort, was one of the very things the diggings lacked. Angus McIsaac said it well on Christmas Day in 1852 when he lamented, “This day I . . . thought of my situation here in this wild mountain hamlet and the very few pleasures it is adapted to afford deprived of social society & of mingling with . . . tender hearted friends.” Other men modified “society” differently—“good society,” “congenial society,” the “sweets of society,” the “pleasures of home and its society,” “quiet home comfort and the society of friends.”1 But however they modified it, they found it missing in the Sierra foothills and themselves the poorer for its absence. What was this “society” that did not exist in California? Why did “the social” as a category of human experience seem empty to some Gold Rush participants as they went about their everyday lives together in the diggings?
In describing California as devoid of society, Anglo American and European men invoked a peculiarly nineteenth-century, middle-class notion of “the social,” one in which the influence of white women and their perceived attributes was axiomatic. “The social” was thought to revolve around familial, relational, and community concerns, around human interaction and connectedness. At the same time, women were thought to constitute a kind of glue that held families, relationships, communities—indeed, society—together. “The social,” in this womanly construction, was an antidote to the manly anomie that increasingly seemed to characterize a changing economic milieu, wherein individual men were encouraged to “make themselves.” It was no wonder, then, that life in the mines provoked male nostalgia not only for the “comforts of home” but for the “sweets of society” as well. Men missed women they recognized as sisters, wives, mothers, sweethe
arts, to be sure. They also missed an intricate mosaic of meaning seemingly embodied in female friends and relatives, a mosaic they felt themselves incapable of piecing together on their own.2
But Anglo American men’s vexation over the lack of society took on a special meaning in the Southern Mines, where the absence of Anglo women was matched by the presence of large numbers of Miwoks, Mexicans, Chileans, French, and, later, Chinese. Of these, only the Miwok population included roughly as many women as men. Among immigrants in the Southern Mines, two years after the gold discovery, men still constituted 97 percent of the population. Of these, only Mexican women accompanied their menfolk to the diggings in noticeable numbers, though handfuls of Chilean and French women and, later, Chinese and Anglo American women lived in the larger camps and towns.3
J. D. Borthwick, the Scottish artist and writer, described the difference between the Northern Mines and the Southern Mines this way:
In the north, one occasionally saw some straggling Frenchmen . . . , here and there a party of Chinamen, and a few Mexicans. . . . The southern mines, however, were full of all sorts of people. There were villages peopled nearly altogether by Mexicans, others by Frenchmen; in some places there were parties of two or three hundred Chilians forming a community of their own. The Chinese camps were very numerous; and besides all such distinct colonies . . . every town of the southern mines contained a very large foreign population. 4
Nevertheless, for many Anglo immigrants, this presence equaled an absence of “good” and “congenial” society. And it was not only white men whose astigmatic vision of the social was as racialized as it was gendered. In 1908, over fifty years after she had lived as one of the few Anglo children in the Southern Mines, Mrs. Lee Whipple-Haslam had herself photographed with two Indian women who had been her playmates in the 1850s. She included the picture in her published reminiscences and captioned it “Photograph of the author and two friends. This picture will exemplify a lonely childhood.” Likewise, though without direct reference to his non-Anglo neighbors in Tuolumne County, Jesse Smith complained to his sister in 1852, “The society I think is not as good here as farther north, there is fewer families. Where men have their wives and children and settle down everything looks and is better than where the population is of the transient unsettled kind.”5
These transient, unsettled people, however, turned the diggings into a grand field for human interaction and connectedness, not only in the ways they organized mining labor and domestic and personal service work but also, and perhaps particularly, in the ways they occupied themselves during their leisure hours. Just as differentiating reproductive from productive labor highlights a problematic opposition, so too does distinguishing between labor and leisure. Notions of labor and leisure were in flux in the nineteenth century, especially in industrializing areas such as the northeastern United States. In such places, as wage work and accompanying notions of time discipline began to replace older labor systems, the distinction between work and leisure was growing more pronounced.6 Yet even Gold Rush immigrants who came from industrializing areas found themselves plunged into largely preindustrial work patterns in the diggings—patterns determined by daily cycles of light and dark, and seasonal cycles of heat and cold, downpour and drought. Whether they came from industrializing areas or not, all immigrants in the mines were part of the global movement of people, goods, and wealth that accompanied the proliferation of market economies and the colonial ambitions of North Atlantic nations in the nineteenth century. Given this context, all participated in marking mining as the “work” of the Gold Rush.
But people in every Gold Rush community, immigrant and Indian, sought diversion from the business of producing material life—they sang and prayed, they told stories and wrote letters, they gambled and got drunk, they danced to one another’s drumming or fiddle playing and cheered at bull-and-bear fights. Leisure, defined loosely to include both diversion and sacred practices, was often a contested terrain upon which gold seekers drew boundaries that separated them into opposing camps—camps divided by language or religion or nationality but also by different notions of what constituted appropriate behavior in a disproportionately male “social” world. Still, the twain did meet: polyglot peoples bartered for companionship at fandango houses; Chilean and French men met at Mass; Anglos and Mexicans sat cheek by jowl over games of chance. Meanwhile, in towns like Sonora, some Spanish- and French-speaking women created a market for heterosocial pleasures that became key in redistributing Gold Rush wealth and in challenging Anglo notions of what would count as society. Indeed, whenever a miner cut loose and stopped working, someone else started—a Mexican matador, a Protestant preacher, a French woman at her gaming table. The worlds of labor and leisure, then, were bound together.
Opposing “labor” to “leisure,” of course, obscures the extent to which—in profoundly material ways—the two terms and the social practices they represent depend on one another for meaning. The leading term, labor, and the social practices it represents generally take precedence in studies of mining rushes because of the predominance of men among the migrants and the prevalence of cultural constructions of labor as male.7 No historian could deny the central importance of mining labor to life in the Sierra foothills after 1848. But in mining—a new occupation for many but one most identified as suitable for men—immigrants found a daily practice in which to ground a sense of themselves as appropriately gendered. Leisure, by contrast (along with reproductive labor such as cooking and sewing), proved a site in which oppositions such as male versus female and white versus nonwhite were thrown into disarray. So here my focus is on leisure because, like domestic and personal service work, leisure was one of the key locations in which gendered and racialized meanings got made, unmade, and remade during the Gold Rush. When immigrant men laid down their picks and shovels, they found that the oppositions which created both social order and social relations—that is, society—back home were all out of kilter in California.8
This was especially true of Anglo American men, who assumed postures of domination in an expanding nation-state that had just acquired continental breadth, and who were best positioned to reap the benefits of the emerging class system that accompanied industrialization (though many would fail miserably in their efforts to achieve middle-class status, and others would contest the emerging class system itself). For such men, the Gold Rush created a kind of crisis of representation, because so much of what they imagined as society was unavailable or unrecognizable in California, and what was within reach did not look suitably social. How, then, would they make sense—for themselves, for each other, and for folks back home—of what they did find and see and touch in the diggings? Posing the question in this manner is not meant to suggest that Gold Rush participants who were not Anglo and male were somehow accustomed to life in the mines. However familiar the rise and fall of the foothills may have been to Miwoks, for most participants, a gold rush was something new under the sun. Nor does the question mean that the representational practices of such peoples were unaffected by the upheaval of the Gold Rush. But few Miwoks, Mexicans, Chileans, French, and Chinese in California conflated their daily lives with a project of national expansion and economic growth infused with notions of progress and “manifest destiny.” All, however, would be touched—some violently—by the will to dominance of those for whom such conflations came easily.
This lettersheet depicts the ways in which the Gold Rush disrupted customary boundaries of gender and race for Anglo American men.
Reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
For Miwok people, for example, the Gold Rush was about invasion on an unprecedented scale, despite earlier contact with Spanish Mexicans on the California coast and white fur trappers coming west over the Sierra Nevada. Miwok responses to conquest were many, from armed resistance to petitions on their own behalf, to assimilation of gold digging into women’s gathering activities, to retreat from the foothills up into the mou
ntains.9 When they laid down the woven baskets they used to pan for gold and the weapons they used to fight off the invaders, though, Miwoks worked to represent their new situation by incorporating symbols of conquest into customary ceremonies. Key among these was one called the pota ceremony, a commemorative gathering that reminded participants of unnatural or unusual deaths, generally by violence or witchcraft, within a lineage group. Much of the ceremony involved relatives of the deceased dancing around vertical poles to which were attached effigies of murderers or others held responsible for the death; dancers attacked the effigies with arrows, clubs, and knives.10
In August of 1855, the white immigrant Alfred Doten walked five miles to attend a pota ceremony on the south fork of the Cosumnes River. When he arrived at what he called the “Indian ‘fandango,’” he found Miwoks dancing around a flagstaff that supported not only the customary effigy of a man but a U.S. flag as well. An English-speaking Indian, whom Doten took to be a chief, explained to the Anglo that this ceremony recalled an earlier time when a neighboring group of Indians had come to a festival, but brought with them “a kind of poison” that made the local people ill. Medicine men learned the nature of the poison, however, and could now prevent the sickness; the ceremony was held “in commemoration of the time of the poisoning.” The effigy on the flagpole, then, probably represented the bearers of the sickness that had afflicted local Miwoks years ago. The dance was a way of remembering.11