Roaring Camp

by Susan Lee Johnson

  Chapter 4

  Mining Gold and Making War

  Out of the day-to-day world of fiddles and fandangos, fresh greens and frijoles, tensions arose that turned the entire Southern Mines into an arena of conflict that came to favor certain contenders over others. Such struggles were bound up not only in the daily act of digging gold—the presumed “work” of the Gold Rush—but in daily acts of nursing and laundering, whoring and hymn singing as well. Most stories of the mining boom in California tie turmoil tightly to contests over gold—who would have access to it and who would profit by its acquisition.1 This makes good historical sense for a period in which a key state legislative act taxed “foreign” miners, in which litigation over mining claims clogged county court dockets as quickly as courts could be established, and in which some miners exchanged picks and shovels for knives and rifles at the drop of a hat. What is lacking in many stories, however, is sustained attention to the social contexts and cultural meanings of battles over mining labor and its product, gold.

  For in the end, if one is to understand something of what happened in the Sierra Nevada foothills after 1848, there can be no separation between productive and reproductive work, or between labor and leisure. Enmities might arise as easily out of disdain for how people got gold, shared food, or played cards. Alliances might be forged over a deer hunt organized cooperatively, over a dance performed admirably, or over a water ditch dug in common so that miners could wash gold-bearing dirt. Central to all of these enmities and alliances were gendered and racialized notions of what it meant to live appropriately in a gold rush. And central to the ways in which observers have seen (and not seen) such enmities and alliances are gendered and racialized notions of what a gold rush is.

  So while I reintroduce herein what many take to be at the center of Gold Rush history—that is, the work of mining and the conflicts it provoked among miners—it is not happenstance that this set of stories follows rather than precedes those already told. In ordering my narrative in this manner, I have not meant to suggest that digging gold was less important, in relative terms, than were other daily activities in constituting what came to be called the Gold Rush. But I have meant to dis-order customary accounts of the period so that the salience of gender and race, both in what happened and in how those events have come to be remembered, would be more evident.

  Here, then, the shovel hits the dirt, the woven basket swirls the water, and women and men look over their shoulders to see who might be gathering more gold than they, and where, and how. And they think about how much gold might be enough gold for whatever reason they started getting it in the first place, and, in some cases, about who might help them get that amount, and what that help might cost. All of these stories placed end to end would not together constitute an adequate Gold Rush narrative; but no adequate Gold Rush narrative can be constructed without them. These are tales that arise out of the complex set of mining labor relations that evolved in the Southern Mines—relations based on the work habits and social practices of diverse immigrant and native populations but patterned as well by the exigencies of an extractive economy emerging in the newest territorial acquisition of the United States and by the overwhelming predominance of men among the immigrants. Work in the diggings proceeded according to a dizzying array of systems that included independent prospecting and mining partnerships as well as altered Miwok gathering practices, Latin American peonage, North American slavery, and, later, Chinese indentured labor. Wage work among miners was much more prevalent after the initial boom, but when it occurred in the early years of the Gold Rush, it fell disproportionately to non–Anglo American men.

  More than narratives of mining labor itself, however, these are stories about the conflicts work in the diggings provoked. In fact, nowhere is the contested nature of Gold Rush social relations clearer than in the series of mining-related ethnic and racial “wars” that plagued the Southern Mines: the Chilean War, the “French Revolution,” the Mariposa War, and a whole host of skirmishes less extravagantly labeled by either participants or historians. Another key set of struggles revolved around white opposition to black labor in the mines. Many of these conflicts reflect the vigorous, often violent resistance that attempted imposition of Anglo dominance could provoke in an area like the Southern Mines, where non-Anglos frequently predominated in numbers. In spite of numerical superiority, though, Miwoks, Chileans, Mexicans, French, African Americans, and, later, Chinese found that U.S. whites were backed by an anti-Indian, antiforeign, and antiblack state government that did not hesitate to levy onerous taxes on “foreigners,” send out militias after troublesome Indians or Mexicans, or return fugitive black slaves to their white masters. Once these struggles were resolved, organized and armed resistance to Anglo control in the Southern Mines—which now began to take shape as class rule too—would become increasingly difficult. Hence the story of individual retribution that began this study of the Gold Rush in California’s Southern Mines—the tale of the “bandit” Joaquín Murrieta and his plucky, til-death-do-us-part partner, Rosa Felíz de Murrieta.

  In order to comprehend the battles that raged in the Southern Mines over access to gold, one must understand something of the methods by which miners extracted the precious metal. Gold in California was found in three types of deposits, which miners called placers, gravels, and quartz. In the boom years of the Gold Rush, most gold seekers set their sights on the placers, surface deposits that were relatively easy to exploit with simple tools such as picks and shovels and buckets. Sometimes placer gold was located in the bed of a stream or river, and so argonauts had to divert these bodies of water in order to work their beds. What miners recovered, however, was not pure gold but gold mixed with dirt and rocks. In order to separate the metal from the debris, miners relied on one of gold’s key attributes—its weight. Gold is heavy, and so miners could wash gold-bearing dirt with water and expect the gold to sink to the bottom while the water washed the debris away. In a pan, a gold seeker simply swirled water and auriferous dirt around and around until the water and dirt sloshed over the sides and gold was left gleaming in the bottom. But most turned to devices such as rockers, long toms, or sluices to get at the gold. Rockers were the smallest and simplest and sluices the largest tools, but all relied on the same principle. Miners washed gold-bearing dirt through these boxlike wooden devices, which were lined at the bottom with cleats, or “riffles,” that caught the gold. To exploit the placers, gold seekers most often worked in small, cooperatively organized groups, not in big, hierarchically organized companies with large numbers of wage laborers.

  As time passed, miners realized that the placers were like the tip of an iceberg—that far more gold lay deeper beneath the earth’s surface. Some of those deposits were “deep gravels,” or ancient placers that had long since been covered by debris. Other underground deposits were composed of gold that was embedded in solid rock—vein or quartz gold, it was called. Extracting gold from these kinds of deposits required more technical know-how, greater outlays of capital, and often larger numbers of workers than did placer mining. Their exploitation eventually turned mining into a full-fledged industry in California and led to an elaboration of class relations similar to those that characterized other industrializing areas in the United States and around the world. Although miners had no way of knowing this in the earliest months and years of the Gold Rush, there were actually fewer deposits of these sorts—deep gravels and quartz gold—in the Southern Mines than in the Northern Mines. Accordingly, economic development and class formation followed different patterns in much of the Southern Mines. But in the boom years of the Gold Rush, these distinctions between the Northern Mines and the Southern Mines were only beginning to emerge, and placer mining remained the chief concern of most gold seekers throughout the gold regions.2

  Some disputes over labor in the diggings echoed those raging in the eastern United States. Important in a few conflicts was the language of “free labor,” which, by the time of the Gold Rush, w
as fast becoming the rallying cry of certain northern white men on the make, and which soon proved decisive in reshaping the political party system in the United States and in the sectional antagonisms that threatened to destroy the Union by the end of the 1850s. Not surprisingly, free-labor ideology lurked around the edges of struggles involving African American miners, but it also cropped up in other disputes as well. In the end, however, given the prevalence of a variety of “unfree” labor systems in the mines, it is striking how modest the drive for free labor could be in the boom years of the Gold Rush.

  The language of free labor fused an older Protestant belief in the worthiness of work with new attention to upward mobility and economic growth more appropriate to the evolving industrial capitalism of the Northeast. In this, hard labor for wages held a certain dignity, but only as a stage in a man’s life before he began to work for himself. As one historian explains, “The aspirations of the free labor ideology were . . . thoroughly middle-class, for the successful laborer was one who achieved self-employment, and owned his own capital—a business, farm, or shop.” Implicit, and often quite explicit, in this was a relentless critique of African American slavery in the South, which to many northerners thwarted economic development and negated possibilities for social mobility. For some, this critique was consistent with a desire to end the enslavement of black people and offer them the perceived benefits of a dynamic, expansive, capitalist social order. For others, it reflected a desire to end the degradation of nonslaveholding, poor whites, who had no opportunity to rise in an economic system that lacked a substantial middle class.3

  Free labor, antislavery, and, sometimes, antiblack rhetoric permeated California’s early state legislative debates, though such ideologies played themselves out differently in the mines.4 In the senate and assembly, California’s initial admission to the Union as a nonslave state gave way to continued disagreements over whether or not even free African Americans should be allowed to immigrate. At the same time, California law before 1852 was silent on the question of what would happen to slaveholders who entered the state with enslaved blacks, and attention to the question was minimal, especially in the diggings.5 As one young master wrote to his father with regard to a slave named Patrick, “I don’t consider there is any risk in bringing Patrick . . . as no one will put themselves to the trouble of investigating the matter.”6 And the Martha’s Vineyard–born Timothy Osborn noted that enslaved blacks near his Tuolumne County camp worked hard for their Mississippi master, “notwithstanding the laws of the land that make them free.”7 Despite their antislavery reputations, white people from states like Massachusetts often did nothing to interfere with men such as this Mississippi planter. Charles Davis, himself an advocate of colonization schemes for African Americans, was sure that he had chosen a path of moderation in his dealings with neighboring slaveholders in Mariposa County: “Everybody here knows that I am a friend to the slave, but for all this, his master is a friend to me. I can say and do just as I wish with the slaves around me, and their masters have no suspicions of my injuring them, and every black man that knows me, manifests the greatest respect toward me.”8 Out in the diggings, the “laws of the land” were largely irrelevant, and it was northern white men like Osborn and Davis who helped ensure that black slave labor would thrive in the Southern Mines.

  Indeed, the Southern Mines were the first destination of many white slaveholders, traveling overland as they did along southern trails to California.9 Mariposa, the southernmost county in the region, seems to have been a special haven for slave-owning whites. The county’s rugged terrain and small immigrant population may have made ignoring the “laws of the land” all the more simple. The evidence is circumstantial, of course, since as a “free” state California gathered no statistics regarding slaves and slaveholders. But the immigrant population of Mariposa County in 1850 (4,379 people in all) included 4.5 percent African Americans, while the larger populations of Calaveras and Tuolumne counties (16,884 and 8,351 people, respectively) included only .5 and .75 percent black people, respectively. And the 1850 manuscript census for Mariposa County reveals a number of large groups from southern states that included both black and white families—parties, no doubt, of slaves and their masters.10

  Despite this relatively hospitable climate for slave owners in a nominally “free” state, enslaved African Americans recognized that the ambiguities of both law and custom in California offered unusual opportunities for escape from bondage. The frequency of fugitive slave cases during the first few years of the Gold Rush makes this clear. And, indeed, the judge in one such case in 1851 found that the federal fugitive slave law, passed as a part of the Compromise of 1850, had no bearing on cases in which slaves fled their masters in California and did not cross state lines in their flight. In 1852, however, the friends of slavery in California succeeded in shepherding through the legislature a state fugitive slave law that allowed white slave owners to reclaim black slaves who had escaped within the state. This law was renewed in 1853 and 1854, and then finally allowed to lapse in 1855.11

  Flight from slavery was not the only means by which African Americans seized their freedom. Perhaps in part because of the tenuous legal status of slaveholding in California, enslaved blacks not infrequently were able to buy their way out of slavery in the diggings. Thomas Gilman, for example, an African American man in his twenties, purchased his freedom for $1,000 in 1852 at Shaw’s Flat, a placer mining area in Tuolumne County. Born in Tennessee, Gilman seems to have worked in the diggings until he accumulated the capital to free himself. He lived in Tuolumne County for the rest of his life, mining and paying taxes on personal property and real estate assessed for as much as $725 during flush years, as little as $25 in hard times. Likewise, Peter Green purchased his freedom from Thomas Thorne, one of the largest slaveholders in Mariposa County, for $1,000 in 1855. Perhaps Green and Gilman, like the black men Leonard Noyes observed at San Antonio Bar in Calaveras County during 1851, had had mining claims of their own that they were allowed to tend on Sundays; these “Sunday claims” may have been the resource many African American men tapped to obtain their “freedom papers” in California.12

  Unlike Thomas Gilman, many black miners who bought or otherwise appropriated their freedom were unable to live in peace in the diggings. Stephen Spencer Hill, who accompanied his Arkansas master to California in 1849, claimed to have bought his way out of bondage in April of 1853.13 The former master, Wood Tucker, went back home, and in October 1853 Hill filed claim to 160 acres of land near Gold Spring in Tuolumne County. He cleared 40 of those acres, planted wheat and barley, and, in his spare time, built a cabin and kept mining for gold. Six months later, however, a friend of Hill’s former master named Owen Rozier arrived at Hill’s ranch, asserting that Hill had never been freed and that the land Hill owned was thus actually the property of Tucker, who was now back in Arkansas. On the advice of a proslavery attorney, Rozier wrote to Tucker asking to be appointed Tucker’s agent in California, so as to reclaim Hill as well as the cabin, the fields, and the diggings. When Hill received word that his former master had authorized Rozier to seize him under California’s fugitive slave law, Hill fled. He was quickly arrested. Meanwhile, a handful of white neighbors rallied on Hill’s behalf. As the British-born John Jolly recorded in his diary four days after the arrest, “Hames, Chips & myself collecting subscriptions for conducting Steves case. Engaged Mr. Wolcot & Barber as his lawyers.”14 Other neighbors harvested Hill’s crops and cleared the ranch of everything from which Rozier and Tucker could profit, and hounded Rozier so mercilessly that Rozier finally pistol-whipped one of them, which landed the would-be slave-catcher temporarily in jail alongside Hill. But in the end, the lawyers engaged for Hill could not prove his freedom, and so Rozier made plans to transport the former slave back to Arkansas. Rozier made it as far as Stockton. There Stephen Spencer Hill made good his final escape, along with, according to the local newspaper, “the gold watch of Mr. R, some thirteen dollars in cash and a dra
ft on Miles Greenwood & Co., of New Orleans, for $500.”15 Rozier’s loose change may not have made up for the land Hill had lost and the work that had gone into the improvements, but there must have been, nonetheless, a sweetness to the taking.

  It was not only recently freed slaves such as Hill who faced harassment in the diggings. James Williams, an African American man who had escaped from his Maryland master as a boy of thirteen, made his way to California when he was twenty-six to dig gold and live in a place of relative safety from those who would enforce the federal fugitive slave law. In the Southern Mines, however, he found his troubles did not cease. As he recorded in a narrative of his life that began with his flight from bondage, Williams worked for a white man in the diggings for six months until the employer turned on him: “he either raised a false report, or caused one to be raised in order to get a certain class of men to pursue me, to make me leave the place, to elude paying me my money, and he accomplished his design.”16

  Williams did not reveal the nature of this “false report,” but other white miners’ responses to black men in their midst provide some clues. In the fall of 1849, William Miller, the Anglo American man from Massachusetts who lived and worked with free African Americans on the Tuolumne River, got into a fight with southern white men over who would be allowed to work adjacent gold claims. Miller and his white partners had joined forces with a party of black miners (“Coulard Gentlemen,” Miller respectfully called them in his diary) to dam the river and work its bed. As the company of black and white men walked downstream together to locate the best spot for damming, they came upon a group of white southern miners and asked whether the damming project would interfere with their digging. The southerners said it would not. But soon enough, as Miller put it, “a Swaggering Looking Fellow Came Along,” and announced that “a White Man might come in [work in the vicinity] but a Black Man Could Not no how.” From there things went from bad to worse, as the southern men came after Miller’s party first “Armed to the Teeth with Rifles. Revolvers. Bowie Knives. and one Pick Ax,” and then with a vow to go to the law. The latter threat proved decisive, as Miller recorded in his diary, “Our Committee thought It was a going to accumulate Considerable expense in the Co[mpany] Concluded to give up to them and went to work below them.”17