Roaring Camp

by Susan Lee Johnson

  Still, most Sierra Miwoks did not choose this strategy for coping with invasion. Indeed, both Savage and the Murphys probably employed not only Miwoks but Yokuts, whose hunting and gathering grounds lay to the south and west of Miwok territory. The Yokuts were native people who, like the Plains Miwoks, had been forced into Spanish Mexican missions earlier in the century and who generally had more experience with non-Indian labor practices than did those Sierra Miwoks who, up to the time of the Gold Rush, had remained largely beyond the reach of Spanish Mexicans and later European and Anglo settlers such as John Sutter and John Marsh.103 Hence, it seems likely that proportionately fewer Miwoks worked initially for white men than did Yokuts in the south and Nisenans in the Northern Mines.

  Sierra Miwoks did dig for gold, however. Throughout August, September, and October of 1850, for example, Timothy Osborn worked and lived alongside Indian miners near the Merced River, noting in his diary mostly friendly exchanges with his neighbors. The Miwok women and men came and went as they pleased, carrying not only bows, arrows, and animal carcasses, but bateas and crowbars as well, indicating that they had begun to supplement customary means of subsistence with mining. Likewise, Friedrich Gerstäcker, passing through Murphys New Diggings in late 1850, encountered a band of Miwoks and watched them dig gold there, noting that Indians in the Southern Mines were far less likely to work for whites than those farther north. These Calaveras County Miwoks labored in family groups, the men breaking up the hard ground with pickaxes and the women and children carrying the gold-bearing dirt off and washing it at the river.104 Few such early descriptions of Miwok mining practices exist, but it seems likely, given Gerstäcker’s account and a scattering of later reports, that women were central in the Miwoks’ turn to gold digging. Sam Ward, brother of Julia Ward Howe, lived among Miwok and Yokuts miners at George Belt’s ferry and store on the Merced River in 1851 and 1852.105 There he, like Gerstäcker, saw Indians mining in families, “the father scooping into his batea the invisible mud and sand of the riverbed, and the mother bearing it to shore to perform those skillful gyratory manipulations by which the water is made to carry away . . . the earthy matter until . . . there remain at the bottom of the pan the yellow spangles surrendered by the incongruous mass.”106

  Among other Miwok bands, women seem to have assumed responsibility for virtually all aspects of mining. This was the case in early 1851 when Ephraim Delano dug gold at Dusty Bar on the Stanislaus River. There, he wrote to his wife back in Maine, he saw “plenty of the Indian woman at the mines.” In fact, he said, “The Woman does the principale part of the Labor I have seen some of the squaws digging gold all day with a Child on there Back slung in a Basket.” As late as the summer of 1854, Jean-Nicolas Perlot saw similar sights when he followed Miwok miners deep into the Sierras to what he hoped would be rich diggings along the south fork of the Merced River. Once Perlot and his companions located the Indian placers, they began working nearby—according to Perlot, in perfect amity. Indeed, Perlot seems to have forgotten who first discovered these diggings, noting in his reminiscences, “The Indians worked constantly around us. All the companies let them go freely where it seemed good to them, even in our ditches, to gather paydirt in their pans, carry it on their heads, and go wash it at the river.”107 Perlot was quick to point out who the miners were in this Miwok community: “The women especially did this work; the occupation of the men consisted almost entirely in watching the women’s work.” In this situation, then, gold digging seems to have been assimilated into women’s gathering activities, leaving Miwok men their customary, more episodic work of hunting, fishing, and horse raiding. Perlot probably mistook this symbiotic sexual division of labor for Miwok women’s economic independence when he wrote, “I have never seen an Indian woman cede to her husband the gold she gathered, which made me suppose that each one worked for herself.” In fact, around the same time, Miwok women also were selling Perlot and his companions fresh salmon—the products of Miwok men’s work—indicating the mutual dependence encouraged in native divisions of labor.108

  Whether Miwok women mined on their own or worked alongside their menfolk, their labor was key to the survival of native peoples in the Southern Mines. When J. D. Borthwick arrived in the vicinity of Mokelumne Hill in 1852 after a stint in the Northern Mines, he was immediately struck by the relative prosperity of the Miwoks, compared with the Nisenans he had seen farther north. Borthwick was sarcastic about the causes of Miwoks’ well-being, suggesting that they must have been “a slightly superior race” because they “had more money, and consequently must have had more energy to dig for it.” What Borthwick probably did not understand was how different the recent histories of Nisenans and Miwoks had been. Nisenans had lost a great deal of their autonomy well before the onset of the Gold Rush: They were hard hit by malaria in the 1830s; they formed the backbone of John Sutter’s Indian labor force in the 1840s; and they, unlike Miwoks, had not engaged in extensive livestock raiding and trading to offset pre–Gold Rush incursions. What Borthwick saw when he compared Nisenans and Miwoks, then, were native peoples differently affected by conquest.109

  The Miwok practice of livestock raiding—developed decades before to cope first with horse-rich Spanish Mexicans coming from the west and, later, horse-poor Anglo American fur trappers coming from the east—proved particularly adaptable to Gold Rush circumstances. Immigrant miners falsely attributed all manner of depredations to Indians in the diggings, and they probably exaggerated Miwok livestock raiding as well. But when it came to horse and mule stealing, there was no denying both Miwok propensity and Miwok prowess. Miwok men increasingly came to supplement hunting with livestock raiding, particularly as deer populations declined, so it was not far-fetched for immigrants to look about for signs of Indians when they woke up in the morning to a missing mule. The Reverend Daniel Woods put it most simply when he described thefts by Miwoks at Sherlock’s Diggings in Mariposa County during November of 1849: “Mules are stolen, and driven away to be eaten.” A few days earlier at nearby Agua Fria, George Evans recorded in his diary that local Indians had proved “very troublesome to the miners, having stolen almost all the mules brought here.” But Evans also wrote that these same Indians were meeting with miners a few miles away to “enter a treaty” with them: “[The Indians] seek to camp in some of these ravines during the winter months and wish to first secure a peace with the palefaces now holding possession of their old winter quarters.” Peace seems not to have been secured, however, because two days later Evans noted that eighteen mules and several horses were missing when the immigrant men arose for breakfast. The miners gathered to plan revenge, vowing “to follow, kill, and plunder this thieving horde of savages.”110

  The Anglo miner John Hovey’s rendering of his camp at Red Bluff Bar, with Jenny and Jerico in the foreground. Such mules were favorite targets for native livestock raiders. From the John Hovey Journal.

  Reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

  Immigrant men were sorely troubled by the loss of their pack animals, but they were also irritated and sometimes frightened by the brazen defiance Miwoks displayed in their interactions with the miners. Alfred Doten wrote about a February 1850 incident in Tuolumne County in which forty miners chased a party of Miwoks assumed to have stolen some mules, only to find the Indians safely ensconced on a hill “in too great numbers to drive them from their position.” The Miwoks stood on the hilltop mocking their pursuers, using “the most insulting gestures and language, slapping their arses and daring the Yankees to come up there.” Enraged, one of the miners picked off one of the Miwoks with a rifle bullet. Later, the miners retrieved the Indian’s bow and arrow as well as his scalp, but they never recovered the mules.111 Similarly, William Miller and his companion, Mr. Savory, were unnerved one night in March 1850, while en route south from the Tuolumne to the Merced River. They had pitched their tent near an Indian encampment. Later in the evening, an older Miwok man was carried in with a bullet hole
in his neck. The women at the camp began to yell and moan and “Kept It up all night,” according to Miller. Concerned, Savory helped dress the old man’s wound. But neither of the white men could sleep that night, as Indians kept passing near their tent, “Damning the Americans in Spanish.” The Miwoks may have known little English, and the Anglos little of whichever Miwok dialect these Indians spoke, but both groups understood enough Spanish for the Miwoks to make clear their general disdain for Anglo invaders, Savory’s wound dressing notwithstanding.112

  Sometimes fear of the consequences of such disdain, along with a fervid belief in widespread Indian “depredations,” could unite not only Anglo Americans but French and Mexican miners as well. Such was the case during the winter of 1850–51 around the headwaters of the Calaveras and Mokelumne rivers, an area the Stockton Times noted was “in a state of great excitement in consequence of the irruptions of large bodies of the hostile Indians.” The newspaper acknowledged that the Miwoks were “irritated by their former sufferings,” but complained that “they now murder and rob all that comes within their reach.” No longer content to take one or two horses or mules at a time, early in January, “immense swarms of Indians poured down and drove off every animal they could find,” or so a white miner told the Stockton Times. In response, some number of French, Anglos, and others—two different newspaper articles estimated 100 and 500, respectively—set out after the presumed livestock thieves.113

  The French men, all accounts agree, were members of the famed Garde Mobile, volunteer troops who had helped suppress street rioting in Paris during the revolution of 1848 but who since, as one historian puts it, “had become somewhat obnoxious.” To rid themselves of potential troublemakers, French government officials shipped 140 of the Gardes Mobiles off to California in November 1850. These soldiers ended up in Calaveras County, sporting arms, flags, and other accoutrements of war, much to the dismay of Anglo American miners, who no doubt remembered the past summer’s “French Revolution” in Tuolumne County. Tensions ran high, and more than one high-spirited, if not particularly lethal, skirmish erupted. In one threatened conflict, a group of Miwok warriors actually weighed in on behalf of the Anglos, though no war ensued. Another struggle prompted the Stockton Times to run a tongue-in-cheek article titled “The Garde Mobile versus the Anglo-Saxon,” which closed with assurance that “the Anglo-Saxon was victorious.”114

  But Anglo-French tensions fell by the wayside when neighboring miners banded together to chase supposed Indian livestock thieves. According to two newspaper reports, the miners chased the raiders to the north fork of the Stanislaus River, but found them ensconced “in a bold and strong position,” on a table-shaped mountain far above the river bed. It must have been a capacious table, because the Stockton Times contended that 500 Indians and “upwards of 700 mules, horses, and cattle” were camped there. Nonetheless, these Miwoks, like those that Doten’s neighbors found “slapping their arses and daring the Yankees” from a hilltop, continually “defied the white man” to retrieve the animals. A second article concluded with the kind of suggestion that always put fear in the hearts of Anglo miners—that is, the possibility that a single struggle was actually evidence of a broader, interracial coalition against the majority of white men in the mines. In this case, a participant in the hostilities told the Times that he thought the belligerents were actually “a mixture of Northern and Pale Indians, a few ‘Niggers’ and white men.”115

  After following these events for a couple of weeks, the Stockton Times suddenly fell silent, failing to report on how the conflict ended. There could have been a number of reasons for this silence, but one particular explanation suggests itself in an account of the struggle Leonard Noyes recorded in his reminiscences. Noyes was camped near the south fork of the Calaveras River, in the heart of the livestock-stealing area, during the winter of 1850–51. He recalled that cattle and horses regularly were found missing that winter, and the “Indians were charged with being the thieves.” Noyes joined the makeshift troops that organized to go after the Indians, a group he remembered as including “50 Americans 25 Mexicans and 75 of the Guard Mobile, French refugees.” The soldiers advanced to the Miwok camp near the Stanislaus River. There they planned for the Anglos and Mexicans to circle around behind the camp, which was up in the hills, and then run the Indians toward the waiting French men.116 But when Noyes’s contingent got to the Miwok camp, the Indians were gone. Furthermore, there were “no signs of their ever having Cattle there or Horses as no tracks appeared,” though there were “plenty of bins made of bushes very neetly constructed, all filled with Acorns.” Some of the Anglos and Mexicans proposed burning the acorn granaries, but others prevented this action because, as Noyes put it, “most of us concluded that we had been lied to in regard to the Indians having stolen the Cattle.” Noyes closed his account of this nonengagement by describing how his party fired a few volleys to make their French allies believe that the Anglos and Mexicans had done battle with the Miwoks, and how one man instructed the rest to tell the French men they had encountered fifteen hundred Indians rather than about fifteen (and those “[too] far off to shoot”). “Always after,” Noyes recalled, when he would run into one of the Gardes Mobiles, he “got a hearty shake of the hand” for his bravery. If Noyes was correct that the combined Anglo, Mexican, and French troops never saw more than fifteen Indians and never found any sign of stolen livestock, perhaps the Stockton Times editors concluded that under these circumstances, no news was the best possible news to print.117

  There must have been dozens of such not-so-close encounters in the Southern Mines during the early years of the Gold Rush, and thus it is not surprising that one set of incidents finally led to genuinely warlike conditions in the diggings. The Mariposa War began in December of 1850 when native people in the employ of James Savage, while he was away, attacked his trading post on the Fresno River, killing three white men, wounding another, and ransacking the store. According to one account, the Indians took this action most immediately because the men left in charge refused to slaughter a cow for their use. Upon his return, Savage located the attackers and tried to negotiate with them. The Indians tried to negotiate too, asking Savage to join them in war against immigrant miners, or a least to return to his trading post and remain neutral in the hostilities. Savage refused, and in fact signed on as commander of the volunteer force organized to chastise the Indians. This force, known as the Mariposa Battalion, consisted of just over two hundred soldiers, with white frontiersmen from Missouri and Texas overrepresented among them but including as well a strong contingent of white men from New York State, a handful of Europeans, and at least one African American from Philadelphia and one Hispano from New Mexico.118

  One of the New Yorkers, Robert Eccleston, is the only soldier in the Mariposa Battalion known to have kept a journal during the military campaign, which lasted officially from February to July of 1851.119 The outbreak of hostilities between Indians and immigrants included not just the contingent that attacked Savage’s trading post in December but a broad, if loose, coalition of Miwok, Yokuts, and mixed bands in Mariposa County. Tensions spilled over into Tuolumne and Calaveras counties as well—though the Stockton Times may have exaggerated when it reported in late January, “It now appears that with few exceptions the whole of the Indian tribes from the Cosumnes to King’s river are in a state of insurrection.” A majority of the struggles occurred in Mariposa County, not coincidentally the site of the most widespread white use of native labor in the Southern Mines. Though actual battles took place, Eccleston’s diary reveals the Mariposa campaign, for the soldiers, as a tedious pursuit of individual Indian bands through the relentlessly rugged terrain of the Southern Mines’ southernmost reaches. The warriors of one band might give themselves up to the troops, calling their womenfolk, children, and elders out of the mountains and taking them down to the plains where the government wanted native people to settle. Meanwhile, another band would keep themselves well in advance of the soldiers, tra
versing the ravines and canyons of Mariposa County with ease while Eccleston and his comrades lumbered along behind.120

  Even Savage himself, no stranger to the local geography, had trouble keeping up with Indians. Before the Mariposa Battalion had been mustered in, he chased after three hundred former employees who had attacked and then bolted the Fresno River post. Eccleston noted that Savage “was but an hour behind the Indians in his start & not with standing they were heavly packed could not overtake them . . . & Savage is no slow traveller.” The whole of the Mariposa War was like this. Once, in March, when some of the troops thought they were closing in on the Yosemite band (a mixed group of Miwoks, Paiutes, and Yokuts), they arrived at the ranchería only to find it deserted, save a few dogs and a hundred-year-old woman. When the soldiers asked where her people had gone, she retorted, “Go look.” Frustrated, the troops burned over five thousand bushels of acorns and “any quality of old Baskets”—all the products of native women’s work. Indeed, burning acorn granaries, and sometimes whole rancherías, was one of the most common acts of the soldiers, who had such difficulty catching up to the Indians themselves.121

  Native women (like native men) played contradictory roles in the conflict, from the aged Yosemite woman who baldly defied a detachment of the Mariposa Battalion to a young woman who served as guide to the troops in their campaign against the Chowchilla Yokuts band. This particular woman delighted Eccleston, with her “black & straight hair hung down gracefully upon her shoulders,” a scarf “thrown negligently over the left shoulder,” her bodice of white muslin and skirt of blue calico, and “her small feet & ankles showed to advantage.” Of course, native men also served as guides to the soldiers, though none of them caught Eccleston’s eye. Sometimes, women could be used as pawns in the struggle, as when the Nuchu Miwok band, once members had surrendered and agreed to move down to the plains, offered to help the Mariposa Battalion. As Eccleston recorded in his diary, “The chief here offers to send with us 50 warriors to fight against the Yoosemita’s providing we give them the women as prisoners.” Perhaps Yosemite women were renowned for their work habits. Indeed, when the Mariposa Battalion finally did make contact with the Yosemite band, through the leader named Tenaya, Tenaya balked at the idea of settling in the San Joaquin Valley and receiving government annuities: “We do not want anything from white men. Our women are able to do our work,” he boasted.122