Roaring Camp

by Susan Lee Johnson

  For many white gold seekers, the situation called for more than dismissing their new neighbors as men with small tools, which they handled “like so many women.” For such white men, expulsion seemed the better solution. One of the first widely reported attempts to drive Chinese miners from the Sierra Nevada foothills occurred in the Southern Mines.15 It came less than halfway into the first year of increased Chinese immigration—1852—and just two weeks after an alarmed Governor John Bigler addressed the California state legislature on the dangers such immigrants represented. Tellingly, it happened at the site of the most vociferous French, Mexican, and Chilean resistance to the foreign miners’ tax of 1850, the town of Columbia, in Tuolumne County.16 In May of 1852, San Francisco’s Alta California declared that the people of Columbia had proven themselves “entirely without a precedent or a parallel in their hatred and hostility for the Chinese.” Men of that town, styling themselves simply “the miners,” had passed in a mass meeting resolutions designed to assure that “no Asiatic or South Sea Islander” would work in local diggings. The resolutions included a charge to create a vigilance committee that would both enforce exclusion in Columbia and encourage white men throughout the Southern Mines to follow suit.17

  “The miners,” however, singled out for verbal abuse not only Chinese men but those “shipowners, capitalists, and merchants” who supported “the importation of these burlesques on humanity.” The resolutions argued that such moneyed men loved California’s “rocks and rills” as well as “her woods and templed hills” only for the “gold they can filch from the one, and the lumber they can obtain from the other.” A man named John A. Palmer (of whom, more anon) chaired the meeting, while the secretary was Thaddeus Hildreth, widely credited among white people as the man who “discovered” gold at Columbia in 1850—though by most accounts, Mexicans mined there first.18 In choosing Hildreth as secretary, “the miners” chose one who could represent them in both senses of the word: he could stand for them literally in dealings with those outside their group—Hildreth, no doubt, reproduced and circulated the miners’ resolutions—and he could stand for them symbolically as well. In his role as “discoverer” of gold at Columbia, Hildreth embodied white miners’ own best hopes for themselves as independent producers, untrammeled from above by “shipowners, capitalists, and merchants,” unabased from below by Chinese “burlesques on humanity.” Here, then, is a moment of conception (again, in both senses of the word) for a homegrown working class in California’s Southern Mines, in which white miners figured themselves as humanity itself, over and against Chinese “burlesques,” and as husband-like lovers of California, over and against rapacious “shipowners, capitalists, and merchants.”19

  As this bold characterization suggests, by 1852 the fissure that started to separate miners from merchants during the fight over the 1850 foreign miners’ tax was widening. The divide yawned wider when California’s legislature settled on a new foreign miners’ tax as a way of dealing with Chinese men in the diggings. In 1852, legislators debated a variety of measures designed to regulate Chinese immigrants, from laws that would have made labor contracts drawn up abroad enforceable in California (a favorite of the men miners called “capitalists”) to those that would have expelled Chinese from the mines altogether (a popular idea among white miners). In a sense, reviving the foreign miners’ tax was a compromise between these two extremes, though one that ultimately leaned toward merchants’ interests over those of white miners.20

  At first, however, merchants and their allies—notably newspaper editors—worried that a new tax would simply bring back old troubles. The San Joaquin Republican—which, under its first banner, the Stockton Times, had denounced the earlier tax—could not forget that the 1850 bill had “convulsed society in the southern mineral region.” What the Southern Mines lost in 1850, and stood to lose again in 1852, were prospectors, laborers, and customers, though now these were Chinese:

  Have not this race of men . . . discovered new placers, and been . . . the hewers of wood and drawers of water for our citizens? In the cities are they not our attendants in our houses, and in our public rooms? Do they not wash our shirts? The Chinese, in this city alone, must expend, and thus throw into circulation, money to the amount of $500 a day, at the very smallest calculation. This money goes into the hands of our merchants.

  The Stockton editor denounced the 1852 act as “The Dog in the Manger Bill,” but in fact legislators did seem to recall the 1850 fiasco.21 This time around, they levied a foreign miners’ tax at a substantially lower rate—three dollars per month as opposed to the earlier twenty dollars a month, a rate that had driven so many Spanish- and French-speaking gold seekers out of the mines.

  The 1852 tax did not scare Chinese miners away.22 To be sure, some resisted paying the fee. In 1855, for example, groups of Chinese men attacked collectors of the foreign miners’ tax at least twice, once in Tuolumne County and once in Mariposa County. In each case, the tax collectors survived, but one or more Chinese lay dead by the end of the incident.23 More common was the kind of evasion described by a white man who had been a young boy in Mariposa County in the 1850s and 1860s. He recalled that the “tax collectors had a hard time collecting,” because when Chinese men saw one coming “they would run & hide in holes & some would climb trees.”24 But many Chinese must have decided to pay the moderate fee and go on about their business. Indeed, by 1856, the once-worried San Joaquin Republican could blithely report that Tuolumne County received more revenue from the foreign miners’ tax than from any other single source, including property taxes.25 What had once been a bugbear was now a bullish sign of growth.

  White miners generally did not see it that way. Shortly after the tax became law, the Alta California drew a sharp contrast between what increasingly were class-motivated points of view—one a vision of those who were coming to constitute an Anglo middle class (a vision shared by a majority of state officials), and the other belonging to Anglo miners. “The difficulty now,” the editors wrote, “is to reconcile” the two perspectives—the first, which condoned “licensing foreigners to work the mines for a consideration,” and the second, which refused “to let them work upon any consideration.”26 The Alta California cast its lot with those who stood to benefit from a foreign miners’ tax—the emerging white middle class and the state. Anglo miners, meanwhile, continued to oppose the tax. Six months after the act’s passage, for example, a constituent wrote from Tuolumne County to the state legislator James Mandeville, reminding him, “As regards the Foreign Tax Bill you are well aware of the opinions of a large portion of the American Miners That is we want no tax levied on them except such as will amount to a prohibition.”27 The foreign miners’ tax of 1852 never amounted to a prohibition on Chinese labor, and thus the “American Miners” lost their bid for exclusion. Instead, the tax survived through the 1860s and became a key source of revenue for the new American state of California.28

  Although Anglo miners railed against the “shipowners, capitalists, and merchants” who flooded the state with “degraded Asiatics” and forced a “system of peonage” on the mines, there is no evidence that a group of Americans orchestrated Chinese immigration and imposed upon Chinese miners a system of coerced labor. As historians of Asian America have shown, most Chinese men came to California having paid for their own passage or having borrowed the fare, intending to repay it out of their earnings as miners.29 Contrary to white miners’ beliefs, the vast majority of Chinese men were not unfree workers. A Stockton restaurateur insisted on this to newspapermen in the spring of 1852: “Chinese John . . . requests us, flatly, to contradict the statement which is going the round of the papers . . . that his countrymen come to California either as slaves or under contract.”30 Entrepreneurial Americans who introduced unfree Chinese labor in the mines were few and far between.

  The arrival of Chinese in the diggings, however, coincided with the growth of local capitalist enterprise that threatened the autonomy of white placer miners. In the minds
of white miners, then, the two phenomena must have seemed related, since anti-Chinese and anticapitalist agitation shaded into one another and drew in common from emerging languages of class.31

  In the Northern Mines, large mining companies represented the greatest threat to individual miners. But in the south, where a relative lack of deposits suitable for hydraulic or quartz mining was matched by an abundance of persistent placers, large water companies took center stage. As a result, in the Southern Mines, antipathy toward Chinese miners and white water company managers went hand in glove.

  In fact, on the very day that the Alta California reported Columbia’s mass meeting to expel Chinese miners, the paper also ran a notice that the Tuolumne County Water Company had succeeded in bringing water to Columbia through a ditch that connected the diggings to Five Mile Creek, a tributary of the Stanislaus River: “Their race is complete at last!—and the water is actually running through it! Hundreds, we say thousands of miners are rejoicing.” These men may not have rejoiced for long, since the race was small and the company’s flumes were built with green timber that warped and shrank. The grand potential of the company would not be realized until a larger race, then still under construction, reached the Stanislaus itself and tapped the waters of that formidable river for the Columbia placers.32 But when miners saw that first fledgling ditch fill with water from a distant creek, their relief must have been alloyed with unease. Water had always been scarce in the Southern Mines, but its use had been free. Now it might be more plentiful, but miners would have to pay to use it. And those they would have to pay looked a good deal like “capitalists” in the making: in the case of the Tuolumne County Water Company (TCWC), a group of men who formed a joint stock corporation capitalized at more than $200,000.33

  White miners’ unease did not erupt immediately into opposition to this or any other of the many water companies that were organized in the Southern Mines.34 Indeed, the anger that erupted at this historical moment was aimed at Chinese miners and only incidentally at Anglo “capitalists.” But the timing of the anti-Chinese meeting at Columbia along with its anticapitalist tenor suggests that white miners’ twin anxieties about the flow of water and the influx of Chinese compounded each other. When Anglo miners finally did cry out against the TCWC, another connection between anti-Chinese and anticapitalist impulses emerged. For its first years of operation, the TCWC was the only venture of its kind in the vicinity of Columbia, though smaller ditches brought water to placer claims elsewhere in the county. Hence the company was able to command high prices. In January of 1853, just eight months after the anti-Chinese meeting, white miners gathered again in Columbia, this time to protest the exorbitant rates they paid for the use of water supplied by the TCWC. These miners likely resembled the group that voted for Chinese expulsion, since they chose as their chairman John A. Palmer—the same man who had chaired the anti-Chinese meeting. As the conflict between white miners and the TCWC unfolded over the next two years, Palmer continued to serve as a leader.35 It would not be until 1855 that the miners succeeded in forcing the company’s hand, but the 1853 meeting did serve to unite them against the TCWC and to broadcast their complaints far and wide.36

  Anti-Chinese activity in the diggings continued throughout the 1850s, but not with the same intensity as in 1852. White miners came to tolerate the foreign miners’ tax as a means of policing and exacting tribute from Chinese miners. And Chinese men themselves carefully orchestrated their gold seeking in order to minimize contact and conflict with Anglo Americans, concentrating their efforts in river claims abandoned by white men and using mining tools that were easy to carry off to new diggings when Anglo hostility erupted. Beyond the mining districts, white men committed a range of anti-Chinese acts; they attacked Chinese brothels, for example, and also turned armed struggles between rival groups of Chinese men into a spectator sport for Anglos.37 In the diggings, however, an aggrieved and anxious peace emerged.

  Even as anti-Chinese agitation quieted in the Southern Mines, proliferating water companies continued to worry white miners into the mid-1850s. If debates over the proper response to Chinese in the diggings revealed the outlines of emerging class divisions among Anglo American men, then arguments about water companies laid those divisions bare. No longer did white miners inveigh against nameless “shipowners, capitalists, and merchants”; now gold seekers targeted local white businessmen who had pooled resources to create large enterprises such as the TCWC and its counterpart in Calaveras County, the Mokelumne Hill Canal and Mining Company. In the end, environmental limits and cultural constraints militated against sustained consolidation of white miners’ interests. Though stillborn, the white working class in counties such as Calaveras and Tuolumne had a momentous gestation.

  Documentation for Tuolumne County, home of the TCWC, is by far the richest.38 Company records reveal the process by which managers, beginning in 1852, bought up land in the Stanislaus River drainage on which the TCWC constructed flumes, cut tunnels, and shoveled out reservoirs. The company also purchased working ditches dug previously by individual miners or smaller water or mining companies. Prices for these land transactions ranged from a low of $25 for a tunnel near Gold Springs to a high of $8,000 for the extensive Yankee Hill Ditch. In addition, company men took up individual 160-acre claims that were then used as TCWC reservoir sites.39 These managers set their own salaries at $7 or $8 per day (in addition to stock dividends as they became available) and then paid laborers, such as ditch diggers and ditch tenders, at a rate of $5 a day.40 Wages fluctuated—and generally dropped—over the course of the 1850s, though those who managed the TCWC lost proportionately less over time than those who tended the company’s growing system of flumes, tunnels, and reservoirs.41

  Meanwhile, no company besides the TCWC had succeeded in bringing water to the rich placer claims of the Columbia mining district. So gold seekers there were compelled to pay the $6 per day demanded for the use of water. By March of 1855, miners had had enough. They held a mass meeting in Columbia and drafted resolutions in which they pledged themselves collectively to refuse to patronize the TCWC until the price of water was reduced to $4 a day. Calling their action a “strike,” the miners charged that they had long been “oppressed by the exorbitant exactions” of the TCWC, the managers of which had grown fat “by the sweat of the brow of the care-worn working man.” Now white miners declared themselves “at war” with the “controling cormorants of this monster monopoly.”42

  The war was not between miners and monopolists alone. In addition to refusing the TCWC’s water, miners called on one another to withdraw any money they had in banks in Tuolumne County or elsewhere in the state. Surplus cash, the resolutions directed, was to be deposited in the safe of a “friendly merchant,” where it would be beyond the reach of well-connected TCWC managers. But the bulk of miners’ money was to be invested in what the resolutions called the “new water company.”43 Though newspaper reports of the mass meeting did not name this enterprise, local miners knew whereof the resolutions spoke. The newcomer was the Columbia and Stanislaus River Water Company (CSRWC), organized less than a year earlier to compete with the TCWC. Trustees of the CSRWC had held public meetings in various camps during the preceding months to drum up support. Very little actual ditchdigging had been done, however, before the mass meeting in March. According to one CSRWC trustee, John Jolly, the miners’ action against the TCWC was just what the new company needed. On the eve of the Columbia miners’ meeting, Jolly noted in his diary, “A mass meeting called for tomorrow which I trust will start our new ditch.” Jolly was not disappointed. Within days, he could write triumphantly that the “old [company] surrendered to the will of the miners,” adding that “the new [company] has distanced [the TCWC] by getting the start we so long wished for.”44

  The white miners, then, were not alone. Both local merchants and a rival water company supported their cause, and TCWC managers were forced to reduce water prices just days after the miners’ mass meeting. Merchants, as t
hey had with the initial imposition of taxes on “foreign” miners in 1850 and 1852, worried about their customers, far more of whom were miners than water company managers. In fact, the “Traders, Mechanicks and business men” in and around Columbia drafted a polite petition to the TCWC to express their collective “anxiety and alarm” over the breach between miners and company men. Unlike the miners, these merchants and their allies disclaimed “all right or disposition to intermeddle or dictate” to the TCWC how it should conduct its “own concerns,” acknowledging that “much of the prosperity that our town enjoys is justly attributable to [the company’s] enterprise.” From their ambivalent position within emerging Anglo American class relations, however, the petitioners argued that “the rates the Miners have been paying for water are higher than the diggings will justify.” The merchants closed with a deferential plea: “We most earnestly express the hope that your circumstances will permit you to reduce the price of your water.”45 The circumstances that permitted such a reduction included both the backing of the merchants and the competition offered by the CSRWC.

  In addition, the TCWC’s decision to reduce rates for the use of water probably depended on the ambivalence of men within the company itself. Many company men had come to California initially with dreams of making their fortune in the diggings, and only recently had abandoned those dreams in favor of entrepreneurial enterprise. Even as they built the Southern Mines’ grandest business venture, they remembered the backbreaking labor of mining as well as the exacting work of exclusion, whereby Anglo Americans attempted to arrogate the placers to themselves. One such man was Joseph Pownall, who collected water rents for the TCWC in the Montezuma mining district. Pownall had trained as a physician in New York and practiced medicine in the South. He went to California in 1849 at the age of thirty-one. Pownall tried his hand at mining for several years before he joined the ranks of the TCWC. Just days after the miners’ mass meeting in March of 1855, he wrote to the company secretary, concerned about the “piping times” in Columbia. Pownall reported that his own policy with Montezuma miners had been to be “as conciliatory as possible.” In fact, he had unilaterally lowered the price of water for his customers: “I took the responsibility to reduce and let the Board [of Trustees] raise the price again and censure me if they saw fit.” Calling “the great majority” of miners “honourable and high minded men,” Pownall argued that the TCWC should go so far as to reduce managers’ salaries before allowing the company’s reputation to be tarnished by a dispute with miners.46