Roaring Camp

by Susan Lee Johnson

  Crime pamphlets had been popular in the United States since the early nineteenth century; their appearance on the literary horizon coincided with the emergence of cheap, often sensationalist newspapers called penny papers, which appealed in both price and content to working men in eastern cities.3 Immigrants to California from the East would have been familiar with the popular genre, while eastern readers would have welcomed new tales from the far western frontier. And indeed, the first of these stories was printed not in California but by a New Orleans publisher who had offices in Charleston, Baltimore, and Philadelphia as well; no doubt it circulated first in such eastern and southern locales. The pamphlet told the story of Two Eras in the Life of the Felon Grovenor I. Layton. Who Was Lynched by the Vigilance Committee, at Sonora, Tuolumne County, California, June 17th, 1852. The second of these stories, however, was published in the Southern Mines, by the printer in Jackson who produced the local newspaper. It, too, told a story of crime and retribution: Murder of M. V. B. Griswold by Five Chinese Assassins; Fou Sin—the Principal . . . Convicted, and Sentenced to Be Hung at Jackson, April 16, 1858. No doubt this pamphlet circulated primarily in California.4

  Different as social relations in the Southern Mines were from those in the East, the first of these two pamphlets suggests how mightily some could struggle to incorporate those relations into stories intelligible to an eastern readership. Two Eras in the Life of the Felon Grovenor I. Layton tells a familiar tale of a respectable young man who travels from the Hudson River Valley home of his loving parents to New York City, the Anglo American capital of vice and immorality. Though Grovenor goes there to study medicine, he soon falls under the influence of a “dissolute and unprincipled young man” who introduces him to the city’s brothels, billiard saloons, and gambling houses. Then, suddenly, Grovenor’s parents succumb to small pox. What is more, he learns that his father has died insolvent, leaving Grovenor a beggar and forcing him into a career of crime. First, he forges a check. Next, he kills a man. By this time, it is the fall of 1848, and news of the gold discovery in California reaches New York. Gripped by gold fever, Grovenor forges another check in order to purchase his passage to “the El Dorado of the Pacific, the Ophir of America.” In the spring of 1849, he boards a steamer bound for Panama, accompanied by his lovely but fallen paramour, Irene (Irene, too, has met her downfall in New York, having left behind a loving family in the Mohawk Valley, only to find herself seduced and abandoned in the city, where she meets Grovenor).5

  Together, Grovenor and Irene arrive in San Francisco. There they manage a gaming house until they are run out of town by a vigilance committee for robbing and murdering a customer. So they move on to Benecia, northeast of San Francisco, and again open a gambling saloon. Here, too, they cheat and kill and must leave town. Next, Grovenor and Irene head for Sacramento, and Grovenor, under an assumed name, opens an exchange office and banking house. At first, he runs a legitimate business, but then he falls in with a gang of counterfeiters and begins to dispose of counterfeit notes to “unsuspecting miners.” Eventually, however, some do suspect Grovenor, and they set up a sting to catch him in the act of exchanging hard-earned gold dust for worthless notes on eastern banks. Again, Grovenor escapes before he can be caught, and he and Irene move on to Stockton, where he works with counterfeiters under a new assumed name. Here he leaves Irene and goes on to continue his nefarious business alone.6

  He heads for the Southern Mines, stopping at Jamestown, near Sonora. There he hears talk of some Chileans who are finding “an immensity of gold at Mormon Gulch.” Grovenor starts immediately for their camp, where he finds two men and a woman sharing a cabin and “digging with might and main.” They tell Grovenor that they have taken ten thousand dollars out of their claim in three short months. So he ingratiates himself with the Chileans, until they agree that he may join them in their labors and keep one-fourth of the gold dug thereafter. Grovenor works with them for a week, meanwhile plotting robbery. One day, he returns early to the cabin, complaining of sickness. Within an hour, the men send the woman back to the cabin to check on Grovenor. She catches him in the act of stealing their gold, and runs to the door to alert her mining partners. But Grovenor stops her and stabs her to the heart, and then rushes out to meet the men who are running from the claim. He slashes each of them to death. Then he drags the bodies into the cabin and, after gathering up the gold, sets the domicile ablaze.7

  Now Grovenor goes to Sonora, “the greater part of whose inhabitants are Chilians and Sonorians,” and puts himself up at “the best house of entertainment.” He explains that his haggard appearance and his bloodied clothing are the result of an Indian attack. Then a party of Chileans, having passed through Mormon Gulch, comes to town. They have seen the burned cabin and found human bones amid the charred timbers. They come to Sonora laden with evidence of the murders. Many suspect Grovenor, and the local vigilance committee questions him. But he cannot be linked positively to the crime until a man from Jamestown steps forward and identifies Grovenor as the person whom he had told several weeks before about Chileans who were striking it rich at Mormon Gulch. So the vigilance committee impanels a jury and swears the Jamestown man in as a witness. Then another stranger comes forward and says that he saw the suspect digging gold alongside three Chileans at Mormon Gulch. On this evidence, Grovenor is convicted of murder and sentenced to hang. Only now does Grovenor feel remorse, and he delivers these dying words before the rope is adjusted about his neck:

  Illustration from the crime pamphlet Two Eras in the Life of the Felon Grovenor I. Layton. Who Was Lynched by the Vigilance Committee, at Sonora, Tuolumne County, California, June 17th, 1852. For Robbery, Murder, and Arson, He Having Robbed Three Chilians, Two Men and One Woman, of Ten Thousand Dollars in Gold Dust, at Mormon Gulch, Murdered and Burned Them, Together with Their Cabin, May 28th, 1852. (New Orleans, Charleston, Baltimore, and Philadelphia: A. R. Orton, 1852).

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

  There was a time, I remember me, when I was innocent, and knew no guile; but a change came over the spirit of my dream, and I turned disdainfully from the beaten paths in which my fathers walked, and followed in pursuit of a phantom which tempted me on with its luring smile and siren song. . . . If this were the only crime I have stained my soul with, I might hope to be forgiven; but I have perpetrated so many crimes that I cannot hope to be forgiven, either in this, or the world to come.

  In case the reader has failed to grasp the meaning of this tale, the writer concludes that “the sad end of the felon, Grovenor I. Layton,” should be “a warning to all, and deter many from taking the first false step.”8

  In this narrative, California in general and the Southern Mines in particular are western outposts of the moral world represented by New York City—extreme outposts where a young man’s propensities toward evil go from bad to worse, where the rush for gold and the race to sin put him on a fast track to judgment. Curiously enough, Grovenor Layton may well have been a figment of that moral world’s imagination. He appears nowhere in the historical record that one would expect to find him—in local newspaper reports, for example, or in the letters and diaries of people who lived in and around Sonora in the summer of 1852, when Grovenor was supposed to have been lynched. In fact, Sonora’s vigilance committee was most active a full year earlier, in the summer of 1851, when reports of vigilante trials and executions in Sonora filled newspaper columns as far away as San Francisco.9 This suggests that the story of Grovenor Layton was not simply shaped by eastern discourses of urban danger and the perils of unseemly gain, as was many a crime pamphlet tale. His absence in the historical record suggests that the story was wholly fabricated within such discourses.10

  Yet even if eastern imaginations created Grovenor Layton’s tale, the actual particularities of social relations in the Southern Mines are among the signposts that give the narrative direction. After trouble follows him from San Francisco to Stockton, Grovenor heads to the vicini
ty of Sonora, the heart of the Southern Mines and the virtual headquarters of gold-seeking Chileans and northern Mexicans—or “Chilians and Sonorians,” as the pamphlet would have it. He learns about a party of Chilean miners, whom he finds and joins, only to rob and murder them in a week’s time. He escapes the crime scene to Sonora, where he lodges at a “house of entertainment.” Looking much the worse for wear, he blames his appearance on marauding Indians. But the miners Grovenor kills are part of a larger Chilean community, and so the crime is quickly discovered. A vigilance committee steps in and, with testimony that can place him at Mormon Gulch with the Chileans, Grovenor is convicted. Signposts drawn from life in the Southern Mines, then, help plot Grovenor’s downfall: Sonora’s multiethnic population and its public amusements, immigrant travel and the perceived threat from native peoples, the arbitration of justice by vigilance committees.

  The signposts, however, just as often as they point in historically meaningful directions, are turned upside down and backward. Put simply, vigilance committees were more concerned with punishing wrongs done to Anglo Americans than wrongs done by them, especially wrongs done by them to non–Anglo Americans. Often enough, wrongs against Anglos were perpetrated by other Anglos, so many a white man dangled from a hangman’s noose. When one did, his name filled not only newspapers but letters and diaries as well. In the summer of 1851, for example, the Sonora vigilance committee went after an Anglo named Hill and eventually lynched him. Hill’s name peppers the historical record for those months. During the same summer, however, a white man named Snow was murdered, allegedly by Mexicans. One must look long and hard to find any reference to the names of the Mexican men who were hanged by the vigilance committee for Snow’s murder. Most typical is the kind of reference the merchant William Perkins made in his diary once the summer’s hangings were over: “The summary execution of Hill and a few Mexicans has had a more wonderful effect than could have been anticipated.”11 All of this is to say that while Grovenor Layton may have been the sort of white man vigilance committees loved to hate—particularly for his bilking of innocent white miners—historically, the crime of cheating and killing Chilean gold seekers would have been an unlikely last straw to lead to a lynching.12

  This takes us back to the eastern imaginations that produced and consumed Two Eras in the Life of the Felon Grovenor I. Layton. In 1852, the region known as Southern Mines did not write its own stories—at least not stories that were consumed by mass audiences outside of California. Details of life in the Southern Mines did circulate via newspapers, emigrant letters, guidebooks, and returning gold seekers—enough so that easterners could imagine Grovenor mining with Chileans at Mormon Gulch, lying about an Indian attack, boarding at a Sonora house of entertainment, hanging by the neck from a vigilante rope. But details and stories are not the same thing. In 1852, stories about the Southern Mines were rarely indigenous tales. Generated elsewhere, such narratives took crucial details of life in the diggings and familiarized them as aspects of an essentially eastern, Anglo American story: the tale of a country boy gone to ruin in the city, which, in turn, was a tale of the moral peril men faced in an increasingly market-based economy. Viewed in this way, the teller of Grovenor’s tale was not so far off in depicting the diggings as an outpost of the urban East. The growth of cities in the nineteenth century depended on the exploitation of resources in the hinterlands.13 And just as gold moved from west to east, from country to city, in 1852, so too did information about the social relations that gold-seeking engendered. The stories easterners told about such social relations may not have made much sense to residents of the Southern Mines, but they would have helped domesticate the Gold Rush for eastern readers by assuring them that the dangers of the city and the dangers of the diggings bore a family resemblance.

  By 1858, enough such stories had been told about the Gold Rush that the event had been domesticated in both senses of the word: Anglo Americans had come to understand the Gold Rush in the context of nineteenth-century domestic ideology, and they also had claimed the event as a domestic episode—an episode in national history. That is to say that the diggings became as familiar a trope for the fevered coupling of material gain and moral hazard as the city had become—a place where a man might “make himself,” but where he also might lose himself and his moral bearings to the excesses of a changing economy. Launched from a middle-class family, as Grovenor Layton was, a young man was expected to have internalized not only the domestic values necessary to work hard, make money, and provide for a family but those that would prevent him from wanting to make too much money too fast without work, since opportunities for unseemly gain abounded.14 In the end, then, the real danger was located within individual white men. Certain settings, such as cities and mines, simply encouraged a man to abandon self-restraint or, as Grovenor put it, to turn “disdainfully from the beaten path in which my fathers walked.” Just as it was incorporated into everyday economic and social thought of the dominant, so too was the Gold Rush assimilated into narratives of nation building, so that gold seeking came to represent perils and possibilities not merely for individuals but for the American nation itself. The California state legislature aided this process by imposing a foreign miners’ tax in 1850 and again in 1852, which not only circumscribed the work of many gold seekers but also helped define gold seeking as a right of citizenship. And the lucky timing of the gold discovery—simultaneous with the 1848 signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, whereby the United States took California from Mexico—made many Americans feel that the Gold Rush was a providential gift to a favored nation. A decade later, in 1858, the event had been housebroken into just such an animal.

  By then, the Southern Mines region was telling its own tales. Whether anyone outside of California was listening is another question. The second pamphlet under consideration here was printed in the town of Jackson by the publisher of the local newspaper. And it is not only this western place of publication that distinguishes the 1858 pamphlet. Where Two Eras in the Life of the Felon Grovenor I. Layton reads as a single, continuous story, Murder of M. V. B. Griswold by Five Chinese Assassins is fragmented. Where one voice tells Grovenor Layton’s tale, several narrate the murder of Martin Van Buren Griswold. And where the Chileans in the former are mute, nameless characters, the Chinese men in the latter have names—Fou Sin and Chou Yee, for example—and they speak on their own behalf. Make no mistake: Murder of M. V. B. Griswold by Five Chinese Assassins is a pamphlet produced by white newspapermen for white readers. Nonetheless, generated as it was in the Southern Mines, the actual particularities of social relations there provide more than just signposts for a familiar story. Indeed, these particularities threaten to spawn counternarratives quite at odds with the overarching tale the pamphlet tries to tell.

  The pamphlet begins with a tribute to the murdered man, Martin Van Buren Griswold, who is the antithesis of Grovenor Layton. Although both were raised by loving parents in New York State, Martin never takes the “first false step” down the road of self-destruction. His origins are “highly respectable”; he is not only a namesake but a relative of the former president Martin Van Buren. A man “of very much more than ordinary vigor,” Martin, unlike Grovenor, when faced with moral or material danger, responds with cool strength of character. He also exhibits appropriate racial self-confidence; according to the pamphlet writer, only “the utter contempt in which he held the whole [Chinese] race” can explain Martin’s murder. His lack of regard for Chinese men, that is, “made him the more readily a victim to Asiatic cunning and treachery.” As Martin’s employer put it, in a fair fight Martin could have “whipped . . . fifty or an hundred such men as the Chinamen.”15

  When Martin leaves home at the age of twenty-one, he does not go to the city but rather embarks on a tour of the southern and western states, in order to prepare himself for “the vicissitudes of life.” He settles for a time in Milwaukee, but then joins the overland migration for California, predicting—prior to the gold discovery—that
“in less than two years the development of wealth on the Pacific slope of the Sierra Nevada . . . will loom up to an extent that will astonish the world.” His party, however, detours to Oregon, where he first hears of the gold excitement. He sails for San Francisco. From there he heads for the Northern Mines, where he works “industriously and with good judgment” and takes out “a large sum of money.” He returns to the Atlantic states, traveling through Mexico, where an altercation with “Greasers” allows Martin to demonstrate “a specimen of American prowess.” Back in New York, he feels for the last time “the kindliest influence that entwines itself about the heart of a man—the influence of HOME.” Thus fortified, Martin sets out on an arduous journey from Milwaukee to St. Paul to “the most remote stations of the Hudson Bay Company.” Eventually, he returns to California, where he spends years crisscrossing the state before settling near Jackson in Amador County. Although Martin’s “capacity, experience, [and] knowledge of the world” have fitted him to run his own business, he chooses instead to enter the employ of Horace Kilham as “general business manager and confidential clerk.” It is while working for Kilham that Martin Van Buren Griswold is murdered.16

  Unlike Two Eras in the Life of the Felon Grovenor I. Layton, which presents a seamless narrative, Murder of M. V. B. Griswold by Five Chinese Assassins ends this biographical sketch abruptly and moves on to a new section, “The Murder—The Trials, &c.” It is as if the life of Grovenor Layton leads inevitably to its ignoble end, while M. V. B. Griswold’s life in no way points to the manner of his death, so that the murder must be considered separately. This section is designed to convince the reader that “five Chinamen were present and participated, either directly or indirectly,” in killing Griswold. From the start, however, the presence of five Chinese men in this pamphlet complicates the tale. In providing their names, the writer acknowledges that “it is difficult to spell Chinese names in English so as to retain the proper sound,” foreshadowing the difficulties these men will bring to Anglo American storytelling. The writer settles on these transliterations from the Cantonese: Fou Sin and Chou Yee, for the two Amador County cooks who are friends; and Coon You, Coon See, and Ah Hung, for the three others who also seem to be acquainted. Fou Sin, Chou Yee, and Coon You, we learn, are convicted of murder and sentenced to be hanged. Ah Hung is never charged. Coon See is acquitted of murder, but convicted of the lesser charge of grand larceny. Coon See then commits suicide in his jail cell.17