53. Borthwick, 342–43.
54. Hinton Rowan Helper, The Land of Gold. Reality versus Fiction (Baltimore: Henry Taylor, 1855), vi, 169.
55. Fairchild, 139. On gender as performative, see Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), esp. 24–25, 33, 134–41.
56. Antonio Franco Coronel, “Cosas de California,” trans. and ed. Richard Henry Morefield, in The Mexican Adaptation in American California, 1846–1875 (1955; reprint, San Francisco: R and E Research Associates, 1971), 76–96, esp. 93–94; Derbec, 128. It is quite possible that Coronel exaggerated his cook’s profits. But even if he doubled the amount she took in each day, her earnings would have been greater than those of the average miner in 1848. See “Appendix B: Wages in the California Gold Mines,” in Paul, 349–50.
57. Perkins, 105–6.
58. Harris, 124; Silvia Marina Arrom, The Women of Mexico City, 1790–1857 (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1985), 158–59, 192–93.
59. Pérez Rosales, 78–79.
60. Helen Nye to Sister Mary, Dec. 26, 1852, Feb. 8, March 14, 1853, May 20, 1855, Nye Letters. On Chinese cooks, see also Evans, 274.
61. Doble, 58; Derbec, 142: Whipple-Haslam, 3–4.
62. Noyes, 35; Christman, 132; Gardiner, 69; Journal entries, Aug. 10, 17, 31, 1849, Osborn Journal.
63. Doble, 245; Journal entries, Sept. 9, Nov. 22, 1852, Little Journals, item 12; Journal entries, Feb. 1, 8, 1851, Allen Journals; Journal entries, March 2–3, 1850, Miller Journal.
64. Journal entry, Jan. 1, 1850, Miller Journal; Woods, 98.
65. Perkins, 157–58.
66. Gardiner, 188–89.
67. Lapp, 49–93.
68. Gerstäcker, 225.
69. On the arrival of large numbers of Chinese starting in 1852, and on the reimposition of the foreign miners’ tax, see chap. 5, “Dreams That Died.”
70. See Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (Boston: Little, Brown, 1989), 92–94; and also Paul Ong, “An Ethnic Trade: The Chinese Laundries in Early California,” Journal of Ethnic Studies 8, no. 4 (Winter 1981): 95–113.
71. Helper, 88–89, 96.
72. Ibid., esp. 36–44, 298–300. For contextualization of Helper’s dim view of the Gold Rush, see Goodman, 24, 64, 136, 179, 205, 208. Helper’s famous critique of southern slavery is The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It (New York: Burdick Brothers, 1857).
73. Borthwick, 82, 361.
74. For a rich portrait of such patterns of sociability in the twentieth century, see Paul C. P. Siu, The Chinese Laundryman: A Study in Social Isolation, ed. John Kuo Wei Tchen (1953; New York: New York Univ. Press, 1987).
75. Journal entry, Sept. 6, 1849, Osborn Journal; William McCollum, California as I Saw It. Pencillings by the Way of Its Gold and Gold Diggers. And Incidents of Travel by Land and Water, ed. Dale L. Morgan (1850; reprint, Los Gatos, Calif.: Talisman Press, 1960), 160–61.
76. Harris, 113, 123, 132–34, 136. The term “male homosocial desire,” of course, is Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s: Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1985). The misquoted line from Troilus and Cressida is “One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.” Given Harris’s exuberance about male relationships in the Gold Rush, it is telling that when I first queried literary scholars about the source of the line, all suggested that it sounded very much like Walt Whitman, though none could identify the poem or essay. Yukiko Hanawa finally found the source for me and helped me think through the implications of Harris’s misquotation, for which I am grateful. (Elsewhere Harris misquotes the line again as “one touch of whose nature made the whole world akin.”)
77. Journal entries, Sept. 25, 29, 1850, Allen Journals.
78. Journal entries, Dec. 19–20, 1849, Miller Journal. On Irish immigrants and questions of race, see Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995); David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991), esp. 133–63.
79. See Susan M. Reverby, Ordered to Care: The Dilemma of American Nursing, 1850–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987), esp. 11–21; Barbara Melosh, “The Physician’s Hand”: Work Culture and Conflict in American Nursing (Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1982), esp. 3.
80. Evans, 250–51.
81. Dexter, 27–30.
82. See, e.g., Glenda Riley, Women and Indians on the Frontier, 1825–1915 (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1984), esp. 76–81; William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), 52–58, 92.
83. Likewise, Ephraim Delano told his wife that the Indians he saw lived primarily on acorns: “the women picks them and kerreys them in baskets.” Sam Ward also “admired the ceaseless activity of the crones who went forth into the forest to gather acorns.” Journal entries, Nov. 16, 17, 1852, Little Journals; Ephraim Delano to Wife, May 15, 1851, Ephraim Delano Letters, Beinecke Library; Ward, 136.
84. Doble, 42–50. Cf. Derbec, 154–56; Noyes, 74–75; Helper, 269–70; Gerstäcker, 210–11; Doten, 1:212.
85. Derbec, 155; Helper, 268; Christman, 180.
86. Gerstäcker, 217
87. See, e.g., Ryan; and essays collected in Carnes and Griffen, and Mangan and Walvin.
88. Perlot, 230–32. See full discussion in chap. 1, “On the Eve of Emigration.”
89. Helen Nye to Sister Mary, Feb. 8, 1853, Nye Letters; Noyes, 75.
90. Journal entry, Oct. 20, 1849, Osborn Journal.
91. Gerstäcker, 217–18; Perlot, 181.
92. Ward, 51–52, 111, 125, 126–27, 136–37; George Phillips, Indians and Indian Agents: The Origins of the Reservation System in California, 1849–1852 (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1997), 111–17. For further discussion of the Mariposa War and its aftermath, see chap. 4, “Mining Gold and Making War.”
93. On the notion of vocational domesticity, see, e.g., Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1977), esp. 74. Catharine Beecher popularized the idea in her Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841), which was in its ninth printing at the time of the Gold Rush; see Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976), 151–67.
94. Journal entry, Aug. 31, 1852, Little Journals, item 12; Benjamin Kendrick to Father, Sept. 25, 1849, Benjamin Franklin Kendrick Letters, Beinecke Library. Cf. Booth, 27. A. W. Genung to Mr. and Mrs. Thomas, Feb. 14, 1852, Genung Letters.
95. Christman, 204–5.
Chapter 3: Bulls, Bears, and Dancing Boys
1. Journal entry, Dec. 25, 1852, Angus McIsaac Journal, Beinecke Library, Yale Univ., New Haven (hereafter cited as Beinecke Library). For brief quotations, see Benjamin Kendrick to Father, Sept. 25, 1849, Benjamin Franklin Kendrick Letters, Beinecke Library; Joseph Pownall to Thomas Tharp, Aug. 5, 1850, Joseph Pownall Journal and Letterbook, Pownall Papers, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif. (hereafter cited as Huntington Library); Journal entry, Sept. 7, 1850, Timothy C. Osborn Journal, Bancroft Library, Univ. of California, Berkeley (hereafter cited as Bancroft Library); Journal entry, March 27, 1851, George Allen Journals, Beinecke Library; George W. B. Evans, Mexican Gold Trail: The Journal of a Forty-Niner, ed. Glenn S. Dumke (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1945), 259; Jesse Smith to Sister Helen, Dec. 23, 1852, Lura and Jesse Smith Letters, Huntington Library. Examples of such lamentations about “society” are rife in Gold Rush personal accounts. Still, there is a less prevalent but not insignificant countertendency in the same kinds of sources for some Gold Rush participants to see themselves as involved in a different kind—for a few, even a better kind—of society. I will discuss such seemingly contradictory evidence below.
2. Here I rely on the argument developed by Denise Riley in her chapter entitled “‘The Social,’ ‘Woman,’ and Sociological Feminism,” in �
�Am I That Name?”: Feminism and the Category of “Women” in History (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1988), 44–66. In a less direct but no less crucial way, I draw on the earlier work of U.S. women’s historians such as Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976); Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1977); Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981).
3. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Seventh Census of the United States: 1850 (Washington, D.C., 1853), hereafter cited as 1850 Census.
4. J. D. Borthwick, The Gold Hunters (1857; Oyster Bay, N.Y.: Nelson Doubleday, 1917), 290.
5. Mrs. Lee Whipple-Haslam, Early Days in California: Scenes and Events of the ’50s as I Remember Them (Jamestown, Calif: Mother Lode Magnet, [1925]), 2; Jesse Smith to Sister Helen, Dec. 23, 1852, Smith Letters.
6. See, e.g., Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983), 35–40, 240, n. 4; Bruce Laurie, Artisans into Workers: Labor in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), esp. 84–86, 168–70; Herbert G. Gutman, “Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America, 1815–1919,” in Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America: Essays in American Working-Class and Social History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976), 3–78; and E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past and Present, no. 38 (Dec. 1967), 56–97.
7. Here I am influenced by Joan Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review 91, no. 5 (Dec. 1986): 1053–76, and “Deconstructing Equality-versus-Difference: Or, the Uses of Poststructuralist Theory for Feminism,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 1 (Spring 1988): 33–50.
8. My thanks to Nancy Cott and Ann Fabian for initially helping me clarify these arguments. Yukiko Hanawa and anonymous readers for Radical History Review helped me refine them even further, and for that I am very grateful.
9. See Albert L. Hurtado, Indian Survival on the California Frontier (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1988); and chap. 4, “Mining Gold and Making War.”
10. E. W. Gifford, “Central Miwok Ceremonies,” Anthropological Records 14, no. 4 (1955): 261–318, esp. 295–99, and “Miwok Cults,” University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology 18, no. 3 (1926): 391–408, esp. 397–98; and Richard Levy, “Eastern Miwok,” in Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 8, California, ed. Robert F. Heizer (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1978), 398–413, esp. 410–12.
11. Alfred Doten, The Journals of Alfred Doten, 1849–1903, 3 vols., ed. Walter Van Tilburg Clark (Reno: Univ. of Nevada Press, 1973), 1:238, 239–42.
12. Doten, 1:238, 239 (Doten’s Plymouth Rock articles are reprinted along with his diary in these edited volumes); Gifford, “Central Miwok Ceremonies,” 295–99.
13. Doten, 1:237, 240. Many thanks to Yukiko Hanawa for helping me rethink my interpretation of this event.
14. Such sources—argonauts’ personal accounts and early twentieth-century ethnographies—are also usefully read as texts caught up in their own rules of representation, their own practices of separating self and other, subject and object. In the end, they tell us as much about midnineteenth- and early twentieth-century white constructions of reality as about Miwok spirituality and sociability in the same periods. See essays collected in James Clifford and George E. Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1986).
15. On Doble’s description of Miwok women’s acorn processing, see chap. 2, “Domestic Life in the Diggings.”
16. See John Doble, John Doble’s Journal and Letters from the Mines: Mokelumne Hill, Jackson, Volcano and San Francisco, 1851–1865, ed. Charles L. Camp (Denver: Old West Publishing, 1962), 45, 48–52. Doble’s description of this event does not match precisely practices for any of the dances the anthropologist E. W. Gifford identified among early twentieth-century Miwoks. This is no surprise; Miwok rituals were syncretic and constantly evolving over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, reflecting material changes in Miwok life and practices learned from other native Californians. Still, some ritual practices and regalia survived the half century that separated the Gold Rush years from the era of ethnographic fieldwork among Miwok people. In the 1920s, Gifford described the significance of birds and their feathers in Miwok ritual practices, the most important of which was the kuksuyu ceremony, in which the main dancer impersonated a revered bird or birdlike spirit. Other dances also featured bird paraphernalia, and, according to Gifford, it was largely the presence of feathers that signified the sacredness of a dance, though Gifford himself acknowledged that the term “sacred” might not best describe what set these dances apart from others. Thus it seems safe to surmise that the preparations John Doble observed were for what might be termed a sacred dance. See Gifford, “Central Miwok Ceremonies,” and “Miwok Cults.” See also Levy, esp. 410–12.
17. Doble, 52.
18. The anthropologist was C. Hart Merriam; see his “The Mourning Ceremony of the Miwok, 1906,” reprinted in The California Indians: A Source Book, ed. R. F. Heizer and M. A. Whipple, 2d ed. (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1971), 520–32, esp. 528. See Doble, 41, 45–46, 52.
19. For more on religious themes during the Gold Rush, see Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp, Religion and Society in Frontier California (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1994).
20. John B. McGloin, S.J., ed., “A California Gold Rush Padre: New Light on the ‘Padre of Paradise Flat,’” California Historical Society Quarterly 40, no. 1 (March 1961): 49–67, esp. 58, 59.
21. William Hanchett, “The Question of Religion and the Taming of California, 1849–1854, Part I,” California Historical Society Quarterly 32, no. 1 (March 1953): 49–56, esp. 51.
22. Pedro Isidoro Combet, “Memories of California,” in We Were 49ers! Chilean Accounts of the California Gold Rush, trans. and ed. Edwin A. Beilharz and Carlos U. López (Pasadena, Calif.: Ward Ritchie Press, 1976), 151–85, esp. 164–65.
23. Borthwick, 298–99; cf. Benjamin Butler Harris, The Gila Trail: The Texas Argonauts and the California Gold Rush, ed. Richard H. Dillon (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1960), 144. Harris describes a drunken American comrade who threatened to tear down the Catholic church in San Andreas.
24. Thanks once again to Yukiko Hanawa for helping me reinterpret this event.
25. On overt and purposeful forms of resistance, see esp. chap. 4, “Mining Gold and Making War.”
26. See Charles E. Rosenberg, “Sexuality, Class, and Role in Nineteenth-Century America,” American Quarterly 35, no. 2 (May 1973): 131–53; E. Anthony Rotundo, “Learning about Manhood: Gender Ideals and the Middle-Class Family in Nineteenth-Century America,” in Manliness and Morality: Middle-Class Masculinity in Britain and America, 1800–1940, ed. J. A. Mangan and James Walvin (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1987), 35–51, and American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993); Howard Gadlin, “Private Lives and Public Order: A Critical View of the History of Intimate Relations in the U.S.,” Massachusetts Review 17 (Summer 1976): 304–30; G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Horrors of the Half-Known Life: Male Attitudes toward Women and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Harper Colophon, 1976); Clyde Griffen, “Reconstructing Masculinity from the Evangelical Revival to the Waning of Progressivism: A Speculative Synthesis,” in Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America, ed. Mark C. Carnes and Clyde Griffen (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1990), 183–204; Ryan; Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1995).
27. On miners’ declining daily yields, see Rodman W. Paul, California Gold: The Beginning of Mini
ng in the Far West (1947; reprint, Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1965), 349–52. I owe my understanding of the ambiguous place of luck in nineteenth-century perceptions of economic advancement to Ann Vincent Fabian, Card Sharps, Dream Books, and Bucket Shops: Gambling in Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1990).
28. See, e.g., sources cited n. 26 above; Cott; Sklar; Carl N. Degler, At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1980); Robert L. Griswold, Family and Divorce in California, 1850–1890: Victorian Illusions and Everyday Realities (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1982); Steven Mintz and Susan Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life (New York: Basic Books, 1988). A good first look at the impact of white women’s absence on white gold seekers appears in Andrew J. Rotter, “‘Matilda for God’s Sake Write’: Women and Families on the Argonaut Mind,” California History 58, no. 2 (Summer 1979): 128–41. See also Malcolm J. Rohrbough, Days of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the American Nation (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1997), 91–105.
29. Journal entries, April 25, May 9, 16, 23, 30, June 20, 27, 1852, P. V. Fox Journals, Beinecke Library.
30. Journal entries, July 7, Nov. 17, 1850; Feb. 2, 9, 23, March 5, 1851, Osborn Journal.
31. Journal entry, Nov. 3, 1850, Allen Journals.
32. See, e.g., Journal entries, Nov. 3, 17, 1850; Jan. 19, Feb. 23, March 10, 16, [April 27], 1851, Lemuel Herbert Journal, Amador County Archives, Jackson, Calif.
33. Daniel B. Woods, Sixteen Months at the Gold Diggings (London: Sampson Low; New York: Harper and Brothers, [1851]), 104; Enos Christman, One Man’s Gold: The Letters and Journal of a Forty-Niner, ed. Florence Morrow Christman (New York: Whittlesey House, McGraw-Hill, 1930), 181–82; Charles Peters, The Autobiography of Charles Peters (Sacramento: La Grave Co., [1915]), 16; Journal entry, May 19–25, 1851, Jason Chamberlain Journal no. 1, John Amos Chaffee and Jason Palmer Chamberlain Papers, Bancroft Library.
34. Étienne Derbec, A French Journalist in the California Gold Rush: The Letters of Étienne Derbec, ed. Abraham P. Nasatir (Georgetown, Calif.: Talisman Press, 1964), 143–44; Borthwick, 308.
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