26. Ibid., April 24, 1858 (the State Journal note is quoted here).
27. See Pamela Herr and Mary Lee Spence, eds., The Letters of Jessie Benton Frémont (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1993), esp. 185, 234, 235, n. 3, 334–35.
28. Kevin Starr, Americans and the California Dream, 1850–1915 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986), 49–50.
29. Harte’s story is often reprinted. For the original, see Overland Monthly, 1st ser., 3 (1869). A useful collection of Harte’s Gold Rush stories is Bret Harte’s Gold Rush, ed. Reuben H. Margolin (Berkeley, Calif.: Heyday Books, 1997).
30. Chamberlain and Chaffee are introduced in chap. 1, “On the Eve of Emigration.” Their lives are documented in the John Amos Chaffee and Jason Palmer Chamberlain Papers, Bancroft Library, Univ. of California, Berkeley; and Jason P. Chamberlain Correspondence, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif. On the connection between “Tennessee’s Partner” and Chamberlain and Chaffee, see Fred Stocking, “The Passing of ‘Tennessee’ and his Partner,” Overland Monthly, 2d ser., 42 (1903): 539–43; Fletcher Stokes, “Fred Stocking and His Service to California Literature,” Overland Monthly, 2d ser., 59 (1912): 105–14; and James G. White, “The Death of Tennessee’s Pardner: The True Story of the Death of Jason P. Chamberlain,” Tuolumne County Historical Society Quarterly 4, no. 3 (Jan.–March 1965): 122–24. My thanks to the Tuolumne County historian Carlo M. De Ferrari for conversations about Chaffee and Chamberlain. Mr. De Ferrari grew up near the men’s homestead, and no doubt knows more about them than any other living person.
31. See, e.g., Jason Chamberlain to [Bicknell], Nov. 23, 1897, Chaffee and Chamberlain Papers. In this particular letter, Chamberlain also explains the origins of his and Chaffee’s association with the story: “Bret Harte was connected with the Overland Monthly and we had a friend and old Partner that was secretary of the company Bret Harte told our friend he was going to write a story and call it Tennessee’s Partner Our Friend said he knew a character that would just fill the bill for Tennessee’s Partner and when Chaffee went to the City a year ago he was introduced as Tennessee’s Partner and was a big surprise to the Partner as he had never heard any thing about the matter before.”
32. See Guest Book (1895–1903), Chaffee and Chamberlain Papers. The guest book entries quoted are dated June 9, 11, and 20, 1895. Similar entries continue through 1903, when both men died. In his discussion of the making of a gay male world in New York City’s Greenwich Village in this period, George Chauncey notes that “in some contexts calling men ‘artistic’ became code for calling them homosexual.” Although this was quite a different historical context—rural and western—most of the travelers who stopped at Chamberlain and Chaffee’s on their way to Yosemite and who wrote in the guest book were from urban areas where such semiotic codes were being developed. Of course, almost no one would have used the term “homosexual” to describe the relationship between Chamberlain and Chaffee at the turn of the century. But I think it not unlikely that future research, by tracing the visitors who wrote in Chamberlain and Chaffee’s guest book, will be able to link the partners to regional variants of the emerging gay worlds Chauncey documents. See Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994), passim and esp. 229. Even more relevant, Jonathan Ned Katz is engaging in a crucial study of intimate relationships between men in the nineteenth century, in which he is uncovering both the varieties of male same-sex bonds and the range of language used to describe those bonds. For example, college-educated men frequently used references to “Damon and Pythias”—and other famous male couples, historical and mythological, of ancient Greece and Rome—to signify intimate male relationships, as travelers did when they visited Chamberlain and Chaffee. Similarly, visitors referred to the two men as “David and Jonathan,” a biblical reference commonly used to denote male intimacies in the nineteenth century. In addition to the guest book entries cited above, see, e.g., those dated June 23 and July 9, 1903. See Katz, “Coming to Terms: Conceptualizing Men’s Erotic and Affectional Relations with Men in the United States, 1820–1892,” in A Queer World: The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Martin Duberman (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1997), 216–35, esp. 221.
33. Jason Chamberlain Diary no. 38 (1899), Chaffee and Chamberlain Papers.
34. Entry dated June 27, 1903, Guest Book, Chaffee and Chamberlain Papers.
35. Diary entries, Aug. 2, Oct. 16, 1903, Jason Chamberlain Diary no. 42, Chaffee and Chamberlain Papers; and White.
36. This story is also often reprinted. For the original, see Overland Monthly, 1st ser., 1 (1868). For another reading of this story, see Blake Allmendinger, Ten Most Wanted: The New Western Literature (New York: Routledge, 1998), 65–78.
37. See Erwin G. Gudde, California Gold Camps, ed. Elisabeth K. Gudde (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1975), 293.
38. Inquest [Unknown Infant] (1858), Inquest Records, Calaveras County, Calaveras County Museum and Archives, San Andreas, Calif.
39. Gudde, 232–33. For a good account of social relations in the Murphys area, see Leonard Withington Noyes Reminiscences, Essex Institute, Salem, Mass., transcription at Calaveras County Museum and Archives, San Andreas, Calif.
40. For related arguments, see Richard White, Remembering Ahanagran: Storytelling in a Family’s Past (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998).
41. Here my argument is influenced by Camille Guerin-Gonzales, Mexican Workers and American Dreams: Immigration, Repatriation, and California Farm Labor, 1900–1939 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1994), esp. 2–8, and by years of conversation with the author that are stretching into a lifetime.
42. Some of Harte’s stories that focus on Chinese characters, even as they helped codify stereotypes, also advanced critiques of white anti-Chinese activity (critiques that frequently were not recognized and certainly were not shared by many readers). See Takaki, 104–8; Jonathan D. Spence, The Chan’s Great Continent: China in Western Minds (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 126–29, 134–39.
43. The work in progress of David Glassberg, Department of History, Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst, will help immeasurably in understanding sites of memory in the “gold country”; e.g., “Remapping the Gold Country” (paper presented at the Western History Association Annual Conference, Sacramento, Calif., Oct. 16, 1998).
44. I attended this commemorative celebration in Oct. 1991. Organizers produced a pamphlet entitled Return to Gold Mountain: The Life of the Early Chinese in California (Sacramento: Chinese American Council of Sacramento, 1991). The festival was conceived by Peter C. Y. Leung, Asian American Studies, Univ. of California, Davis, who also served as co-chair of the planning committee. Wesley Yee chaired the planning committee.
45. I have not visited the Del Rey Mural, but it is reproduced, described, and analyzed in Signs from the Heart: California Chicano Murals, ed. Eva Sperling Cockcroft and Holly Barnet-Sánchez (Venice, Calif.: Social and Public Art Resource Center, 1990; Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1993), 22, 26–27.
46. I have visited this park, which is located off Highway 88 near Jackson, many times. The State of California produces a useful brochure about the park entitled “Chaw’se, Indian Grinding Rock State Historic Park,” California Department of Parks and Recreation, Sacramento, 1994. The periodical News from Native California (published by Heyday Books in Berkeley, Calif.) prints quarterly events calendars in which such gatherings as the Big Time festivities are listed.
Selected Bibliography
I. Archival and Manuscript Sources
Amador County Archives, Jackson, Calif.
Herbert, Lemuel. Journal.
The People v. A. C. Brown, E. H. Williams, Hiram Allen, T. Hinckley, and Ellis Evans (1854), Amador County Court of Sessions.
Proceedings of a Meeting of the People of Lower Mocalime Bar.
Amador County Courthouse, Jackson, Calif.
County Court Records.
District Court Records.
/>
Bancroft Library, Univ. of California, Berkeley
Bowen, Ben. Journal.
Brainard, Clementine H. Journal.
Chaffee, John Amos, and Jason Palmer Chamberlain. Papers and Correspondence.
Franklin, Lucy A. (Harrison). Papers and Correspondence.
Osborn, Timothy C. Journal.
Pownall Family Papers.
Tuolumne County Water Company. Papers and Correspondence.
Beinecke Library, Yale Univ., New Haven, Conn.
Allen, George W. Journals.
Bourne, Julia A. C. Correspondence.
Chase, Nathan. Correspondence.
Davis, Charles. Correspondence.
Delano, Ephraim. Correspondence.
Flagg, Josiah Foster. Correspondence.
Fox, P. V. Journals.
Genung, A. W. Correspondence.
Kendrick, Benjamin Franklin. Correspondence.
Little, Moses F. Journals.
McIssac, Angus. Journal.
Miller, William W. Journal.
Nye, Helen. Correspondence.
Post, J. H. Correspondence.
Spicer, Julius A. Correspondence.
Watson, Nelson. Correspondence.
Calaveras County Museum and Archives, San Andreas, Calif.
Calaveras County Court Records, District Court Cases.
Calaveras County Court Records, Inquests.
Noyes, Leonard Withington. Reminiscences. Transcription of original from Essex Institute, Salem, Mass.
California State Library, Sacramento, Calif.
Amador County Legal Records.
California Legal Records.
Délèpine, Antoine Alphonse. Papers and Correspondence.
Gilman, Thomas. Papers.
Laws of Chinese Camp Relating to the Mines and Mining Claims.
Lee, Harriet Jane (Kirtland). Journal.
Pennell, William Doyle. Correspondence.
Tuolumne County Records.
Tuolumne County Water Company Papers.
Holt-Atherton Center for Western Studies, Univ. of the Pacific, Stockton, Calif.
Baker, John W. H. Correspondence.
Brame Papers. Effie Johnston Collection.
Wallis, John. Journal.
Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif.
California Lettersheet Facsimiles.
Chamberlain, Jason P. Correspondence.
Hovey, John. Journal.
_____. “Historical Account of the troubles between the Chilian and American Miners in the Calaveras Mining District”
_____. “Account of the troubles between the American Miners and the Frenchmen of the Garde Mobile at Mokelumne Hill, Calif.”
Mandeville, James Wylie. Papers and Correspondence.
Martenet, Jefferson. Papers and Correspondence.
Pownall, Joseph. Papers and Correspondence.
Smith, Lura and Jesse R. Correspondence.
Mariposa Museum and History Center, Mariposa, Calif.
Appling Family File.
Bernhard-Patterson Family File.
Clark Family File.
Counts Family File.
Mariposa County Courthouse, Mariposa, Calif.
District Court Records.
Court of Sessions Records.
Tuolumne County Courthouse, Sonora, Calif.
District Court Records.
Court of Sessions Records.
II. Government Documents
California Legislature. Journals of the Senate and Assembly. Journal of the Third Session of the Legislature of the State of California. San Francisco, 1852.
U.S. Bureau of the Census. The Seventh Census of the United States: 1850. Washington, D.C., 1853.
_____. Seventh Federal Population Census, 1850. National Archives. Washington, D.C. RG-29, M-432, reels 33–35.
_____. Population of the United States in 1860; Compiled from . . . the Eighth Census. Washington, D.C., 1864.
III. Newspapers
Alta California (San Francisco), scattered issues, 1849–58.
Amador Weekly Ledger (Jackson) (continues Weekly Ledger), 1857–58.
The Golden Era (San Francisco), scattered issues, 1852–57.
Stockton Times, 1850–51.
San Joaquin Republican (continues Stockton Times), 1851–58.
San Francisco Chronicle, scattered issues, 1936.
Volcano Weekly Ledger, 1855–57.
Weekly Ledger (Jackson) (continues Volcano Weekly Ledger), 1857.
IV. Published Primary Sources
Ayers, James J. Gold and Sunshine: Reminiscences of Early California. Boston: Richard G. Badger, Gorham Press, 1922.
Booth, Edmund. Edmund Booth, Forty-Niner: The Life Story of a Deaf Pioneer. Stockton, Calif.: San Joaquin Pioneer and Historical Society, 1953.
Borthwick, J. D. The Gold Hunters. 1857. Oyster Bay, N.Y.: Nelson Doubleday, 1917.
Bunnell, Lafayette Houghton. Discovery of the Yosemite and the Indian War of 1851 Which Led to That Event. 1880. Yosemite National Park, Calif.: Yosemite Association, 1990.
Burns, Walter Noble. The Robin Hood of El Dorado. New York: Coward-McCann, [1932].
Carson, James H. Early Recollections of the Mines and a Description of the Great Tulare Valley. Stockton, Calif.: [San Joaquin Republican], 1852.
Christman, Enos. One Man’s Gold: The Letters and Journal of a Forty-Niner. Edited by Florence Morrow Christman. New York: Whittlesey House, McGraw-Hill, 1930.
Cleaveland, E. L. Hasting to Be Rich. A Sermon Occasioned by the Present Excitement Respecting the Gold of California, Preached in the Cities of New Haven and Bridgeport, Jan. and Feb. 1849. New Haven, Conn.: J. H. Benham, 1849.
Colton, Walter. Three Years in California. New York: A. S. Barnes, 1850.
Combet, Pedro Isidoro. “Memories of California.” In We Were 49ers! Chilean Accounts of the California Gold Rush. Translated and edited by Edwin A. Beilharz and Carlos U. López. Pasadena, Calif.: Ward Ritchie Press, 1976.
Coronel, Antonio Franco. “Cosas de California.” Translated and edited by Richard Henry Morefield. In The Mexican Adaptation in American California, 1846–1875. 1955. Reprint, San Francisco: R and E Research Associates, 1971.
Cossley-Batt, Jill L. The Last of the California Rangers. New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1928.
Dart, John Paul. “A Mississippian in the Gold Fields: The Letters of John Paul Dart.” Edited by Howard Mitcham. California Historical Society Quarterly 35, no. 3 (Sept. 1956): 205–31.
Délèpine, Alphonse Antoine. To My Children: A Simple Narrative of My Travels. Sonora, Calif.: Banner Printing Co. for Harold Mojonnier, 1963.
Derbec, Étienne. A French Journalist in the California Gold Rush: The Letters of Étienne Derbec. Edited by Abraham P. Nasatir. Georgetown, Calif.: Talisman Press, 1964.
Dexter, A. Hersey Early Days in California. Denver: Tribune-Republican Press, 1886.
Doble, John. John Doble’s Journal and Letters from the Mines: Mokelumne Hill, Jackson, Volcano and San Francisco, 1851–1865. Edited by Charles L. Camp. Denver: Old West Publishing, 1962.
“Documents: California Freedom Papers.” Journal of Negro History 3, no. 1 (Jan. 1918): 45–51.
Doten, Alfred. The Journals of Alfred Doten, 1849–1903. 3 vols. Edited by Walter Van Tilburg Clark. Reno: Univ. of Nevada Press, 1973.
Eccleston, Robert. The Mariposa Indian War, 1850–1851: Diaries of Robert Eccleston: The California Gold Rush, Yosemite, and the High Sierra. Edited by C. Gregory Crampton. Salt Lake City: Univ. of Utah Press, 1957.
Evans, George W. B. Mexican Gold Trail: The Journal of a Forty-Niner. Edited by Glenn S. Dumke. San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1945.
Fairchild, Lucius. California Letters of Lucius Fairchild. Edited by Joseph Schafer. Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1931.
Frémont, Elizabeth Benton. Recollections of Elizabeth Benton Frémont. Compiled by I. T. Martin. New York: F. H. Hitchcock, 1912.
Frémont, Jessie Benton. Far-West Sketches. Boston
: D. Lothrop, 1890.
_____. The Letters of Jesse Benton Frémont. Edited by Pamela Herr and Mary Lee Spence. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1993.
Frémont, John Charles. The Expeditions of John Charles Frémont. Vol. 2, The Bear Flag Revolt and the Court-Martial. Edited by Mary Lee Spence and Donald Jackson. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1973.
_____. The Expeditions of John Charles Frémont. Vol. 3, Travels from 1848 to 1854. Edited by Mary Lee Spence. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1984.
Gardiner, Howard C. In Pursuit of the Golden Dream: Reminiscences of San Francisco and the Northern and Southern Mines, 1849–1857. Edited by Dale L. Morgan. Stoughton, Mass.: Western Hemisphere, 1970.
Gerstäcker, Friedrich W. C. “The French Revolution.” Translated by George Cosgrave. California Historical Society Quarterly 17, no. 1 (March 1938): 3–17.
_____. Narrative of a Journey round the World. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1853.
Gonzales, Rodolfo. I Am Joaquín––Yo soy Joaquín: An Epic Poem. 1967. Reprint, New York: Bantam Books, 1972.
Gunn, Lewis C., and Elizabeth Le Breton Gunn. Records of a California Family: Journals and Letters of Lewis C. Gunn and Elizabeth Le Breton Gunn. Edited by Anna Lee Marston. San Diego: n.p., 1928.
Harlan, Jacob Wright. California ’46 to ’88. 1883. Oakland: n.p., 1896.
Harris, Benjamin Butler. The Gila Trail: The Texas Argonauts and the California Gold Rush. Edited by Richard H. Dillon. Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1960.
Harte, Bret. Bret Harte’s Gold Rush. Edited by Reuben H. Margolin. Berkeley, Calif.: Heyday Books, 1997.
_____. “The Luck of Roaring Camp.” Overland Monthly, 1st ser., 1 (1868).
_____. “Tennessee’s Partner.” Overland Monthly, 1st ser., 3 (1869).
Hays, Lorena. To the Land of Gold and Wickedness: The 1848–59 Diary of Lorena L. Hays. Edited by Jeanne Hamilton Watson. St. Louis: Patrice Press, 1988.
Heckendorn, J., and W. A. Wilson. Miners and Business Men’s Directory for the Year Commencing January 1st, 1856. Embracing a General Directory of the Citizens of Tuolumne...Together with the Mining Laws of Each District, a Description of the Different Camps, and Other Interesting Statistical Matter. Columbia, Calif.: Clipper Office, 1856.
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