by Fred Rosen
The following eight resolutions were offered for public approval:
1. On account of circumstances over which we have no control, we are constrained to believe that the crimes of grand larceny, burglary, and arson should be punished with death, disclaiming the right to inflict this penalty after a proper time has elapsed to obtain the voice of all the people, through the ballot box.
2. That a committee of seven be appointed to call an election of the citizens in each ward, to decide whether or not these crimes shall be punished with death, appoint the officers of the election, and define the form of the ticket.
3. That at the same time and place, a judge and sheriff shall be elected (unless one of our judges and sheriff will serve), who shall enforce the will of the people in punishing the guilty, who shall have jurisdiction only on those criminal cases above-mentioned.
4. That we pledge our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honors, to protect and defend the people’s court and officers, against any and all other jurisprudence.
5. That any person charged with crime shall have a fair and impartial trial by jury, nor shall he be deprived of the privilege of giving any evidence he can bring to prove his innocence.
6. That in case of any doubt as to the guilt of any person, he shall have the benefit of such doubt, in accordance with established usage.
7. That the people’s court shall have no jurisdiction after the next legislature has been convened five days.
8. That all expenses of such court shall be paid by the contribution of citizens.
Once again by loud acclamation the resolutions passed.
The Vigilance Committee controlled San Francisco. It was 1850, California was a state, but the seat of government was still Monterey, far south. It was therefore no surprise that San Franciscans saw the handwriting on the wall.
Soon, the vigilance organization’s ranks were swelled by the voluntary enrollment of great numbers of the best and most effective citizens. Opposition was offered at various times to the Vigilance Committee’s holding sway, usually by lawyers “who were losing a fruitful source of revenue in the defence of scoundrels.” But the vigilantes maintained their ground.
Within ten days, criminals seemed to have gotten the message. They could be hung quickly for a variety of crimes. Suddenly the crime wave stopped. Assaults, robberies, and murders were dramatically lowered. An effective and active police force was formed. The rogues were caught, killed, or kicked out of the city. Change was not felt in San Francisco alone. Taking a page out of justice in the big city, in the mining towns, vigilante committees were organized and also held sway. Those found guilty by a miners’ court were summarily punished, including by hanging.
The most famous of these hangin’ miners’ towns was Placerville. Its nickname was, and is, Hangtown.
It hadn’t taken long. Coloma was so crowded with gold seekers by the summer of 1848 that prospectors had no choice but to search elsewhere for gold. Three ranchers from the Sacramento Valley—Perry Macoon, William Daylor, and Jared Sheldon—traveled east of Coloma, ten miles down the American River, onto a branch of Walnut Creek. There they discovered pay dirt. In one week in June 1848 they took out $17,000 from a small ravine “not more than a hundred yards long by four feet wide and two or three feet deep.”
The creek tended toward dryness in the summer. The dirt had to be physically transported to water for the washing. The miners thus named their new camp “Dry Diggings.” With rumors spreading throughout the area that Dry Diggings paid a man six ounces of the gold dust every day, miners came by the droves, some even abandoning already good claims to join the second phase of the Gold Rush, to Dry Diggings. Maybe there they could get even richer.
By December 1848 fifty log cabins had been built. During the following year, the population multiplied to a total of two thousand hearty souls camped out on every conceivable patch of ground, from ravines to hillsides, in all manner of protection from the elements. There were muslin tents, the aforementioned log cabins, lean-tos with one wall opened to the wind and rain, and then the more commercial establishments—saloons, whorehouses, restaurants, gambling houses, all charging exorbitant prices, anything to get that precious gold off the miners.
Crime flourished in the lawless environment as it did in San Francisco. Here, too, people decided when enough was enough. The change occurred in January 1849, when five men entered a gambling hall without the best of intentions. They stole their way into the office of the owner, John Vivyan. They put a gun to the unlucky man’s head and rifled his office and clothing for gold.
In some way, Vivyan managed to tip off his employees, who waited for an opportunity and then crashed into the room, catching the robbers without firing a shot. The following day the five were found guilty of attempted robbery by a miners’ court and sentenced to receive thirty-nine lashes.
Public punishment for crimes was still common in many other states as well as in California; people were used to viewing it. A large crowd of miners came out the next day for the spectacle. Each of the robbers in his turn was tied to an old oak tree, and the shirt ripped off his back. The man representing the state flung his cat-o’-nine-tails made out of toughened cowhide and leather. It flashed across bare backs thirty-nine times, baring some of the flesh close to the bone.
No sooner had that sentence been carried out than new charges were made against three of the five, Manuel, a Chileño and Frenchmen Garcia and Bissi. The charges were robbery and attempted murder in Stanislaus County. Too weak to stand for an arraignment, they were taken to a nearby house to “recover” while they were tried in absentia by a lynch mob. The trial took thirty minutes, and the sentences were immediate.
Of course, that left the issue of punishment. Someone in the crowd who looked like he himself had killed a few people shouted, “Hang ’em!” The mob roared its approval. Three ropes materialized, hanging from the limb of a sturdy white oak.
Half an hour later, the condemned men, barely able to stand and their backs still raw from their public flogging, were marched out and put into the back of a wagon, which then progressed a few feet to the hanging tree. A black handkerchief was put around the head of the three condemned men. Their arms were tied behind them. At a prearranged signal, the wagon was drawn out from under them, and they dangled into eternity.
The lynchings of those men, who became known as the Stanislaus Three, are among the first recorded homicides ascribed to vigilante justice in the Gold Rush camps. Shortly after the three met their Maker, a notorious character, “Irish Dick” Crone, was hung at the same tree for gutting a man and killing him over a disagreement at cards. Other bad men also were hung for assorted crimes.
Thus Dry Diggings became infamous throughout the gold diggings as “Hangtown.”
Thirty days after the first hanging in San Francisco, “a security of life and property was felt throughout the whole length and breadth of the land, which had not existed since 1849. When, at length, order had been restored, and the courts began tardily to administer that justice for which they were designed, the Vigilance Committee, instead of executing the law themselves, acted as a people’s police, to aid the constituted authorities in detecting villains, and left their condemnation and execution to the conservators of the law.”
The state legislature passed a criminal code similar in nature to the resolutions of the San Francisco Vigilance Committee. Crime in San Francisco and the mines slowed to a manageable crawl. But that wouldn’t last for long. A man was about to emerge from the mass of “foreigners” who had come to the mines, a man who was not going to tolerate discrimination, and a man who would become a champion to his people and to oppressed people everywhere.
11.
THE FIVE JOAQUINS
Disagree as you would with whatever national policy the president of the United States set. The French were not enamored when Jefferson set Lewis and Clark on their westward trip; they knew the result would be forfeiture of their American territory. The Spanish knew even
earlier, when the colonies declared independence from Britain, that eventually that would cost them their possessions in the New World.
Regardless of the president’s policies, what no one in the world of the 1850s disagreed with was that the president of the United States told the truth. Period. The president was not a liar. President Polk’s statement assured the rest of the world that gold had been discovered in California, and neither Taylor nor his successor Fillmore, said anything to the contrary.
It was there, a holy grail now to be found. To Americans in the slums of New York; on the Kansas prairie; in the Mississippi Delta, where slaves, fully aware of the gold strike, could look up and look to the West to a place where they could be free.
Even in 1849, before California became a state, slavery wasn’t tolerated in the freewheeling Gold Rush. That’s how Nancy Gooch got her freedom. Nancy was a slave who came to California with her owners, the Monroe family of Missouri. When they got to Coloma, Nancy was given her freedom. It was either that or the Monroes would face a lynch mob. Despite its isolation from the rest of the country, California had already grown in some ways into a politically progressive place that philosophically favored the North over the South.
Nancy Gooch was an industrious person, not surprising considering that she had been a slave to white people one minute, always at their beck and call, and the next, she was free. Whether she threw up her arms and danced a jig is unlikely. Nancy was pretty level-headed and was concerned about her son Andrew Monroe. He, too, was a slave.
Andrew had been sold to a different family and was still back in Missouri. Nancy’s foremost identity was as a mother, but now, she realized, she could be a mother with a white person’s freedom to earn money and turn it toward breaking a black man’s chains. Nancy determined to earn enough money in the Gold Rush to buy Andrew’s freedom.
Looking around her, she saw people in a pitiable state. The miners lived and worked in total filth. They could certainly use some clean clothes and good grub. Nancy began hiring herself out as an independent, doing laundry and other domestic chores for the miners. She lived in a shack that didn’t cost her very much, and she had no real needs except food and drink.
It took almost a decade until Nancy had accumulated enough money to buy the freedom of her own son. Nancy contacted Andrew’s owners, negotiated a price for his freedom—and putting in something additional for Andrew’s recently taken wife, Sara Ellen—and then sent them the agreed-upon sum.
Andrew and Sara Ellen traveled over the Oregon Trail to California by covered wagon and joined Nancy Gooch in her Coloma home. It was a joyful reunion; the Monroes moved in with Nancy. Soon the family prospered. As the placer gold ran out in the late 1850s and miners went to the new boomtowns, land could be had at a low price. The Gooch Monroe family began buying land, which could be had at deflated prices. Some of the land was later turned into orchards that were worked by Andrew and his sons Pearly and Jim.
The Monroes were well liked and respected for their integrity and honesty. All through the Gold Rush boom-towns, blacks were treated most equitably. The same did not hold true for the Chinese.
In 1849, thirty-five Cantonese miners arrived at Camp Salvado to prospect. They struck it rich, pulling out thousands from the pay dirt. The thing about rich claims is that they attract prospectors who think that they, too, can strike it rich. Never mind the majority who don’t; all it takes is one for people to flock like vultures to flesh. Soon white miners came to Camp Salvado and pushed the defenseless Chinese out.
In 1850 there were three thousand Chinese miners in California. The number doubled by 1852. Americans feared the Chinese because they would do any job to survive. That lowered the wages for all. Many camps chose to banish their Chinese rather than allow them to affect their pocketbooks. The Chinese could not even expect relief from the courts.
California state courts treated the Chinese as nonentities. They were not allowed to testify. But that still didn’t stop them. The Chinese organized their own district unions to deal with disputes, to take care of the sick and infirm, and to bury their own.
The mining camps had a uniform ethnicity, but not every white man was a racist. Ironically, the American camp known as either Washingtonville or Camp Washington, located opposite Rocky Hill from Camp Salvado, accepted the outcast Chinese miners without problems. Camp Washington turned out to be a rich site. Other Chinese, who knew they would be accepted, flocked to the camp. Like the Lancaster boys, the Chinese knew that there was strength in numbers.
Unfortunately, the area they had gravitated to lacked water. The dirt had to be hauled out for cradling. Even the strong Americans who mined the placers pailed when it came to pailing dirt. But the Chinese didn’t. Whatever it took to get the gold out of the dirt, they’d do it. They even made money on claims abandoned by non-Asian miners.
The mines around Camp Washington were mostly diggings, the rich gold scattered in the dirt. Mine a hilltop or a gulch, it made no difference; it was guaranteed to be pay dirt. Hilltops as well as gulches paid good money. That was only after the dirt had been brought out by muscle and mule to the Sims Ranch or Six Bit Gulch, where a creek was used to wash the dirt.
It seemed a lot easier to apply some basic tenets of irrigation. Trenches and flumes were built to allow a connection with Woods Creek. Water thus came to the camp, and with it, a new batch of miners. As the camp grew, and with it the Chinese population, it eventually became known as Chinese Camp. Its location made Chinese Camp a transportation center. Freight and stage lines used the place as a regular stop. By that time, the mid-1850s, most of the Chinese had been forced off their claims.
That kind of prejudice was tolerated because there was a dream that despite all of that, you could still get rich regardless of your ethnicity. It didn’t make sense, given the facts, but then greed never does. As with any great upheaval, forces had been building below the surface and were now threatening to erupt. It came down to greed under the guise of racism.
From 1848 to 1851, fifteen thousand Latin Americans came to the gold fields. Most came from the Mexican state of Sonora, the rest from other parts of Mexico as well as Chile and Peru. The Mexicans and South Americans had centuries of experience as miners and easily surpassed their American competitors, who were jealous of their expertise that increased their profits.
Many of the Mexicans weren’t even keeping the majority of the gold they mined. They came as encumbered peons, day laborers paying debts to their creditors by working in the mines. The peons were paid wages. To the “native” Americans, not only were they taking up valuable claim space, they were also doing it for an absentee owner.
Added to this racist brew were the Californios, the Californians of Spanish or Mexican descent whose families went back to the mission period of previous centuries. They became reluctant American citizens by the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo. They were already recipients of white settlers’ enmity; the whites coveted their well-tended lands. It was as if, by some divine right, it belonged to them! These same Californios streamed to the mines, too, and of course, bringing their centuries-old experience, from their Spanish and Mexican cultures, were more successful than the “Americans” in mining.
When anti-Mexican and anti-Californio feelings were at their highest, the state began to act. The governor, Colonel John Mason, decided by executive order that foreigners working at the mines be treated as trespassers. That is, no foreigner could have a first “dibs” claim. They could only mine a claim after an American left it. Of course, Mason’s edict was a contradiction in terms, since all the land being mined was public land, owned by the state and federal governments. His memo to Sutter, composed by Sherman, had seen to that. Therefore, all miners were trespassing, whether they were black, white, yellow, red, or any other color. But that made no difference.
Politicians did what politicians usually do: the cowardly thing. The California state legislature passed the Foreign Miners License Tax in 1850. Whereas Mason’s edict had been ju
st that, the tax was actually codified, albeit a racist law. Foreigners who were not U.S. citizens had to pay a monthly tax of $20.
Europeans frequently managed to avoid paying because they were the right skin color. The Mexican miners, who weren’t, immediately protested. As peons they made all of $6 a month when they got lucky. Mexican-American War veterans gathered, fully armed, to help the tax collectors enforce this new law. They had no problem firing on the Mexicans, whom they still considered their enemy.
The state legislature, seeing they might just be fomenting a genocide they weren’t prepared to accept, changed the law and made it $4 a month. That still was two thirds of what the Mexicans made, leaving them barely enough for anything in a place where everything cost a lot.
Despite the prevalent racism, many U.S. citizens, particularly traders, supported the foreigners by opposing the Foreign Miners License Tax, understanding that it was based only on racial prejudice. Nonetheless, the lines between the ethnic groups had been harshly drawn. Violent encounters between the races became common. Mexicans, whom the miners referred to as “greasers,” who had disagreements with whites, could expect little relief from the courts. While thefts committed by Americans were ignored, those committed by Mexicans faced the harshest punishment.
The idea of the tax, of course, was to drive the foreigners out, particularly the Mexicans. By 1851, not coincidentally when the state legislature came to its senses and repealed this “legislation,” ten thousand of the fifteen thousand Latin Americans who had been prospecting for gold gave up and went home. The remaining five thousand faced an intense hatred from the indigenous white “culture,” which was still jealous over their mining prowess.
Among the remaining five thousand were five Mexicans who became bandits. When Governor Mason later put a bounty on them, he referred to them as the Five Joaquins, because each had Joaquin as his given name. Only one became a revolutionary legend to his people.
