Roaring Camp

by Johnson, Susan Lee

  At Yale as well, I was surrounded by graduate students who nurtured and challenged me, including George Chauncey, Phil Deloria, Debbie Elkin, Faulkner Fox, Amy Green, María Montoya, Katherine Morrissey, Gunther Peck, Dorothy Rony, Beryl Satter, Barbara Savage, Tom Smith, Brian Wescott, and David Yoo. Although she was a fellow graduate student, it was in her professional capacity that Ann Garland helped me through some difficult times at Yale. My dissertation reading group offered me the most thorough and thoughtful critiques I received of early versions of my work. To Michael Goldberg, Yvette Huginnie, Reeve Huston, and Karen Sawislak, a thousand thanks. A special thanks to Yvette for keeping the faith. I couldn’t have survived my years at Yale without the love of other close comrades who helped me live my daily life with dignity. In addition to many of those named above, my deepest gratitude to Adrienne Donald, Leslie Frane, Regina Kunzel, Susan Larsen, Mary Renda, and Lynn Yanis.

  I accumulated many intellectual and personal debts at the University of Michigan. A junior faculty women’s reading group gave me excellent comments on my work. The members included Elsa Barkley Brown, Miriam Bodian, Sueanne Caulfield, Laura Downs, Kali Israel, Sue Juster, Valerie Kivelson, and Kathryn Oberdeck. Thanks as well to Elizabeth Anderson, Andrea Hunter, Carol Karlsen, Terri Koreck, George Sánchez, David Scobey, John Shy, Pat Simons, and Domna Stanton. My years in Michigan were not easy ones for me personally, and no one helped me more through those times more than Abby Stewart and Elsa Barkley Brown. I miss you both. My gratitude, too, to the matchless Betty Bell for her many gifts. Several Michigan graduate students worked as research assistants at various stages in this project, including Lorena Chambers, Mary Coomes, Cathleen Craighead, Richard Kim, David Salmanson, and Peter Shulman; many, many thanks. Elizabeth Kodner (now Shook), then an undergraduate, distinguished herself as an effective research assistant for me as well—so effective, that I recruited her several years later to come to graduate school at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and also engaged her research assistance once again.

  A brief interlude at the University of California, Los Angeles, allowed me to get to know Michael Salman and Muriel McClendon, from whom I have learned much about living and working with dignity. That interlude gave me time with Deena González and Alicia Gaspar de Alba as well, from whom I also have learned a great deal. I am especially grateful to Deena for her continued support of my work.

  I completed this book after I joined the faculty of the University of Colorado at Boulder, and have called on several colleagues to read or otherwise consult with me about my work as it neared publication. Martha Hanna, Patty Limerick, Ralph Mann, and Tim Weston all felt the weight of the manuscript on their laps when it reached the last draft and saved me from important errors. I am especially grateful to Ralph Mann for his intellectual generosity toward me and this book. And for her support of and enthusiasm for my work, I am grateful, too, to Nan Alamilla Boyd. María Montoya of the University of Michigan also read key portions of the final draft and offered helpful suggestions. Katherine Morrissey of the University of Arizona read that draft as well, and provided essential assistance at the final hour, for which I offer my thanks. And over the last few years, I also have benefited from the insight of Krista Comer of Rice University.

  I consider it a singular privilege to be publishing this book with

  W. W. Norton & Company. I am more grateful than I can say to my editor, Steve Forman, for his astounding patience and his warm encouragement. I work best in silence and isolation, and Steve has honored these penchants by leaving me alone until I was ready to venture out of my cocoon. And then he shepherded the book through the production process with acuity and forbearance. I also am thankful to Don and Jean Lamm for their wonderful hospitality in Santa Fe just after I completed the book manuscript. My profound gratitude, as well, to Jacques Chazaud for the handsome maps, and to Otto Sonntag for the superb copyediting. Since I love maps and have worked as a copyeditor, I especially appreciate this labor on my behalf.

  With so much help, this should be a flawless work of scholarship. But alas, I couldn’t respond to every piece of advice these students, friends, colleagues, editors, and teachers offered me, and so difficulties, no doubt, still abound herein. Whatever remains that is graceless, contradictory, or just plain wrong is my responsibility alone. Credit for whatever is artful, coherent, and right-minded must be shared among many.

  This book openly yearns for social relations in which difference and domination are not so closely, so predictably, and so devastatingly linked to one another. While I was writing it, I happened briefly upon a human community that gave me hope for the future as well as sustenance in the here and now. This was the congregation of Christ the Shepherd Evangelical Lutheran Church in Altadena, California, a multiracial congregation that welcomes lesbian, gay, and transgender people. It is not an affluent community, but a community rich in respect, warmth, and humor—a community that does justice and loves kindness, to paraphrase a biblical admonition, as a matter of course. I am grateful to members of that church for all that I learned from them.

  I owe it to my parents, Jan Johnson and the late Bud Johnson, that I could recognize what was happening in that community of faith and yearn for the same in the world around me. After this project was completed as a dissertation but before it became a book, my father’s terminal illness began to take its slow, inexorable, and painful march toward death. Nothing I have ever witnessed has taught me as much as my father’s death—and no lessons have I so not wanted to learn. But learn them I have—not from death alone but from the grace with which my father faced it. This book is in part dedicated to his memory. It is also dedicated to my mother, who has given me an extraordinary model for living with loss and growing in grace. This is for you, too, Mom. I am grateful as well to my sister and brother, Lynne and Scott Johnson, for early on teaching me to assume nothing, to question everything—even if that questioning sometimes grew tedious for our parents. And also I thank the rest of my family: Kerrie, Ron, Mike and Caryn, Marlisa, and Michelle and Rodrigo. Special thanks to the five lights of my life, our dear grandchildren: Casey, Mason, Courtney, Michael, and Kelcey.

  No one deserves more thanks, however, than my lover and life partner, Camille Guerin-Gonzales. Also a historian, Camille has read every word of this book and talked with me not only about how to make it better but about how to make it matter. From very different life histories, from very different positions in the contemporary world, we share visions for social justice, and those visions motivate our daily work. We also love each other with abandon. This book, then, is also for her.

  Prologue

  Joaquín Murrieta and the Bandits

  Chances are whatever memory you have of the California Gold Rush depends in part on where you grew up—San Francisco, Santiago, Paris, a New England port town, or somewhere off the winding path of California Highway 49, in what tourist culture calls the gold country. It depends on the people you grew up with and the stories they told you about the past. If you are Chicano, you may have a different sense of what the Gold Rush was about than if you descend from the native peoples of interior California, or if, like me, your northern European forebears took root in the American Midwest after the Civil War. If you grew up in the United States, or received much of your formal education here, chances are your early book learning about the Gold Rush placed the event as an episode in a larger story about westward expansion, Manifest Destiny, and the inevitable march of civilization. If you are a historian, you may have accumulated more specialized knowledge about the discovery of gold in 1848 and its consequences, but chances are collective memory of the event still informs your impressions. It does mine—schoolbook pictures of abandoned ships in San Francisco’s harbor, a portrait of a bewhiskered white fellow gripping a pan in which flecks of gold catch the midday sun.

  The Gold Rush is that kind of event. Like “Civil War” or “Depression,” the term we use to describe what happened in the Sierra Nevada foothills during the
midnineteenth century rolls easily off the tongue, slips naturally into discussions of present-day concerns, particularly economic concerns. You know what a gold rush is—at least that it has something to do with sudden pecuniary gain. You probably can remember when the Gold Rush happened, if only by recalling the name of a professional football team. But even if you must consult contemporary popular culture to “date” the event, the term is still largely sufficient to itself, relatively self-referential. You can know it outside of a clear historical context in a way that you cannot, for example, know the War of 1812, the Uprising of the Twenty Thousand, or Angel (as opposed to Ellis) Island, though the tale of westward expansion is no doubt close at hand when one speaks of the Gold Rush. The event exists in that tension between memory and history described by the French historian Pierre Nora when he writes of les lieux de mémoire, roughly “sites of memory.” According to Nora, les lieux de mémoire “capture a maximum of meaning in the fewest signs”; they have a remarkable “capacity for metamorphosis, an endless recycling of their meaning.”1

  For that reason, your recollections are important. They hint at the varied uses to which the Gold Rush has been put in the last century and a half, and as such they are as much my concern as the century of scholarship that began with Charles Howard Shinn’s and Josiah Royce’s tomes of the 1880s, that continued with Rodman Paul’s and John Caughey’s volumes in the 1940s, and that finds its most recent expression in the work of Ralph Mann, J. S. Holliday, David Goodman, and Malcolm Rohrbough.2 I do not attempt to resolve the tension between memory and history that gives the Gold Rush its salience. I write within that tension, now indulging in what two scholars call the “rules of recording and interpretation that . . . belong to historical discourse,” now in the more “unreflective, erratic operations of memory.”3 I am concerned both with what happened in California after 1848 and with what the Gold Rush has come to mean.

  Since the California Gold Rush occurred in a time and place wherein diverse peoples competed over resources, notions of social order, and definitions and distributions of wealth and power, I am particularly concerned with how the event has been construed more and more narrowly over time until it has come to connote merely fast fortune. In this process, some collective memories, such as mine of the independent Anglo American prospector, have come to carry more truck than others. Likewise—in a multiethnic, multiracial social world of entrenched gender hierarchies and vast political and economic inequities—some Gold Rush recollections predictably have died quiet deaths or have been nurtured only among particular peoples, now kept on the margins, now endangered by the voracious appetite of the “main plot.” My task here, then, is not so much to construct an accurate narrative of what happened in the Sierra foothills after 1848, to create a new main plot, but to take issue with received wisdom about the Gold Rush by encouraging the proliferation of alternative plot lines, stories not customarily nourished by the dominant culture, broadly defined, or even by most historical scholarship. I start, then, with a tale born of strife in what was, in the gold era, known as the Southern Mines.

  The Southern and Northern mines, along with the Shasta-Trinity diggings in the far northwest, were California’s premier gold-producing regions after 1848.4 The northern and southern sections were both located in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. The Northern Mines constituted the drainage of the lower Sacramento River, while the Southern Mines fanned out over the drainage of the San Joaquin River—the Cosumnes, Mokelumne, Calaveras, Stanislaus, Tuolumne, and Merced rivers and their tributaries. Today, the Southern Mines would roughly comprise Amador, Calaveras, Tuolumne, and Mariposa counties. Prior to 1848 the area was home to Sierra Miwok Indians and other native peoples; within a decade, Miwok rancherías still remained, but were overshadowed by Anglo American–dominated towns like Jackson and Mokelumne Hill to the north, Sonora and Columbia in the midsection, and Coulterville and Mariposa to the south. Stockton, down in the San Joaquin Valley, was the regional supply center.

  An 1852 map of California’s Southern Mines with the supply town of Stockton. Note Spanish- and English-language place-names, as well as those derived from Miwok dialects, such as Tuolumne and Moquelumne (now usually spelled Mokelumne).

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

  It was from this southern area in 1853 that a Mexican family fled from a well-armed, state-sponsored band of Anglo rangers. Some of the Mexican men got caught, and some were killed. At least one had his head cut off; another, a three-fingered hand. Both body parts were preserved in alcohol and put on exhibit until they apparently were lost in the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906. If this story sounds familiar, you are probably a California native, a student of western or Chicano history, or an aficionada of western movies, or you have read one of the many fantastic accounts of Joaquín Murrieta. It was his head, so they say.5

  For at least two groups of people, the short life of Murrieta has become a Gold Rush parable of resistance. According to the researcher Frank Latta, who spent much of his life in search of the “historical Joaquín,” branches of the Murrieta family in the Mexican state of Sonora have sustained an oral tradition regarding Joaquín, “El Famoso,” and his lesser-known relatives for over a century. They remember the Gold Rush as a series of outrages upon their people—men driven from rich mining claims by Anglos, Jesús Carillo Murrieta murdered, his brother Joaquín Murrieta horsewhipped, Joaquín’s wife, Rosa Felíz de Murrieta, raped—outrages for which Joaquín, his brothers, and male cousins finally sought revenge, and then paid with their lives.6 Likewise, Chicano scholars in the 1970s reclaimed Joaquín Murrieta and his counterparts elsewhere in the Southwest as “los bandidos Chicanos,” social bandits whose insurrection in the face of American invasion thrilled local Mexicans as much as it horrified Anglos.7

  My impulse for beginning a study of California’s Southern Mines with the story of Joaquín Murrieta is in part guided by the uses to which his familial, political, and intellectual heirs have put his life—uses that call into question traditions invented to explain and justify the imposition of Anglo American dominance in the diggings. It is also guided by the many key historical and historiographical issues raised by the Gold Rush incidence of Mexican insurgency and by the separate but related construction of the problem of Mexican banditry. And because Murrieta met his fate in 1853, roughly midway through the period under study here, his activities serve as a benchmark for the changes that characterized the Southern Mines from the discovery of gold in 1848 to the departure of gold seekers for new western bonanzas starting in 1858. That the alleged banditry of Murrieta and his relatives came at a moment of constricted economic opportunity for most Gold Rush participants is easily established. That it also marked the culmination and ultimate demise of armed resistance to Anglo rule by disenfranchised peoples in the mines is only a little more difficult to document—as is the contention that Anglos’ hysterical response to perceived brigands in their midst indicated the fragility of that rule before 1853. That the showdown between Murrieta’s men and the California Rangers was as well a desperate struggle over the content of gender (what was it to be a woman or a man?) and entitlement to work (who had a right to get a living from the earth?) is less evident in what has been written to date about Mexican banditry. But these issues, along with the more often asked and still crucial questions of opportunity and insurrection, guide my reading of the events of 1853.

  As near as anyone can tell, people who went by the name of Murrieta had been migrating north toward what became the Mexican state of Sonora for over three centuries by the time of the Gold Rush, with long periods of residence in the present-day states of Michoacán and Sinaloa. Family tradition identifies the forebears of Joaquín Murrieta as pobladores, pioneers, who stayed in the northern and western reaches of what was, until 1821, part of the Spanish empire. By the time they settled in southern Sonora, family members recall, the Murrietas engaged regularly in three activities—digging gold, r
aising stock, and fighting Indians.8

  That one collective memory suggests the ways in which people named Murrieta have conceived of their past and the ways in which historians might further understand it. First, it is a past lived by women and men related to one another by marriage and by what is called blood; that is, it is a familial past of cousins, siblings, spouses, grandparents. Second, it is a past remembered primarily through the activities of men—mining, ranching, warring—and only incidentally through the deeds of women.9 Third, a historian might note, the Murrieta past is one of people living on the periphery, making commodities of natural resources and sending them off to more populated areas. Finally, it is a past of frontier people, of those in the New World who vied with native peoples for control of the land. This is the background against which occurred the troubles in California.

  No written records document the Murrietas’ response to news of the Gold Rush. But oral tradition places at least one Murrieta, a half brother to Joaquín, in the diggings just months after the discovery of gold at Sutter’s mill in January 1848. He would have been among compatriots: Mexicans from Sonora were among the first to arrive, following close on the heels of Californios and South Americans, as well as assorted North Americans and Europeans already in the territory.10 Within a year, a dozen family members followed, among them Rosa Felíz de Murrieta and her young husband, Joaquín. Rosa may have been the only woman in the party, but on the trail and in the mines she would not have been all that exceptional. Mexican women accompanied their menfolk to the diggings more frequently than women of any other immigrant group. After all, California was not only close to Mexico; until recently it had been part of Mexico.11 Once in the gold region, the Murrieta clan, like a majority of Mexican gold seekers, went to work in the Southern Mines.12