It was confusing—the way that gender relations, race relations, and labor relations coursed into and out of customary channels in California, here carving gullies out of hard ground, there flowing in familiar waterways, whereby women waited on men, darker-skinned people served lighter-skinned people, and a few held control over the labor of many. Beyond food preparation, other kinds of domestic and personal service work became sites of such confusion. This was especially true of laundry and sewing as well as the care of convalescing men, activities that were often gendered female in immigrants’ homelands.
Washing and mending clothes was an endless preoccupation for miners, who spent much of their time shoveling dirt, sand, and gravel. Out in remote camps, men did their own laundry in rivers and streams. Although most left no record of using anything but water to clean their clothes, some used a plant of the lily family, the bulb of which has the properties of soap. John Doble may have learned this trick from a native man who stopped to wash his pants, shirt, and vest at the river where Doble was working. Likewise, Mrs. Lee Whipple-Haslam recalled that Indians taught her mother to use the soap plant, while the French journalist Derbec claimed that Mexican men often made use of such bulbs.61 Like ways of cooking, washing techniques could be shared across the various populations in the diggings. In this, native peoples and those from nearby held a premium on knowledge of how best to use the local environment.
Miners, particularly Anglos, did their laundry on Saturday afternoon, after half a day of work in the mines, or else on Sunday. Some found that digging gold was such dirty work that they had to wash themselves and their clothes more often, as Leonard Noyes recalled: “every morning we would take a swim, put on our blue drilling pants and shirt work all day in the mud go home at noon. jump into the water wash mud off, put on our flannels and let our cloathes dry while we got dinner—at night go through the same motions.” It must have been a common scene in the diggings—men bathing naked together in the river and walking about camp in flannel drawers, trousers draped over bushes and drying in the sun. Some men hated the work—both Enos Christman and Howard Gardiner called laundry “detestable”—but others seemed to revel in the washing-and-bathing ritual. Timothy Osborn, in particular, looked forward to his Saturday afternoon plunge into the slow, deep waters of the Merced River, allowing himself to be drawn out into a swift current that whirled him downstream until rapids forced him to scamper up the bank and return to his friends.62
If washing and bathing proved a site of homosocial bonds among some Anglo American men, so too did sewing. Although John Doble moaned to a female correspondent about the task—“One thing troubles us old Bachelors sorely and that is mending our clothes”—others recorded the repair of shirts, pants, and socks without complaint. Most knew that sewing was work that could be done while beans were boiling or friends were “spinning long yarns,” and it also passed the time when sickness or bad weather confined miners to their tents.63 Some even elevated the care of clothing to a moral imperative, as did William Miller when he wrote in his diary, “I am sorry to say there is one in my Camp who . . . chooses to Lay Down and Sleep rather then mend his Cloths, or eaven wash them . . . he does not Improve his time as he Should.” But it was the Reverend Woods who articulated the gendered meanings that some men could not help attaching to their rainy-day sewing circles. In January of 1850 Woods wrote, “In our visits to each other these days, like the ladies at home, we often take our sewing with us. Today I took a pair of stockings to darn, one of my shoes to mend, and the ‘Democratic Review’ to read. While we plied our needles, our tongues were equally busy speaking of mutual friends and hopes.”64 Busy tongues and needles, mutual friends and hopes—these were intimate terms for an everyday task shared among miners.
Still, while some seemed to enjoy such scenes, many jumped at the chance to turn over the care of personal belongings to someone else. More often than not, that someone else was a woman, frequently a Mexican woman, or perhaps an African American or Chinese man. In the town of Sonora, the all-male milieu of laundry work in the diggings was replaced by settings in which Mexican women washed clothing while Mexican men—and often Anglos as well—looked on. William Perkins, ever the voyeur, described one such tableau:
O, for a camara lucida to enable me to delineate some faithful pictures of mining life and scenery! I thought thus, as I sat watching a party of Mexican women, who, in a little stream behind the house were busy . . . washing clothes. There they were, all squatted on their haunches, and naked to the waist, for they are obliged to disembarrass their arms and shoulders from the folds of the rebosa. . . .
He went on to explain how Mexican men—Perkins called them “lazy Greasers” in “dirty zarapes”—lounged on the stream bank, “keeping up a continual clatter of not the most chaste conversation” with the women. Whether or not Perkins’s own participation in the scene was “chaste” was not an issue he addressed, but rather one he projected back onto the Mexican men. Although Perkins thought of himself as el amigo de los extranjeros, in fact his “friendship” with “foreign” women seems to have been based on visions of them as erotic, even animal-like others (“squatted on their haunches, and naked to the waist”). And his relationships with non-Anglo men were of a discriminating sort—French and South American men always excited his sympathies, while Mexican men often seemed to him lewd, filthy, and indolent.65
Given that Perkins is the only known chronicler of the scene in Sonora, can one read the scene from a different vantage point? From the perspective of women who toiled in the cool water while bantering with countrymen and wondering about the Anglo who watched from his window? From the perspective of the voluble men on the stream bank who relaxed while their countrywomen worked under the gaze of a “friend of foreigners”? It was a volatile combination—Mexican women, Mexican men, and Anglo men in close proximity, Anglos seemingly taking for granted that Mexican women labored, that Mexican men lounged, and that Anglo men did whatever they pleased. In a town like Sonora, where Mexicans and other Spanish- and French-speaking immigrants lived in large numbers, men like Perkins had to watch their step; leering from a window might be the extent of their intrusion into social worlds not their own.
Out in the diggings, however, in more sparsely populated areas with scattered concentrations of various immigrant men and few women at all, those who took in washing could find themselves in far more danger. Howard Gardiner, for example, recalled a story one of his partners had told him about an incident at a Mexican woman’s washhouse in Tuolumne County. The partner, Stephen, had taken his dirty clothes to this establishment, but then lost in a card game the dollar he needed to pick them up. So he borrowed a dollar back from the victor and proceeded with his three companions to “the Spanish woman’s.” The laundry doubled as a saloon, and Stephen’s friends, having had more luck at cards, bought several drinks there. According to Gardiner, the drunken Anglos “became hilarious and disorderly to an extent that offended the woman’s husband.” The Anglos, in turn, took offense at the suggestion that they were behaving badly, and one called out to another, “what had we better do with this Greaser?” The rest happened quickly; one grabbed the Mexican man, another bound his hands, and a third threw the man’s own reata over his neck and strung him up from a tree outside his own door. “This summary execution,” Gardiner claimed, “staggered Stephen,” who, fearing punishment, fled from his friends. Fear—for her own safety—also kept the Mexican woman silent; she answered all inquiries about the identity of her husband’s murderers with “quien sabe?” (who knows?).66
All this for what started as a hike to pick up a dollar’s worth of clean clothes. One cannot help wondering if the Anglos’ hilarity and disorderliness involved what William Perkins might have called “not the most chaste conversation” with the Mexican woman, provoking yet one more interethnic Gold Rush drama revolving around notions of male honor and ending—like the story of Joaquín Murrieta—with the murder of one more Mexican man. Indeed, by invoking the te
rm “greaser,” an epithet usually reserved for Mexican men, the Anglos could have been justifying their unlimited access to the personal services—domestic or otherwise—of the Mexican woman. Whatever the Anglo misbehavior that prompted the Mexican man’s anger and led eventually to the Anglo murder, it was clear that even the act of picking up freshly laundered clothes could prove deadly in the diggings.
Usually, laundry establishments were sites of more benign interactions, but ones nonetheless that bespoke some of the social hierarchies of the Gold Rush. Non-Anglo men joined Mexican women in the laundry business. In particular, those men who were subject to systematic harassment as miners, such as the Chinese, worked in washhouses, but so did other men of color. An older African American in Calaveras County, for example, ran a laundry as early as 1850. Although free blacks in the diggings did not face the strictures of the foreign miners’ tax, they did face countless daily insults and informal prohibitions, which might have encouraged entry into the commercial domestic sphere.67 Friedrich Gerstäcker recalled that the Calaveras County man charged half the going rate for shirts—twenty-five cents each rather than half a dollar each—and yet “lived exceedingly well by it.” The demand for laundry services must have been great, because when Gerstäcker went to pick up his wash at this man’s establishment, he found a huge pile of clean but unironed and unmarked shirts, which the proprietor told him to sort through on his own. In frustration, Gerstäcker randomly picked out six wrinkled shirts that he liked. The laundryman, not one to coddle his white customers, just shrugged, “Ebery gen’leman did the same.”68
As the number of Chinese immigrants to California increased after 1852, and as the state government reinstated a foreign miners’ tax (the first tax, imposed in 1850 and directed primarily at Spanish- and French-speaking miners, had been repealed), Chinese men moved into the laundry business.69 Documentation for how and why Chinese started opening washhouses is frustratingly slim. Most scholars acknowledge that the process began during the Gold Rush and assume that it is explained by the absence of women in California and the harassment that encouraged some Chinese to provide goods and services to miners rather than engaging in mining themselves. Historians argue that both ethnic antagonism and the low capital and equipment requirements of washing accounts for the prevalence of Chinese laundries in California. And they remind readers that washing was women’s, not men’s, work in South China—that the “‘Chinese laundryman’ was an American phenomenon.”70
Gold Rush sources do not reveal much more about the process. Hinton Helper, in his 1855 book The Land of Gold: Reality versus Fiction, claimed that washing clothes provided “the most steady and lucrative employment” for Chinese men. He noted a sign outside one establishment that read, “Wong Cho. Washing and Ironing—$3 per Doz.,” indicating that like the black laundryman in Calaveras County, Wong Cho charged twenty-five cents for each piece of clothing. The Chinese man, however—probably a proprietor in a larger town where he would have had competitors—also did ironing. Helper’s observations appear in a full chapter on Chinese in California, the main point of which is to suggest why “the copper of the Pacific” will likely become “as great a subject of discord and dissension as the ebony of the Atlantic.” That such race trouble, actual or potential, was also by definition gender trouble is suggested by the fact that Helper’s reflections on Chinese laundries immediately follow his discussion of the preponderance of men among Chinese immigrants, the lack of virtue among the few Chinese women in California, and the difficulty whites have in “reading” Chinese gender: “You would be puzzled to distinguish the women from the men, so inconsiderable are the differences in dress and figure.” Helper is no guide to the meanings Chinese men may have attached to their work as launderers, but his observations suggest that Chinese immigrants—like much else in the Gold Rush—generated gender and race anxiety among Anglo Americans.71 When it came to California, Helper had an ax to grind. Just as he would soon condemn southern slavery for its deleterious effects on poor whites, so too did Helper worry over the impact of the Gold Rush on the honest (white) laborer. A larger purpose of his book was to discourage emigration to the golden state, and one of his key strategies was to stress the different sorts of moral peril white women and men would face there. The heightened ambiguity of gender relations in a multiracial, predominantly male social world seemed to him heavy artillery to deploy in this battle for perceptions of the Gold Rush, and his discussion of Chinese laundry workers arises in this context.72
J. D. Borthwick, on the other hand, saw the “whole Golden Legend as one of the most wondrous episodes in the history of mankind,” and so his descriptions of Chinese washhouses had a different aim. For him, the laundrymen were picturesque—part of the exotic human landscape of Gold Rush California—even while whites might sometimes find them repugnant. Borthwick explained that “the great scarcity of washerwomen” gave “Chinese energy” room to show itself in laundry work. Like Helper, Borthwick noted the large number of washhouses with their English-language signs, but the latter also stepped within such establishments to give the reader a sense not only of the work process but also of the social relations fostered by the preponderance of Chinese in the business: “Inside these places one found two or three Chinamen ironing shirts with large flat-bottomed copper pots full of burning charcoal, and, buried in heaps of dirty clothes, half-a-dozen more, smoking, and drinking tea.”73 Like Borthwick’s description of Chinese cooking, this passage reflects as much his own ideas about Chinese men—that they were hardworking and gregarious and yet accustomed to squalor (“buried in heaps of dirty clothes”)—as it does Chinese habits. But it also suggests that washhouses were not only work sites but centers of sociability for Chinese men.74
Care of the sick proved another kind of work that encouraged men to stretch, twist, invert, or even temporarily abandon customary ideas and practices. If one ignored the near absence of all women save Miwoks in the diggings, one could see much that was familiar. Timothy Osborn thought so: “A mining camp very closely resembles a country village, in its domestic concerns . . . sickness . . . excites the enquiry of neighbors, and the little exchanges by way of mutual relief is one of the beauties of camp life.” William McCollum, a doctor from western New York State, went even further, claiming that the sick and destitute got along better in California than anywhere else in the world: “There is fellow-feeling there, a spirit of active, practical benevolence.” According to McCollum, men made charity offerings for the ill on a scale that matched the extravagance of the Gold Rush itself: “$1000 could be raised easier there . . . than $5 in any of our large villages.”75
Enthusiastic as some men could be about such “fellow-feeling” in 1849 or 1850, those who wrote reminiscences decades later could be positively enraptured. Benjamin Butler Harris, recalling the manly democracy of the diggings (and misquoting Shakespeare) was breathless: “Was this Utopia? Was it the Isle of the Blest? What largeheartedness, what floods, what gushes, what warm glows of friendship and kindness one for the other. One touch of their grand natures made them all akin.” In Harris’s memory, such male homosocial desire could transcend even racial and ethnic hatred. During the winter of 1849, scurvy was common in the mines. Harris thought the disease was particularly widespread among Mexicans, and he remembered that at one point seven hundred in his camp were “sheltered, doctored, nursed, and maintained by miners’ subscriptions alone.” Recalling this scene prompted Harris to condemn the “bigot,” the “loud-mouthed Pharisee” of the “civilized” world in favor of those “whole-souled pioneers” who constituted “a superior society.” Elsewhere Harris’s reminiscences are filled with accounts of Mexican and French resistance to the foreign miners’ tax, of Indian-immigrant conflicts, of the Australian “flood of scoundrels” that “polluted the mines” (floods could bring danger as well as pleasure), belying his romantic constructions of ubiquitous male harmony in the diggings.76 But something about the way men cared for one another prompted Osborn and McCollum
and then Harris after them to celebrate the manly benevolence they saw manifest in the mines.
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