Roaring Camp

by Johnson, Susan Lee

  If Doten asked about the meaning of the U.S. flag that waved above the effigy, perhaps he got no answer. If he did, he chose not to record it either in his diary or in an account he sent to his hometown newspaper in Massachusetts, the Plymouth Rock. But something about the proximity of the flag and the effigy must have troubled him. He noted the presence of both in his diary (“Old ‘Santiago’s’ tribe was . . . dancing about a flag staff, with the stars and stripes flying at the top, and a small effigy of a man hung by the neck”). But his Plymouth Rock article ignored the effigy altogether, portraying the dance as an innocent romp around the Star-Spangled Banner (“the Cosumnes tribe were dancing around a pole about twenty feet high, with a small American flag flying at the top”). Doten’s discomfort may have been well placed. Items that were displayed on poles in pota ceremonies (generally effigies and bear hides that also represented killers) always became objects of derision and violence.12

  Given this, the act of dancing around a U.S. flag during a pota ceremony was, at best, no compliment. The incorporation of the flag into the customary practice of attacking effigies suggests an understanding of the U.S. conquest as something altogether different from other tragedies that had beset Cosumnes Miwoks, tragedies that could be represented adequately by effigies of those who brought death by foul means. And, indeed, while this pota ceremony commemorated an earlier time of loss, sickness and death were everywhere in the summer of 1855 as well. Just two days before Doten attended the ceremony, for example, a native boy whom area white men called Jack—who had been adopted, abducted, or otherwise taken in by two of Doten’s friends—had died after “slowly wasting away with consumption.” Miwok women in the area, including the boy’s aunt, loudly mourned the child’s passing. Likewise, the day after the pota dance, elders brought several sick children to healers who gathered for the ceremony, in hopes of saving them from Jack’s fate.

  With death all around—no doubt occasioned by disease and hunger as much as by overt violence—the 1855 pota ceremony looks like evidence of a new means of representation, whereby a flag stood for a people who took what they wanted in the name of a nation. The crisis of representation, then, was Doten’s: he could not find a way to communicate what he had seen along the Cosumnes River to Plymouth Rock readers without challenging their understanding of the national project of westward expansion. Nor could he explain it to himself, even if he noted privately the proximity of effigy and flag. Miwoks found the flag’s presence compatible with collective memory of an earlier period of suffering, and with the losses of the present time. For Doten, the link between death and the flag was unrecognizable, or perhaps unspeakable.13

  Pota gatherings were just one of the many Miwok ceremonies and celebrations immigrant miners witnessed during the Gold Rush. Indeed, all extant accounts of such events were written by white American or European observers, who rarely knew enough about their Miwok neighbors to understand or contextualize what they saw. Half a century after the Gold Rush, at a time when Indian populations had dwindled from several thousand to several hundred and settled village life had superseded an earlier seasonal mobility, anthropologists ventured up into the Sierra foothills to make social scientific observations of Miwok ceremonies. In this, scholars relied both on native informants and on ethnographic assumptions about “primitive” cultures. Whatever their deficiencies as observers, however, white miners and, later, early anthropologists did witness Miwok ceremonies and speak with Miwok people about their meanings.14 These were ceremonies situated in time that might otherwise be lost to the historical record, given the precipitous decline and restructuring of native populations that was underway even before 1848 but that the Gold Rush itself accelerated. For historians, then, such sources are indispensable.

  John Doble, who took such pains to describe Miwok acorn processing, was also an especially careful observer of Indian ceremonies.15 When he happened upon the Miwok women grinding acorns on a limestone outcrop near the Mokelumne River in February of 1852, for example, he was watching preparations for what he described as a “big fandango.” The women themselves might have used the Miwok word kote to describe the upcoming events, though Spanish terms like “fandango” and “fiesta” would have been as familiar to them as they were to Doble. Hundreds of Indians had filed into the camp the day before, men carrying bows and arrows and women toting children as well as large, conical shaped baskets suspended from straps around their heads. No doubt the travelers were responding to an invitation from local Miwoks sent out by runners days before; the invitation took the form of a knotted string, the number of knots indicating the number of days before the kote would start. After watching the women grinding, Doble came upon Miwok men readying themselves for a dance. His description of the men’s costumes and of their procession toward the ceremonial assembly house, a round, partly underground earth lodge, suggest that they were preparing for a particularly sacred dance—this because the men were covered with a profusion of owl and hawk feathers, arranged in elaborate headdresses and glued to faces, torsos, and limbs with a mixture of pitch and grease. For Miwok people, feather regalia were enormously powerful; if they were not made or handled correctly, or if someone accidentally touched them, illness was sure to follow. So it seems likely that the dancing men Doble followed to the ceremonial lodge were involved in a ritual not meant purely for entertainment.16

  Nonetheless, plenty of entertainment went along with such a dance. Doble noted that only a hundred of those who had come for the kote could actually fit themselves into the dance lodge, and so “those outside kept time by hooping yelling singing & dancing . . . keeping up a perfect and most beautiful confusion.” No doubt Doble was more confused by what he saw than the hooping, yelling, and singing Miwok women and men who gathered outside the lodge and danced to the rhythms emanating from the foot drum inside. Still, Doble appreciated what he heard—“they keep good time . . . & some of their tunes are good”—that is, until he went back to his own camp and was kept awake by the hollow log drum into the wee hours of the morning.17

  The kote Doble observed was not a timeless expression of Miwok culture but an event situated historically. When Indians arrived for the ceremony, those coming from the lowlands, closer to the San Joaquin Valley, came in cast-off Euro-American clothes, having learned from repeated contact with immigrants that few things irked white people more than minimally clad Indians. Miwoks arriving from more mountainous areas had learned this particular method of appeasing whites imperfectly. Some men came just in loincloths and some women in simple skirts, while others sported Euro-American items in a haphazard manner that bedeviled white people—“from a shirt above to a full and fine cloth dress with calf boots & a high top beaver with a belt and revolver.” Likewise, as Indians passed a white-owned store on their way to the kote, they traded gold dust for beef and cognac. Doble noted that many gathered outside the ceremonial lodge were intoxicated (Doble himself was an expert on this subject, having just spent his twenty-fourth birthday in drunken revelry) and that some of the young men were in ill humor, picking fights with one another. One wonders if these youths were subjected to the same kinds of speeches that an anthropologist heard elders make when he attended a Miwok ceremony fifty years later: “The young men were admonished to let drink alone, to keep away from quarrelsome people, to be slow to anger; to avoid hasty replies, particularly when talking to white men who might say exasperating things.”18 Euro-American clothing, store-bought beef and cognac, white men watching sacred dances (some, like Doble, clambering to the top of the ceremonial lodge and peering down through the smoke hole)—these were signs of the times.

  While dances such as the one John Doble observed were central to Miwok spirituality, few other Gold Rush participants incorporated dance into spiritual observances. For most, this reflected distinctions some Christians made between body and soul, in which the bodily intensity of dance seemed a threat to religious rectitude. This is not to say that practicing Christians did not dance, but rather that dance
and worship for them separated easily into profane and sacred domains, respectively. In the sacred domain resided church services and other religious rites performed by clergy, as well as private and informal spiritual observances such as prayer, Bible reading, and hymn singing. Catholic and Protestant immigrants alike re-created these familiar rituals in the diggings.19

  Mexicans, Chileans, and French constituted the bulk of the Catholic population in the Southern Mines; Irish, Peruvian, German, Italian, and American-born Catholics rounded out the numbers. As one Gold Rush–era Benedictine missionary put it, “It is very difficult to obtain useful priests for this country because a priest should be able to speak at least three languages—English, Spanish, and French. Everywhere the population is a mixture.” Not all gold seekers raised Catholic were practicing Catholics in the diggings, but as the same priest explained, “Even the bad ones still want to be counted as Catholics and die as such.”20 Good or bad, by clerical standards, a majority of Catholic Gold Rush participants were concentrated in the Southern Mines. Indeed, two of the three established Catholic churches in the diggings were located in the southern towns of San Andreas and Sonora.21 Few descriptions of these early churches survive, but services held in them must have resembled one that a French-born Chilean, Pedro Isidoro Combet, attended when he took refuge from the rigors of mining down in San Jose: “Nothing could have been more impressive and picturesque than this gathering of the faithful of all Catholic nations: the types and manners all mixed together. . . . This assembly of men of many races, wearing the same kind of clothes . . . and worshipping the same God, all of this did affect me deeply.”22

  The San Jose church, located in a low-country town still dominated by Californios, featured a Spanish-speaking priest who was fluent in French. Up in the foothills, however, at the tent that served as the San Andreas church, a French priest who was fluent in Spanish officiated. When J. D. Borthwick passed through San Andreas, he noticed the structure, which was distinguished only by the wooden cross over its door. He found the interior spare, with the exception of an altar that was draped with colored cloth and covered with candlesticks, “some of brass, some of wood, but most of them regular California candlesticks—old claret and champagne bottles.” Closest to the altar stood a number of Mexican women, and behind them the church was filled with Mexican men, except for Borthwick and a few curious Anglo Americans standing near the door. Suddenly, though, two of the Anglos—“great hulking fellows,” Borthwick called them—swaggered in, making it clear “that their only object was to show supreme contempt” for the service. Borthwick himself, a native of Scotland, had little sympathy for Anglo American impudence. Thus when the Mexican congregation and their French priest dramatized that impudence, Borthwick was gleeful: “the entire congregation went down on their knees, leaving these two awkward louts standing in the middle of the church as sheepish-looking a pair of asses as one could wish to see.”23

  Here the crisis of representation belonged less to Borthwick or the Mexican churchgoers than to the “great hulking fellows” who tried to disrupt the Mass.24 That disruption was, in effect, an attempt to define the meaning of the service—that is, as a foolish exercise of piety on the part of a benighted, dark-skinned people and their foreign spiritual father. When the congregants fell to their knees, the sacredness of the space was restored, and the Anglos momentarily lost their power to establish meanings. While Mexican (and French) resistance to Anglo dominance in the diggings took more purposeful forms outside of Mass, this intervention into the control of definitions was probably unconscious—yet no less effective for being deployed in the course of everyday habits.25 Still, while Borthwick enjoyed the contest of meanings, his own sense of order was disrupted by other aspects of the scene he observed. He claimed, for example, that the Mexican churchgoers spent the rest of the Sabbath gambling. For Borthwick, this accentuated the proximity of the sacred and the profane in California—altar candles in champagne bottles, obnoxious American louts standing in a roomful of prayerful Mexicans, prayerful Mexicans leaving Mass for the gaming tables.

  Indeed, these kinds of juxtapositions were especially troubling to certain Protestant argonauts, for whom the Gold Rush itself was a site of moral peril. Such gold seekers—would-be middle-class white men from the northeastern United States—generated and preserved by far the greatest volume of primary sources that address the sort of daily concerns of interest to social historians (this from men convinced “society” was lacking in California). In fact, the act of generating those texts—letters, diaries, and reminiscences—was part of the way in which many such men tried to come to terms with the moral ambiguity of their participation in the Gold Rush. That ambiguity arose in part out of a discursive shift in the meanings of white manhood in the industrializing United States, such that self-control became one of the hallmarks of manliness. Restraint may have seemed wise to a variety of men whose lives were rendered precarious by the nation’s fitful economic transformation. But it was particularly well suited to men who aspired to the emerging middle class—master craftsmen, shopkeepers, clerks, and their sons—whose interpretation of success in the new order emphasized individualism and competition over cooperative enterprise.26

  Two aspects of Gold Rush life ensured that questions about male self-control would assume increased relevance in California. First, there was the means by which most men earned a living. Elsewhere men might find greater congruence between their own experience as economic actors and the notion that success, increasingly defined as the accumulation of capital, resulted from hard work and prudent plans. Placer mining gave men cause to dispute that belief. For one, the average daily yields of white miners declined precipitously over the boom years of the Gold Rush. In addition, though few made a fortune in California, those who did relied as much on luck as hard work. Placer mining exaggerated the economy’s capriciousness to such an extent that men could seriously question the value of self-control.27 Second, the absence of white women—and their discursive presence—contributed to debate over male restraint. At the time of the Gold Rush, northeastern Anglo American women and men were enacting the transformation of domestic life that accompanied industrialization. That shift included a new emphasis on the sentimental heterosociality of the privatized home, which entailed gendered responsibilities for its realization—for men, the diligent exercise of self-control, and for women, the application of superior moral sensibilities.28 In the diggings, then, battles raged over whether white men had either reason or ability to practice restraint when apart from their collective better half. Was the discursive presence of women alone enough to encourage self-control?

  In the absence of women, many aspiring middle-class white men from the Northeast turned to organized Protestant worship for support in their efforts to stay on the moral high road in California. Finding that support, however, was often no simple task. Sometimes trouble arose from the physical distance to the nearest services. When P. V. Fox was situated in the remote area of Chilean Gulch on a Sunday in April 1852, he complained, “There was no meeting nearer than Mokelumne Hill but I did not feel like walking five miles and back so I staid at the cabin.” The next month, when he relocated to Mokelumne Hill, he began to attend the Methodist church there regularly.29 For other men, it was not only miles that separated them from worship. Timothy Osborn wrote twice in his diary that he would gladly walk five miles on the Sabbath, if he could find but one minister in the mines who had “enough of the true Christian spirit.” His complaint may have been disingenuous, however, because when he moved down to Stockton, a bustling supply town with a number of established churches, Osborn still proved a restless soul. He attended Methodist Episcopal services there a couple of times, but spent as much time in his diary describing the “low necked dress” of a young woman in the congregation, Miss Isbell, as he did the sermon and music. By the end of the month, not even Miss Isbell could lure Osborn back to Sunday worship, as he noted in his diary, “there is but little inducement for one to sit an
hour upon anything but an easy seat and be bored with a dull stereotyped sermon.” For New England boys like Osborn, the thrill of the profane triumphed daily over the tedium of the sacred. Indeed, the eve of the following Sabbath found Osborn and a male companion window peeping at a young French woman of “fair proportions” as she undressed for bed.30

  Protestant ministers in the diggings longed for men to find relief in true religion. Some did. After several months mining at Rich Gulch in Calaveras County, George Allen went down to San Francisco to buy provisions for the winter. There he went to church and found himself “verry happy to have the privalege of meeting with Gods People and to worship him in his sanctuary once more.”31 The diary of Lemuel Herbert, however, suggests that some found more than mere happiness in Protestant worship. Herbert was a Methodist minister from Ohio who dug gold and preached salvation in the far northern reaches of the Southern Mines. At Drytown, Upper Rancheria, Fort John, and Volcano, Herbert presided over Sunday services as well as temperance meetings, the latter sometimes held in the street, where large crowds, “a mixture of every grade and colour,” would gather. Church services themselves may have drawn primarily Anglo Americans, but even on a Sunday Herbert could look out on his flock and see the faces of men whose homelands had been touched by the Protestant missionary impulse and the proliferation of market economies. On one occasion Herbert turned his gaze upon a dark-skinned man who exclaimed, “Bless God,” during the sermon, only to learn after church that the man was a Hawaiian whose father, “the king of the Island,” had sent him to New York as a youth to learn English “so as to fit him for to do business between the different countries.” As this man’s enthusiastic participation in the Sunday service suggests, Herbert tended toward ecstatic worship of the camp-meeting variety, where men shouted and cried and declared themselves “seekers of salvation.” The bonds among men who worshiped this way were strong, and yet the transience of placer mining populations meant such ties were severed regularly. On a Sunday when one of Herbert’s temperance societies was about to dissolve, the men gathered “lost all ballance and found relief in giving way to sighs sobs and gushing tears.” They sang and embraced one another and then, after they had recovered from their “passion and grief,” turned their conversation to the prospect of meeting again in heaven. “This hope cheered us,” Herbert wrote in his diary. In California, the love of God and the love of man for his fellow man, through which Christians “lost all ballance” and sought relief in each other’s arms, seemed especially compatible.32