Roaring Camp

by Johnson, Susan Lee

  Still, the incongruities of a pious life in the Southern Mines could be striking. Like the Catholic priest who used champagne bottles for candleholders, a Protestant minister might find himself preaching at a store with a brandy cask for a pulpit or in a gambling tent where men sat at monte tables for worship. He might have to refuse donations from a man who staged a footrace on the church’s behalf, raising funds by encouraging spectators to bet on the outcome. Even those who attended services were sometimes surprised at what they heard there. When Jason Chamberlain and John Chaffee, the partners who spent half a century together in Tuolumne County, first attended church in 1851, they listened to a Dr. Moore, who exhorted them “to lead sober temperate lives to get gold as fast as possible” and then head back east. But Moore went on to tell the congregants a number of stories, “some of them very humerous,” Chamberlain recalled, “perhaps . . . [too] much so for preachers . . . at home.” Chamberlain had an explanation for this comic sermon, however: “California is an exception to all rules of propriety every one seems to have a kind of way of his own preachers as well as others.”33

  And, indeed, gold seekers of many descriptions had ways of their own when it came to spiritual matters. In part because of the scarcity of established churches, some men gave themselves over to private devotions and informal hymn singing to a greater extent than they might have back home. The French journalist Étienne Derbec wrote that Mexican miners sometimes knelt at the foot of a tree on which they had carved a cross; there they would “celebrate the divine services in their own way.” And passing by an early quartz mine at Carson’s Creek just after a Catholic holy day in 1852, J. D. Borthwick spotted a ten-foot-high cross erected by Mexican miners and “completely clothed [with] beautiful flowers.” Such men might also sing hymns in two- or four-part harmony late into the night, punctuating the refrains, according to Derbec, with shouts and gun shots. Unlike Borthwick, who was convinced Mexican churchgoers gambled after Mass, Derbec was sure that Mexicans refrained from gaming on the Sabbath, though the latter felt such abstinence was “a great privation for them.”34 No doubt some Mexicans gambled and others did not. Of those who did not, some probably felt deprived while others were just as happy to avoid the monte tents and spend their Sundays in prayer and song.

  Likewise among Anglo Americans. As Charles Davis complained to his wife, in the diggings even godly men would “join the ranks of Satan and spend their Sabbaths with little or no restraint.” Davis exempted himself from this indictment, as would have other men who regularly set aside time for private worship. Perhaps it was not surprising that a clergyman like Daniel Woods did so. After conducting what he called “family worship” with a friend on New Year’s Day in 1850, for example, Woods exclaimed at “the refreshing fountain of comfort which springs up in the soul while kneeling before the throne of ‘our Father in heaven.’” But laymen also found fountains of comfort in private devotions, and even in quiet correspondence with pious relatives in the East. Singing hymns together could bring “silent but eloquent tears” to men’s eyes, as familiar tunes prompted thoughts of home. Scripture reading, alone or with tentmates, could do the same, particularly because Bibles were often gifts gold seekers had received, on departing for California, from female friends and relatives. As such, Bibles were tangible reminders of the female moral influence posited in nineteenth-century middle-class notions of gender. Reading correspondence from home had a similar effect. As Lucius Fairchild explained to his sister, “your good kind letters have done much towards keeping me within sight of the straight & narrow path.”35

  Keeping that path even within a white man’s peripheral vision was a constant struggle. In August of 1850, George Allen was shocked to learn that some of his fellow miners had turned against him: “I know not for what cause other than I will not Join with them in their Profanity and Vulgarity.” Allen was outraged, but also worried that he too might fall prey to evil influences. He had watched as professing Christians in the diggings had learned to “roll sin as a sweet morsel under the[i]r tong[ue]s.” For himself, Allen prayed that he would outride such temptations, and thus land his “weather beaten bark on the fair banks of deliverance.”36 This imagery calls to mind the ways in which white men of Allen’s class believed in concentrating their energies—economically, for success in the market place; genitally, for procreation; and morally, for the life hereafter. For some, then, the Gold Rush itself was incitement to profligacy. Consider the long diary entry P. V. Fox wrote on his thirty-first birthday chronicling his life to that point. Fox intertwined the economic, the sexual, and the moral, glossing over childhood and identifying the start of his life odyssey as his first acquaintance with female friends. Such contact gave him “exquisite pleasure,” he wrote, demonstrating that his “domestic organs were large or active or perhaps both.” His vital energies thus confirmed, Fox took his place in the “busy world” of men and money, and soon thereafter married and became a father. Suddenly, however, “there was a great stringency in the money market,” and Fox could not collect on debts, sell property, or satisfy his creditors. Desperate, he left for California in February of 1852. But after seven months in the mines, he had accumulated a mere $150. Meanwhile, his wife bemoaned his absence, and Fox could only conclude, “Surely I must be wicked to remain away so long . . . for the little gold I am getting.”37

  Such worrying white men, however, were surrounded by others who had indeed learned to roll sin as a sweet morsel under their tongues. For those who had, notions of sin themselves gave way to the sweetness of Gold Rush pleasures—card playing, strong drink, easy sex, and even the license to cuss with impunity. These were the “vices” the clergyman Daniel Woods felt substituted for “common amusement” in California.38 Just as men could worship outside established churches in the diggings, so too could they seek pleasure in private moments or together in twos and threes, far from the din of the monte tent or dance hall. But documenting these often relatively private practices is not easy. Those men driven to generate and preserve the kinds of primary sources most apt to shed light on the dailiness of pleasure seeking in the mines were also the men most likely to have internalized Protestant moral codes—since diary writing itself was seen as a way to keep a record of one’s soul.39 Such moral codes, if they did not prevent untoward behavior, at least discouraged men from keeping a written record of their indulgence in sex, cards, liquor, and strong language. It is easy enough to find white men’s accounts of such activity among their neighbors—particularly but by no means exclusively if their neighbors were non-Anglo—but much harder to find white men who wrote about their own private patterns of excess. Those few who did used a variety of narrative strategies to explain the relationship of their behavior to their larger sense of themselves as white, Protestant-raised, American men.

  Three examples illustrate some of the different ways in which men confronted the crisis of representation the Gold Rush wrought: the diaries of Alfred Doten, from Plymouth, Massachusetts; of John Doble, from Sugar Creek Township in southeastern Indiana; and of Timothy Osborn, raised in Edgartown, Massachusetts (on Martha’s Vineyard), but emigrated from New York City. All three men were in their early twenties; Doble and Doten, at least, were younger sons in large families. Doten’s and Osborn’s fathers seem to have been sea captains, while Doble grew up on a farm. At least two of the three had been apprenticed to a manual trade, and at least two of the three had done some clerking or bookkeeping as well. In short, all three had followed typical trajectories for midnineteenth-century northern white men who struggled to be part of the emerging middle class.40

  Of the three men, it was Alfred Doten who most reveled in what many Protestants experienced as the moral ambiguity of the Gold Rush. Although he joined with fellow passengers in singing temperance songs during his sea voyage to California, once in the diggings Doten rarely advocated self-control. The sheer number of terms Doten used to describe his drinking patterns, for example, indicates how central liquor quickly became in his lif
e. One day he might write that he had been on a “bender” or a “tall spree,” on another that he had been “tight,” or “wild,” or “obscure,” or, more to the point, “infernally drunk.” Doten does not seem to have been an inveterate gambler, but he did know how to curse. Once, when convinced Mexican men had stolen some of his gold-bearing dirt, he exhibited his talent in writing: “God damn their thieving Mexican souls eternally to the hottest corner of hell.” Needless to say, there was no love lost between Doten and many of his non-Anglo neighbors. As he recorded in his diary one day while keeping a store in Calaveras County, “I had plenty of Chinese, Mexicans, indians, and other scrubs to deal with and several drunken ones to bother me, but the day passed off without too many rows.” Still, Doten saw fit to carouse with other such men. During just one week in September 1852, for example, he got “tight” with some French men, had a “big fandango spree” with four Mexicans, and, with a friend named Alfaro and other Chileans, did both: “we had a hell of a spree and . . . got a little tight.”41

  Not all of Doten’s non-Anglo “friends” were men, however. His diary includes reference to sexual encounters with both Miwok and Mexican women, and to a contemplated encounter with a black woman.42 For instance, Doten detailed the visit of two Indian women to his store, a young mother with a baby in tow and an older woman who, given that Doten describes her as having “short stiff grizzly hair,” was probably in mourning—Miwoks cut off their hair when a close relative died. Doten claimed to have wooed the younger woman with presents and taken her into his tent, where he was “about to lay her altogether,” until the older woman burst in and “gave the young gal a devil of a blowing up.” Doten was convinced the younger woman appreciated his attentions: “She didn’t get cross at all but gave me a slap in the face and ran away laughing.” Meanwhile, the older woman shook her fist at Doten and gave him a piece of her mind in her native language, as Doten returned her fire, “cussing her in good round English.” Neither could understand the other, but their mutual displeasure was clear enough. As the women left, Doten pleaded with his would-be sexual partner in Spanish to come back to the store alone when she could. She replied that she would try, though there is no evidence that she ever returned.43

  Doten’s diary, then, offers one reading of his encounter with the young Miwok mother, a reading in keeping with the meaning-making strategies of white men who gave themselves with some enthusiasm to the moral peril of the Gold Rush. But other readings are possible, if elusive in evidential terms, and must be ventured for historical situations such as this, where so much was at stake for all involved—even the future of customary ways of living and thinking and being in the world. Without information about sexual practices and their meanings among nineteenth-century Miwoks, one can but guess at what this encounter meant to the women involved.44 Perhaps Doten was right in assuming that the younger woman was a willing partner who was thwarted only by the older woman’s intervention. Then again, maybe the two women were actually of like mind, and their visit was an elaborately planned ruse to trick a white man out of some trade goods but deny him the payment—in sexual favors—he expected. Or perhaps Doten’s advances were unwanted, the young woman’s laughter when she broke free of his embrace a way of mocking the failed assault, and her parting promise a ploy to discourage him from tracking her down later.

  Whatever the encounter meant to the women, the meaning for Doten is clear enough. Doten thought himself “quite a hunk of a boy,” and he hated for anything to dampen his ardor. On his twenty-first birthday, for example, he saluted himself, “Hurrah old man how’s your crotch rope,” and then complained because a cold kept him “not in a condition to enjoy it.” Enjoying it, it seems, was somehow easier with women he presumed would not bring their moral authority to bear upon him. While Doten maintained a chaste correspondence with a white sweetheart back home and politely pursued a young white woman in Calaveras County, his relationships with women of color were shorn of the trappings of courtship or, as he satirically put it, “happy hearts, fluttering gizzards, honey sugar.” The only potential dalliance with a non-Anglo woman that gave him pause was one proposed by a light-skinned black woman, as Doten wistfully recorded in his diary: “‘Maria’ has fell in love with me and wants me for her lover as she is a yellow gal and it would hardly do for me to marry her legally. . . . She is a real good looking girl of fine shape and no doubt a fine bedfellow.” An antislavery northerner who within a week read Uncle Tom’s Cabin for the first time, Doten seems not to have been able to reconcile this particular temptation with his belief in the moral superiority of Yankee race and class relations. No such misgivings entered into his relationships with Miwok or Mexican women, however. In fact, nothing slowed Doten down until September 7, 1855, six years after he arrived in California. While prospecting that day near Volcano, Doten was crushed from the waist down by a cave-in. He was partially paralyzed for a time, and even a month later, though he had begun to take a few steps, he noted, “no feeling in my crotch yet.” By December, still lame, he left the diggings for good.45

  John Doble was more ambivalent than Alfred Doten about mining camp life, and thus provides a second example of the ways white men negotiated the phantom “society” of Gold Rush California. There is no evidence that Doble was sexually active with women; indeed, he frowned on the kind of behavior Doten took in stride. When friends once approached an Indian camp in search of sexual partners, for example, Doble declined to accompany them. And when a cabinmate announced that he planned to have an overland emigrant woman move in without benefit of clergy, Doble would not allow it.46 Indeed, Doble seems to have been quite comfortable with the homosociality of the diggings. His relationship with James Troutman is a case in point. Nothing affected Doble more deeply than Troutman’s untimely death in September of 1853, nine months after the two moved in together in Volcano. For ten days, Doble attended his sick friend—sitting up with him each night, giving him medication, and watching as his body and then his mind succumbed to a high fever. The day Troutman died, Doble wrote in his diary, “Now am I again alone the only heart that I have found that beat in unison with mine suddenly torn from me.” Doble’s description of the heart that “beat in unison” with his own is especially instructive: “I have never met a Man in life as generally respected as was Jim. . . . he was entirely clear of all the Vices for which Cal is so noted he used strong drink in no form. . . . he made use of no profane Language at all.” The bond between the two men at first seems curious, because Doble himself was hardly “clear of all the vices” for which California was notorious. But Doble’s misgivings about these habits ran deep, and his friendship with Troutman marked a period of intense efforts at self-reformation. Troutman possessed the attribute that was so elusive in Doble’s life; he was self-control incarnate.47

  John Doble’s early months in the Southern Mines bore some resemblance to Alfred Doten’s. Doble, for example, recorded in his diary a precise definition for the miner’s “spree”: “to go the Grocery & drink as much liquor” as one could. But Doble’s particular weakness was gambling. From the start, he disapproved of the practice. After a night of poker in which he lost forty dollars, Doble confessed that he had “a love for that game” even though he knew that “Money thus gained is of no Value”—that is, it was money gained without labor. He thought he ought to quit. He did not. After a long losing streak a few months later, Doble finally won a dollar and a half. Again he thought he should quit: “If I can resist the temptation I surely will now henceforth & forever.” He could not. For six months he played only for liquor, but then joined another cash game and lost a dollar and a half. This time, he wrote in his diary, he was “determined to quit the evil practice of Gambling.” He may or may not have kept his resolve, but he recorded no more gambling in his diary. By that time, he had lived with Jim Troutman for three months, and his commitment to learning habits of restraint was at an all-time high. For Doble, then—in contrast to Doten—seasons of indulgence brought seasons of regr
et. Troutman’s death six months later shook Doble, but never again did he give in to temptations as he had during his first months in California.48

  Timothy Osborn, a third miner who dared keep record of his flirtation with vice in California, followed neither Doble’s trajectory of earnest self-reformation nor Doten’s antipathy toward the strictures of middle-class manhood. Osborn’s self-representation did not read as a triumph of the forces of good over those of evil or as a devil-may-care embrace of dissipation. Instead, his was a delicate oscillation between propriety and the pull of illicit pleasures. This back-and-forth motion takes literal shape in the way Osborn chose straightforward prose to describe most daily concerns in his diary, and more coy and allusive language to refer to situations fraught with moral ambiguity. Sometimes not even allusion was obscure enough, though, and then Osborn abandoned conventional writing altogether, substituting shorthand in its place, as he did when describing his window peeping at the naked French woman in Stockton. Osborn also used shorthand to record private, though less morally questionable, musings about white women back home on Martha’s Vineyard—marriage prospects, kisses dreamed of, memories of parting from his special favorite, Cousin Annie Coffin.49 But the remainder of the coded entries refer quite explicitly to Osborn’s curiosity about sex and the opportunities the Gold Rush offered him to indulge it.