Roaring Camp

by Johnson, Susan Lee

  97. Borthwick, 276–83.

  98. Ibid.; Marryat, 131.

  99. For an overview, see Lisbeth Haas, “War in California, 1846–1848,” in Special Issue: Contested Eden: California before the Gold Rush, California History 76, nos. 2 and 3 (Summer and Fall 1997): 331–55.

  Chapter 4: Mining Gold and Making War

  1. California Gold Rush scholarship includes Charles Howard Shinn, Mining Camps: A Study in American Frontier Government, ed. Rodman W. Paul (1884; reprint, Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1970); Josiah Royce, California, from the Conquest in 1846 to the Second Vigilance Committee in San Francisco: A Study in American Character (1886; reprint, Santa Barbara, Calif.: Peregrine, 1970); Rodman W. Paul, California Gold: The Beginning of Mining in the Far West (1947; reprint, Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1965); John Walton Caughey, The California Gold Rush (originally titled Gold Is the Cornerstone) (1948; reprint, Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1975); Ralph Mann, After the Gold Rush: Society in Grass Valley and Nevada City, California, 1849–1870 (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1982); David Goodman, Gold Seeking: Victoria and California in the 1850s (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1994); and Malcolm J. Rohrbough, Days of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the American Nation (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1997). Of the older works, only Royce’s is concerned with what late twentieth-century historians would consider issues of social context and cultural meaning. All of the more recent works—those of Mann, Goodman, and Rohrbough—to varying degrees address such issues, and I have been guided by their approaches. My own approach centers issues of gender and race differently and sees the Gold Rush as a global as well as a national event.

  2. The best account of these matters is found in Paul, 50–68, 91–123. On later economic development and class formation in the Southern Mines, see chap. 5, “Dreams That Died.”

  3. See Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970), esp. 11–75, quotation on 17.

  4. Cf. Tomás Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1994).

  5. Discussion based on Rudolph M. Lapp, Blacks in Gold Rush California (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1977), esp. 126–57. See also Eugene H. Berwanger, The Frontier against Slavery: Western Anti-Negro Prejudice and the Slavery Extension Controversy (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1967), 60–77.

  6. Robert Givens to Father, Sept. 10, 1852, Robert Givens Letters, Bancroft Library, Univ. of California, Berkeley (hereafter cited as Bancroft Library), quoted in Lapp, 131, and see 293, n. 11.

  7. Journal entry, Aug. 23, 1850, Timothy C. Osborn Journal, Bancroft Library.

  8. Letter to Wife, May 20, 1853, Charles Davis Letters, Beinecke Library, Yale Univ., New Haven (hereafter cited as Beinecke Library). Cf. Letter to Wife, Jan. 6, 1853.

  9. On southern trails, see Ralph Bieber, ed., Southern Trails to California in 1849 (Glendale, Calif.: Arthur H. Clark, 1937), 17–62; Benjamin Butler Harris, The Gila Trail: The Texas Argonauts and the California Gold Rush, ed. Richard H. Dillon (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1960); and George W. B. Evans, Mexican Gold Trail: The Journal of a Forty-Niner, ed. Glenn S. Dumke (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1945).

  10. U.S. Bureau of the Census, The Seventh Census of the United States: 1850 (Washington, D.C., 1853); and U.S. Bureau of the Census, Seventh Federal Population Census, 1850, National Archives, Washington, D.C., RG-29, M-432, reels 33–35, esp. reel 33 (Mariposa County).

  11. Lapp, 126–57.

  12. See Bill of Sale, dated Aug. 17, 1852, folder 1, and Tuolumne County Tax Receipts, 1857–1907, folder 13, in Thomas Gilman Collection, box 353, California State Library, Sacramento; and “Documents: California Freedom Papers,” Journal of Negro History 3, no. 1 (Jan. 1918): 45–51, esp. 48–49. On the “Sunday claims,” see Leonard Withington Noyes Reminiscences, Essex Institute, Salem, Mass., transcription at Calaveras County Museum and Archives, San Andreas, Calif., esp. 44.

  13. The following account is derived from Carlo M. De Ferrari, “A Brief History of Stephen Spencer Hill: Fugitive from Labor,” appended to John Jolly, Gold Spring Diary: The Journal of John Jolly, ed. De Ferrari (Sonora, Calif.: Tuolumne County Historical Society, 1966), 125–42. De Ferrari’s account is based on thorough research in local court records, newspaper articles, and family reminiscences. Stephen Spencer Hill and his master Wood Tucker are introduced in chap. 1, “On the Eve of Emigration.”

  14. Jolly, 66.

  15. San Joaquin Republican (Stockton), Sept. 25, 1854, quoted in De Ferrari, “A Brief History,” 138.

  16. James Williams, Life and Adventures of James Williams, a Fugitive Slave, with a Full Description of the Underground Railroad, 3d ed. (San Francisco: Women’s Union Print, 1874; reprint, San Francisco: R and E Research Associates, 1969), 34.

  17. Journal entries, Oct. 13, 20, 22, 1849, William W. Miller Diary, Beinecke Library.

  18. Charles Davis to Wife, Jan. 6, 1853, Davis Letters.

  19. See Foner, 261–300, esp. 266.

  20. Leonard Pitt, The Decline of the Californios: A Social History of the Spanish-Speaking Californians, 1846–1890 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1966), esp. 57.

  21. Theodore T. Johnson, Sights in the Gold Region and Scenes by the Way (New York: Baker and Scribner, 1849), 196.

  22. Alta California (San Francisco), July 26, 1849.

  23. Howard Lamar, “From Bondage to Contract: Ethnic Labor in the American West, 1600–1890,” in The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation, ed. Steven Hahn and Jonathan Prude (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1985), 293–324, esp. 31.

  24. Cf. Almaguer, esp. 12–13, 32–37.

  25. See Antonio Franco Coronel, “Cosas de California,” trans. and ed. Richard Henry Morefield, in The Mexican Adaptation in American California, 1846–1875 (1955; reprint, San Francisco: R and E Research Associates, 1971), 76–96, esp. 86.

  26. Coronel claimed to have raised Augustin as a family member, though the young man’s muteness may have been a marker of the childhood dislocation from his land and people (pp. 77–78). On genízaros, see Ramón A. Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500–1846 (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1991), esp. 149–56, 171–90. The work of Estevan Rael y Galvez (American Culture Program, Univ. of Michigan) also has helped me see Augustin’s status.

  27. Coronel, 86–87.

  28. Ibid., 87.

  29. See, e.g., Pitt, 54–55; William Robert Kenny, “Mexican-American Conflict on the Mining Frontier, 1848–1852,” Journal of the West 6, no. 4 (Oct. 1967): 582–92, esp. 586.

  30. Journal entry, June 22, 1850, Osborn Journal; cf. June 29, 1850.

  31. Journal entries, June 27, Aug. 31, Dec. 20, 1850, ibid.

  32. Daniel B. Woods, Sixteen Months at the Gold Diggings (London: Sampson Low; New York: Harper and Brothers, [1851]), 100.

  33. I am deeply indebted to David Montgomery for helping me clarify this argument.

  34. See Alta California, Dec. 31, 1849, Jan. 2, 7, 1850; Journal entries, Dec. 28, 1849, to Jan. 4, 1850, John Hovey Journal, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif. (hereafter cited as Huntington Library), and Hovey’s “Historical Account of the troubles between the Chilian and American Miners in the Calaveras Mining District, commencing Dec. 6, 1849, & ending Jan. 4, 1850,” Huntington Library; Ramon Jil Navarro, “California in 1849,” in We Were 49ers! Chilean Accounts of the California Gold Rush, trans. and ed. Edwin A. Beilharz and Carlos U. López (Pasadena: Ward Ritchie Press, 1976), 101–49; and James J. Ayres, Gold and Sunshine: Reminiscences of Early California (Boston: Richard G. Badger, Gorham Press, 1922), 46–63. On the Chilean War, see also Jay Monaghan, Chile, Peru, and the California Gold Rush of 1849 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1973), esp. 243–48; and George Edward Faugsted, Jr., The Chilenos in the California Gold Rush (1963; reprint, San Franci
sco: R and E Research Associates, 1973), esp. 37–38. Neither Monaghan nor Faugsted used the Navarro account, which was not available in English translation until 1976.

  35. Alta California, Dec. 31, 1849.

  36. Ibid., Jan. 2, 1850.

  37. Ibid., Jan. 7, 1850.

  38. Journal entries, Dec. 28, 1849, to Jan. 4, 1850, Hovey Journal (quotation in Jan. 3 entry), and esp. Hovey, “Historical Account of the troubles between the Chilian & American Miners.”

  39. Navarro, 103–4.

  40. Ibid., 111–15.

  41. Ibid., 116–21.

  42. Ibid., 122–26.

  43. Ibid., 127–30.

  44. Ibid., 130–33.

  45. Ibid., 134–42.

  46. Ibid., 143–49.

  47. Ibid., 137–38, 145.

  48. Ayres, 44–46.

  49. Ibid., 46–48.

  50. Ibid., 48–50.

  51. Ibid., 50–53.

  52. Ibid., 53–54.

  53. Ibid., 54–57.

  54. Ibid., 57–58.

  55. On the importance of such frontier tales in the 1890s, see, e.g., Richard White, “Frederick Jackson Turner and Buffalo Bill,” in The Frontier in American Culture, ed. James R. Grossman (Chicago: Newberry Library; Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1994), 6–55; and Susan Lee Johnson, “‘A Memory Sweet to Soldiers’: The Significance of Gender in the History of the ‘American West,’” Western Historical Quarterly 24, no. 4 (Nov. 1993): 495–517, esp. 497–98 (reprinted in A New Significance: Re-envisioning the History of the American West, ed. Clyde Milner II [New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996]). On the meanings of “civilization” at the turn of the twentieth century, see Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1995).

  56. Ayres, 59–60.

  57. Ibid., 60–63.

  58. See Nina Silber, The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1993).

  59. Jay Monaghan provides an anticommunist reading of Neruda’s success with the Murrieta opera, 217–18. I am grateful to Susan Larsen (Department of Literature, Univ. of California, San Diego) for telling me about the Moscow performance of a musical play based on Neruda’s opera in the winter of 1988 under the title “Zvezda i smert’ Khoakina Mur’ety, chilijskogo razboijnika, podlo ubitogo v Kalifornii 23 iulja 1853 goda” [The star and death of Joaquín Murieta, a Chilean bandit foully murdered in California on 23 July 1853]. Larsen writes, “This production premiered in 1983 in the Lenin Komsomol Theater under the direction of Mark Zakharov. The ‘star’ of the title refers to Joaquin’s love interest, Teresa, who, as I recall, is gang-raped by a bunch of Rangers . . . dressed in checkered cowboy shirts. . . . The play is sort of a schlocky rock musical and, according to the program, uses slides of engravings of the Mexican artist Posada and documentary photos from the Soviet Committee of Solidarity with Chilean Democrats. The theater is one of the main Moscow theaters and in the 80’s was considered one of the more liberal and progressive stages in the country.” Personal communication, Oct. 19, 1992.

  60. I first saw a slightly different translation of lines from this “Cancion Masculina” in Monaghan, 217. This particular song does not appear in the standard English translation, which is based on a later version of the opera. The translator Ben Belitt says this later version was “the text finally preferred by the poet himself.” See Pablo Neruda, The Splendor and Death of Joaquin Murieta, trans. Belitt (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972), 181–82. My thanks to Camille Guerin-Gonzales for helping me find the original version in Neruda, Fulgor y muerte de Joaquín Murieta (Santiago: Empresa Editoria Zig-Zag, 1966), 78, and for helping me think about the translation.

  61. Samuel McNeil, McNeil’s Travels in 1849 to, through, and from the Gold Regions, in California (Columbus, Ohio: Scott and Bascom, 1850), 3. On the middle-class project, see, e.g., Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981); and, in the English context, Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1987).

  62. “Proceedings of a Meeting of the People of Lower Mocalime Bar, Oct. 14, 1849,” Amador County Archives, Jackson, Calif.

  63. Woods, 115. Alfred Doten records the same expulsion in The Journals of Alfred Doten, 1849–1903, 3 vols., ed. Walter Van Tilburg Clark (Reno: Univ. of Nevada Press, 1973), 1:65–66.

  64. William Shaw, Golden Dreams and Waking Realities; Being the Adventures of a Gold-Seeker in California and the Pacific Islands (London: Smith Elder, 1851), esp. 56, 64, 86–87.

  65. Ibid., 87–88.

  66. Secondary accounts of the imposition of the foreign miners’ tax include Pitt, Decline of the Californios, 60–68, and “The Beginnings of Nativism in California,” Pacific Historical Review 30, no. 1 (Feb. 1961): 23–38; Richard H. Peterson, Manifest Destiny in the Mines: A Cultural Interpretation of Anti-Mexican Nativism in California, 1848–1853 (San Francisco: R and E Research Associates, 1975), 48–59, “The Foreign Miners’ Tax of 1850 and Mexicans in California: Exploitation or Expulsion?” Pacific Historian 20, no. 3 (Fall 1976): 265–72, and “Anti-Mexican Nativism in California, 1848–1853: A Study in Cultural Conflict,” Southern California Quarterly 62, no. 4 (Winter 1980): 309–27; William Robert Kenny, “Mexican-American Conflict on the Mining Frontier, 1848–1852,” Journal of the West 6, no. 4 (Oct. 1967): 582–92, and “Nativism in the Southern Mining Region of California,” Journal of the West 12, no. 1 (Jan. 1973): 126–38.

  67. Antoine Alphonse Délèpine to Father, Aug. 20, 1850, Délèpine Papers, California State Library, Sacramento (hereafter cited as California State Library), from a typescript translation by C. R. Délèpine.

  68. See Friedrich W. C. Gerstäcker, “The French Revolution,” trans. George Cosgrave, California Historical Society Quarterly 17, no. 1 (March 1938): 3–17. Cosgrave’s translation is from Gerstäcker’s Scènes de la vie californienne (Geneva, 1859), which is itself a translation of his Californische Skizzen (Leipzig, 1856). See also Gerstäcker, Narrative of a Journey round the World (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1853), esp. 209.

  69. Jamestown, as well as Columbia, was called American Camp, but these events seem to have taken place in or near the settlement that would become Columbia. See “Introduction” in William Perkins, Three Years in California: William Perkins’ Journal of Life at Sonora, 1849–1852, ed. Dale L. Morgan and James R. Scobie (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1964), 19, n. 10, 39–40; Erwin G. Gudde, California Gold Camps, ed. Elisabeth K. Gudde (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1975), 78–80.

  70. Stockton Times, May 25, June 1, 1850; Gerstäcker, “The French Revolution,” esp. 4–5.

  71. On William Perkins as “Leo,” see “Appendix” in Perkins, 395–405.

  72. Stockton Times, May 25, June 1, 1850; Perkins, 153–56; Gerstäcker, “The French Revolution,” 4–5.

  73. Stockton Times, May 25, 1850.

  74. Ibid., May 25, June 1, 1850; Harris, 132; and Perkins, 153–56, 251; cf. the account apparently published in the Sonora Herald in 1852 (copies of the Sonora Herald are no longer extant) and reprinted in J. Heckendorn and W. A. Wilson, Miners and Business Men’s Directory for the Year Commencing January 1st, 1856. Embracing a General Directory of the Citizens of Tuolumne . . . Together with the Mining Laws of Each District, a Description of the Different Camps, and Other Interesting Statistical Matter (Columbia, Calif.: Clipper Office, 1856), 38–40.

  75. Stockton Times, May 25, 1850; Harris, 133.

  76. Stockton Times, May 25, June 1, 1850; Harris, 133; Perkins, 155; Heckendorn and Wilson, 39.

  77. Gerstäcker, “The French Revolution,” 4–10.

  78. Ibid., 14–15.

  79. Ibid., 12.

  80. Stockton Times, May 25, June 1, 1850; Heckendorn and Wilson, 39.

  81. Stockt
on Times, June 1, 1850.

  82. See chap. 5, “Dreams That Died.”

  83. Stockton Times, Aug. 10, 1850, March 15, 1851.

  84. Heckendorn and Wilson, 40; Stockton Times, July 20, 1850.

  85. Stockton Times, July 20, 1850.

  86. Woods, 140–42.

  87. Stockton Times, June–July 1850, passim.

  88. Ibid., July 27, 1850; Heckendorn and Wilson, 42–43. Other accounts of the attempted expulsion of “foreigners” from Tuolumne County, and from Sonora in particular, include Enos Christman, One Man’s Gold: The Letters and Journals of a Forty-Niner, ed. Florence Morrow Christman (New York: Whittlesey House, McGraw-Hill, 1930), 171–78; and Edmund Booth, Edmund Booth, Forty-Niner: The Life Story of a Deaf Pioneer (Stockton, Calif.: San Joaquin Pioneer and Historical Society, 1953), 27. A few days after reporting on the meeting at Sonora, the Stockton Times noted with pleasure that “the inhabitants of George Town” had taken an “opposite position to the adjacent town of Sonora,” having passed resolutions stating “That all men shall have permission to live in this Camp without being molested.” Stockton Times, Aug. 3, 1850.

  89. Harris, 132; Heckendorn and Wilson, 43 (emphasis in original).

  90. John Baker to Julia Ann Baker, Sept. 20, Nov. 8, 1853, John W. H. Baker Correspondence, Holt-Atherton Center for Western Studies, Univ. of the Pacific, Stockton, Calif.; Eduard Vischer, “A Trip to the Mining Regions in the Spring of 1859,” part 2, trans. Ruth Frey Axe, California Historical Society Quarterly 11, no. 4 (Dec. 1932): 321–38, esp. 322–23; Journal entry, May 23, 1857, Harriet Jane (Kirtland) Lee, “Journal of a Trip Through the Southern Mines” [1857], California State Library (typescript from original); [Henry S. Brooks], “Hornitos, Quartzburgh and the Washington Vein, Mariposa County,” California Mountaineer 1 (1861): 335, quoted in Paul, 112. As early as 1851, the Belgian Jean-Nicolas Perlot found Hornitos a very diverse place. Business was conducted in both English and Spanish, and in the street “all possible tongues” were spoken. Perlot saw native people there as well. See Perlot, Gold Seeker: Adventures of a Belgian Argonaut during the Gold Rush Years, ed. Howard R. Lamar and trans. Helen Harding Bretnor (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1985), 95.