Roaring Camp

by Susan Lee Johnson

  No record survives, either, of how Rosa Felíz de Murrieta spent her time in the diggings. If she was like other Sonoran women, though, she may well have done her share of panning for gold. When Monterey’s alcalde Walter Colton went up into the foothills to survey the placers in the fall of 1848, he saw at least two Mexican women at work alongside men. One announced, Colton reported, that she was taking out an ounce of gold a day (about sixteen dollars worth), and the other he observed indignantly tossing the contents of her batea, or pan, back into the water when it yielded a mere half dollar.13 Chances are, these women were not full-time gold washers; an ounce a day was not a particularly high take for 1848, and frustration at a half-dollar pan indicates that the second woman was hoping for a quick bonanza.14 Both probably mined in the time they could spare from their other tasks.

  Their other tasks must have been formidable, too. Although Mexican women were not so rare as Anglo American or European women in the mines, even among Mexicans, men made up the majority of immigrants. As a result, women’s perceived capabilities were in demand. Antonio Franco Coronel, a Californio who arrived at the Stanislaus placers in the fall of 1848, recalled that a female servant not only cooked for her own party but sold frijoles and tortillas to other miners for one peso a plate. Coronel claimed that she left the diggings after three months with more than thirteen pounds of gold.15 Both Mexican and non-Mexican men ate food prepared according to Mexican practices; William Perkins remembered how Mexican women sold “the national dish of meat and chile pepper, wrapped within two tortillas” from carts in the Gold Rush town of Sonora, and R. A. Appling, an Anglo southerner, wrote to a relative at home about how much he paid for frijoles, which he knowingly explained was pronounced “free holders.”16 Likewise, Mexican women not only washed the clothing of those with whom they had come to the mines but also sold their laundry services to men who traveled without women.17 Someone like Rosa Felíz de Murrieta, then, probably looked after the cluster of tents that sheltered her male relatives, and perhaps brought income into the camp by selling her domestic skills and by working the placers—that is, the surface diggings—in her spare time.

  Rosa’s husband, Joaquín, and his brothers and cousins, relieved from daily domestic concerns, turned their attention to familiar pursuits—gold mines and livestock—pursuits that they hoped would prove more lucrative in California than they had in Mexico. In the state of Sonora, Indian resistance often frustrated settlers’ efforts to eke out a livelihood from the land—Apaches, Yaquis, Seris, and Mayos all challenged the Murrietas and related families in the hinterlands.18 California Indians too resisted invasion, but Sonorans headed for the Sierra foothills found that native peoples there were inundated by immigrants to an extent unheard of by northern Mexican Indians.19 Then, too, the United States had just acquired California in the late Mexican War; Sonorans accustomed to Spanish and Mexican styles of conquest that stressed incorporation and exploitation of native peoples over elimination may have known they were headed to a country where an aggressive Indian policy touted removal of Indians from areas settled by whites as an ultimate goal.20 In such a place, perhaps, the Murrieta men could finally make their fortune.

  Maybe it would be a fortune in gold, or maybe a fortune that galloped out of California on its own hooves. It seems likely, in fact, that Joaquín Murrieta and his kin were compelled to turn their attention from gold to horses over the four or five years they spent in California. If Mexican miners in Sonora had been hounded by Indians, in California they faced equally indomitable foes—hostile Anglo Americans backed by an arrogantly anti-Mexican state legislature. The story of nativist agitation in the diggings is a complicated one, but Anglo American opposition to Mexicans in the mines took three basic forms: individual incidents of harassment; mining district “laws” that excluded Mexicans and other non–U.S. citizens from particular areas; and a statewide foreign miners’ tax, approved in 1850, that charged foreign nationals twenty dollars a month to work the placers.21 What evidence exists for Murrieta’s treatment in the mines concerns harassment—in this case violent attacks by Anglo men in Calaveras County—but such incidents took place in a larger context of systematic exclusionary and discriminatory measures against Mexican nationals.

  Anglo intimidation assured that the Gold Rush would be more boondoggle than boom for the Sonorans who accompanied Murrieta to the Southern Mines in 1849. Joaquín, Rosa, and their relatives probably were driven from the Stanislaus placers at least once, maybe more than once, during their California sojourn. No contemporary written accounts describe their expulsion, but everyone from former Murrieta associates to one of the California Rangers later agreed that Anglos evicted Joaquín from rich mining claims. Likewise, not only Murrieta descendants but the grandson of a Calaveras County sheriff told Frank Latta of at least three brutal assaults on the Sonorans: Anglo ruffians raped Rosa, and then, after a dispute with Joaquín’s half brother, Jesús Carillo Murrieta, over either a horse or a mule, English-speaking toughs lynched Jesús and horsewhipped Joaquín.22

  By this time Joaquín may have given up mining altogether—Rosa too would have abandoned whatever use she had made of the batea—and the couple seems to have turned to keeping a gaming table near Angels Camp. There Joaquín is said to have dealt monte, a popular Mexican pastime that drew in miners of all nationalities during the Gold Rush. Rosa, depending on how wary she had become of the Anglo men who were then swarming into the foothills like so many hornets, may have frequented the monte table herself; Mexican women in the town of Sonora were doing so at the time, and prior to the American conquest that began in 1846, women’s gambling was not uncommon on Mexico’s northern frontier.23

  Ultimately, though, according to Murrieta descendants and associates, Anglo outrages in the Southern Mines proved intolerable. Economic siege was one thing. Just as Sonoran forty-niners knew more about mining than Anglos did, so too they knew more about surviving in what was until so recently the Mexican hinterlands; they knew other ways to create commodities out of California’s abundance. Refusing to be driven out of the area altogether, most of the Murrieta men seem within a year or two to have turned to rounding up wild horses in the San Joaquin Valley and driving them south into Mexico for sale to wealthy rancheros.24 The animals themselves were evidence of earlier decades when Miwok and other interior Indians raided Spanish and then Mexican coastal settlements, capturing horses for their own use and, after the entry of Anglo American fur trappers over the Sierra Nevada in 1826, for trade as well. The vast mustang herds that the Murrietas found in the valley were progeny of those stolen steeds, and the Sonoran immigrants, so familiar with running livestock on the open range, could put the animals to immediate use.25

  But economic siege accompanied by flogging, rape, and murder was something else altogether. These were personal, physical assaults that called for different strategies of resistance. Driven from mining claims, Sonoran men could profitably herd wild horses—and steal some Anglo mounts for good measure. In the memories of Murrieta descendants, however, an unholy trinity of events at long last unleashed the vengeance of their forebears. When asked in the 1960s what had happened to Joaquín in California, one aging Murrieta woman replied, apparently through an interpreter, “What happened? Just that the Americano miners assaulted Joaquín’s wife, hung his brother and whipped him.” The woman’s cousin recalled what he had heard from Sonorans who returned with news from the diggings: “They said that Joaquín Murrieta was an honest, hard-working man in . . . Alta California . . . and that the miners in las placeras assaulted Joaquín’s wife, whipped him and hung his brother.”26

  Why might these details be so firmly anchored in family memory? Perhaps the events recall a time when Spanish and Mexican notions of communal and familial honor were in decline, disrupted by the incursion of market forces and eclipsed by concomitant values of individual achievement.27 The very migration undertaken by the Murrietas is evidence of the economic transformations at work in the Mexican north, though Sonora�
��s ties to urban markets were by no means stable in the 1840s and 1850s.28 The persistent stories of Gold Rush violence and vengeance hark back to an earlier ethic, not yet archaic in the 1850s, under which rape, lynching, and whipping took on meaning as affronts to male honor. Of course rape, in particular, had its own meanings for women, as did the notion of honor.29 For men, however, sexual violation of a woman called not for her retribution but for the retaliation of her menfolk. And, indeed, however Rosa Felíz de Murrieta reacted to her assailants, it is not her response but that of her husband which is remembered.

  The nature of that response is remembered too. Here Murrieta family tradition and contemporary Anglo accounts of conditions in the Southern Mines for a moment converge. All agree that by early 1853 one or more men named Joaquín and his or their comrades were dodging in and out of the Sierra foothills on fast horses, stealing gold dust and livestock and occasionally killing people. Then the stories bifurcate. Murrieta associates and descendants recall that Joaquín Murrieta carried out a personal vendetta against only those Anglo thugs who heaped shame upon his family, and that his banditry consisted of hunting down the offenders and, one by one, roping and dragging them to death. If Murrieta stole, he stole only what he needed to survive, and only from men like his persecutors; he deplored raids on stages and expresses, freighters and provisioners. In fact, family tradition holds that Murrieta’s men broke ranks with a related gang led by Manuel Duarte, who was known as Tres Dedos (Three Fingers), precisely because of Duarte’s penchant for highway robbery and indiscriminate bloodshed.30

  Contemporary Anglo accounts told a different tale, with different characters. There was a Joaquin, but not until May of 1853 was that given name linked to a surname resembling Murrieta.31 By that time, California newspapers had been running stories about “the notorious outlaw, Joaquin” and his band of desperadoes for months. Generally no family name was attached, though beginning in February accounts occasionally identified a “Joaquin Carillo” as ringleader. Under his direction, or under the direction of some Joaquin, Mexican bandits robbed gold miners of gold, stockmen of stock, and almost anyone of life itself. Attacks were random and unprovoked. If any group of people suffered most at the hands of the thieves and murderers, it was the newest immigrants to the Southern Mines: Chinese men.32

  Anglos were hard-pressed to make sense of all this. Early on, some writers placed Joaquin in a recognizable cultural and historical category by referring to his men as “banditti,” a term of Italian origin that conferred upon the men a daunting European lineage. Others linked Joaquin to guerrilla bands active during the U.S.-Mexican War.33 At least one newspaperman, though, saw danger in ascribing to Joaquin the status of bandit: “It has been the fashion of the historian and the novelist to trace in the characters of their bandit heroes some redeeming traits,” the writer warned, “but in the conscience of this blood-thirsty villain there appear to be no qualms, no mercy or reproach.”34 No one had yet claimed publicly that the Sonorans had any motivation other than greed and innate depravity, but this writer wanted to make sure that Joaquin and his band would not be cast in that familiar drama of decent men forced by unfavorable circumstances into brigandage.

  The tension that arose out of using the language of banditry to describe the thefts and murders of 1853 continued in Anglo accounts, but newspapermen did their best to guard against the implication that Joaquin was a victim turned avenger. No decent man, however tormented, would wreak havoc on the innocent and defenseless, and this is what Joaquin did. White women and children—customary candidates for the cultural category of “innocent and defenseless”—were few and far between in the diggings, and so Anglos took to assigning Chinese men such roles: “[Joaquin] rides through the settlements slaughtering the weak and unprotected. . . . So daring and reckless is he, that he marches in the day time through thickly peopled settlements and actually correls [sic] the Chinese by the score.”35 According to newspapers, Joaquin would bully his way into Chinese tents and force the residents to cook for him. If a Chinese man resisted, one of the bandits might draw a knife and “run the unfortunate celestial through the body.”36 The process by which Anglo Americans came to terms with Asian immigration in part by assimilating Chinese men to dominant notions of female gender is a complicated one, but one aspect of that invidious process began here, where white men momentarily proclaimed themselves defenders of Chinese miners.37

  If Joaquin proved himself unmanly by attacking the “weak,” he did so in other ways as well. To Anglos, particularly those from the northeastern United States, Joaquin had all the fortitude and bravery of a man, but none of the conscience, all of the lively impulses of a man, but none of the self-control. He was both “daring and reckless,” his deeds both “bold and heartless.”38 His thieving ways further challenged the emerging discourse of manliness by lampooning the belief that success, increasingly defined as economic gain, resulted from hard work and prudent plans. After one incident in which Joaquin’s band apparently stole several thousand dollars, a Calaveras County correspondent lamented, “once more has the hand of industry been forced to yield its hard earnings to depraved and reckless outlaws.”39 For Anglo Americans, Joaquin must have been a sort of gender nightmare, embodying the potency of manhood without its customary restraints. Indeed, when white men tried to chase him down in locally organized posses, Joaquin easily eluded them: “so fertile is he in expedients,” one account read, “that he baffles his pursuers and defeats the plans of the many thousands who are lying in wait for him.”40 For Anglo men, Joaquin was like their own worst selves set loose in the diggings—dark, sensual, impulsive, out of control.41

  Something had to be done. At first, Anglo men in Calaveras County took it upon themselves to clear out what they deemed to be the robbers’ den, known to the English-speaking as “Yackee Camp” (located first by Yaqui Indians, who, like other Sonorans, had journeyed north to the California placers). According to newspaper reports, a posse from nearby San Andreas rode into the camp and found a Mexican “who boasted of having killed Americans . . . and who was supposed to have been concerned in the present murders.” On that evidence, they strung him up. Then the Anglos moved on to Cherokee Flat (another camp first settled by Indians) “and came up with two other Mexicans,” who tried to flee. The Americans shot one and hanged the other.42 In the meantime, other Anglos did their part in San Andreas and along the forks of the Calaveras River, forcing Mexicans one by one out of the area: “If an American meets a Mexican,” one account explained, “he takes his horse, his arms, and bids him leave.” A mass meeting at Double Springs called for more sweeping measures, passing a resolution to make it “the duty of every American citizen . . . to exterminate the Mexican race from the county.”43 As another item declared, “Violent diseases require violent remedies . . . and we should remember that in Calaveras county no man can retire to his pillow without the fear of the intrusion of some villain, no man’s life is safe, there is no settlement that is not liable to an attack.”44

  The hysteria reflected in newspaper reports was not the whole Anglo story, however. Anglo American men in the Southern Mines who kept journals were more temperate in their response to the events of 1853. Many diarists did not mention the commotion at all. Others devoted one or two entries to the events during the winter months, noting down whatever they could learn from conversation and from the local papers.45 Alfred Doten, a twenty-three-year-old New Englander who was keeping a store in Calaveras County, was in an unusually good position to gather information, and indeed, he wrote more about the excitement than did others. As early as September 1852, Doten mentioned a “Mexican rascal” who frequented the tent to buy provisions and on whom Doten had pulled a revolver in a dispute over liquor; Doten claimed the “scamp” was one of a band of six thieves headed by a man named Cladne.46 In January 1853, Doten noted that “the Mexicans on the upper part of the Calaveras have taken to robbing, murdering, stealing horses, & c,” and he described the exodus of Mexican women, men, and
children from the area after the cleanup at “Yankeeville” (Yaqui Camp).47 Even at the height of the excitement, though, on February 17—when hundreds of Anglo men were combing the hills of Calaveras County in pursuit of “Joaquin, Cladne, and his band”—Doten reported no widespread terror in the area, save that among Mexicans who were being driven from the diggings. On a night when no man was supposed to be able to go to bed without fear for his life, the habitual reveler Doten noted, “Evening, the boys were in and we had a soiree.”48

  The newspapermen and the diarists, of course, were telling different stories for different reasons. Stockton’s San Joaquin Republican, in particular, had joined in a larger campaign among Anglo men in the Southern Mines to persuade the California state government to accomplish what they had proved themselves incapable of accomplishing—ending Mexican insurgency once and for all. What good was the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which had ended the war with Mexico in 1848, if Mexican men in California were free to resist Anglo dominance with arms and at will? The short-lived foreign miners’ tax of 1850, which similarly had sought to contain and control the Mexican presence in the diggings, had been a fiasco; so many Sonorans simply headed for home that commerce in the Southern Mines collapsed.49 Some Mexicans defiantly stayed on, and now it seemed Anglo Americans were reaping what they had sown. Individual Anglo men could and did sign petitions begging California Governor John Bigler, first, to offer a reward for the capture of Joaquin (he did—a thousand dollars), and then, when local posses failed, to deputize a company of rangers to bring the bandit in.50 But the newspapers could dramatize the plight of law-abiding citizens in a more disinterested fashion.