Roaring Camp

by Susan Lee Johnson

  Of all the scores of Murrieta family members and acquaintances Frank Latta interviewed between 1920 and 1980, only one person (and then her offspring) remembered what had become of Rosa and Joaquín. In 1936, in Hermosillo, Sonora, a woman who described herself as the widow of Joaquín Murrieta’s nephew explained to Latta that once Joaquín had finished the burials at the arroyo, he rode with a male companion north and west to meet Rosa in Alameda County, where she was living with Joaquín’s sister and nephew. En route, the two men ran into some Anglo officers and, assuming the officers were looking for them, tried to escape. But the Anglos began shooting and injured Joaquín before he and his companion got away. Joaquín made it to the rancho, but died of the gunshot wound two days later. Before he died, he insisted that Anglos never learn of his fate, and so Rosa, Joaquín’s sister, and the male companion buried him beneath the hard-packed dirt floor of the rancho’s saddle room. Then, Latta’s informant said, “Rosita [as she was known to family members] sold everything and went to San Francisco. She married the compañero who had brought Joaquín home and helped bury him. The newly married couple went to Mexico on a boat.”106 No one ever heard from them again.

  Built within the structure of this memory is an obvious explanation for why Rosa and Joaquín disappear without a trace in other recollections; Joaquín demanded that his death and burial be kept secret, and Rosa, having remarried quickly and departed with the profits from Joaquín’s mining and horse herding and her work keeping up the rancho, would have been disinclined to maintain family ties. Whatever one makes of the story—it does not contradict what most scholars would take to be the historical record—it is telling that Latta found the only keepers of the tale to be the woman who first related it in 1936, her daughter, and a granddaughter, who in 1972 was business manager for an appliance company in Hermosillo. No simple story of a helpless woman raped and then widowed as her husband seeks vengeance, this reinvented female tradition brings Joaquín home to a household and ranch managed by his womenfolk, and buries him in the safety of its foundations. Then, as if to frustrate any lingering sentimentality or nostalgia, the tale ends as Rosa sells the land, the livestock, and the adobe house; she leaves California for good and sails off to Mexico with the proceeds and a new husband.107 An ambiguous legacy, perhaps, but one that three women thought important to remember.

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  On the Eve of Emigration

  When Rosa Felíz de Murrieta and her husband, Joaquín, chose to leave Sonora in 1849 and start out on the overland journey north to California, they were trying to improve their lot in life. Theirs was a constrained choice. The very concrete constraints the Murrieta family faced involved three abstract categories of relationships. First, there were local, regional, and international economic ties. Second, there were formal political and diplomatic relations. Third, there were bonds forged over cultural ideas and practices of work, gender, and migration. In other words, going to California depended on the extent to which and the ways in which the commercial and industrial revolutions of the nineteenth century had permeated emigrant homelands and tied those homelands to other places and peoples around the globe. Emigration also depended on the extent to which and the ways in which those links were reflected in the political and diplomatic ties between such homelands and the United States, which had so recently acquired California. Finally, the decision to emigrate—and sometimes, the coercion that dictated emigration—depended on how people in various places understood and acted on interrelated cultural constructions of work (what constituted work and who did it?), gender (what was required for someone to be regarded as a woman or as a man?), and migration (who could leave the homeland, for what purpose, and for how long?).1

  The Murrieta family was caught up in just such a dense web of interrelationships, the nature of which will become clearer in the following pages. Similar constraints faced women and men in other parts of the world. For some, the constraints were such that going to California was out of the question: Gold Rush migration was global but selective. Chileans went; Argentineans and Brazilians, for the most part, did not. Cantonese speakers from South China went; people from Shanghai and Nanjing did not. African Americans, both enslaved and free, went; Africans did not. France sent many forty-niners; Spain, hardly any. Men immigrated in droves; women, in comparatively small numbers.

  It was not so much, then, that “the world rushed in,” but that more men and fewer women from very particular places at very particular times left their homes and made their way by water and by land, as quickly as they could, to the California diggings.2 What tied these disparate movements together was the imminent, and selective, triumph of capitalist market economies, whose representatives sent tentacles out around the globe, linking many peoples, products, and places to each other in their pursuit of wealth. In this world of commerce and, increasingly, of industry, gold was money, or wealth, that could be turned with human labor and tools of manufacture into capital. That is not, emphatically, to say that all who dug for gold were capitalists—far from it. But all had been touched by capitalism’s expansive tendencies. Some sought gold to create capital; others, to ward off capital’s dynamism and its definitional habit of turning human energy into labor power. The discovery of gold in California in 1848, then, must have seemed wildly fortunate to a wide variety of people coming to terms with such monumental economic changes.3

  But emigrants’ movements were governed, too, by shifting geopolitical relations, and these relations helped shape the conditions under which people left their homelands as well as their reception in California. Western liberal political notions were on the ascendance in certain parts of the world, sometimes in lockstep with leaps of commercial faith, sometimes not. Political liberalism and commercial ambition often colluded—in Britain’s relations with China, for example, or the United States’ with Mexico. In these cases, the arrogance of colonial power could be stunning. But people came from these places so recently defeated in war, often hoping against hope for a better life in California.4

  The nature and the degree of freedom people exercised in participating in the Gold Rush varied greatly, from the craftsman who aspired to a better life he could not find in New England to the Parisian prostitute frustrated by dull times after the French debacle of 1848 to the northern Mexican peón or southern U.S. slave who left home at someone else’s behest but who might use the tumult of the diggings for his or her own ends. One group of Gold Rush participants, of course, was not an immigrant group at all. Native peoples of the Sierra foothills—and in the Southern Mines these were primarily Miwoks—played unwilling hosts to the hordes of sojourners who descended on their gathering and hunting grounds. Some Indians actually migrated out of the area after 1848, pushing farther up into the Sierra Nevada, though most stayed and adapted to the radical changes underway in the foothills.

  My purpose here is to suggest some of the momentous local and global forces that worked together to bring sixty or seventy thousand immigrants in less than a decade to an area that had once supported perhaps six or seven thousand native people.5 These forces had everything to do with what would happen in the Southern Mines between 1848 and 1858. Gold Rush social relations, then, arose out of the backgrounds and aspirations of polyglot peoples differently affected by worldwide economic and cultural change. Among these, Miwoks, Mexicans, Chileans, French, Chinese, African Americans, and Anglo Americans would come to play important roles in what I identify as central dramas in the gold era of the Southern Mines.6 It is clear that there were as many stories that led to the banks of the Mokelumne, Stanislaus, and Merced rivers as there were women and men in the mines. From these stories, however, particular patterns emerge. Consider first those who hailed from the former Spanish empire in the New World.

  Mexico and Chile sent more emigrants north to California than any other Latin American nation did. Both were in the throes of political, economic, and social change that followed their declarations of independence from
Spain earlier in the century (Chile in 1817, Mexico in 1821) and their increasing incorporation into world markets. Those changes, however, took distinctive courses in the two countries. Furthermore, the differences between Mexico and Chile that shaped their emigration patterns were reinforced by the regional origins of Mexican and Chilean emigrants; Mexicans came from the isolated northwestern state of Sonora and Chileans from the thriving central area of their country.7

  The migration of the Murrieta clan, for example, suggests some of the conditions that prompted Sonorans to consider leaving home. Recall that Murrieta family members remember a Mexican past of digging gold, raising stock, and fighting Indians. The Murrietas lived in what one historian calls the “periphery of nineteenth-century Mexico.”8 The area that became the state of Sonora in 1831 lay on the western slope of the formidable Sierra Madre Occidental, a rugged mountain range that cordoned the state off from the rest of Mexico. Like the Sierra Nevada foothills in California, the region west of the Sierra Madre was distinguished by mineral-rich streams that flowed out of the mountains, carving valleys that broadened as the rivers drained into the Gulf of California. Home to such native peoples as the Yaquis, Mayos, Seris, Pimas, and Opatas, the area drew Jesuit missionaries in the late sixteenth century. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a larger white and casta (mixed-race) mining, farming, and ranching population followed, settlers who alternately vied with Sonoran Indians over land and sought to engage them as laborers. In the late eighteenth century, the Spanish crown expelled Jesuits from the northern frontier and sent in the military to break Indian resistance where missions had failed. Indians responded variously, but violent retaliation against cultural, economic, and military dominance was a regular feature of relations between native peoples and Spanish Mexican interlopers in northern Mexico.9

  In the decades before Rosa Felíz and Joaquín Murrieta were born, their Sonoran homeland was relatively removed from settlements to the north in California and from the seat of colonial power in Mexico City. But its isolation was hardly complete. Oceangoing commerce with Pacific neighbors and land links to New Mexico continued, and Sonora was also touched by the momentous economic and political changes of the era. These transformations would set the stage for mass emigration by the late 1840s. Since the precarious Spanish Mexican communities of Sonora had depended on the royal military presence and on royal promotion of the mining industry for peace and prosperity, the nationalist movement that swept New Spain after 1810 found little support in Sonora. But nationalism prevailed elsewhere, and independence came in 1821, leaving Sonora on the margins of national development. During the war for independence, Sonoran mining suffered from severed lines of trade and loss of royal protection. The industry, and hence the people whose livelihood depended on it, never fully recovered in the following decades. Agriculture also suffered during the war. But from the 1820s on, owners of large haciendas and small farms alike benefited from renewed access to interregional markets and especially from the new participation of foreign merchants who brought increased access to Pacific trade. Workers on farms and haciendas and in mines were often Indians. With the decline of mining, more and more mine laborers became tied to the growing agricultural sector as peónes.10

  In southern Sonora, where Rosa and Joaquín grew up, Yaquis and Mayos prevented rapid agricultural expansion. They did so by holding on to fertile commons in the Yaqui and Mayo valleys, maintaining pueblos to which Indians dispersed throughout Sonora returned with regularity. Squeezed by white and casta encroachment and denied the special legal status they had enjoyed under Spanish rule, Yaquis mounted armed revolts in 1825 and 1832. Meanwhile, farther north, Apaches took advantage of the decline in frontier defense to renew their raids on Spanish Mexican settlements and trails, and found eager buyers for their booty among Anglo American traders who poured into New Mexico after 1821. Mexico City could do little for the beleaguered northern Sonorans, and in 1835 the Sonoran state legislature declared war and created local militias, which proved no match for determined Apache opponents. Through the 1830s, then, life in sparsely populated rural areas of Sonora, particularly in the far south and far north, became increasingly untenable for Spanish Mexican settlers. Because of this, and because of increased foreign trade since independence, cities in the middle of the state—Hermosillo, Ures, and the port of Guaymas—grew apace.11

  In the 1840s, when Rosa and Joaquín came of age, courted, and married, the situation went from bad to worse. The national political conflict between federalists and centralists became a kind of race war in Sonora, as Indians allied themselves with local centralists who vowed to protect native land claims. (Federalists were liberals who railed against hereditary privilege and established authority, while centralists were proclerical conservatives who favored a strong central government.) Then, in 1846, as if such regional strife were not ruinous enough, war broke out with the United States, disrupting all overseas commerce through Guaymas. Despite the American naval blockade, central Sonora was spared some of the worst ravages of the civil and foreign wars, because of the comparative shelter offered in the cities and because the centralist political majority there was able to maintain peaceful relations with native peoples. Rural Sonora, however, was not so fortunate. By the time gold was discovered in California in the winter of 1848, much of northern and southern Sonora had been laid waste by years of unremitting turmoil.12

  It comes as no surprise, then, that some ten thousand people, maybe more, left Sonora for California between 1848 and 1850.13 The precise racial/ethnic makeup of the migration is unclear, though one historian notes that a sizable number of Yaquis were among those who departed.14 Perhaps these were Yaquis, primarily men, who had left their central Sonoran homeland to work as miners for Spanish Mexicans elsewhere in the state. The precipitous decline in regional mining since independence would have made tales of rich placers in California all the more enticing. Such men, accustomed to migrating for labor within Sonora, may have seen mining in California as a better alternative than debt servitude on haciendas and farms closer to home. Not all Sonorans, however, whether Indian or Spanish Mexican, avoided peón/patrón labor relations by emigrating to California. While many, like the Murrieta clan, traveled north as gambusinos, or independent prospectors, others went to the mines under the control and protection of a wealthy patrón—recall the servant of the Californio Antonio Franco Coronel, who cooked for her own party and sold beans and tortillas to other hungry miners as well.15

  Coronel’s female servant notwithstanding, the vast majority of Mexican Gold Rush emigrants were men. In April of 1850, for example, a Sonoran newspaper reported official emigration figures for five towns, including Ures and Hermosillo. Out of almost six thousand emigrants, only a hundred were adult women; another hundred were children.16 Adult men, then, made up over 96 percent of the travelers. Unlike the Murrietas, these emigrants left Sonora’s more urban areas; the extremely small proportion of women might reflect how much easier it was for female-headed households to survive in towns and cities. Indeed, according to newspaper reports, some municipalities lost so many men that political offices, long a male province, went vacant.17 Given the state of the Sonoran countryside, particularly in the north and south, one might assume that rural families, more than urban families, left for California together, rather than leaving women and children behind to fend for themselves. Rosa Felíz de Murrieta’s migration is a case in point.

  Still, Murrieta family tradition suggests that Rosa was the only woman of the clan to accompany her male relatives to the diggings. What of those rural Spanish Mexican women who stayed behind? Their ability to maintain family farms and ranchos must have depended in large part on their relationships with local Indians and their proximity to Apache raiding trails that entered the Sonoran heartland from the north. It seems likely, though, that a good number of rural women embarked upon their own migration—not to distant California, but to the towns and cities of Sonora. Evidence of heavy female migration to Mexico City a
nd to other Latin American municipalities in this period suggests that women may have been overrepresented among Sonoran rural–urban migrants as well—just as men were overrepresented in the exodus to California.18 Urban areas offered rural women work as domestic servants for affluent families and as food vendors on city streets.19 Not surprisingly, female-headed households abounded in urban centers, as also they must have in Yaqui pueblos.20 The seemingly male world of the California mines, then, may well have been linked to virtual cities of women in northern Mexico.21

  The many men and few women who journeyed by sea from central Chile north to California left behind a very different homeland. Unlike the Murrietas, they did not come from an area that had been remote in colonial times and that remained peripheral after independence. Chilean emigrants came from a core agricultural and commercial region that witnessed a population boom and saw a more decisive incursion of foreign economic interests in the nineteenth century than did Sonora. From the sixteenth-century Spanish conquest until the independence period of the early nineteenth century, the fertile central valley and its environs defined Chile. Desert country farther north did not come under Chilean control until the 1880s, and the southern region remained in the hands of Araucanian Indians. The central valley, with its port at Valparaíso and the national capital inland at Santiago, resembled California’s Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys in climate and in suitability for orchard, vineyard, cereal, and livestock production. The towering Andes Mountains formed a barrier to the east, and coastal hills lay to the west. Because of this geographic unity and natural abundance, and because of Araucanian resistance to the south, Spanish settlement took root in the central valley. Araucanians’ warlike opposition bequeathed to those settlers a legacy of militarism and a habit of colonizing those Indians whom they were able to subdue. In central Chile, a relatively homogeneous casta population was thus among the main fruits of conquest.22