Roaring Camp

by Susan Lee Johnson

  A Gold Rush–era Chilean sailor who jumped ship in San Francisco Bay. His name is unknown. From a daguerreotype by William Shew.

  Courtesy of Stanley B. Burns, M.D., and the Burns Archive.

  Early on, the Spanish encomienda system—whereby the crown granted men rights over native peoples as a reward for military service—consolidated land and labor in the central valley and helped create a colonial elite that would pass on its wealth and power to later generations. As Indian workers in these agricultural areas succumbed to disease and the severity of forced labor, or as they simply fled, casta workers began to take their place. Although encomiendas were abolished in 1791, large estates still dominated central Chile into the nineteenth century. To a greater degree than in northern Mexico, then, relations and conditions of labor in Chile maintained continuity from the late colonial era on into the post-independence years.23 That continuity would affect the nature of Chilean emigration to California.

  The castas who worked the land of large proprietors included both inquilinos, or service tenants, and peónes or gañanes, who engaged in seasonal day labor. An inquilino man assisted in rodeos and harvests, and worked as well at various tasks on the estate perhaps two or three days a week. In exchange, he received a small plot of land that he and his family could farm. He might also be required to supply one full-time worker to the landowner from his own household or from smallholders or landless men in the area. An inquilino woman might provide domestic labor for the landholder, but she also engaged in extensive household industry, especially in dying, spinning, and weaving woolen cloth for rugs, blankets, ponchos, and other apparel. After independence, increased foreign trade brought cheap British cotton into Chile, and women’s wool production decreased, though woolen ponchos continued in use and cotton cloth itself still had to be made into garments.24

  Unlike inquilinos, who called a piece of land their own, peónes or gañanes lived in the interstices of the large estates and were not themselves small proprietors. In part because of rapid population growth in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, an increasing number of Chileans formed a class of unattached, landless, and mobile people who engaged in seasonal labor and lived precariously off the natural abundance of the central valley. Some of the men looked for work in the area just north of the valley called the norte chico. There a mining economy rivaled agricultural pursuits, and a smaller number of women found employment in pulperías—store-saloons where men drank, gambled, danced, and sought sexual services from prostitutes. Others must have found their way to Valparaíso, which nearly quadrupled in population with the opening to foreign trade after independence and started to become, as one historian notes, a “rough-and-tumble, bawdy Pacific port.” But many formed the backbone of the central valley’s transient rural labor force. Proprietors hired them at harvest or roundup time for remuneration that might amount to bountiful food and drink and a setting for exuberant song and dance.25 These rural workers, along with more affluent men increasingly involved in commerce, would contribute disproportionate numbers of those who answered California’s call of gold after 1848.26

  Just as the lives of the Murrietas help demonstrate the particularities of Mexican Gold Rush emigration, so does the life of the patrón Vicente Pérez Rosales, who traveled to California with péones and inquilinos, help illuminate Chilean emigration. Pérez Rosales was born in 1807 to a landowning family in the central valley. He grew up in the years of Chile’s independence movement. During the period of adjustment to independence that characterized Chile in the 1820s, Pérez Rosales was in France completing his education. He returned to his homeland, but by 1830 found that financial difficulties caused the loss of his parents’ estate. The young Pérez Rosales spent the following years trying to recoup family fortunes—searching for Chilean gold, operating small factories, engaging in commerce, smuggling cattle over the Andes from Argentina.27

  News of California’s gold discoveries, which arrived at Valparaíso in the autumn of 1848, seemed to offer Pérez Rosales a new opportunity to regain the affluence of his youth. Without extensive landholdings and control over large numbers of laborers—both of which assured a life of relative comfort and a means of participating in Chile’s fledgling export sector—Pérez Rosales’s last best chance lay in finding a way to prosper in an evolving cash economy. Trade, manufacturing, running livestock—all moneymakers—proved insufficient, and Chilean gold seemed in short supply. What could be more auspicious, therefore, than word of astounding quantities of placer gold in California? Cash in rivers, cash in ravines, cash in hand! Already oceangoing commerce—dominated by British, North American, and European merchant marines—linked Valparaíso with the port of San Francisco. It would not be hard to get there. As for mining, Pérez Rosales had spent a good deal of his young adulthood looking for, if not finding, precious metals, and he would not have trouble finding other inveterate prospectors to accompany him. Indeed, one foreign observer claimed that Chileans panned for gold after every good rainfall.28

  And so Pérez Rosales assembled his band of argonauts, including three half brothers surnamed Solar Rosales—Ruperto, César, and Federico—and a cousin or brother-in-law (or both) named Felipe Ramírez. These patricians of small means were able to bring with them two tenant laborers—inquilinos—from Las Tables estate, and three peónes, hired on contract. The conditions of that contract are unclear, as is the labor arrangement made with the tenants. Although Pérez Rosales kept a diary of his California adventures, he did not mention the terms under which he engaged these five men.29 The inquilinos as well as the peónes were subservient to Pérez Rosales. But the inquilinos seem to have maintained a relationship with their Gold Rush patrón that included a modicum of personal regard, while bounded by habits of paternalism and deference. Pérez Rosales recorded the inquilinos’ names in his diary—Cipriano Avello and Juan Urbina—and routinely noted tasks they completed, mishaps they suffered, and remarks they made.30

  The peónes, however, remain shadowy figures; the patrón mentions only a “mulatto” who was with the brothers and a peón called Chinguillo.31 The social distance and relative power that defined relationships among patrónes, inquilinos, and peónes is inscribed in the writings of Pérez Rosales as degrees of silence. Still, the distinctions he makes between categories of workers—tenants and contract laborers—are not always clear and fixed. He calls Avello, one of the Tables men, a “peón” on occasion and routinely refers to “los peónes” as an undifferentiated group. And it is as a group that the peónes made Pérez Rosales most nervous. At sea less than a month, he noted in his diary that although all business matters had long since been settled, disputes had arisen nonetheless between peónes and patrónes. Pérez Rosales was alarmed by the peónes’ behavior: “They refuse to obey now; how will they act later?” The prospect of vast gold deposits in California, much as it thrilled men like Pérez Rosales, made them worry as well that their customary relations with men like Avello, Urbina, “the mulatto,” and “Chinguillo” might be in jeopardy.32

  Pérez Rosales and his companions boarded the French ship Staouelí bound for San Francisco in December of 1848. His narrative of shipboard adventures reveals that other social and labor relations sailed north from Chile to California as well. Among the passengers who caught the attention of Pérez Rosales was a woman traveling under the name Rosario Améstica. Pérez Rosales wrote his diary as a sort of extended letter to his mother, and the coyness with which he discussed this particular shipmate may have been his way of trying to entertain his mother without entirely offending her sensibilities. Améstica, Pérez Rosales implied, had made the rounds of Chilean towns and cities before boarding the Staouelí—he reported that she had been known as Juana in Concepción, Pancha in Talca, and Rosa Montalva in Valparaíso. A port officer challenged her right to passage on the Staouelí, though she had paid her fare of six onzas (about $125). According to Pérez Rosales, she pleaded her good character to the officer, and finally was allowed to board, all
the while intending to recoup her fare among the all-male passengers and crew and then make her fortune selling sexual services in California.

  Pérez Rosales did all he could in his diary to titillate his mother, and whoever else he thought might read it, with suggestive remarks about “Rosita’s” shipboard activities. Meanwhile, he insisted that he had opposed her passage and that he and his brothers alone had been “virtuous, chaste; or finicky and choosey” during the voyage. He did admit to hosting “Rosita” and her guitar in the cabin one evening to hear her perform French and Chilean tunes, both lewd and patriotic. What his diary does not reveal is whether his mother was at all amused, and whether “Rosita” was able to earn back her fare, in spite or because of men like Pérez Rosales.33 The intricacies of Chilean class and gender relations suggested by the diary of Pérez Rosales would soon be played out on a new stage crowded by an international cast of characters, and peónes, patrónes, and prostitutes would reevaluate their roles accordingly.

  Meanwhile, in the southern U.S. state of Arkansas, an African American man by the name of Stephen Spencer Hill was at work as a slave for a white master named Wood Tucker. In 1849, the two would go west in search of gold. Regarding the backgrounds of Hill and Tucker, the California record reveals little—how long they had been in Arkansas, what kind of enterprise Tucker ran there, how many other people lived under Tucker’s control.34 Chances are they had not been in Arkansas long. They probably had migrated there from a southern state farther east, contributing to the phenomenal population growth in states like Mississippi and Arkansas that accompanied the expansion of southern agriculture before the U.S. Civil War. That expansion occurred largely in response to the emergence of an industrial economy in the North Atlantic region, spearheaded by the extraordinary growth of English textiles in the late eighteenth century. By the early nineteenth century, the northeastern United States had established its own textile industry. Thus demand for cotton increased dramatically, and southern agriculturalists hurried to plant more and more acres of the crop, always moving westward in search of new lands.

  Black slavery long predated the cotton boom, but whites found it particularly suitable for cotton production. So slavery moved west with agricultural expansion. Although the grand plantation with its vast slave quarters epitomizes the antebellum South in popular memory, a modest farm in a state like Arkansas where a white man like Wood Tucker oversaw a handful of African Americans like Stephen Spencer Hill was probably more common. Tucker may have moved west to Arkansas in the company of family members—siblings, parents, cousins, perhaps a wife. But Hill is less likely to have done so. The cotton boom meant that masters sometimes sold slaves into the western territories without regard for black kin ties. Whether or not Tucker or Hill had been living with relatives in Arkansas, the two men seem to have set out for California alone. Tucker left no record of his reasons for emigrating; perhaps his farm had failed, or perhaps he sought quick capital to expand his holdings.35

  While some slaveowners traveled west alone with only a single slave in 1849, a handful of white southern men went to California accompanied by their own families and those of their African American slaves. Like Tucker and Hill, they came primarily from western slave states—Mississippi, Arkansas, Texas, Missouri. These large parties of black and white gold seekers were not common in the California migration. But once in the diggings they were highly visible—because whites and blacks lived side-by-side, because the parties so obviously depended on coerced labor, and because they included black and white women and children. Thomas Thorne, for example, a New Jersey–born white man who had married a white woman, Mary, from North Carolina, seems to have followed the cotton boom west to Arkansas and Mississippi, where two of the couple’s children were born, in 1840 and 1845. A third child must have been conceived en route to the diggings, because the Mariposa County census taker found the Thornes with a four-month-old baby in 1850. Close in age to Mary and Thomas, Diana and Lewis Caruthers, the Thornes’ African American slaves, hailed from North Carolina and Virginia, respectively. Diana had given birth to all three of their children in Arkansas in the mid to late 1830s.

  Similarly, the white McGee family of Tennessee—two brothers and their wives—had stopped for a time in both Missouri and Texas, where each of the women had six children. The two white families brought with them a forty-five-year-old black slave named Silas, himself a native of Tennessee, and seven young African Americans who ranged in age from three to twenty-one years. The 1850 census does not reveal how the twenty-one-year-old black woman who accompanied the party was related to Silas—she might have been his wife or his daughter—though she too was born in Tennessee. The six black children with them all were natives of Texas. The McGee masters and their slaves, like the Thorne and Caruthers families, had been on the move for decades, following King Cotton west, before they answered California’s call of gold.36

  When slaves and their masters left Texas or Arkansas in 1849, they could not be certain how their distinctive style of labor relations would be received in the California diggings. In just three years, between 1845 and 1848, the United States had added over one million square miles to its domain, an increase of two-thirds over its earlier lands resulting from the annexation of Texas (1845), the treaty with Great Britain over the disputed Oregon boundary (1846), and the conquest of California and most of the Southwest from Mexico (1848). Territorial aggrandizement threatened earlier sectional compromises that kept slavery a southern labor system, while the North moved toward a predominance of “free” wage work. Texas entered the union as a slave state in 1845, and Oregon would do so as a free state in 1859. But slavery’s fate in California was not assured, even though the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo had called for the United States to honor the Mexican abolition of slavery in former Mexican territories. The sudden influx of tens of thousands of Americans into California after the discovery of gold in 1848 dictated that the slavery question would be called there sooner rather than later.

  In the fall of 1849, delegates met at Monterey to draft a constitution for California, preparatory to applying for admission as the thirty-first state of the Union. The document they produced prohibited slavery, not so much out of abolitionist sentiment as out of fears that slave labor could limit opportunities for free white miners and that some slaves might eventually be emancipated in the diggings, thereby augmenting California’s free black population. Indeed, some at the convention sought unsuccessfully to prohibit free black immigration as well. The U.S. Congress finally did admit California as a free state, but not until statehood had been balanced with a number of other measures designed to placate the white South; the entire package became known as the Compromise of 1850.37

  All of this occurred as black and white southerners traveled to and arrived in the diggings, and even with free labor established as the letter of the law in California, none could be sure how it would be enforced. Masters took their chances bringing slaves to the Gold Rush. But many must have been willing to face the prospect of losing their human property given the promise of placer bonanzas in the Sierra Nevada foothills. Indeed, some slaveholders planned in advance to grant slaves their freedom in California once the slaves had worked for a set period of time or had dug a certain amount of gold—in this way masters benefited from coerced labor while minimizing the potential conflicts they might face in bringing slaves to a free state. Enslaved African Americans, for their part, could exercise little choice in emigrating. But they must have learned on the way to California or in the diggings that placer mining in a nonslave state could offer new roads to freedom. Slaves might live less at the whim of masters in a place where the legal status of their relationship was in question. Blacks might also find new possibilities when surrounded by a diverse population that encompassed a variety of labor systems and that included some antislavery northerners—both whites and free blacks. For many, the potential would never be realized; for others, digging for gold meant an opportunity to buy themselves, and perh
aps even their loved ones, out of bondage.38

  Nonslaveholding white southerners who went to California had entirely different hopes and fears. Their hopes and fears, however, arose out of a shared past with black slaves and white masters. John Paul Dart, for example, a Mississippi surveyor and civil engineer who had fought in the Mexican War, had little sympathy for the most powerful men of the southern social order. Even from far-off Tuolumne County, where he arrived in 1850, Dart filled letters home with criticisms of white planters, deriding their devotion to cotton and their ironic dependence on the “Free Soil States to which they appear to have such an antipathy.” Decidedly Whig in his political leanings, Dart thought the South should pull itself up by its own bootstraps by raising more corn and less cotton. But his dim view of planters did not include a critique of the labor relations that underlay their regime. Indeed, that regime permeated his own understanding of himself. In the diggings, despite the boom-and-bust nature of local economies, Dart determined that he would always live “like a white man.” This, he wrote to his brother, “I have always done, if it took the last shot in the locker.”39 In California “whiteness” was defined in opposition to a variety of “nonwhite” peoples, but for a southern white man like Dart, black slaves were the first point of reference. So too for Jefferson Martenet, a young man from Baltimore who went to California to establish his economic independence. While still in the East, he incurred substantial debt, which he considered a “cause of great mortification.” “I have been made to feel my dependence,” he lamented to his mother, “to blush at being compelled to submit to degradation, to negro treatment, all because misfortune placed me under obligations which I cannot as yet cancel.”40 Anguished that he had to blush as he imagined a white woman would, to submit as he imagined a black slave would, Martenet believed he deserved better. In California, southern white men such as Martenet, Dart, and Wood Tucker would search for the good life to which they felt entitled.