Roaring Camp

by Susan Lee Johnson

  On January 24, 1849, two northern white men—Jason Chamberlain, a carpenter by trade, and John Chaffee, a wheelwright—set sail from Boston together on the ship Capitol, bound for San Francisco. Chamberlain was twenty-seven years old and Chaffee twenty-five. Neither had married. They arrived in California 176 days later, after a voyage around South America’s Cape Horn. Immediately, they found employment in San Francisco at the astounding daily wage of twelve dollars—an amount that exceeded the weekly wages of most antebellum workers in the Northeast.41 Within two weeks, however, they could no longer withstand the temptation of gold in the foothills. As Chamberlain told a female correspondent half a century later, “We . . . then were stricken badly with the mining fever and at times I think it as the worsed moove we ever made in leaving the City so full of bustle & business for the uncertainty of the mines.”42 It was a move Chamberlain never reversed, as he and Chaffee joined the minority of Gold Rush participants who spent the rest of their lives in the diggings. After fifty years, though, in June of 1903, Chaffee made one more trip down to the Bay Area. Afflicted with a painful skin disease and other ailments, Chaffee accompanied a professor friend “below” to see a doctor. The fellow forty-niners never saw each other again. On August 2, 1903, Chamberlain wrote in his diary, “went for mail heard the sad news of my Dear Partner Chaffee he died 2 oclock The morn of 31.”43

  The story of Chamberlain and Chaffee—a Gold Rush narrative that stretched out over half a century—has become a part of local color in Tuolumne County, where the two men grew old together. Some say it became part of American popular culture with the publication in 1869 of the short story “Tennessee’s Partner” by Bret Harte, who more than any other writer helped codify collective memory of the California Gold Rush in the United States. According to some accounts, Harte heard about the partnership of Chamberlain and Chaffee in the 1860s from a mutual friend and used it, loosely, as the basis for his famous tale.44 But whatever the uses to which Chamberlain and Chaffee’s California sojourn has been put, it began in an utterly common New England manner.

  The two young men were artisans in a changing northern economic and social order that had begun to disrupt preindustrial labor relations, especially for white men. In earlier times, a man might learn a trade first as an apprentice and then proceed to the intermediate status of journeyman working under the direction of a master craftsman. The first half of the nineteenth century, particularly in the Northeast, brought a revolution in markets, in transportation, and in manufacturing that threatened customary paths to self-sufficiency for men like Chamberlain and Chaffee. More and more, journeymen in various trades found that an entrepreneurial spirit began to infuse craft production. This shift opened opportunities for some to achieve unprecedented economic rewards as master craftsmen in a newly commercial milieu, while others remained locked in a dependent, subordinate status that had once represented only one stage in a working man’s life. Labor historians have shown how some such men actively resisted these changes, developing new forms of solidarity and a language of class to articulate their wants and needs. This was a male language, but it encompassed the concerns of men as providers for their families as well. Other men sought more individualist solutions to the precarious position into which economic transformation put them and their families. These men, along with their womenfolk, forged a new middle class of prosperous artisans and shopkeepers and, in time, clerks, managers, and professionals as well.45

  It is important not to draw these distinctions too sharply, however, for the period under study here. The process of industrialization was a gradual one that affected different localities at different times. Even the same New England town could, for example, support both an industrially organized textile mill and more traditionally organized artisan workshops.46 The Gold Rush occurred at a pivotal point in these economic transformations, when the languages of class and the languages of individualism were only beginning to diverge. Nonetheless, fear of subordination for male artisans like Chamberlain and Chaffee was in the air, and the discovery of gold in California provided an answer to such fear that leaned toward individualism rather than solidarity.

  Another forty-niner, Nathan Chase, explained such motivations in a letter to his wife and the mother of their sons: “Jane i left you and them boys for no other reason than this to come here to procure a littl property by the swet of my brow so that we could have a place of our own that i mite not be a dog for other people any longer.”47 Chamberlain and Chaffee had no such obligations, but the young men were at an age where they might be expected to marry and assume familial responsibilities. It seems reasonable to surmise that the two did not depart for California intending to live out their days together in the shadow of the Sierra Nevada. Instead, like Nathan Chase, they probably sought to navigate northeastern economic change by finding a quick western way to achieve what was known as a “competency”—a couple of years of diligent gold digging and then economic independence. Whatever their intentions, they could hardly have predicted a lifetime of labor in the Southern Mines.48

  Mary Harrison Newell, a white woman from Wilmington, Delaware, could hardly have predicted the twists and turns the Gold Rush brought her life either. Although she grew up in a border state between North and South, Mary Newell spent the early days of her marriage to William Newell in his hometown of Utica, New York, where she probably gave birth to their son, Jesse. There William experienced a business failure. So when news of the Gold Rush arrived in late 1848, he formed an association with nine other men to go to California and share the costs of shelter and provisions there.49 After William left, Mary headed south with Jesse to her father’s home. In Wilmington, her family—father, a sister close in age, and other siblings—ran a bakery, and Mary soon settled into the rhythms of a baker’s life. Her father, Benjamin Harrison, was proprietor, and it fell to him to work late at night preparing cakes, pies, and breads for the following day’s customers while his daughters watched over the household. But during the day everyone took turns at the shop. All hoped that William’s sojourn in California would be brief, and that he and Mary would be reunited to continue their young lives on firmer financial footing.50

  But the Newell and Harrison families were restless in this uncertain economic era, and letters sailed back and forth between California and Delaware debating the merits of various schemes to augment family fortunes. Mary pleaded with William to come home, gold or no gold, that they might search for prosperity together. Benjamin Harrison asked his son-in-law about a tract of land the younger man owned in Pennsylvania. Would William sell the land to Benjamin? Could William return and join his wife’s family on the land, turning it into a productive homestead? What were the prospects for bakers in mining towns like Columbia, where William lived? Should Benjamin, Mary, and other family members relocate and open a shop there? Mary insisted that if William would not come home, she must join him in the mines. William insisted that she must wait until he had himself established in his own business, so they could avoid the financial straits they had faced in Utica. Meanwhile, William’s Utica relatives joined in the fray, at first imploring him to return east, and then sending his less than industrious younger brother out to California so that William could “make a man” out of him.51

  Mary’s requests grew more urgent six months after William departed, when their son, Jesse, died suddenly in June of 1849. William did not learn of his child’s death for months, and that news came in a letter from Mary announcing that she too was in poor health. Although she recovered quite quickly, slow mails and lost letters meant that William spent most of the winter wondering whether his wife had succumbed to illness as well.52 Still, the bereaved father was determined to stay the course in California. In this, he sounded a little like Nathan Chase (who went west so as not to be “a dog for other people any longer”): “How can I now leave all and go home to be dependent on others to be a clerk a servant of servants.” But William’s goals were not nearly so modest as those of Nathan Chase. By re
jecting the occupation of clerk, William scoffed at what some took to be a sure entryway to middle-class manhood. In 1852, he scolded his wife for asking him to come home: “I can not go home this fall when I go Home I must carry with me enough to support us through life.” Finding a “place of our own”—Nathan Chase’s aspiration—was not enough for William: “if I should return home I could only bring enough to start in some kind of business and then if I should again be unfortunate it would be worse than before.”53 One white man’s competency, it seemed, was another’s empty purse.

  Although Mary urged William to return, or to send for her to join him, it was not William’s financial ambitions that troubled her. What Mary seemed to reject was her husband’s assumption that their common prosperity should depend on his efforts alone. The increasing separation of home and workplace that accompanied northern industrialization gave some newly middle-class women a standpoint from which to question emerging commercial values—even as the home itself, however paradoxically, became a “launching pad” for middle-class men.54 Mary Newell was not one of these critics. She was a valued partner in a family enterprise controlled by her father but dependent on her labor. Indeed, once she left Wilmington, her father complained that the shop’s profits declined, that the undependable boys in the family were no substitute for her. So Mary rightly chafed at the idea that her husband was responsible for their welfare. In the end, her persistence bore fruit. On December 12, 1853, William penned these words to his wife, “Now you and I shall live separate no longer than I can help and I will leave it altogether for you to say whether you will come out here and stay two years or whether I shall come home next spring”—though his description of business prospects in California indicated he had no desire to return east.55

  Six months later, Mary Newell set sail from New York City and by July of 1854 was safely situated in the new house William had built in Columbia. Mary immediately began to lobby her sister and father about relocating to California, assuring them that this was the place to make money, particularly if they would leave the boys behind and bring with them only the hardworking (and marriageable) girls. But before the Harrisons could arrange their affairs and prepare to move, Mary wrote to tell them that William, whose health had been failing since before she arrived, was dead. After five long years apart and after the loss of their son, one might assume that Mary would return to Wilmington as soon as she could dispose of her husband’s assets in Columbia. Instead, the young widow continued to press her relatives to come west, now suggesting that she and her sister Lucy take up the family’s entrepreneurial banner:

  I think Lucy and I had better make arrangments to go into some kind of business. . . . I want to be doing something. you know I cannot keep still eny more than you can Lucy I think you had better get some childrens Patterns for clothes and some trimmings such as buttons Pins Tape dress trimming . . . coton thread neadles sewing silk . . . and you had better get a cloak . . . plain black velvet I would get if I were you. . . . I think you had better get some nice dresses as they dress as much here as at home and get Father some nice things.56

  Materials for a clothing business, respectable apparel for the family—middle-class husbands might be mortal, but middle-class dreams died hard. Among her many resources, Mary Newell could fall back in a sorrowful time on the knowledge of her own economic competence in a increasingly commercial world. With that knowledge, with family members who saw her welfare as tied to their own, and with the privilege that arose out of being a “respectable” white widow in a town like Columbia, Mary was well situated to realize her hopes in California.

  Mary and William Newell, Jason Chamberlain and John Chaffee—each pair illustrates some of the local, regional, national, and even global forces that drew northerners to California after 1848. All four people were trying to make their way in a changing economic milieu, but the aspirations of Chamberlain and Chaffee, on the one hand, and the Newells, on the other, were not the same. Chamberlain and Chaffee sought to avoid the threat to artisan independence that industrialization seemed to portend. The Newells had different dreams. They were already on the path to middle-class life at the time of the Gold Rush, and California became a new venue in which to follow that star. And indeed, Chamberlain and Chaffee maintained what they understood as their independence over the years as small-time miners and cultivators in rural Tuolumne County. Mary Newell, for her part, remained in the town of Columbia and remarried quickly. Her new husband was an officer of the Tuolumne County Water Company, one of the grandest entrepreneurial schemes the Southern Mines ever saw, and one of the economic anchors of Columbia’s homegrown white middle class after the boom years of the Gold Rush.57

  Years earlier, in the adjacent town of Sonora—a more heterogeneous town than Columbia—another group of women sought access to the gold dust that seemed to pass so freely from hand to hand in the diggings. They served liquor in saloons; they tended gaming tables; they had sex with men, sometimes for profit in brothels, sometimes in intimate relationships—men whose pockets seemed lined with gold. The women were from France, and, if we can credit the recollections of the Canadian-born forty-niner William Perkins, they wore stunning clothes and could turn men inside out with their winning ways. Unlike many immigrants who took up unfamiliar tasks such as gold-mining in California, these French women knew their work and practiced it with aplomb. Perkins himself must have been a bit unnerved by their poise, because he went to great lengths to assail their collective character in his reminiscences, which were probably written a decade after the Gold Rush: “Artificial in the extreme, [the French woman] adapts her manners, as she does her dress, to circumstances. . . . she is a lady, a gambler, a coquette, a fury, a bachante and a prude by turns. . . . for money to the Frenchwoman is the real object of her adoration, and to acquire it there is nothing she will not do.”58 That adaptability and unalloyed ambition were useful to any Gold Rush participant was lost on Perkins, who felt sure that anyone who embodied such traits was, by definition, not a woman. Who were these people who so troubled Perkins, and why had they come to work in Sonora?

  No letters or diaries written by French women who worked in the saloons, dance halls, and brothels of the Southern Mines have survived in the historical record. Their names, however, abound in Gold Rush legal proceedings: Anne Lyons worked at a dance house and barroom kept by Rose Cartier in Sonora, for example, and Emilie Henry ran a saloon in Mariposa.59 One can only assume that many of these women hailed from the extensive French demimonde of the midnineteenth century. Prostitution flourished in Paris and other French municipalities under a distinctive system of rules, called regulationism, that had roots in the ancien régime but came into full flower only after 1802. In that year, Parisian administrators established facilities in which to examine prostitutes for sexually transmitted diseases. From there, officials made the medical examination mandatory and then began to require all prostitutes to register with the police. As an older begrudging tolerance of sexual commerce joined with newer anxieties about contagion and public hygiene, women who sold sex for cash found themselves caught in a legal limbo that matched their customary economic marginality. If they followed regulationist procedures, they could ply their trade. But if they then broke a rule, or missed a medical exam, or created any other sort of trouble, they were arrested and imprisoned without trial. Thus by complying with registration, prostitutes could easily put themselves outside the law. Of course, not all women who sold sexual favors registered with the police, and officials began early on to register suspected prostitutes against their will. Over the course of the nineteenth century, concern about “clandestine” prostitution increased, until nearly any working-class woman who raised suspicion might be subjected to arrest and examination. The real hysteria over unregistered prostitutes came decades after the Gold Rush, but the arbitrary harassment of working women, both those who were registered as prostitutes and those who were not, was common practice by the time Paris received word of California’s gold discov
ery in late 1848.60

  The freewheeling world of the Gold Rush must have looked good to women accustomed to the strictures of regulationism, which represented an attempt to stabilize unstable sexual and economic categories among urban women. In the mines, such Parisians might or might not engage in sexual commerce, since the demand for women in a variety of service occupations seemed to equal the demand for prostitutes. Women could serve men drinks, or deal them cards, or set up housekeeping with them. Informal union with Gold Rush men had its advantages over prostitution: companionship, reduced risk of sexually transmitted disease, greater protection from the fluctuation of local economies, maybe even better sex (or, if not, then less of it). Then, too, simple sex for cash was always an option, since gold dust and men willing to pay were rarely in short supply. And in California, a woman did not have to register with authorities or submit to a medical examination, nor was she as likely to be arrested as she had been in Paris. In short, the diggings offered the tolerance of home without the constant surveillance.

  Even the structure of prostitution was looser in California, particularly in the early years and particularly outside of San Francisco. In Paris a registered prostitute was likely to work in a maison de tolérance under the watchful eye of a madam, who usually split a prostitute’s earnings with her after deducting the costs of room, board, clothing, and other incidentals. A madam might induce a prostitute to run up a substantial debt, so that the latter could ill afford to leave the bordello. And brothel life itself could be tedious and confining. While it offered possibilities for intimacy among women who worked as prostitutes—if we can believe the fevered commentators who wrote about French prostitution in the nineteenth century—it fostered same-sex eroticism in the context of enforced proximity, economic coercion, and the constant scrutiny of public authorities.61 By comparison, while California promised no bed of roses, it seemed to offer a kind of autonomy to women schooled in social constructions of male need and desire.