Roaring Camp

by Susan Lee Johnson

  Perlot, an eager pupil, was transfixed. Did Juan think that Commè would eventually prevail over Ouatou, the moon thereby regaining her status as a sun? “Oh yes,” Juan replied, “already in spite of [Ouatou], the snows are appearing on the mountains, and Commè, who gathers her î-attissa [pieces of light] and who does not throw them, is keeping them to make use of them when she has enough.” He went on ominously, “Look carefully when she has grown big and you will see a large bundle of î-attissa she is hiding so that Ouatou doesn’t see them, but she lets them be seen enough so that Oscha (woman) always hopes that Ouatou will be conquered at last.” On that day, Juan concluded, “it will be so much the worse for the Nang-à (man), that Ouatou made, and so much the better for Oscha (woman), who is the work of Commè; then the latter will rule the world, which will begin again, and the Oscha will rule the Nang-à, and she will avenge herself on him, if he has mistreated her.”96

  Perhaps Juan had perceived a change in climate of late, or perhaps the growing cold had something to do with his people’s move up into the mountains, or perhaps he was simply entertaining himself with his naïve guest. Whatever was the case, Juan’s words indicated an intellectual penchant for imagining transformations of the most elemental sort. It was this sense of the grand potential for change—along with this notion of the contingency of power and the responsibilities of those who held it—that would carry Miwoks and their allies through the Gold Rush years.

  Much of what made life after 1848 so difficult for the six or seven thousand native people who lived in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada was the influx of immigrants that increased the human population there tenfold in a few short years. A dense web of economic, political, and cultural transformations, both global and local, brought Mexicans, Chileans, Anglo and African Americans, French, and Chinese to Miwok gathering and hunting grounds in response to the discovery of gold in California. Miwoks, too, had participated in some of these transformations before the Gold Rush, but not to anywhere near the extent they would after 1848. Once assembled in the Southern Mines, this diverse array of people would contend with one another to determine whose interests would be best served by the rush for riches. Like the relationship Juan described between Commè, the moon, and Ouatou, the sun, Gold Rush relations of domination were achieved through struggle, maintained by constant vigilance, and always threatened by subordinates’ will to come out from the shadows. Commè continued to wax and wane over the Sierra Nevada foothills. In the meantime, she witnessed many a contest like her own.

  Part II

  Chapter 2

  Domestic Life in the Diggings

  “I have heard of Miners at some diggins subsisting for days on Acorns of which we have a very fine kind in this Country,” Helen Nye wrote to her mother in 1853. Nye, a Massachusetts-born white woman whose husband was a merchant at Don Pedro’s Bar in Tuolumne County, went on to explain how immigrant men learned to make use of the oak tree’s bounty: “The Indians make great account of gathering [acorns] for their winter store.” Newcomers to the Sierra Nevada foothills watched the autumn harvest with interest. And though they preferred to purchase rather than hunt for or gather their own provisions, in hard times, and especially on prospecting tours, they might follow Miwok practices. While looking for new diggings in Tuolumne County during November of 1849, for example, William Miller and his Anglo companions baked acorns for supper, and a few days later, farther south in Mariposa County, the clergyman Daniel Woods and his prospecting party boiled a kettle of acorns with a bit of venison for their evening meal. In general, though, Gold Rush immigrants saw the food that Miwoks most valued as something to be eaten only in dire circumstances. As Charles Davis explained to his daughter in 1852, while acorns, grass, and wild oats abounded in the Sierra foothills, “these serve for Wild Indians and Wild Animals.”1

  As Davis’s disdain for Miwok sustenance suggests, cooking and eating could be sites of contestation, as well as of communion, in the Southern Mines. That was because culinary practices fit into a larger constellation of activities in the diggings that signaled for many a world of confusion—men mending trousers and caring for the sick, Anglos dining on acorns and frijoles. Edmund Booth captured one aspect of that confusion when he complained to his wife in 1850, “Cal. is a world upside down—nothing like home comforts and home joys.” Booth was a New Englander by birth and an Iowan by migration, and he wrote to his wife, Mary Ann, from the Tuolumne County town of Sonora. He lived at a boardinghouse there kept by a young Mexican man and two African American men from Florida. Edmund told Mary Ann that his daily routine began when he awoke from a night’s sleep on the bare ground, rolled up his blankets, and sat down to a breakfast of coffee, meat, butter cakes, and applesauce. Then he walked half a mile below the town to the diggings. “The evening passes,” he wrote, “in reading, talking, thinking of home, or as I am now—writing.” Booth stayed in towns and at boardinghouses more frequently than did many placer miners, perhaps in part because he was deaf and thus lived most safely in densely populated communities of hearing people.2 But if Booth’s privations were less severe than those of most gold seekers, what did he mean when he complained to his wife about the absence of “home comforts and home joys”? Why did California in the 1850s seem like a world standing on its head?

  To answer these questions, one must ponder the multiple meanings of such common activities as eating acorns, digging gold, thinking of home, and inhabiting a race or a gender.3 Even in so short a time as the Gold Rush years and even in so small a place as the Southern Mines, meanings proliferated, evolved, collided. By attending to daily life in the diggings—to the work people did to maintain and enrich themselves and to the ways they filled the rest of their Gold Rush hours—one can begin to comprehend why so short a time was so transformative and why so small a place was so volatile. While native people in the Southern Mines lived in communities with roughly equal numbers of women and men, among immigrant peoples, skewed sex ratios meant drastically altered divisions of labor in which men took on tasks that their womenfolk would have performed back home. Analyzing how immigrant men parceled out such work and how they thought about what they were doing shows us much about the content of gender in the Gold Rush. Examining the meanings of the domestic and personal service work that the small number of non-native women did in California opens a window on the same subject. And studying the perceptions Indian and immigrant peoples held of one another’s ways of manufacturing material life provides yet another view.4

  Skewed sex ratios in the diggings were accompanied by an extraordinary demographic diversity: people came to California from many parts of the world, producing and reproducing ideas about color, culture, and nation that, on U.S. soil, often coalesced into conversations about race.5 Race, like gender, is a changing set of ideas about human difference and hierarchy, and a relation in which those ideas are put into practice. In Gold Rush California, its meanings pulsed through everyday life like an erratic heartbeat. For instance, the way that certain tasks, such as cooking or laundry, came to be associated with particular groups of non–Anglo American men demonstrates how constructions of race could be mapped onto constructions of gender in the diggings.6

  Not everyone in the Southern Mines dug gold, but everyone did perform, or relied on others who performed, life-sustaining and life-enhancing tasks such as procuring provisions, preparing meals, and providing companionship. Since few could reproduce in California the divisions of labor that made the performance of these tasks seem more or less predictable and culturally coherent back home, Gold Rush participants devised new ways to provide for their needs and wants. But all the while they wondered and worried about what it meant, for example, that Anglo men were down on their knees scrubbing their shirts in a stream, that Mexican women were making money hand over fist selling tortillas on the streets of Sonora, or that French men seemed so good at creating homey cabins in the diggings.

  Distinguishing between two kinds of work—domestic and personal service work,
on the one hand, and work in the mines, on the other—may seem to reify categories of labor. Surely placer mining sustained and enhanced human life as much as baking bread or caring for the sick did. In making such distinctions, one invokes the discursive division between home and the workplace that accompanied the growth of industrial capitalism in the nineteenth century, especially in the northeastern and urban United States. One also echoes more recent Marxist-feminist delineations of productive and reproductive labor, which have placed “reproductive” chores (often women’s work) on a par with those “productive” chores (often men’s work) assumed to constitute true economic activity. But impulses similar to those that split home life off from labor in the nineteenth century—impulses scrutinized by twentieth-century feminists—also led most Gold Rush participants to view mining as qualitatively different from and more important than their other daily tasks. This makes intuitive sense, especially since immigrants traveled hundreds or thousands of miles to dig gold or to profit from those who did. Yet performing this privileged activity required that miners pay attention to the exigencies of everyday life. And, in fact, evidence shows that gold seekers paid great heed to their more immediate desires—for shelter, for food, for company, for pleasure, for some way to make sense of what was for most a novel situation. Then, too, for one group of people in the Southern Mines—Miwok Indians—gold digging rarely became the most important, community-defining kind of labor performed. So the distinction drawn here between mining labor and domestic and personal service work is at once heuristic and grounded in some, but not all, relevant historical circumstances.7

  English-speaking miners used lettersheets such as this for correspondence with friends and relatives back home. This lettersheet expressed nostalgia for domestic comfort.

  Reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

  In the end, though, the distinction serves yet another purpose. During the 1980s, historians learned to use poststructuralist analyses of language that show how binary oppositions work—oppositions such as the one between productive and reproductive labor. In the productive/reproductive labor distinction, for example, the leading term (productive or “breadwinning” work) takes primacy, while its partner (reproductive or “domestic” work) is weaker or derivative. This hierarchical relation mirrors some social relations of dominance and subordination based on gender and race. So foregrounding reproductive or domestic labor in a history of a mining area, where mining labor might be assumed to take precedence, is itself a gesture toward unsettling that hierarchical relation.8 I begin, then, not in the mines themselves but in the brush and bark houses and canvas-topped cabins Gold Rush participants built in the Sierra foothills.

  Indeed, one of the first needs immigrants had to meet was that for shelter. Only occasionally did immigrants imitate Miwok practices that made use exclusively of local materials to shield people from the elements and to bind them together in small groups that shared a common living space. Sierra Miwoks built two kinds of dwellings, one primarily for the warmer months, when people were on the move in search of food, and another for the colder months, when bands tended to stay in one place, living off the summer and autumn harvest and waiting out the winter rains. Both were conical structures—to a Canadian and a Belgian gold seeker alike, they looked like beehives—but summer houses were thatched with brush and grass, while winter shelters were made of long slabs of bark.9 Immigrants sometimes constructed brush camps too, especially in the heat of the summer and when they were on prospecting tours. At least one observer acknowledged the miners’ debt to native peoples in this, using a term for Indian dwellings of eastern origins: “Some comfortable wigwams are made of pine boughs thrown up in a conical form, and are quite dry.”10 French, Mexicans, and Americans all seem to have built such houses. An Anglo chronicler claimed that Chileans and Mexicans also made structures of hides laid over wooden frames.11

  Still, by far the most common material Gold Rush immigrants used for shelter was canvas, and this may have been even more true in the Southern Mines than in the Northern Mines. When J. D. Borthwick, a Scottish artist and writer, toured the diggings in 1852 and 1853, he noted that in the north, “log cabins and frame houses were the rule, and canvas the exception; while in the southern mines the reverse was the case.”12 Winters farther south were milder, which accounts for some of the difference, and the persistence of placer mining—which characterized the southern region throughout the 1850s and which necessarily encouraged transience—may explain it as well. Placer miners were always on the move, taking up new claims when old ones gave out or situating themselves near riverbeds during the dry months and on smaller creeks in the rainy season; they relocated so often that “vamos the ranch” was often the first “Spanish” English-speaking miners learned.13

  Though most did live in canvas homes, the word “tent” actually described a wide variety of structures. Some people lived in cramped quarters, such as the Chinese men Borthwick saw in 1852, the first year of mass Chinese immigration to California, and who were organized “in a perfect village of small tents.” Likewise, the Pennsylvanian Enos Christman shared with two others a nine-foot-square dwelling that ran up to a ridge pole in the center. “Within this house,” Christman noted in his journal, “we eat, sleep, rest and tell each other good yarns.”14 Tents like these were not only small; they also offered little protection. John Doble’s canvas home in Calaveras County got damp with every rainfall, and, since it had no fastenings, camp dogs ran in and out with impunity, sometimes carrying off mouthfuls of provisions.15

  So when miners stayed still for any length of time, they built more elaborate shelters. For instance, although the Belgian Jean-Nicolas Perlot and his five French companions lived at first in a small tent and a brush hut, within a year the four men who remained in partnership built a typical structure, “a sort of cabin of tree trunks, topped with canvas to form [a roof] composed of two tightly stretched pieces of canvas, one six inches above the other.”16 Such canvas-topped cabins were ubiquitous in the Southern Mines. In them, immigrants could set up rough bedsteads and construct fire-places, though at least two Anglo men remembered how improvised chimneys forced smoke into their living quarters instead of drawing it out.17 Heavy rain could impair the draft of even a well-built fireplace, and Welsh-born Angus McIsaac, situated near Mariposa, noted in his diary that men living with such irritants often compared their smoky cabins to scolding wives or leaky ships.

  McIsaac’s observation suggests how readily Gold Rush participants saw in their material world metaphoric possibilities, how easily the frustrations of camp life took on gendered meanings. McIsaac himself thought a smoky home was “ill compared” to a scolding spouse or a leaky vessel. An unmarried man with a sweetheart back home and a seafaring past, he noted, “were I compelled to take charge of either, I would on all acations choose the former.”18 Wives, ships, cabins—men grumbled about the responsibilities entailed in their dominion over each of these when the objects of their authority proved unmanageable. McIsaac may have thought a woman the most pleasing ward, but he took for granted the gender hierarchy his words implied. Meanwhile, he and his neighbors took charge of their more immediate surroundings by christening their cabins with names that suggested, even celebrated, the absence of sharp-tongued spouses: Loafers’ Retreat, Main Top (a cabin of sailors), Temperance Hole, and Jackass Tent. Like the Anglo miners a bit to the north who called their camp Whooping-boys Hollow, McIsaac and friends took a certain pleasure in the canvas-covered world without women they created.19

  Not all shelters in the Southern Mines bespoke the ambivalent bachelorhood of men like Angus McIsaac. Among immigrant peoples, more Mexican men than others came to California with their womenfolk. Although descriptions of the dwellings they built are few and written primarily by non-Mexicans, it seems likely that some Mexican Gold Rush communities celebrated social possibilities different from the ones celebrated by Whooping-boys Hollow. By far the most perspicacious observer
of Mexican camp life was Canadian-born William Perkins, a merchant in the town of Sonora who claimed he was known among Spanish-speaking people there as el amigo de los extranjeros, friend of foreigners.20 Perkins found among Spanish-speaking people an otherness that attracted him as much as it repelled many of his English-speaking neighbors. Hence his rhapsodies on Mexican life in Sonora:

  I had never seen a more beautiful, a wilder or more romantic spot. The Camp . . . was literally embowered in the trees. The habitations were constructed of canvas, cotton cloth, or of upright unhewn sticks with green branches and leaves and vines interwoven, and decorated with gaudy hangings of silks, fancy cottons, flags, brilliant goods of every description; the many-tinted Mexican Zarape, the rich manga, with its gold embroidery, Chinese scarfs and shawls of the most costly quality. . . .