Roaring Camp

by Susan Lee Johnson

  For Perkins, the scene was at once novel and familiar; he could not help recalling “the descriptions we have read of the brilliant bazaars of oriental countries.” Whatever the scene evoked for the orientalizing eyes of Perkins and men like him, there is no reason to doubt that Mexicans did indeed decorate their dwellings with brightly colored flags and fabrics and serapes. Perkins noted that it was Mexican men who built the brush houses for their families and who, “leaving their wives and children in charge,” went off during the week to dig gold. However few and far between, then, even in Gold Rush California there were eye-catching, well-tended worlds without men.21

  For the most part, though, miners fended for themselves. Once they constructed cabins or pitched tents, inhabitants had to organize domestic labor such that all stayed reasonably well fed and healthy. By far the preponderance of evidence about camp life describes the subsistence strategies of Anglo American men—particularly diary-writing northerners. Still, a handful of sources generated by French- and Spanish-speaking immigrants, as well as descriptions of non-Anglo camps by Anglo writers, help round out the picture of daily sustenance in the diggings. Then too, multiethnic, multiracial tents and cabins were by no means rare in the Southern Mines, and white men who worked in partnership with men of color, for example, sometimes left a record of shared domestic duties.

  Probably the most common type of household in the Southern Mines during the boom years of the Gold Rush was that of two to five men who constituted an economic unit: they worked together in placer claims held by household members, alternating tasks and placing the gold in a common fund from which they purchased food and other necessities. Profits, when there were any, were divided among the partners.22 But such households were not universal. Often the men of several cabins would band together, for example, to dam a river and work its bed. In this case, domestic concerns were the province of the cabinmates, while the larger group distributed the proceeds of labor in the diggings. Likewise, a household might include members who worked separately and did not pool resources, but did share household tasks and provisions. The variations on these themes were endless, and the unpredictability of placer claims meant that a miner might find himself in a variety of domestic situations over the course of a year or two in California. At times he might even end up, as Anglos put it, “on his own hook,” mining and tenting alone. But most men spent a good deal of time living and working in cooperation with other gold seekers.23

  These generalizations probably hold for most white men, both North American and European, and most free African Americans during the Gold Rush. It is likely that they hold for a large number of Mexican and Chilean and perhaps some Chinese men as well. But for those North Americans, Latin Americans, and early-arriving Chinese who went to California under conditions of slavery, debt peonage, or contract labor, other domestic arrangements may have obtained. And whenever women of any background were present in the camps or whenever men lived in or near towns with boardinghouses and restaurants, daily subsistence was a different matter. All types of households in the Southern Mines, save those of Miwoks, relied on tenuous market relations to supply most of their basic needs. (In time, even Miwoks would turn to the market for many provisions.) Out in the camps, men traded in gold dust for provisions at the nearest store, generally a tent or cabin located a fair hike from home and stocked with freight hauled overland to the mines from Stockton.24 In the first year of the Gold Rush, some goods came straight from Mexico, as merchants in northern Sonora emptied their shelves and hurried their wares on pack animals to the mines. Rancheros from southern California also bypassed the new trade routes, driving their cattle directly to the diggings and reaping healthy profits.25 But Stockton was a conduit for most trade goods. Beef, pork, beans, flour, potatoes, and coffee ranked high on miners’ lists of provisions purchased. In flush times, they might also be able to buy onions, dried apples, or a head of cabbage, though fresh fruits and vegetables were the hardest items to find.26

  Limited foodstuffs spelled monotonous meals for most, but also encouraged people to exchange cooking techniques. Men from Europe and the United States, for example, sometimes adopted Mexican practices. Perlot and his French companions, en route to the mines in 1851 and low on provisions, met a party of Mexicans who were eating what looked to Perlot like turnips dipped in salt and pepper, fresh tortillas, and hearty beefsteaks cooked on sticks over an open flame. The Mexican men gave Perlot some raw meat, and he returned with it to his own party’s fire, proclaiming, “Messieurs . . . in this country, this is how beefsteak is cooked.”27 Howard Gardiner, a Long Islander, was less enthusiastic about the Mexican-style foods he learned to prepare during lean times, recalling that he and his partners lived “more like pigs than human beings.” But those meals based around pinole, a fine flour of parched corn that had been pounded in a mortar, sustained him until he was able to buy what seemed to him more appropriate Anglo fare.28 While not all English-speaking miners were as disdainful as Gardiner was, the contrast between Perlot’s and Gardiner’s responses to Mexican dishes would be echoed in later conflicts between Anglo Americans, on the one hand, and Spanish- and French-speaking immigrants, on the other. Just as Gold Rush shelters took on gendered meanings, so too could Gold Rush food become racialized in its procurement, preparation, or consumption—recall Charles Davis’s comment about fare that was fit only for “Wild Indians and Wild Animals.”

  Among Latin Americans in the diggings, men might try to appeal to one another’s tastes, especially when commercial interests were at stake. When Vicente Pérez Rosales, the Chilean patrón who went to California with his brothers and five laborers, learned in mid-1849 that non-Anglos were being driven from the mines, he turned his attention to trade. He and his companions set up a store filled with goods purchased in San Francisco—Chilean cheese and beef jerky, toasted flour, dried peaches, candied preserves, and two barrels of brandy. All items sold well except the jerky, which was full of what looked like moth holes. In desperation, the Chilean merchants laid the jerky out in the sun and coated it with hot lard to fill up the apertures. Then they piled it up in a pyramid shape and doused it with a “devilishly” hot sauce made from Chilean peppers. The pungent smell of the jerky caught the attention of some Mexican customers, and so the traders thought fast: “We told them it was the most select jerky,” Pérez Rosales recalled, “the kind served to the aristocracy in Santiago.” He went on, “We lied like experienced merchants who assure a trusting female customer that they are losing money on an item, and would not sell it at such a low price to anyone but her.” Here Pérez Rosales turned Mexican unfamiliarity with Chilean foodstuffs to his advantage, playing on envy of aristocratic privilege and, in his own mind, making women out of Mexican men, thereby underscoring Chilean manliness. While this incident took place in Sacramento, entrepôt for the Northern Mines, similar interethnic gastronomic and commercial episodes, which were charged with taken-for-granted notions of gender and tinged with class meanings, must have occurred in Stockton and the Southern Mines as well.29 Most immigrants, like these Mexican customers, preferred to purchase their provisions in the diggings. But during the first few winters of the Gold Rush, floods in the San Joaquin Valley and treacherously muddy roads between Stockton and the foothills brought severe shortages of even the most basic supplies. In mid-October 1852, for example, Moses Little wrote from Sandy Gulch in Calaveras County, “We have been living rather short for the past few days. On Baked beans & bread—no potatoes.” A month later: “No provision up yet and the last flour in the loaf.” In another month, his tone was more ominous: “Frank and friend C went over to the store. . . . but they were all out of Flour Meal & Pork. We have now not more than enough to last for 2 or 3 days longer.”30 During the same winter, Perlot and his Belgian partner, Thill, living in Bear Valley near the Merced River, could find no provisions at all until they learned of a lone merchant at Big Oak Flat who was distributing beans and flour in equal portions to hungry miners regardless of their ability
to pay. A number of men did receive their rations gratis, but at times such as these food was often scarcer than gold.31

  Thus many miners tried to supplement store-bought provisions by hunting and fishing, and a few gathered greens in the hills or planted small gardens. Not all who hunted met with success. Moses Little managed to bring down some quail just in time for Christmas dinner during the lean winter of 1852, but he spent most of his shot at target practice. Timothy Osborn, another white New Englander, and his cabinmates were similarly ineffective in late 1851 despite the abundance of deer, antelope, and bear near their Tuolumne County camp. They depended instead on neighboring Texans, “genuine back-woods-men,” to supply them with venison.32 William Miller had better luck. He and his fellow white partners were camped near a group of free black men in the fall of 1849, and in addition to coming together to dam the river and work its bed, the two parties went out deer hunting with one another and otherwise shared provisions. Heavy rains foiled the plans of the damming company, but the African and Anglo American residents of the camp continued to exchange gifts of fresh venison. By Christmas, one of the black men, Henry Garrison, had moved into Miller’s tent, and all parties spent the holiday together indulging in a “Splendid Dinner” and dancing to the music of Garrison’s fine fiddle playing.33

  Fewer men planted gardens or gathered greens. So visitors were astonished by Perlot’s singular store of herbs and vegetables. After serving salad to an incredulous miner in the mid-1850s, Perlot took him on a stroll: “I led him a hundred paces from the house . . . where I gathered chervil; a few steps farther to a place where cress was growing well . . . ; a little farther, I found lamb’s lettuce,” and so on. One of Perlot’s partners, the French Louvel, had planted the garden the year before. On seeing it, the newcomer exclaimed, “My God, . . . how stupid can you be! to suffer four years as I have, without having had an idea as simple as that.”34 A few others had that same idea. William Miller planted cabbage and onions in 1849; the preacher Woods put in potatoes, turnips, and cabbage the next spring; and the following year A. W. Genung cultivated two acres from which he boasted he could raise a thousand dollars worth of vegetables—a claim that had as much to do with their scarcity and high price in the diggings as with his confidence as a gardener.35

  Still, most immigrant men suffered from the dietary deficiencies created by their ignorance of the wild plants that Miwok women gathered and by their unwillingness to grow more familiar crops. Perhaps they hesitated to plant vegetables because their campsites were temporary or because kitchen gardens were generally women’s responsibility back home. Whatever the reason, their reluctance made them sick. George Evans, for example, could not fathom why he was too ill to work in the mines during the winter of 1850, until doctors told him he had scurvy: “They advised me to get all the vegetables afforded by these hills.” So he had friends gather what looked to him like wild cabbage and onions, and he bought some Irish potatoes and a bottle of lime juice. Within two days, his health took a clear turn for the better.36

  Evans, given his condition, was wise to eat his vegetables raw, but miners cooked most of their food and had to determine among themselves how to share culinary duties. What evidence exists about such divisions of labor reveals more about Anglo American men than other Gold Rush participants, but Europeans and free African Americans, at least, seem to have followed similar practices. The Belgian Perlot claimed, in fact, that most men in the diggings organized cooking in like fashion: “The rule generally observed between miners in partnership . . . was to do the cooking by turns of a week.” Similarly, John Doble explained to a correspondent, “sometimes one does the cooking and sometimes another and one only cooks at a time and cooks for all who are in the Cabin.” Moses Little approved of this common arrangement: “As we take turns to do the cooking we shall know how things are done.”37

  Indeed, there were many things to do. A man’s “cook week” began on Sunday, when he prepared for the days ahead, as Little recorded: “It being my week to cook I have been somewhat busy—more so than on other Sabbath—Coffee to burn A box full of nuts to fry Bread to bake & Beef to cut up & take care of.” George Allen’s Sunday journal entries note a similar round of tasks—boiling meat, making bread, stewing grapes, cooking rice and beans, frying doughnuts, baking apple pie and bread pudding. During the week, the cook continued to make large quantities of staple foods like bread and beans, in addition to getting up three meals a day. Little, for example, described his evenings as punctuated by the rhythm of domestic duties: “I sit & mended a shirt while my bread is baking & my Beef boiling”; and two nights later, “I am writing My Beans are stewing & Bread baking.”38 The days around New Year’s 1850 must have been the cook week of Henry Garrison, the African American fiddle player who lived with William Miller and his dancing partners, because Miller’s journal for that period is filled with references to Garrison cooking breakfast, making apple pudding (“the Best Pudding I had Eaten Since Leaving home,” Miller wrote), and stirring up a “Beautiful Stew” of squirrel meat. Miller must have looked forward to Garrison’s cook weeks, because at least one of his other partners had trouble even lighting a fire, to say nothing of preparing meals for the men.39 Domestic competence was hardly universal in the diggings, but men valued it when they found it among their comrades.

  It is much more difficult to determine from English-language and translated sources whether or not Mexican and Chilean men working in partnership with their compatriots adopted similar divisions of labor. While Anglo Americans, particularly northerners, occasionally remarked about household arrangements that differed from their own—those in which women or male subordinates such as slaves took on cooking duties—they wrote little about camp life among, for example, Mexican men who lived in groups of four or five. It is hard to say whether this silence represents indifference or whether the divisions of labor were similar enough among small parties of Anglos and Mexicans that Anglos found in their neighbors’ habits little upon which to remark. Perhaps Perlot’s contention about “the rule generally observed between miners in partnership” was widely applicable in the Southern Mines.

  Anglos did occasionally write about Chinese men, who arrived in the Southern Mines in large numbers toward the end of the boom years of the Gold Rush. But white observers were more apt to note how odd they found Chinese foods, cookware, and eating implements than to describe how Chinese men divided up domestic work. Borthwick, the Scottish traveler, visited Chinese camps in both the Northern and the Southern mines, and claimed that Chinese men “treated in the same hospitable manner” all those who approached them. On each visit, Chinese miners invited Borthwick to eat with them, but the traveler declined, finding their dishes “clean” but “dubious” in appearance. He added that he much preferred “to be a spectator,” a role chosen by many a white man in his dealings with Chinese miners. The spectacle Borthwick described was that of a Chinese camp at dinnertime, with men “squatted on the rocks in groups of eight or ten round a number of curious little black pots and dishes, from which they helped themselves with their chopsticks.”40 Borthwick’s word picture evoked white men’s visions of the Chinese; there was something both delicate and animal-like in the circle of squatting Chinese and their curious cookware. While his words said as much about white visions as about Chinese practices, they did suggest that Chinese miners working in large parties broke into smaller groups of men who shared meals and that they used cooking and eating utensils from their homeland.

  The Scottish artist and travel writer J. D. Borthwick’s rendering of a domestic scene at a Chinese camp.

  Courtesy of the Bancroft Library.

  Some white men were more gracious than Borthwick when invited to join Chinese circles. John Marshall Newton was camped with a partner near five hundred Chinese miners in Tuolumne County in 1852. After helping the Chinese secure their title to a claim that had been challenged by English miners, Newton fancied himself a “hero” in his neighbors’ eyes. The Chinese men did bri
ng him plates of “rice flavored with sweetmeats” and other small gifts. They also invited him for meals, a practice Newton described with nostalgic flavor and a dash of exoticism: “many a pleasant dinner have I had eating their outlandish dishes.” No doubt the Chinese miners appreciated Newton’s assistance in what often proved for them an inhospitable local world. But however much they credited his actions, they also relished making him the butt of dinnertime jokes. Invariably when Newton sat down to eat, someone would hand him chopsticks. “Of course I could do nothing with them,” Newton remembered, and so “the whole 500 seeing my awkwardness would burst out into loud laughter.”41

  To the Chinese miners, their neighbor must have looked a bit like an overgrown child fumbling with his food. Still, despite this momentary, ritual reversal of a dynamic in which Anglo American men disproportionately held the power and resources necessary to ensure survival in the diggings, more often Chinese men found it expedient to curry favor with whites. In a situation where white men missed more than anything “home comforts and home joys,” Chinese men could turn Anglo American longings to their advantage. Indeed, although Newton sometimes offered his Chinese neighbors cups of coffee, neither he nor other white men whose personal accounts are readily accessible left behind evidence of having shared their own meals with Chinese miners; the dinner invitations flew in one direction, from the Chinese to their Anglo neighbors. Howard Gardiner, for example, the one who loathed Mexican foods, lived for a time by himself near the tent of a Chinese man. Sometimes Gardiner would stay late working on his claim, and when he went home, he recalled, “I found that the Celestial had preceded me and prepared supper.”42 Gardiner’s neighbor must have found some benefit in looking after the white man. Meanwhile, for Gardiner the arrangement seemed so unremarkable—so familiar, perhaps—that he granted it only passing mention. In everyday events like these, where men of color performed tasks white men associated with white women, Gold Rush race relations became gender relations as well.