Roaring Camp

by Susan Lee Johnson

  Among some groups of men in the diggings, such domestic practices were institutionalized. In 1850, Timothy Osborn, a white man from Martha’s Vineyard, lived near a Mississippi party headed by a planter named Gaster, whose sons had persuaded him to try his luck in California. Gaster brought four of his thirty black slaves with him from home, men who Osborn observed were “prompt in executing the commands of their master.” Osborn, who did his own domestic work, remarked that the African Americans “were very useful fellows about a camp . . . some of them being occupied . . . in cooking and keeping everything ‘decently and in order.’” Northerners sometimes remonstrated against slave labor in the mines, but, if Osborn’s sentiments were at all common, the idea of having someone else prepare meals for white men and clean up around their camps had its appeal. After all, this was a culturally intelligible division of labor, even if back home it usually followed what were understood as lines of gender rather than race. As another Anglo man complained to his mother, “If, as at home, we had others to attend to the household arrangements, it . . . would be different, but here everything must be done by ourselves.”43

  Osborn did not stop to think why Gaster’s slaves were so “prompt” in obeying their master—after all, California was admitted to the union as a “free” state as part of the Compromise of 1850. The New Englander later learned that at least one of the enslaved men had left behind a wife and two children in Mississippi; this could have provided good motivation for helping Gaster achieve his goals as quickly as possible. Then too, although four black men accompanied Gaster to California, by the time the group left for home, only three joined the return party. Perhaps one of the black men had been able to buy his way out of bondage after a few months of diligent work in the diggings. This was a common occurrence in California, where the price of freedom was generally around a thousand dollars. Whatever motivated the African American men’s behavior, Osborn himself could not help looking longingly at the services they provided.44

  In still other camps, men who were not in hierarchical relationships with one another nevertheless chose divisions of labor that resembled the habits of home. Sometimes the practices were temporary. When Pérez Rosales, his brothers and workers, and three other Chileans first went to the mines, all of the men hauled their belongings over rugged terrain and all went to work in the diggings—all save a man named Hurtado, who, because he was sick and unable to do heavy work, was assigned cooking duty. When the others returned from a day of mining, Pérez Rosales recalled, “Hurtado was awaiting us with beans and rice he had been keeping good and hot.” It was not unusual for convalescing men to do extra domestic work, which for some must have reinforced the notion that such tasks were best suited to the weak.45

  On occasion, however, a healthy man in partnership with another took over food preparation entirely. When Perlot teamed up with Louvel, the French man who gardened behind the cabin, the two came up with such an agreement. According to Perlot, Louvel had a “refined palate” and was a superb cook, while Perlot’s skills were “mediocre.” So the men decided to forgo cooking in weekly rotations: “Louvel . . . consented to do it alone, on condition that I would go hunting every Sunday. He concocted the stew, I furnished the hare; each one found his satisfaction in this arrangement.” In the long run, the plan had its costs. During their first summer together, both Louvel and Perlot spent most of the time digging a ditch for water to make it easier to wash gold-bearing dirt once the winter rains began. When they finished and found the skies still clear, Louvel grew restless. As Perlot recalled, Louvel “had nothing for distraction but his culinary occupations,” while Perlot kept busy hunting. After several weeks of inactivity, Louvel left Perlot to join a fellow countryman working farther north. Perlot was on his own for several months until he finally found a new partner, for whom he immediately prepared a welcoming feast. This partner was the fellow who was so taken by Perlot’s succulent salads—so taken that the newcomer, like Louvel before him, agreed to take on cooking duties indefinitely. Perlot had a way with men.46

  No doubt similar domestic arrangements existed elsewhere in the diggings. But most who could rely on someone to make all their meals by definition either lived in or near a boardinghouse, owned a slave, or had a wife. Thomas Thorne must have been in Gold Rush heaven. An Anglo Texan, Thorne came to the Southern Mines with enslaved black women and men and a white wife. The party ran a boardinghouse renowned in Mariposa County for delicacies such as buttermilk and fresh eggs. In 1850, three Anglo American men lived with the Thorne family in the shingle-roofed cabin that the merchant Samuel Ward, brother of the soon to be famous Julia Ward Howe, called Thorn Villa. Many others spent a night there when traveling through the area, and some who lived nearby took their meals at the cabin for a weekly fee. Neighbors like Charles Davis ate there only on occasion, when their taste for finer fare got the best of them, as Davis explained to his daughter: “here in California we can get . . . a great plenty of common food of every kind. . . . But no eggs, no Turkey, no Chickens no pies no doughnuts no pastry . . . unless we take a meal at Mrs. Thornes.” Mary Thorne, mother of three children, managed the boardinghouse with the assistance of Diana Caruthers and her two daughters, Caroline and Georgeanne, three of the ten African American slaves who lived with the Thornes in the diggings.47

  Even when black labor helped create such plenitude, white men associated domestic comfort largely with white women. Thus both Ward and Davis attributed the bounty they encountered at the boardinghouse to “Mrs. Thorne.” When Mary Thorne was ill, Davis acknowledged that there was “nobody except the Old darkey Woman & her two daughters to serve up for the boarders”; but his preface of “nobody except” defined the presence of the Caruthers women as a sort of absence. Indeed, while white men might credit the usefulness of slave labor for household chores, it was white women’s domestic abilities that most enthralled them. After eighteen months of cooking for himself, Lucius Fairchild, a future governor of Wisconsin, moved into a sturdy frame dwelling where one of the residents lived with his wife and infant daughter. The Vermont woman kept house for the men, and Fairchild was ecstatic: “You can’t imagine,” he wrote to his family, “how much more comfortable it is to have a good woman around.” Enos Christman, who gave up mining to work for the first newspaper in the Southern Mines, the Sonora Herald, echoed Fairchild’s sentiments. Christman lived in the two-story adobe building that housed the newspaper offices, and when his partner’s wife and children finally arrived in 1851, he beamed, “Everything now goes on quite comfortably. A woman about a house produces a new order of things.”48

  It was not only family homes that triggered gendered and racialized imaginings. Roadside houses where white women cooked for travelers also proved perfect sites for conflating things culinary and things female. When P. V. Fox described his stop at Richardson’s Ranch en route to the diggings, he was especially vivid: “Had beef steak, Pickled Salmon, Hash, Potatoes, Bread, biscuit, Griddle cakes & Sirrup, Tea & coffee. Pies & cakes, Peach sauce, and a chat with the land lady (The rarest dish).” It was indeed the case that meals at white women’s establishments were more elaborate than white miners’ usual fare. In particular, where an Anglo woman served food, milk and eggs were sure to be found—not surprising, since cows and chickens had long been a special province of women in rural American divisions of labor. In California, the prospect of indulging in such items could take on the urgency of romance. Sam Ward, traveling to Stockton from the mines, hesitated to stop at a new wayside inn rather than the one kept by a male acquaintance on the Tuolumne River. But, he recalled, “a smiling hostess in the doorway and a tethered cow hard by tempted me.” Then he completed the metaphor: “This infidelity to my friend, the landlord of the Tuolumne, was recompensed by the unusual luxury of eggs and milk, for which I felt an eager longing.”49

  As Ward’s turn of phrase suggests, men’s longings and men’s loyalties could be confusing in California. Domestic concerns were somehow female (were they not?), and so i
t was only natural (was it not?) that men would prove inept at caring for themselves and one another in the diggings. Often enough, this was so. But for every case of scurvy, for every burned loaf of bread, for every man who could not cook a decent meal for his partners, there were daily domestic triumphs in the diggings.50 When he first arrived in the mines, for example, Enos Christman complained that his flapjacks “always came out heavy doughy things” that no one could eat. “Want of a teacher,” he thought, made learning to cook difficult. But trial and error brought good results, as Christman proudly noted: “We can now get up some fine dishes!” Likewise, William Newell, writing to his wife Mary, was emphatic about the improvement in his own culinary skills: “I have got to be a great Cook.” Others, like Perlot, found that a new man about the house could produce a different order of things. Likewise, Daniel Woods was especially thrilled when a young sailor came into his life, “a man with a brave heart in danger, but with a kind heart to those he loves—rough or gentle like the ocean he has navigated.” The fellow was a “first-rate cook,” and he also built camp stools and a bedstead, Woods noted, “so that our mining home presents an unusual air of comfort.” What were men to make of the domestic contentment they found in the diggings? What did it mean when a New Englander sat down to his journal after a sumptuous trout dinner and wrote, perhaps with some exaggeration, “French cooks we consider are totally eclipsed and for the reestablishment of their reputation we can do no less than recommend a visit to our camp”?51

  French miners relax at lunch, not looking particularly domestic.

  Courtesy of Matthew R. Isenburg.

  For English-speaking men to liken themselves to French cooks was no empty gesture. Anglo American and British immigrants considered exaggerated domesticity a national trait among French men. The Englishman Frank Marryat was delighted to find a large French population in the town of Sonora, “for where Frenchmen are,” he wrote, “a man can dine.” Likewise, A. Hersey Dexter, who suffered through the hard winter of 1852–53, was saved by “the little French baker” next door who allowed neighboring miners a loaf of bread each day. Yet it was the traveler Borthwick who best elaborated upon this vision. Borthwick described a French dwelling along Coyote Creek in Calaveras County that resembled Perlot and Louvel’s—a “neat log cabin,” behind which was a “small kitchen-garden in a high state of cultivation.” Alongside stood a “diminutive fac-simile of the cabin itself,” inhabited by a “knowing-looking little terrier-dog.” Along with Dexter, Borthwick insisted on fashioning French men and things French as somehow dainty (small, little, diminutive)—echoing Borthwick’s descriptions of Chinese men huddled around their “curious little black pots.”52

  But in the domestic lives of the French Borthwick found nothing exotic—the cabin was neat; the garden was cultivated; even the dog had an intelligent face. Instead, Borthwick found among the French a magic ability to create a homelike atmosphere: “without really expending more time or labor, or even taking more trouble than other men about their domestic arrangements, they did ‘fix things up’ with such a degree of taste, and with so much method about everything, as to give the idea that their life of toil was mitigated by more than a usual share of ease and comfort.”53 The experience of Perlot and Louvel, of course, indicates that among French-speaking men some more than others were inclined to “fix things up.” But the Anglo propensity for casting all French men as a sort of collective better half in the diggings is telling. More explicitly than back home, where gender could be mapped predictably onto bodies understood as male and female, gender in California chased shamelessly after racial and cultural markers of difference, heedless of bodily configurations.

  California was, for many, a “world upside down.” Even in hotels and restaurants, all the help might be male. When Hinton Rowan Helper—who would soon be known as a southern critic of slavery but who first took aim at California—passed through Sonora and breakfasted there, he noted that the male proprietor and two male workers cleared the table. “Women have no hand in these domestic affairs,” he exclaimed. “There is not a female about the establishment.” In case the reader missed the point, he added, “All the guests, owners and employees are men.” (The breakfast was dull, too—pork, beans, and flapjacks.)54 The future governor Lucius Fairchild himself became such an employee for a time and felt compelled to explain the situation to his family: “Now in the states you would think that a person . . . was broke if you saw him acting the part of hired Girl. . . . but here it is nothing, for all kinds of men do all kinds of work.” Besides, he went on, “I can bob around the table, saying ‘tea or Coffee Sir.’ about as fast as most hombres.” Although Fairchild insisted it all meant nothing in California, his explanation suggested that it meant a great deal—white men bobbing around tables waiting on other white men. If he could act the part with such enthusiasm, did gender and race have less to do with bodies and essences than with performing tasks and gestures? No doubt Fairchild thought he could tell a “natural” hired girl from one just “acting the part.” But the anxiety such situations produced could be striking. Fairchild, for example, compared his own performance not to that of “real” women but to that of other hombres—as if the English word might not adequately insist upon his own essential manhood.55

  It was true that people who thought of themselves as “hombres” rather than “men” had less call to wait on or be waited on by other male gold seekers. Recall that Mexican men came to California with their womenfolk more often than did men of any other immigrant group. Mexican women, while few in number, provided domestic labor not just for husbands and brothers but often—at a price—for larger communities. Remember, for example, the party assembled by Antonio Franco Coronel, the southern California ranchero. Coronel traveled with two Indian peónes and two Sonorans who were indebted to the patrón for the cost of the journey north—Benito Pérez and his wife, whose name was not recorded. The wife of Pérez received half an ounce of gold (about eight dollars) each day to buy provisions for the group. Of her own accord, she started preparing more food than she and the four men could eat; the extra she sold. She charged a peso a plate for tortillas and frijoles, and eventually earned three or four ounces of gold (fifty dollars or more) per day. It must have been women such as Coronel’s cook whom the French journalist Étienne Derbec encountered, prompting him to conclude that tortilla making was “the sole occupation of Mexican women when they do not have an Indian to take care of that job.” (And if Coronel’s party was at all typical, more male Indian peónes were employed in the mines than over campfires.) Derbec thought it a hard life for a woman. It may have been tedious, but no miner would have scoffed at a steady income of three or four ounces a day, even in 1848; by 1849, an ounce per day was considered a respectable yield.56

  In the town of Sonora, Mexican women made a magnificent display of their culinary talents, cooking in open-air kitchens huge quantities of wheat and corn tortillas to serve along with a sopa of meat cooked in a chile sauce. William Perkins recalled that Indian and Spanish Mexican women alike sold their wares in this manner, while native men who had once lived in Spanish missions passed through the weekend crowds carrying buckets of iced drinks on their heads and singing out, “agua fresca, agua fresca, quatro reales.” Meanwhile, stalls and stands tempted passersby with “sweetmeats of every description, cooling beverages, with snow from the Sierra Nevada floating in them, cakes and dried fruits, hot meats, pies, every thing in the greatest abundance.”57 Some white women also sold food in quantity—at Curtis Creek, Benjamin Butler Harris met an Oregon woman “who cooked and sold from early morn to dewy eve dried-apple pies for $5.00 each.” But nowhere did Anglos create the extensive commercial domestic world that Mexican women, along with mission Indian men, set up on the streets of Sonora. It was a world that was reminiscent of Mexican cities where women supported themselves and sometimes their families by hawking tortillas, tamales, and fresh produce from homes, market stalls, and street corner stands.58 Even Hermosillo and Ures
could not have produced as many willing customers for women’s wares as the Gold Rush town of Sonora, however. There is no way to quantify how much gold dust passed from men’s hands to women’s hands in this domestic marketplace, but it must have been considerable.

  Still, as Lucius Fairchild’s waitressing suggests, this commercial sphere included men who provided goods and services as well. Fairchild was not alone in serving his fellow (white) man, but more often men who did such work were not Anglo Americans. When Vicente Pérez Rosales gave up on mining and storekeeping, for example, he opened a café in San Francisco called Citizen’s Restaurant. Perhaps the name was defiant; noncitizens like Pérez Rosales were already subject to harassment in California. Indeed, his decision to leave the diggings had everything to do with such treatment. The Chileans built their café and immediately hired a French cook, who Pérez Rosales claimed was famous and whom he paid more than twenty dollars a day plus room and board. There is no evidence to explain why this particular French man took this particular job, but French-speaking as well as Spanish-speaking immigrants faced Anglo opposition in the mines, and so the domestic marketplace may have been an attractive alternative. Nonetheless, restaurant work, even proprietorship, seemed to hold stigma for men thus employed. As Pérez Rosales complained, “We were, at one and the same time, the masters and the servants of the restaurant,” a statement that may also have reflected the patrón’s affluent youth.59

  In the diggings, too, non-Anglo men provided many of the services the largely male population wanted. Helen Nye, the white woman whose husband was a merchant at Don Pedro’s Bar, was in a good position to keep track of the demand, in particular, for non-Anglo cooks. Her home on the Tuolumne River was also a boardinghouse, but she did not prepare the meals. In letters to her mother and sisters, Nye explained her absence from the kitchen in a variety of ways. Once she intimated that her husband and a boarder had decided to hire a French cook, seemingly over her objections. On another occasion, she wrote that although she wanted to help out, “about all who hire as Cooks prefer to do the whole and have the regular price.” In yet another letter, she complained that the cook Florentino had “left in a kind of sulky fit” and that his job landed in her hands: “I found it was too much as it kept me on my feet all the day.” “If we were a private family I should prefer to do it,” she reasoned, but keeping a boardinghouse was a different matter. The shifting ground of Nye’s explanation suggests that she worried about what her female relatives might think of her circumstances. Whether or not Nye herself wanted to stay out of the kitchen, the male cooks kept on coming. Florentino got over his fit and returned to Don Pedro’s Bar, and he was preceded and followed by others—a fellow named Scippio, for example, and an African American man whom Nye, in spite of her stated wish to help with the cooking, disliked because he worked slowly, forcing her to assist. And although she implied that her husband made hiring decisions, she once revealed her own hand in the process by writing to her sister, “I think I shall try a Chinese cook next they are generally liked.”60 Nye’s compulsion to explain her relationship to domestic duties—like Fairchild’s to explain his—and her inconsistent descriptions indicate that novel divisions of labor could unsettle notions of womanliness as well as manliness. What did it mean for a white woman to turn over cooking to a black man, a French man, a Chinese man? For a Chilean patrón to wait tables alongside his peónes?