Roaring Camp

by Susan Lee Johnson

  As the inconsistencies in Harris’s reminiscences suggest, that benevolence was hardly universal. Whether or not miners’ subscriptions actually maintained seven hundred Mexican men in the winter of 1849, other kinds of cross-racial, cross-ethnic incidents revolving around care of the sick did occur in the diggings. For example, George Allen, who belonged to a damming company of twenty-odd men, noted in his diary during the summer of 1850 that two members were ill, one of whom he called simply “the Mexican.” The men voted that one of the Anglos would “take charge of the sick Mexican . . . and see that he is taken cair of and provided with things to make him comfortable.” Although this man was part of the company, he was the only one whom Allen failed to mention by name. This suggests the Mexican man’s marginal status in the largely Anglo operation; he was a coworker whose health was important, but he would never be a member on the same footing as Allen and the other Anglos. For the unnamed Mexican, this was neither utopia nor the isle of the blest, but rather a local world in which loyalties among men reflected limits as well as largeheartedness.77

  An incident with similar implications occurred at William Miller’s camp in December of 1850. Henry Garrison, the black man who cooked beautiful stews and played a fine fiddle, had moved into Miller’s tent (Garrison’s own having been too thin to withstand heavy rains). Shortly thereafter, neighbors tried to persuade Miller to take in a sick white man. The invalid was one of a party from the Sandwich Islands whose tent had also been threatened by winter storms. One of the sick man’s partners came to Miller drunk and railed: “he begun with Blowing up Garrison the Colard Man for not Comeing to lend him A hand & . . . then Commenced throwing out his hints to me that I had a fine tent And that the Sick Man was A Laying on wet Blankets And on the wet Ground.” Garrison, though born in New York, had come to California from the Sandwich Islands; he knew the white men camped nearby and apparently thought little of them. As for Miller, he found the intoxicated intruder obnoxious, perhaps in part because the man was Irish; although Miller always described cordial relations with African Americans, his every reference to Irish immigrants was racialized and derogatory. Miller refused to care for the ailing white man, commenting, “It is D-D [damned] hard . . . If People . . . that are in Partys together And have Sick men Amongst them that they Should be Unwilling to take Care of them.” A few minutes later, another white neighbor came by, someone who was friendly with both Miller and the islanders, to try to talk Miller and Garrison into taking the invalid in. Miller refused, and then Garrison “knowing the whole Party And their Proceedings Explained things more clearly.” The neighbor turned to leave, muttering that the sick man “was a White And Should be takeing care off.” Miller and Garrison stood their ground, as Miller recorded in his diary: “I . . . Said to him that the Partey the Sick man belonged to Should be made to take Care of him or they Should be Drove from the Mines.” Apparently they convinced the skeptic, because he returned to the islanders and told them they must nurse their own. “Fellow-feeling” knew clear boundaries in the diggings, and often those boundaries followed racial and ethnic lines. When they did not—as when Miller welcomed Garrison into his tent—miners could expect challenge, particularly from white men who felt entitled to certain kindnesses in California.78

  As fractured as “fellow-feeling” could be by race trouble, it was also full of potential for gender trouble. In the eastern United States, at least, and probably in other emigrant areas as well, caring for sick people was more often women’s work than men’s. Male physicians, to be sure, intervened from time to time, especially in cases of serious illness, but wives, sisters, mothers, female slaves and domestics, and sometimes hired home nurses (who were women) provided much of the daily maintenance for convalescents—the kind of maintenance that men needed most often in California.79 So when Gold Rush men took care of each other, it was not surprising that some read that care as gendered female. George Evans is a case in point. Before Evans discovered he had scurvy, he had been sick on and off for weeks. He worried about the scarcity of doctors in the diggings, but more than anything he missed “the tender care and unceasing attentions received from loved hands at home”—hands, no doubt, of his womenfolk. Nevertheless, in California other hands were busy attending to his needs, as he recorded in his diary: “Mr. Parker, an excellent and attentive nurse in sickness . . . baked us some apple pies . . . the only food relished by me in the past four days. These pies could not have been better if baked at home.” Much as Evans longed for the care of the women he left behind, men like Mr. Parker proved that the diggings were full of tender, competent nurses.80

  Offering such tenderness could put men in compromising situations, however. When a man in A. Hersey Dexter’s camp became so ill as to require constant attention, Dexter took on the role of caretaker. He remembered long days and nights spent alone with the invalid, broken up only by visits from his mining partners on their way to and from work. Occasionally, the sick man became delirious and tried to embrace Dexter forcefully, a situation Dexter felt might have proved dangerous had not the two men been of equal strength. Dexter recalled: “He seemed to have taken a fancy to me, and in his calmer moments would beg me not to leave him.” Although the nurse did not articulate the kind of danger he thought he faced from his ward, his description of an incident that occurred the night before the man died can be read as saturated with erotic imagery. That evening, Dexter remembered bending over with his back to the patient to pick up wood chips off the floor. Suddenly the sick man leaped up from the bed and grabbed Dexter from behind: “we both fell on the floor, he on top and holding me with a grip of iron.” Were the man’s actions involuntary? Dexter described them that way: “This contraction of the muscles did not last for long . . . and in a short time he released his hold and lay as if he were dead.” Whatever else the caretaker may have felt for the invalid, there was something in the nursing role that left Dexter feeling alternately protective of and vulnerable to his charge—feelings probably shared by many women who attended sick men in isolated domestic settings in the nineteenth century.81

  Beyond these daily struggles over cooking, laundry, and caretaking, one of the clearest indications that life in the diggings raised questions for immigrant men about the content of gender and race is the extent to which Gold Rush personal accounts are filled with painstaking descriptions of sexual divisions of labor among native peoples. Such personal accounts, of course, were written disproportionately by literate, white Americans and Europeans, and hence tell little about the responses of black, Chilean, Mexican, or Chinese men to California Indian practices. But it is no exaggeration to say that Gold Rush letter, diary, and reminiscence writers were obsessed with the ways in which Miwoks organized men’s and women’s work. No other group’s daily habits so interested white people, and no aspect of those habits proved so fascinating as the seemingly endless round of native women’s work. This was not a new fascination. For nearly three centuries, Europeans and then white Americans had observed, described, and commented on native divisions of labor all over North America, far more often than not concluding that Indian women did most of the work while Indian men frittered away their time hunting and fishing. Historians have paid close attention to this Euro-American practice, pointing out the actual differences between native and white divisions of labor that gave rise to such perceptions as well as the ways in which such perceptions bolstered Euro-American ideologies of conquest.82 These elements infuse descriptions of California Indian practices as well.

  Native gender divisions of labor interested Anglo American and European men. Here, John Hovey, who illustrated his own diary with watercolors, depicts an Indian man hunting. Given that Hovey lived and worked in the Southern Mines, the man represented was probably Miwok. From the John Hovey Journal.

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

  But Gold Rush accounts were written in a particular historical context—one where men far outnumbered women, where a stunningly d
iverse population inhabited a relatively small area, and where most turned their attention to an economic activity that offered potential (however seldom realized) for quick accumulation of capital. In this context, where differences based on maleness and femaleness, color and culture, and access to wealth and power were so pronounced and yet so unpredictable, curiosity about the habits of native peoples took on a special urgency. In particular, immigrant men who had assumed, often for the first time, responsibility for much of their own domestic and personal service work now seemed preoccupied with how differently Indian women maintained themselves and their communities.

  White men were especially interested in how native women procured and prepared acorns, perhaps the single most important food Miwoks ate. If a Gold Rush writer wrote nothing else about Indians in his letters or diary, he generally included at least a brief mention of acorn gathering or processing. In November of 1852, for example, Moses Little noted that his “neighbors the Indians” had come “to their old winter quarters” nearby and that the “Squaws [were] out pounding Acorns to make their bread.”83 But many included more elaborate descriptions of women’s work—gathering up acorns, hulling and then pounding them on limestone outcrops to make a fine meal, leaching the meal to remove the bitter-tasting tannic acid, and then preparing acorn-based soups and breads. During February of 1852, for example, John Doble watched as a nearby Miwok encampment grew from three bark huts to four hundred in preparation for what he called “a big Fandango.” Doble’s curiosity got the best of him, and he decided to take a look. As he approached, he found half a dozen Miwok women at work. Suddenly he realized why he had seen in the foothills so many “large stones with flat surfaces . . . & all the flat surface filled with small round holes in the shape of a physicians Morter.” It was on such surfaces that women sat pounding acorns with large, oblong rocks; the holes were created by the repeated impact of stone against stone. It was hard work. Women built brush shades to protect themselves from the burning sun, but even so, some perspired enough to dampen the stone around them for several inches. Once the acorns were hulled and ground, women leached the meal and then, unless they immediately made it into bread, boiled it, a process that involved dropping red-hot rocks into tightly woven baskets filled with water.84

  Other white men’s descriptions of this process shared Doble’s obsessive attention to detail, an obsession matched rarely in Gold Rush personal accounts, save in explanations of placer (and, later, quartz) mining techniques. Even miners’ own culinary efforts did not receive as much attention as those of native women. It was almost as if, in their diligent representations of the seemingly reproductive work of Miwok women and the seemingly productive work of mining men, diary and letter writers tried to reinscribe ideas about gender difference that life in the diggings had so easily unsettled. But ideas about gender difference were always already ideas about race difference, and those processing acorns were not the women whose absence white miners bemoaned. Indeed, in California difference piled upon difference until it was hard for Gold Rush participants to insist upon any one true order of things. After all, no one could deny that white miners also performed “reproductive” tasks. Nor could anyone deny that native women’s customary chores were “productive”—or that Miwok women panned for gold as well. Besides, there were few simple parallels between California Indian women’s labor and the Euro-American category of “domestic” work. So immigrant men tried to make sense of what they saw by drawing on an older discourse that opposed native women’s drudgery and native men’s indolence.

  It was a familiar refrain. The French journalist Étienne Derbec knew the tune: “It is generally believed that the Indians live from the hunt; but, mon Dieu! they are too lazy.” Hinton Helper, employing the generic term whites often used for native peoples of California and the Great Basin, echoed Derbec: “The male Digger never hunts—he is too lazy for this.” Both Helper and Derbec claimed Indian women fed their communities; Derbec thought they spent “their entire lives in the hardest toil.” What is more, women always struggled under heavy burdens—either baskets of seeds and nuts when out gathering or family provisions when traveling from place to place—while men carried only their bows and arrows. Enos Christman, watching a party of Miwoks pass through the town of Sonora, noted this too: “The women appeared to do all the drudgery, having their baskets . . . well filled with meat.” A more thoughtful diarist might have wondered whose work produced the animal flesh the women carried.85

  Friedrich Gerstäcker, the German traveler, assessed Indian divisions of labor differently. He acknowledged that a woman had to collect seeds, catch insects, cook meals, rear children, bear heavy loads, “and, in fact, do nearly every thing,” while a man merely walked about “at his leisure with his light bow and arrow.” But Gerstäcker thought he understood why: “though this seems unjust,” he wrote, “it is necessary.” He went on, “in a state of society where the lives of the family depend on the success of the hunter, he must have his arms free . . . for action at every minute.”86 Still, the seemingly contradictory impulse either to castigate native men for their sloth or to elevate their economic role to a position of dominance arose from a common, culturally specific concern about the meanings of manhood.

  Another popular lettersheet represented the California Indians whom English-speaking miners observed in the diggings. In accordance with white men’s interest in native gender divisions of labor, this lettersheet concentrated on Indian women’s labor. Although at least one of the images depicted native men working, the text read, “The women do the work, the men the eating, grumbling and sleeping.”

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

  This concern had its origins in the changing social and economic order that sent such letter, diary, and reminiscence writers off to California in the first place—one in which the transformation from a commercial to an industrial capitalism was accompanied by an increasing separation of home and workplace and by shifting distinctions between male and female spheres. White men who aspired to middle-class status were quickly caught up in this whirlwind of change, and the uncertainty of their own positions in the emerging economic system made the potential for quick riches in California all the more enticing.87 What most found in the diggings was no shortcut to middle-class manliness but rather a bewildering array of humanity that confounded whatever sense of a natural order of things they could find in midnineteenth-century western Europe or eastern North America. They might try to remember gender difference through ritual descriptions of Miwok women’s “domestic” chores and their own “breadwinning” labor. But in the selfsame gesture, that reinscription produced and reproduced race difference as well. Besides, the content of both immigrant and Indian lives in the diggings defied such easy oppositions.

  Then too, Miwok people talked back. Recall, for example, how the Awal man Juan explained his people’s style of gender relations to the Belgian miner Perlot. Juan located the greater power of Miwok men in an ancient battle between two suns of equal brilliance, one of whom had created woman and the other man. The fight ended in victory for the sun who created man; the sun who created woman shattered and became the moon and the stars. But Juan claimed that the moon gathered to herself her lost brilliance every month, and, in spite of her waxing and waning, she was slowly and secretly retaining more and more of her splendor until the day when she could again do battle with the sun and at long last conquer him. The present order of things, then, was just that—a contingent set of relations constantly undermined by the life-sustaining tenacity of women who gathered strength from their surroundings.88

  Still, while such relations might be contingent, Miwok women and men alike took pride in them and looked with incredulity at the ways in which immigrant peoples organized their lives. Helen Nye found that her curiosity about a Miwok encampment near her home at Don Pedro’s Bar, especially about “the women with their little ones their mode of cooking & [such],” was returned in kind.
Nye told her sister that Indian women watched her as closely as Nye watched them: “they come round to my door and gaze at me and my movements as if I was a seventh wonder.” The Miwoks not only looked; they talked. Nye could not understand what they were saying—to her it was all “jabber”—and hence we cannot know what these particular women made of what they saw. But in other situations, Miwok women spoke plainly—probably in Spanish—to immigrants about white gender relations. Leonard Noyes recalled that an older Indian woman one day gave him “quite a Lecture on White Women working [too] little and Men [too] much.” “She became very much excited and eloquant over it,” Noyes remembered, “saying it was all wrong.” In exchanges like these, Gold Rush contests over the meanings of gender and race—contests never far from the surface of everyday life—were articulated emphatically.89

  And Miwok sexual divisions of labor were not unchanging; they were dynamic constructions that shifted according to the exigencies of local economies increasingly impinged upon by market forces. At times, Indians resisted the changes, continuing older subsistence practices to an extent that bewildered immigrant observers. As Timothy Osborn put it, “so long as a fish or a squirrel can be found . . . they will not make any exertions towards supplying themselves with any of the luxuries so indispensable to . . . the white man!” He watched in October as Miwok women gathered acorns, and wondered why they continued to do so, “while with the same labor expended in mining they could realize gold enough to keep them supplied with flour and provisions for the entire winter!”90 Osborn might have noted a few other things—that immigrant miners often had trouble supplying themselves with flour and provisions during the winter; that non-Indians, too, relished an occasional meal of squirrel stew, or acorn soup, or fresh-cooked salmon; and that Miwok women did, in fact, dig gold and use it to buy flour and other goods. Still, Osborn’s descriptions of Indians persisting in old habits may not have been all that selective. Miwok subsistence patterns varied a great deal from place to place in the Southern Mines and from year to year during the Gold Rush, and Osborn’s neighbors may well have been able to sustain themselves through gathering and hunting alone in the fall of 1849.