Roaring Camp

by Susan Lee Johnson

  Indeed, while Osborn took a drink from time to time and was also quick to acknowledge the “peculiar fascination in card playing” (which, nevertheless, had to be “kept within proper bounds”), his sexual inquisitiveness knew fewer limits.50 Miss Isbell’s “low necked dress” aside, it was Miwok women who most often captured Osborn’s imagination. Mining along the Merced River during the late summer and fall of 1850, Osborn lived and worked in close proximity to native peoples, both Indians of the foothills and lowland Indians who had left coastal missions to join up-country bands. He frequently remarked at the scant clothing of Sierra Miwoks, taking particular interest in the women’s bare breasts. He acknowledged that his curiosity “was exercised rather more freely than strict propriety would allow under other circumstances,” but insisted that the women’s “modesty did not seem to suffer much,” underlining that phrase for good measure. All of this Osborn recorded in his diary with just a hint of moral inhibition. But in shorthand Osborn indicated that his exercises went beyond observation. He had heard, he wrote, that Indian women, like animals, had “certain times for seeking the man.” And his own experience inclined him to believe this pernicious bit of white wisdom: “I have seen Indian girls, who, when they were ‘in heat,’ would fondle around you and in every possible way would ask you to relieve them, while at other times it would be an impossible thing to get your own wishes gratified.” Like Doten’s description of his attempt to “lay” a young Miwok woman, Osborn’s reflections were steeped in dominant discourses regarding native women’s “animal” proclivities. Such discourses precluded other readings of Miwok sexual practices in the context of conquest: for example, Miwok women might have their own reasons for wanting sex at one time and not at another; some Miwok women might have welcomed intimacy with white men, for whatever reason, while others abhorred the thought; one white man might have appealed to a Miwok woman, while another repelled her.51

  Despite this indication that Osborn may have had sex with Miwok women, most often he seems to have gratified his own wishes simply by watching—or else by spending lazy Sunday afternoons alone in his hammock. In addition to his voyeuristic observation of Miwok and French women, Osborn found other opportunities for looking. In the mines, he and a partner once shared a meal with a mission Indian couple who were traveling through and who seemed particularly enamored of each other. When the couple bid the white men adiós, Osborn and his partner followed them surreptitiously until the Indians left the trail and stole into a cluster of willows. The miners got as close as they could and then, Osborn wrote in his diary, “we stood almost breathless lest we should be discovered and spoil our fun!” That was as much as Osborn would commit to paper, fearing “the displeasure a description of after scenes might bring” upon him. Once settled down in Stockton, Osborn found more visual enticements. On a Saturday night, for example, he met up with a French man crying out, “Ici, il y a vue de Paris,” and offering a look into a “camera of very powerful size.” Osborn gave him two bits, and saw something he could only record in shorthand: “Naked men and women in the very act.” Shifting back to conventional writing, Osborn concluded “it was a very good view of Paris.”52

  Still, most of the scenes Osborn contemplated were ones he conjured up in his own mind. While mining along the Merced, Osborn’s favorite spot to dream was in a hammock of Peruvian netting that he rigged up beneath an oak tree overhanging a ravine. Here, on a Sunday or early on a weekday afternoon when he and his partners enjoyed a siesta, Osborn would nap or read a borrowed novel or let his thoughts drift to women back home.53 He may also have masturbated. In one diary entry, his description of cigar smoking in the hammock seems full of double entendres. The entry begins with Osborn “smoking away . . . at a third rate ‘short six,’” and imagining women he knew walking to church. In no time, the diarist found himself taking a pleasure “in the curling smoke of an ordinary ‘long nine’ which the unpracticed do not know.” Osborn himself must have been practiced, because he knew that a smoker was a contented man who, “impotent of thought, Puffs away care.”54

  At other times, Osborn counted on slumber to bring him contentment. Early on, he was frustrated that dreams of hometown girls had left him unfulfilled: “I never have had a ‘golden dream’ yet!” But within a few months sleep brought results. Once, after dreaming about hours spent alone with a woman in an Edgartown hotel, he awoke uncovered, undressed, and exposed to the December chill—but happy. On another occasion, an afternoon nap delivered up “a romantic dream” about a woman in Mexico City who was wealthy, worldly, and “over-anxious to see ‘Los Estados Unidos.’” Osborn was equally anxious to show her estadounidense valor, though domestic life in the diggings intervened. With sweet regret, he noted in his diary, “Had I not awoke by the cry of ‘supper!’ I should have gratified her.”55

  Even in their dreams, then, the sights and sounds of the Gold Rush haunted Anglo American men, disrupting the ways in which they had imagined the world was ordered, showing them that such conventional terms of ordering required, at the very least, refinement in California. Different men negotiated the crisis of representation differently. Some tried to ignore it, projecting “social” disorder onto cultural “others”—Mexican gamblers or French prostitutes, for example—collapsing race and culture into questionable leisure practices. Men such as Doten, Doble, and Osborn, however, located themselves in the very belly of the beast and struggled to represent themselves—wholeheartedly or ambivalently, with or without a trajectory of self-reformation or dissipation—as aspiring middle-class white men in a world where constructions of gender, class, and race were unfamiliar and in flux.

  It was not only in the private pursuit of pleasure described by men like Doten, Doble, and Osborn that Gold Rush participants faced this crisis of representation, because such men were also relentless in their search for companionship. Both heterosocial and homosocial ties flourished in California, but the paucity of women along with cultural constructions of male needs and desires meant that, for many men, contact with women was at a premium. Women knew this. In fact, the small number of non-native women in the Southern Mines—in 1850, maybe 800 in an enumerated immigrant population of 29,000—occupied an extraordinary position in what quickly became a multiracial, multiethnic market for male-female interactions.56

  This is not the same thing as saying prostitutes abounded in the diggings. The sexualized geography of gender and race in the Sierra foothills was far more complicated than such a statement suggests. A smug Anglo man like Enos Christman living in a predominantly non-Anglo town like Sonora might claim that the women there were “nearly all lewd harlots,” but even he knew the situation in Sonora was more elaborately alluring. On any given Sunday he might attend an auction, a bullfight, a circus, or an exhibition of “Model Artists” (with naked women posing), and then he might go to a dance house, a gambling hall, or a fandango. No matter where he went, part of what he paid for was often, quite simply, proximity to women. Not that sex itself was not for sale—it was. But men would lay down gold dust for far less. Christman himself, after a long Sunday working in the office of the Sonora Herald, for example, drank wine with a friend and then rushed uptown to spend his earnings at a fandango, “looking at the Americans dancing with the Mexican señoritas.” No doubt the dancing Yankees were willing to pay a little bit more.57

  Dance houses, sometimes called fandangos, dotted the Southern Mines and the supply town of Stockton. They were so common that men rarely bothered to describe them. As one miner offhandedly noted, “Went to some of the houses, saw some of the senoritas.” Spanish-speaking women may have predominated among those who worked in such houses, but it was not only Anglo men who paid for their company. John Wallis, a God-fearing, Cornish-born emigrant from Wisconsin, once wandered into a dance hall in Stockton and saw “a set of teamsters” (teaming was an overwhelmingly Mexican occupation in the mines) and some Mexican women “Dansing and drinking and Cutting Up and a thousand other fooleries.” The Mexican women an
d men must have continued their lively fandangos, though Wallis was sure he never wanted to “See a Nother.” Up in the foothills, such establishments, like businesses of all sorts, came and went with astonishing rapidity. In late June of 1852, for example, John Doble mentioned Volcano’s “Spanish Dance house” in his diary. Within two weeks, the dance hall had closed down, its proprietors arrested for grand larceny. While they lasted, though, fandangos were like magnets to men who mined in the surrounding gulches and ravines. And although Mexican and Chilean men frequented them to dance with their own or each other’s countrywomen, the halls were not havens from Anglo American hubris. Alfred Doten and his drunken companions, for example, took the occasion of the Fourth of July in 1855 to march into Fiddletown playing “Yankee Doodle” on fife and drum. They stopped at the “Spanish dance hall” to dance, then marched downtown and “up again into the dance hall, three times round inside” and then paraded out of town. Like the impudent display of the two Anglos in the San Andreas tent that served as a Catholic church, the march through the Fiddletown fandango was another instance in which white Americans tried to regain control over meaning making in the Southern Mines. Ethnic social spaces might be permitted in the diggings—and patronized by Anglos—but men such as Doten and his friends made sure that the recent Anglo American conquest of Mexican California, and the dominance it implied, would remain fresh in the minds of all Gold Rush participants.58

  One spot in the Southern Mines held out more successfully against such Anglo indignities, at least until the passage of the foreign miners’ tax in 1850.59 The town of Sonora, between the Stanislaus and Tuolumne rivers, had been established by Mexican miners well before the flood of immigrants from the United States and Europe arrived in the latter half of 1849. For a time, it was known as “Sonoranian Camp” to the English speaking, “Camp Sonoranien” to French speakers, and “El campo de los Sonoraenses” to those who founded it. Eventually the shorter name Sonora took hold, reflecting the birthplace of the town’s founders. When the California state legislature tried to change that name to “Stewart,” local businessmen prevailed in their arguments that “no foreign or Atlantic communication directed to ‘Sonora’ would ever reach ‘Stewart,’” whether that communication came from Mexico, Chile, Peru, or the United States. In this, the merchants acknowledged the diversity of Sonora’s population as well as its international ties.60

  Sonora, California, in 1852, home to an unparalleled world of commercialized leisure. Note the diverse group of gold seekers in the foreground, who appear to be Anglo American, Latin American, and French.

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

  One of those businessmen, William Perkins, who arrived in the summer of 1849, left behind a detailed account of life in this Tuolumne County town during its heyday, from 1849 to 1852. Recall that Perkins, who was Canadian-born, thought of himself as “a great favorite with the foreign population,” though he extended the hand of friendship more often to well-situated South American and French men than he did, for example, to Mexican gambusinos or Chilean peónes. As an English-speaking merchant (he could also converse in French) in a largely non-Anglo town, Perkins did what he could to maintain ties with his neighbors. One of the ways he did so was by participating fully in the social life of Sonora—going to the fandangos; frequenting the dance halls and gambling saloons; and attending the “celebrations, balls and dinners,” often patriotic in tone, given by French- and Spanish-speaking people.61

  The Sonora that Perkins described encompassed an unparalleled Gold Rush world of heterosocial leisure. Or so it seemed to the men who participated in it; for the women of Sonora, it was also a world of work. Moreover, it was a world of work stratified by race and national origin. According to Perkins, “A lady’s social position with white gentlemen was graduated by shades of color, although we would sometimes give the preferance to a slightly brown complexion, if the race was unmixed with the negro.” The “social position” to which Perkins referred was that of mistress: Chilean and Mexican women who appeared to be of Indian and European descent, as well as French women, all could make their way in Sonora by attaching themselves to men of some means in the diggings. Perkins claimed that the typical Mexican or French woman preferred informal union to marriage—the former, he presumed, because she would not “marry a heretic,” and the latter because she would rather not “bind herself by ties” that in time would seem “irksome.”62

  Perkins’s characterization of the differences between Spanish- and French-speaking women who cohabited with men says a great deal about how white men came to terms with the presence of female people who did not fit comfortably in the category of “women” upon which such men’s understanding of “the social” rested. If Perkins is a reliable guide to this process, Anglo men felt compelled by Gold Rush social relations to create new typologies of women—new hierarchies of gender, race, and ethnicity. For example, Mexican and Chilean women met Perkins’s approval because they, “even in the equivocal position of mistress,” maintained a certain dignity, while French women did not. French women’s chief sin, it seems, was their love of money. By contrast, Perkins claimed, “the spaniard” would not allow men “a glimpse of interested motives.” The latter, then, “remain[ed] a woman,” while the former was “made up of artificiality; profligate, shameless, avaricious and vain.” Now, disinterestedness was hardly a useful trait in a gold rush, and so it seems likely that Spanish-speaking women simply made sure that Perkins could not read their motivations. And undoubtedly, more than one Mexican or Chilean woman benefited from his romantic naïveté.63

  Part of what distinguished French women from Mexican and Chilean women in Perkins’s eyes was that the former tended bars and gambling tables, while the latter, at least in these early years, did not. By May of 1850, Perkins contended, French women had monopolized the “Lansquenet tables and the liquor Bars,” so that “no decent place” where liquor was sold failed to employ “a pretty and handsomely dressed Frenchwoman behind the counter.” Despite his contempt for such women, even Perkins sometimes deigned to drop a “few quarters for the enjoyment of a genial smile” from a Parisian bartender. In the end, Perkins judged women by what they sold. While Spanish Mexican women in New Mexican towns like Santa Fe ran saloons, in the town of Sonora during the boom years, French- and Spanish-speaking women seem to have filled different niches in the Gold Rush market for heterosociality: French women took gold dust from men for a drink or a bet on cards, while Mexican women, in particular, specialized in selling prepared foods and working in dance halls. Mexican women did gamble in the saloons of Sonora; Perkins once watched two young Mexican women at a table by themselves “betting, flirting, and smoking cigaritos” until they lost all their money on a single card, bid Perkins buenas noches, and “glided away” together. French women, by contrast, not only gambled but tended gaming tables, overseeing men’s winnings and losings, for which Perkins dubbed them “the forms of angels in the employ of Hell.”64

  Like many men, Perkins felt compelled to impose some kind of moral hierarchy on a market in which he was a willing consumer, and from first to last, he held the French, Mexican, and Chilean women of Sonora responsible for emptying men’s pockets and tempting their weak natures.65 That French women earned Perkins’s special disapprobation (and his patronage, too) no doubt reflected the means by which they emptied those pockets. As mistresses of gaming tables, French women put Anglo men’s control of their own resources at risk. This potential loss of control mocked dominant definitions of manhood, in which manly restraint was supposed to coexist in symbiotic relationship with womanly moral sensibilities. Here, in California, were whole new species of women, living and working not alongside emerging bourgeois neighborhoods—as, for example, prostitutes did in cities like New York—but at the very center of Gold Rush society, with few middle-class Anglo women physically present to contest newly sexualized, racialized, and commercialized notions of womanhood.66

&
nbsp; Given how hard men like Perkins worked to develop ways of ordering this new world, ways to make sense of this novel situation, it is no wonder that the eventual arrival of middle-class Anglo women in the Southern Mines proved disconcerting. As Perkins put it, “It is too much to expect from weak male human nature in California, that a man ever so correctly inclined, would prefer the lean arm of a bonnetted, ugly, board-shapen specimen of a descendant of the puritans, to the rosy cheeked, full formed, sprightly and elegant spaniard or Frenchwoman.”67 Having struggled to find new ways of representing gender relations that could accommodate the presence of Miwok, Mexican, Chilean, and French women, now Anglo men had to relocate Anglo women in an altogether new discursive field. So in spite of white men’s frequent complaints that the mines lacked the “sweets of society,” not a few such men paradoxically bemoaned the arrival of increasing numbers of Anglo women in California.68

  The arrival of a “board-shapen specimen of a descendant of the puritans” was a harbinger of things to come. There were other harbingers as well. J. D. Borthwick saw a hint of the changes when he visited Sonora in 1852. He delighted in the Sunday scene, when men came into town from miles around, some dressed in rough miners’ togs, but others “got up in a most gorgeous manner.” Many wore silk scarves of orange or scarlet hanging over one shoulder and tied loosely across the chest. Some attached feathers, flowers, or squirrel tails to their hats, while others braided their beards in a whimsical style. Mexican men sported brightly striped blankets, while French men, with neatly trimmed whiskers, flaunted caps of red or blue. The men caught Borthwick’s eye first, but he admitted that the “Mexican women with their white dresses and sparkling black eyes were by no means an unpleasing addition to the crowd.” But Borthwick ended his description on a dark note. He was alarmed at the occasional man in a black coat and stovepipe hat—“a bird of evil omen among a flock of such gay plumage.” Writing in the same year, Perkins was more blunt: “Sonora is very dull compared to what it used to be.” Indeed, the more the town took on the look of an eastern seaboard city in the United States, the less Perkins liked it: “What with peaceable citizens, picayunish yankees, Jew clothing shops and down-East strong-minded women, Sonora will soon be unbearable.” While other gentile argonauts echoed such antisemitic comments, it was notable that Perkins saw the presence of Jewish merchants as a marker of a larger shift in Gold Rush relations of gender, class, and ethnicity.69