Roaring Camp
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Some gold seekers did not wait for the arrival of Jewish merchants and “down-East strong-minded women” to begin bemoaning the changes that were in the air. For such men, the presence of any women at all foretold an end to male camaraderie in the diggings. John Doble, for example, touring the town of Jackson in May of 1852, noted that the “Gamblers & women were busily engaged at their different avocations which lead to misery and wretchedness,” possibly referring to women employed at two Chilean dance houses in town. Jean-Nicolas Perlot, the Belgian miner, who spent more time in the mountains with Miwok Indians than in the immigrant towns of the Southern Mines, had managed to avoid contact with non-native women for the better part of four years. When he finally noticed the influx of women into the diggings in 1855—an influx that had begun much earlier—he was stunned: “From that moment, everything changed! Farewell to the peaceful life of the placers! . . . People worked less and spent more; illnesses were more frequent, more numerous, more deadly.”70
As Perlot’s lament suggests, the equation of “women” with all that constituted “the social” as a category of human experience was not ubiquitous in the Gold Rush. Granted, Perlot and Doble both were making thinly veiled allusions not to married, middle-class women but to those who sold companionship to a variety of male customers (and who presumably caused “misery” and “illnesses”). Yet Doble and Perlot were also among the men most content with the homosociality of mining camp life. Indeed, beneath the complaints about the absence of “society” in California ran an undercurrent of pleasure taken in the constant company of men. It was not so much that gold seekers fit into neat categories of those who preferred either the homosocial or the heterosocial—though some, no doubt, did—but rather that the meaning of “social” life in the diggings was hotly contested. In the end, a particular vision of “society” would assume an uneasy dominance in the Southern Mines, but in the meantime, struggles continued both within argonauts and between them over what the Gold Rush had wrought.
The tension exhibited itself even in a single text produced by an individual Gold Rush participant. On the one hand, the German gold seeker Friedrich Gerstäcker could remark at the “perfectly social body” that he and his fellow miners constituted at Rich Gulch in Calaveras County—“a little world of ourselves, in closest neighborhood and amity, eating, working, and sleeping together, and not caring more for the world around us, than if it did not exist.” On the other hand, when he reflected on the long-range potential of California, he insisted that “social life” would come about there gradually, “principally by and through the presence of the gentler sex.”71 Likewise J. D. Borthwick acknowledged that “society—so to call it” lacked a certain polish in the diggings. But, he reasoned, that was all to the good, because it meant that each man was “a genuine solid article . . . the same sterling metal all the way through which he was on the surface.” Benjamin Butler Harris went so far as to applaud the “superior society” of the mines, made up as it had been of “people culled from every race and nation . . . [a] varicolored, and Babel-tongued group . . . free in every sense, standing on an equal plain, a nobility whose title was manhood.” In a world where dominant constructions of gender were disrupted by the physical absence of white women, what was it about the socialities of the mines that could prompt for some such romantic memories? After all, as a New York friend reminded Timothy Osborn one Sunday when the men in camp dressed up in order to look “fascinating” for one another, “Ah! Tim, this isn’t going up Broadway with a pair of bright eyes by your side.”72
That, it was not—not Broadway, not the Bowery, not the streets of Valparaíso or Paris or Hermosillo. Nonetheless, men in California sometimes had bright eyes for each other. As Borthwick’s description of Sonora’s “gay plumage” and Osborn’s of his friends’ “fascinating” Sunday styles suggest, miners could take great pride in their appearance and great interest in the appearance of others. One of Osborn’s Sunday visitors, “a little fellow,” Osborn called him, came dressed in white pants like a sailor, “looking decidedly ‘cunning’ as the girls would say.” But even more than his Anglo friends, Osborn noticed his Mexican neighbors. “Their peculiar dress always excites my attention,” he wrote in his diary, “the loose bottomed under pants of snow white, and the gay woolen outside, open at the sides with long rows of brass buttons, and their black velvet tunic so short . . . as unable to reach the top of their pants.” Neither was John Marshall Newton afraid to be caught looking. He recalled that one of his partners in Tuolumne County in 1851, a tall Dane named Hans, was “one of the most magnificent looking young men I ever saw.” He had “massive shoulders and swelling muscles” that stood out “like the gnarled ridges of an oak tree.” Newton remembered himself as a slight, softhearted boy who “yearned intensely for a friend” and who at first had so much trouble handling heavy mining tools that he often fainted from exertion. The magnificent Dane, then, was a perfect partner, because when Newton could not budge a boulder with a crowbar, he recalled, “Hans would . . . thrust me aside, take hold of the stone . . . and throw it out of the pit.”73
Such differences in age, strength, and inclination could contribute to a cross-gendering of men’s relationships with one another. At Howard Gardiner’s camp on the Tuolumne River in 1853, for example, one “handsome youngster” was christened Sister Stilwell because of his “fresh complexion, lack of beard, and effeminate appearance.” The reveler Alfred Doten made an even more tantalizing reference in one of his diary entries. In May of 1852, he described a Sunday fandango with visiting Chileans that included an expedition across the Mokelumne River to a store kept by a man named Brooks. When Doten returned home that night, he noted in his diary, “There is a Chileno hermaphrodite camped near Brooks’ store.”74 To date, the historical record offers up no other definitive clues about Brooks’s neighbor.75 S/he could have been a cross-dresser or someone with unusual genitalia. Whatever qualified h/er for Doten’s designation of “hermaphrodite,” s/he seems not to have kept it to h/erself. S/he was, in other words, a public “hermaphrodite”—someone everyone “knew” to be anatomically female or male but who cross-behaved, or else someone everyone “knew” to have, for example, what no one could easily recognize as a clitoris or a penis, testicles or a vagina. Whatever s/he had or whatever s/he did, s/he was “known” for miles around, and no one—least of all Alfred Doten—seemed especially troubled about h/er presence.76
Perhaps this is because Brooks’s store on the Mokelumne and Gardiner’s camp on the Tuolumne were not isolated sites of cross-gender gymnastics in the diggings. Not every ravine had a “Sister Stilwell” or a Chilean “hermaphrodite,” but most saw men coming together in novel ways on a daily basis. If devising domestic divisions of labor did not create gender trouble enough, there was always dancing. Miwok ceremonial lodges and Mexican fandango houses were not the only venues for itchy feet in the Southern Mines. In fact, in the diggings, all that was needed for what one argonaut called “the tallest kind of dancing” was a handful of men and a fiddle. From the very first night they shared a tent, William Miller, a white man from Massachusetts, enjoyed the company of Henry Garrison, a black man born in New York but emigrated from Hawaii: “he being a Mucision And haveing his Fiddle the Eavening was Spent very agreeable.” While neighboring white men disapproved of Miller’s relationships with African Americans, that disapproval did not prevent the black and white men from celebrating Christmas together in 1849. They spent all afternoon and evening dancing to Garrison’s fiddle, interrupted only by a “Most splendid Dinner,” a “fine Cold Lunch,” and then more of the “hot stuff” just before midnight.77
Alfred Doten’s holiday bashes, characteristically, always sounded a bit wilder than anyone else’s, perhaps because he was, in a word, a drunk or perhaps because he would commit to paper what other men kept to themselves. Christmas of 1853, for example, found him at Fort John in Amador County, throwing for his friends “a glorious game supper of fried deer tongue, liver, quails, and
hares” and a “Christmas spree” replete with bottomless bottles of cognac and the music of violin, flute, banjo, clarinet, and accordion. Doten himself was a fiddler, and he made sure the tunes were right for inebriated men afflicted with barnyard wit: “The ‘Highland fling’ was performed to a miracle, and the ‘double-cow-tird-smasher’ was introduced with ‘tird-run variations.’” Of course, Doten did not wait for Christmas or the Fourth of July to carouse, and he did not carouse only with Anglos. In the summer of 1852, for instance, he had “quite a fandango” with some Mexican men, one of whom played the violin and another of whom tripped the light fantastic with “rattles on his feet.” The dancer may have been a Yaqui Indian, because Doten noted the fellow’s “Yacky deer dance with Coyote accompaniment.”78
Diary-keeping men like Doten and Miller, however, wrote next to nothing about the way men interacted with one another when they danced in the diggings. Fortunately, J. D. Borthwick took time to describe a ball he attended at Angel’s Camp, a largely Anglo American town, in 1852. Such balls were common, he thought, in the gulches and ravines of the Southern Mines.79 At Angel’s Camp, a fiddle and a flute provided the music, and the fiddler led the dancers through their steps, singing out “Lady’s chain,” or “Set to your partner,” or, a favorite call, “Promenade to the bar, and treat your partners.” Here lancers were special favorites—sets of five square dances for several couples, each one of the sets in a different meter. “The absence of ladies,” Borthwick noted, “was a difficulty which was very easily overcome.” All agreed that every man “who had a patch on a certain part of his inexpressibles” would be a woman for the night, indicating just how successfully Gold Rush demographics and contests for meaning had unsettled normative notions of gender. Borthwick thought the patches themselves quite “fashionable”—large squares of canvas on dark pairs of pants. Elsewhere in the diggings, another miner noticed men wearing pants patched front and back with sacking that read “SELF RAISING HAXHALL,” a favorite Virginia-made flour, or else bearing the name of some brand of hot chile. If the “ladies” of Angel’s Camp announced their potentialities in this manner, Borthwick declined to comment. He did, however, remark at a Scottish boy who spelled the men from their lancers for a time by performing the Highland fling. The boy danced and shouted furiously, while the men cheered and clapped. After a quarter of an hour, he retired to the bar, where, Borthwick noted, “if he had drunk with all the men who then sought the honor of ‘treating’ him, he would never have lived to tread another measure.”80
The Scottish artist and travel writer J. D. Borthwick’s rendering of a Gold Rush ball, seemingly attended by white Americans and Europeans. Note the lone fiddler on the left who provides the music.
Courtesy of the Bancroft Library.
Did the “gentlemen” see their “ladies” home, or the “men” their “boys”?81 The Gold Rush did occur in an era of increased possibilities for same-sex eroticism. Sex between seafaring men was common enough, for example, that it had its own name. The “boom cover trade” referred to the sex sailors had with each other under the covering that protected ship masts.82 This was also the period in which Walt Whitman walked the streets of New York in search of working-class male lovers, and in which the Reverend Horatio Alger was dismissed from his Massachusetts church for having sex with boys.83 It was a time when moralists generally considered sex between men a sin or vice, but not necessarily an indicator of an identity or sense of self. In this context, most Anglo American Gold Rush letter and diary writers would have been just as wary about keeping a record of sexual contact with other men as of drunkenness, gambling, or, for that matter, nonmarital sex with women. Indeed, the only unambiguous extant record of sex between men in the Southern Mines occurs not in a letter or diary but in the divorce proceedings of Hanna and Jeremiah Allkin of Calaveras County. Jeremiah had come to California in 1851, and Hanna joined him there in 1854. Two years later she divorced him, in part because “of his frequently sleeping with certain men, in the same house then occupied by her as his domicil—for the diabolical purpose of committing the crime of bugery.”84
But ambiguous records abound. Alfred Doten, never one to tiptoe around what some thought of as vice, habitually noted the individual men with whom he spent the night, using language not unlike Whitman’s. As early as February of 1850, when he first approached the mines from San Francisco, Doten noted, “I picked up a companion on the road & got behind my party and night overtaking us, we had to spread our blankets & pass the night on the ground.” In March of 1852, Doten took in a friend, James Flynn, who was fighting with his own tentmate. “We slept together at my house,” Doten remarked. Flynn seems to have stayed only a few days, though a week later Doten was referring to him as “Jimmy, my little partner.” But Doten was a rolling stone, and so in the same diary entry he wrote that he had gone to a store where he was to begin work the next day, “and slept there all night” with a “Dr. Quimby.” Doten could make life in the camps sound like a game of musical beds. One night he wrote, “Moody and John Spicer went down to the ranch—Newt came down and passed the evening with me—slept here,” and the next, “Newt and Moody stopped at the Gate—Young slept with John—I slept in the house alone for the first time.”85
Moody and John, Newt and Moody, John and Young, Doten and Newt, Doten and Jimmy, Doten and Dr. Quimby—we cannot know what transpired when beds in the diggings were thus occupied. Certainly bed sharing was a common practice in the nineteenth-century United States, perhaps particularly in frontier areas, and it would be foolhardy to suggest that bed partners commonly shared sexual pleasures.86 But Doten and his friends bedded down together in a particular setting—one characterized by the presence of curious young men and lonely husbands, by close dancing and hard drinking, by distance from customary social constraints and proximity to competing cultural practices. In this context, it would also be foolhardy to suggest that Jeremiah Allkin was the only man in the Southern Mines who ever reached for a friend in the heat of the night.
This, then, was the Gold Rush world that some white men complained deprived them of “good,” “congenial,” or simply “social” society. Although it was abundantly clear that connections of all sorts flourished in the diggings, Anglo men did not always know how to represent those connections, which often failed to follow customary rules for negotiating oppositions that constituted the realm of the social. For such men, the absence of white women and the overwhelming presence of Miwoks, Mexicans, Chileans, French, and, later, Chinese, upset the gendered and racialized oppositions upon which notions of social relations and social order rested—male/female, white/nonwhite, sacred/profane, even labor/leisure. Indeed, the profusion of California letters, diaries, and reminiscences is itself evidence of the crisis of representation the Gold Rush wrought.
During the Gold Rush, this popular image circulated as that of a “girl miner.” More recently, it has been reproduced as that of a “woman miner.” Actually, according to Jennifer Watts, curator of photographs at the Huntington Library, it is an image of John B. Colton, a lad whose countenance has transfixed many a male viewer for a century and a half. See Jennifer A. Watts, “From the Photo Archives: ‘That’s no woman . . .,”’ The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens Calendar, July–Aug. 1998.
Reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
Of course, all Gold Rush participants had to renegotiate their usual modes of representation in California, where everything from the natural environment to demographics to local economies was strange and unstable. Just as Anglos could march into a Mexican dance hall playing “Yankee Doodle,” as if to give their personal stamp of approval to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, so too, for example, could Miwok dancers represent their understanding of the politics of conquest in customary pota ceremonies. But the crisis of representation—the profound dis-ordering of conventional oppositions and conventional hierarchies—may have been peculiar to Anglo American men, who in si
tuation after situation found their power to establish meanings in jeopardy. These were, after all, the people in whose favor industrialization and westward expansion were supposed to work. But for all their faith in these processes, white men found unanticipated discursive contests in the Southern Mines, contests with material consequences.
These material and discursive contests were nowhere brought into sharper relief than in such popular leisure practices as gambling and blood sports.87 In the Southern Mines, games of chance like monte and bloody spectacles like bull-and-bear fights reflected Gold Rush enmities that were rooted in the will to dominance of some Anglo American men in the diggings—enmities that were played out simultaneously on a broader stage where expulsion from mining areas, excessive taxation, and paramilitary campaigns plagued Miwok, Mexican, Chilean, and French Gold Rush participants.88
Gambling was far and away the chief entertainment in the diggings, and perhaps the most popular pastime in the Southern Mines was the Mexican game of monte. As early as October of 1848, just ten months after the discovery of gold at Sutter’s mill and well before most emigrants from Europe and the United States arrived, the Californio Antonio Franco Coronel and his servants, mining with great success near the Stanislaus River, watched as a Sonoran gambusino dug enough gold in seven hours to set up a monte bank. Dealing out the cards on a woolen blanket and drinking from a bottle of brandy, the Sonoran lost all that he had in less time than it took him to make it, leaving him with nothing but the blanket, his pants and shirt, and an empty bottle. Such losses might have ruined a man in the Southern Mines a year or two later, but with rich diggings still plentiful, the Sonoran probably recovered. Coronel did not stay long at the Stanislaus. He wintered in the town of Sonoma and then worked the placers in the Northern Mines. But when he returned ten months later to purchase a mule team, he found the area overrun with gambling tents. A large landowner who controlled the labor of many servants, Coronel was surprised by what he saw there: “men who . . . nobody would give a cent for in normal times, plac[ing] on a bet bags of gold each one of which . . . would insure to a family as much happiness as money can buy.”89