Roaring Camp

by Susan Lee Johnson

  Gambling took on a special significance in a setting like California, where it shared with the primary economic activity, placer mining, elements of unpredictability and irrationality.90 Then too, in an intensely multiethnic, multiracial place such as the Southern Mines, gambling could also expose deadly fault lines in communities bent on digging what was thought of as cash from the earth. In popular games such as monte as well as an Anglo favorite, faro, gamblers ostensibly competed not with one another but with the “bank” of gold and silver coin managed by the man or woman who dealt the cards. Even though the games’ design did not entail direct competition between players (as mining did not between miners), jealousies over big winnings at the monte table (as over high yields in the diggings) could foster ill will. Fear of cheating (as of unfair advantage in the mines) also ran rampant; no man wanted the deck stacked against him.91 Indeed, no other activity in the diggings, aside from mining itself, provoked as much rancor as gambling.

  Leonard Noyes, who in 1851 worked near Murphys Camp in Calaveras County, may have exaggerated when he remembered, “Every Sunday someone was shot in a Gambling den and often times during the week.” As if it was part of the same thought, though, he went on to describe the “loss of life” occasioned by “quarels about [mining] claimes.” In this, he suggested the symbiosis between mining and gambling as well as their common progeny—“every one was compelled to be on the Fight enough to take his own part.” Noyes actually thought Murphys “was not so bad as many other places,” because there were fewer Mexicans and so “Miners got along better.” In the next breath, however, he acknowledged that these same Anglo miners “frequently made rades on Mexican communities” in which the Anglos would “commit all sorts of Degradations.” It was, in fact, the area around Murphys and neighboring Angels Camp that is said to have witnessed the rape of Rosa Felíz de Murrieta, the lynching of Jesús Carillo Murrieta, and the horsewhipping of Rosa’s husband and Jesús’s half brother, Joaquín.92

  Another incident that took place near Murphys in 1851 helps illustrate how monte could make bad blood boil. Noyes recalled that Mexicans had “quite a camp” at Indian Gulch that year, just north of Murphys. The camp boasted three tent stores, one of them kept by a Chilean man named José María and his wife. Two Anglo gamblers, Hugh O’Neil and Dick Williams, opened a monte table at María’s tent, where in the space of a couple days, eight or ten Mexican and Chilean men “lost all their dust.” O’Neil claimed that he overheard the men plotting in Spanish to murder the Anglos and reclaim the $10,000 monte bank. So when a scuffle broke out and the Anglos thought the Mexican and Chilean men were robbing the bank, O’Neil tore through the back of the tent with his knife and escaped with what money he could grab. Williams, also trying to run off with part of the bank, met a different fate; as Noyes heard it, a Mexican man put a knife through the gambler’s chest. That was all it took for neighboring Anglos to tell a familiar tale: “by daylight everybody was out having been told the Mexicans had raised and were murdering all the Americans in Indian Gulch.”

  A story started this way and told by Anglos tended to move inexorably toward a predictable denouement, and so it was that fifty or sixty Anglos rushed into Indian Gulch that morning, a dozen of them intent on holding a makeshift inquest and the others hungry for quick revenge. The supposed murderers were long gone, and so the mob turned to a dark-skinned Chilean man (perhaps of African descent) who, along with his light-skinned wife, had kept a boardinghouse where the Mexican monte players took their meals. Noyes recalled that he and the handful of Anglos committed to a more orderly form of vigilantism pleaded with the others to let the Chilean man go. In the end, the more vengeful Anglos prevailed, forcing the Chilean to run up a hill while they opened fire on him, killing him instantly. When his wife “burst forth in a tirade of curses,” the Anglos set fire to her tent. Next the mob went after José María and his wife, at whose store Williams and O’Neil had set up their monte table. Both husband and wife were nearly hanged. Again the calmer minority of Anglos interceded, arguing that María was “a very nice Gentlemanly Chilano” who had begged for his life in English. Noyes and his comrades won this debate, perhaps by emphasizing perceived class and race differences that distinguished the English-speaking María from the dark-skinned man who kept the boardinghouse: José María and his wife escaped lynching, though they lost everything but their lives. Then, according to Noyes, the Anglos continued their depredations at Indian Gulch, burning, robbing, and killing until they were satiated. Among the mob was a Texan named Sam Green, later hanged for murdering a fellow Texan, William Byrnes, the supposed headsman of Joaquín Murrieta.93

  It was striking how rapidly the death of an Anglo at the hands of a Mexican became for some Anglos the opening line of a larger story about a Mexican uprising replete with murder and mayhem. Such hysterical narrative responses to ethnic tensions in the mines indicated how fearful Anglos could be over the lack of control they were able to exert in the Southern Mines—whether control over meanings, control over the proceeds of mining, or control over the complex interactions between the two. Indeed, when the new widow of the dark-skinned Chilean man “burst forth” with her “tirade of curses,” no doubt turning the charge of murder back onto the Anglos, they burned down her tent. Contests over meanings mattered. They drew blood; they destroyed homes; they brought death.

  Perhaps tensions at monte tables frequented by Mexican miners and Texas Anglos were predictable, but racial/ethnic violence spilled over into gambling tents patronized by non-Texans as well. One Sunday evening in December of 1851, Alfred Doten was sitting down to write to his hometown sweetheart, when he heard cries of “to arms!” and “get your rifles!” He soon learned why his Anglo neighbors—a collection of northerners and southerners—were so excited. According to the Anglo rumor, some Anglos had stepped up to a bar at a Mexican tent to order a drink. One of them, a man named Alexander McDonald, had asked some Mexican men standing there if they were going to drink. One of the Mexicans retorted, “no sabe,” or at least that is how the Anglos remembered it, and so McDonald replied, “Well if you are not going to drink, we are, so just stand back.” When he got no response, McDonald took the man by the shoulder and pushed him aside (“not roughly,” Doten insisted). Then, according to the Anglos, the Mexican man and his partner left the tent, only to return later swinging swords at McDonald and another Anglo. One thing led to another, until both McDonald and one of the Mexicans had gunshot wounds.

  By the next morning, Doten had managed, by means of a dare, to gather half a dozen Anglo men to pursue the Mexicans believed to have wielded the weapons at the bar. Other Mexicans in the neighborhood gave the Anglos no assistance, until a boy tipped them off about an older man who knew where the men were hiding. The Anglos tied the older Mexican up and threatened his life until he told what he knew. Eventually the Anglos rounded up two Mexican men presumed to have been the sword swingers. Meanwhile, Alexander McDonald died, and shortly thereafter his mining partner, Dave Keller, rode in on horseback and begged Doten and his vigilante gang, which had grown considerably from the original half dozen, “Oh, let me kill them with my own hands.” When the mob refused, intent on their own version of justice, Keller broke down and sobbed in another man’s arms, calling out, “Alex! Alex! Alex!” Doten himself was touched by the scene, and confessed, “I cried too and many a rough hardy miner turned away . . . to wipe away their tears which came rolling down their bronzed and manly cheeks.” At once, the tearful men assembled a jury of twelve. Only half of the witnesses summoned had to swear to the prisoners’ identities before the jury cried out impatiently, “enough, this is evidence enough.” After deliberating fifteen minutes, the “jury” found the Mexicans guilty of murder and sentenced them to death. In no time at all, both men were hanging by the neck from a pine tree.

  Doten insisted that other Mexicans in the neighborhood “hated and feared” the lynched men, and that one of the two was a “noted highway robber” in Mexico. Nonetheless, a large p
arty came the next day and asked to bury the corpses, and a week later two compatriots threatened the life of the older Mexican who had been coerced into revealing the whereabouts of the wanted men, indicating a good deal more community support for the deceased than Doten recognized. For his part, Doten was deeply affected by the hangings, and suggested that even the weather reflected the situation’s solemnity: “The night was dark and fearful and . . . the howling and roaring of the wind through the tall pines and the warring of the elements rendered the scene awful and terrific.” It was not a night to spend alone, as Doten recorded in his diary: “I slept at my camp with James Flynn and John (a Mexican boy) for company.” As awful as Doten found the night, the terror must have run much deeper for those neighboring Mexicans who, unlike the boy sleeping with Doten and Flynn, were not in good graces with their Anglo neighbors.94

  If antagonism at monte tables and liquor bars could escalate quickly to bloodshed, another popular pastime in the Southern Mines itself dramatized Gold Rush tensions rather than playing them out on human flesh. Animal flesh did not fare as well. Like monte, bull-and-bear fighting was a Mexican cultural practice, one particularly well suited to the Sierra Nevada foothills, home to both grizzly and black bears and within trading distance of low-country ranchos. Bull-and-bear fights were only one of the blood sports common in the mines. Mexicans staged bullfights and cockfights too, as well as engaging in splendid displays of horsemanship. In one amusement, for example, men buried a rooster in the sand and then dashed past the bird at full tilt, trying to grab it by the neck without toppling from their horses. But bull-and-bear fights were clear favorites among gold seekers of many descriptions—Mexicans, Anglos, and French to be sure, and perhaps others as well. Leonard Noyes contended that almost every good-sized camp in the Southern Mines had a circular arena constructed of wood and surrounded by tiers of seats and a high fence to keep out nonpaying spectators. Mexicans held not only bull-and-bear fights but bullfights in these arenas. For variety, a mountain lion might be put into the ring. P. V. Fox, for instance, once witnessed a “fight” where the bull and bear were reluctant to tangle; eventually the pacific duo was removed from the ring and replaced by another bull and a matador. All in all, it proved a quiet afternoon, because this second bull was not in a “fighting mood” either.95

  More often, pitched battles ensued. Practices varied from camp to camp, but bears were generally roped or chained to a post in the middle of the arena and given ten or twenty feet of slack in which to maneuver. Sometimes bulls were similarly restrained, and some proprietors also sawed off the tips of the bulls’ horns. Spectators gasped and whooped and shouted as the fight began, often with a charge by the bull that was met by a snout-crushing chomp of the bear’s teeth. Bulls were the real crowd pleasers, enjoying as they did a special relationship to notions of manhood among Spanish-speaking peoples. Women and men alike marveled at the daring and determination of the bulls. Indeed—in California, at least—bullfights in particular seemed quite conducive to gender play, constituting a kind of liminal space in which attributes of manhood could be extracted from larger constellations and claimed by anyone willing to look a bull in the eye.

  At Sonora, for example, Enos Christman watched as a stunningly dressed Mexican woman entered the arena after picadores had taunted the bull. In an intricate dance, she parried with her foe until, at an opportune moment, “she plunged the sword to the hilt into the breast of the animal.” A shower of silver dollars fell at her feet, and the cheer of the crowd was deafening. Likewise, J. D. Borthwick attended a bullfight at Columbia where it had been announced that Señorita Ramona Pérez would be matador. In this case, however, the woman turned out to be an exquisitely cross-dressed man, who made short order of the bull and then ran out of the arena, “curtsying, and kissing her hand” to the audience. As for the bull-and-bear fights, Mexican women thronged to them, hollering and laughing and waving handkerchiefs along with the other spectators, whom Hinton Rowan Helper described as men of “all sizes, colors, and classes such as California, and California alone, can bring together.”96

  Helper was always disturbed by California’s multiracial, all-too homosocial population, and so his reflections on the audience had an anxious, disapproving tone. But J. D. Borthwick, himself an artist as well as a writer, romanticized human diversity in the arenas, representing it (as he did in his description of Sonora’s streets) as a riot of color, turning spectators into spectacle. Borthwick’s description of an 1852 Mokelumne Hill bull-and-bear fight began with the two fiddlers—“a white man and a gentleman of color”—who played while the crowd gathered. The arena itself, he thought, was “gay and brilliant,” and the “shelving bank of human beings which encircled the place was like a mass of bright flowers.” There were the blue, white, and red miners’ shirts; the men’s bronze faces; the variegated Mexican blankets; the guns and knives glancing in the sun; the red and blue French caps; and always, the “Mexican women in snowy-white dresses.” The bear seemed a dull brute, but Borthwick’s bull was a gorgeous beast, “of dark purple color marked with white. . . . his coat . . . as smooth and glossy as a racer’s.” Once the fight began, however, the purple and white, the bronze and blue, and the glint of steel all dissolved into crimson. The bull’s nose turned “a mass of bloody shreds,” and a red flag taunted a bear brought low. While it began as a celebration of human diversity, Borthwick’s depiction of the bull-and-bear fight now took an ominous twist—the circle of bright human flowers blanched by the animal carnage within the ring.97

  Some representations dispensed with romantic images altogether. At Mokelumne Hill, for example, proprietors advertised an upcoming event throughout the area on placards that read,

  WAR! WAR!! WAR!!!

  The celebrated Bull-killing Bear,

  GENERAL SCOTT

  will fight a Bull on Sunday the 15th inst., at 2 p.m.

  at Moquelumne Hill.

  General Winfield Scott, then a Whig presidential candidate, had led the invasion of Mexico in 1847, taking fourteen thousand U.S. troops from Veracruz into Mexico City in what proved the decisive campaign of the war. Like the bull-and-bear fight Frank Marryat described a year earlier in Sonora—where the bear was christened America—the Mokelumne Hill event, while rooted in Mexican cultural practices, took on particular Gold Rush meanings. In this case, General Scott did indeed vanquish his foe, and the proprietor took up a collection from the spectators to pit the bear against yet another bull (one “equally handsome,” Borthwick noted). This bull, too, met defeat, but a few weeks later the grizzly himself perished when a bull’s horns tore through his ribs and ruptured vital organs.98 Still, in the 1850s, a bear probably did not need to be called America or General Scott for Anglo/Mexican tensions to be invoked. Bull-and-bear fights called to mind not only the association of bulls with Spanish Mexican culture but also the recent Bear Flag Rebellion of pre–Gold Rush Anglos against Mexican rule in California. In that conflict, a grizzly bear and a lone red star graced the flag of the short-lived Anglo “California Republic.”99

  In bull-and-bear fights, then, enemies could meet in the ring again and again, spectators could place bets on the action, and the outcome of the contest, now freighted with ethnic as well as gendered meanings, could change from one Sunday to the next. All over the Southern Mines, events like this drew gold seekers from their diggings, dealers from their gaming tables, even some preachers from their makeshift pulpits. Perhaps the unpredictable endings of bull-and-bear fights and the mutual high spirits of the spectators provided some relief from the relentless tensions of life in the mines.

  But in the end, those tensions were reproduced in the spectacles, which themselves became representational just as surely as the practices of writing letters and diaries, attacking effigies (and flags), assigning gender by means of a patch on a pair of pants, or marching into a dance hall playing patriotic tunes. Such contests over meanings in California revolved around a central question: Who would own the rush for riches in the Sierr
a foothills? Coming as it did at a pivotal moment in the course of industrialization, westward expansion, and class formation, the Gold Rush seemed to Anglo American men an opportunity whereby they might secure for themselves dominant positions in the emerging social order. Once in the Southern Mines, however, such men found that the absence of white women and the presence of native peoples, Latin Americans, Europeans, and later, East Asians, confounded their notions of what constituted “good” and “congenial” society. The crisis of representation that followed erupted with particular force across the terrain of leisure. There the boundaries of the social—the boundaries that make meaning—blurred, transmogrified, and reconstituted themselves again and again in the diggings, with different consequences for different Gold Rush participants.