Roaring Camp

by Susan Lee Johnson

  In all of this, racialized understandings of “free labor” haunted the everyday work lives of African American men in the mines. Ironically enough, this was particularly true for those who were indeed free laborers; such miners could face opposition from both northern and southern whites. A few of these men, like Thomas Gilman, were able to carve out niches of relative safety in the foothills, living out their lives beneath the Sierra Nevada. More often—even when they had white allies like the Gold Spring men who helped Stephen Spencer Hill or the associates of William Miller who stood by their “Coulard Gentlemen” friends—free African Americans faced harassment in the diggings. Meanwhile, enslaved blacks benefited little from the attentions of white northerners like Charles Davis, who thought slavery “a great evil” but fancied himself equally the friend of both master and slave.18 Indeed, free-labor ideology rested on an important ambiguity in its critique of slavery; it was never entirely clear whether it was the institution of slavery itself or the presence of black workers that ideologues thought degraded (white) labor.19 In this, the “friends” of African Americans in the mines could bear an eerie resemblance to their enemies.

  If the Southern Mines were no haven for African Americans, neither was the area a refuge for Latin Americans. Chileans and Mexicans who worked in parties led by a patrón faced their own set of Anglo hostilities in the diggings, but those hostilities at times resembled black-white conflicts. Several historians point to Latin American peonage as a central concern for Anglo Americans who wished Chileans and Mexicans out of the mines. Such scholars argue that Anglo treatment of Spanish-speaking miners “hinged . . . on the slavery question” as it was evolving in the United States, a debate that encouraged immigrants from northeastern states to see “parallels between Negroes and masters, on the one hand, and peons and patróns, on the other.”20 Some evidence for this interpretation exists. For example, when Theodore Johnson entered a gorge near Weber’s Creek, just to the north of the Southern Mines proper, he noted, “we met a large party of Peruvians and Chilians, with their Indian peones or slaves, besides a considerable number of Mexicans from Sonora.” In this, Johnson indicated how closely connected North American slavery and Latin American peonage could be in Anglo men’s minds.21 And in the summer of 1849, San Francisco’s Alta California reported that a mass meeting of Anglos along the Tuolumne River had issued a proclamation complaining about “the sudden and unexpected appearance among us of influential men from distant provinces of Mexico, Peru, Chile, the Sandwich Islands & c., with large bands of hired men, who are nominally slaves.” This proclamation called for the “immediate expulsion from the diggings . . . of all classes of slaves or hired serfs coming from distant countries.”22 Instances such as these demonstrate that, as another historian puts it, “in the gold camps, individual Anglo-Americans feared that Sonoran peons or Southern capitalists with gangs of slaves would exploit the gold fields in such an efficient way that free labor would be driven out.”23

  Yet in situations where one might most expect to hear the voice of free labor rising in protest, one listens in vain.24 In the spring of 1849—before the bulk of Anglo Americans and Europeans immigrated—the Californio Antonio Franco Coronel returned to the diggings after wintering at a Sonoma rancho.25 Coronel seems to have had four servants with him—Benito Pérez and his wife, and two “mute Indians,” as Coronel called them, one of whom was named Augustin. Augustin was probably an genízaro, a detribalized New Mexican Indian captured and eventually traded to Californios for horses.26 When Coronel returned to the mines with Augustin and the others, he settled in for a time at the “dry diggings” along Weber’s Creek, where Theodore Johnson had encountered Chileans, Peruvians, and Mexicans. Coronel found a similar mix of argonauts, along with Californios like himself and some Anglo Americans and Germans. As Coronel recalled, “All—some more, some less—were profiting from the fruits of their labor.” Yet one Sunday, Coronel arose to find armed Anglos on patrol and notices posted on trees ordering all who were not U.S. citizens to leave the area within twenty-four hours. In response, according to Coronel, a number of people “of various nationalities” gathered in a defensive position atop a hill. But twenty-four hours passed, and then three or four more days, and not much more transpired than verbal taunts, warning shots, and some drunken revelry. “Finally,” Coronel remembered, “we returned to . . . our work, although daily some of the weak were despoiled of their claims by the stronger.” A few days later, however, a French-speaking man and a Spanish-speaking man were summarily hanged by inebriated Anglos for allegedly stealing four pounds of gold. For Coronel, this was the last straw: “This act dismayed me. . . . Two days later I picked up camp and went to the northern mines.”27

  An artist’s rendering of an early Gold Rush scene, with a Californio patrón and Indian miners working alongside Anglo Americans. Both women depicted appear to be Spanish Mexican. From The Shirley Letters from the California Mines in 1851–52 (San Francisco: Thomas C. Russell, 1922).

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

  Dictating his reminiscences of the Gold Rush nearly thirty years later for the Bancroft collection of Californiana, Coronel tried to make sense of what had happened to him and his workers in the diggings. Nowhere did it occur to him that the disputes in which he became embroiled were disputes about his use of peón labor, though Coronel went on to become a high-ranking official in Los Angeles city and California state governments and was thus well versed in Anglo American political culture. Instead, Coronel thought that the main reason for Anglo antipathy to Spanish-speaking miners was that “the majority of them were Sonorans who were men used to gold mining and consequently more quickly attained better results—as did the Californians by having come first and acquired the same art.”28 Indeed, historians have noted the frequency with which Anglo miners first learned placer mining techniques by watching Mexican or Chilean miners in action, and Southern Mines sources underline this conclusion.29 When he arrived in the diggings, for example, Timothy Osborn saw Spanish-speaking mission Indians washing out gold in wooden bateas: “It was the first mining we had ever seen and we watched them carefully.” Osborn questioned them in Spanish about how much gold they were finding, and the miners replied, as Osborn wrote in his diary, “‘Poquito medio once esta dia’ (little—half an ounce today).” That sounded good enough to Osborn and his two cousins; they staked a claim nearby.30

  With Mexicans, Chileans, Californios, and mission-educated Indians as frequent gold-mining teachers and guides to gold deposits, Anglo Americans rarely took quick offense at the labor practices that produced the first glint of yellow metal they saw in California, whether those were the practices of independent gambusinos or teams of patrónes and peónes. In June of 1850, for example, Timothy Osborn noted, “The Spaniards (more especially Sonorians) are hospitable to the Americans in their own country, and it is due to them that every opportunity to reciprocate their kindness should be seized upon.” In fact, it took Osborn a full six months in the diggings to learn to use the racial epithet “greasers” when writing about Mexican miners in his diary. These later references were a far cry from journal entries written when he first arrived in the Southern Mines.31 As Osborn’s early observations suggest, little more than curiosity often characterized initial meetings between English- and Spanish-speaking peoples. The Reverend Daniel Woods, for instance, came upon a large Chilean camp in January 1850 south of Sonora. Woods noted that the Chileans had “come from their own gold mines to try their fortune here.” He took particular interest in a family at work in the diggings—the father and older children panned for gold, while the mother washed clothes and kept an eye on an infant swinging in a basket from branches overhead. Meanwhile, a five-year-old girl “with a tiny pick and spade” worked at a hole already two feet deep, washing the dirt down at the stream and placing a “scale or two of gold into a dipper a little larger than a thimble.”32 This was not the stuff of ethnic war in the mines.

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bsp; But war there was. What happened in the diggings near the Calaveras River during the winter of 1849–50 was the first of three key ethnic conflicts that occurred during the boom years in the Southern Mines. These are conflicts that demonstrate the delicate interplay between global economic change and individual actions in creating the event that is remembered as the Gold Rush. They also demonstrate the decisive role of the state on behalf of white Americans in the diggings, though that role itself could be contested among competing groups of Anglos. In all of this, the language of free labor was often muted by the overwhelming desire of many Gold Rush participants to gather gold as quickly as possible and then return to their homelands. But that language, along with the rhetoric of the European revolutions of 1848, sometimes surfaced—for example, in Anglo American men’s expectation that the state would surely support them (as true independent producers) and in the French deployment of symbols of revolutionary ferment.33

  The first of these three conflicts has often been called the Chilean War. Documentation for what happened in the Calaveras diggings includes articles from San Francisco’s Alta California; an unpublished account by an Anglo participant, John Hovey; another by an Argentinean-born Chilean observer, Ramon Jil Navarro, published as a series of articles in Concepción’s El Correo del Sur; and a reminiscence by another Anglo participant, James J. Ayres, written in the 1890s but published in the 1920s. The accounts diverge in both particulars and in narrative intent.34

  Taken together, however, the various accounts suggest the following. In late 1849, parties of both Chileans and Anglos decided to winter south of the Calaveras River in a ravine that had come to be known as Chile, or Chilean, Gulch. At some point, Anglo miners called a mass meeting, elected a judge or alcalde for the mining district, a man named Collier, and ordered the Chileans out of the diggings. Few Chileans left. Around the same time, some Chileans drove some Anglos off a mining claim in the vicinity. After the Chileans were ordered out of the district, they sent a delegation to Stockton to plead their case to a regional judge there, a man named Reynolds. Reynolds sympathized with them and issued a warrant for the arrest of Judge Collier and the Anglos who had tried to expel the Chileans. Fortified by the writ of arrest, but lacking Anglo officials willing to enforce it, the Chileans returned to the gulch and planned a surprise attack on the Anglos in order to make the arrest. Sometime between eight and ten o’clock on the night of December 27, 1849, somewhere between twenty (a Chilean estimate) and two hundred (an Anglo estimate) Chileans fell upon the Anglos, who numbered between a handful (according to the Anglos) and a horde (according to the Chileans). At least two Anglos and perhaps one Chilean died in the ensuing struggle. The Chileans finally subdued the Anglos, tying some to trees while capturing others, and then began marching them in the middle of the night to the regularly commissioned local alcalde, a man named Scollan, who apparently offered the Chileans no assistance. Then the whole party started toward Stockton, several of the Chileans dropping out of the procession along the way. En route, however, an Anglo rescue party overtook the captors and their captives, and now the rescuers marched the Chileans back toward the Calaveras, while the former Anglo captives continued on toward Stockton to deal with the authorities there. Back in the Calaveras diggings, Anglo miners organized a makeshift trial for the Chileans. The jury sentenced three men to death, perhaps two to have their ears cut off, and several to fifty lashes or more.

  The Alta California seems to have lost track of events in the diggings by this time and failed to report on the final outcome. At first, the Alta noted that two hundred Chileans had attacked about twenty Americans, killing several and then marching the prisoners toward Stockton, “not even allowing the wounds of the unfortunate men to be dressed.” The paper reported that “the Chilenos said they were acting under orders from the authorities,” and warned that “this outrage will be the signal for a general outbreak between the Americans and foreigners in the mines.”35 Two days later, however, a letter from a Stockton correspondent provided more details, some of which contradicted the earlier story. The correspondent explained that it was Anglos who had decided to winter near the Calaveras first, though they had chosen a spot where “Chileans or other foreigners” had worked the summer before. Soon after the Anglos settled down for the rainy season, Chileans moved in nearby. This led to the mass meeting of Anglos, which produced the order for Chileans to leave the area. The correspondent acknowledged that the Chileans had secured a writ of arrest for the Anglos from the Stockton judge, but added that “none of the Chilians spoke English, nor did they show any authority for the arrest of the Americans.” In the process of the arrest, two Anglos and one Chilean were killed. The Chileans marched Anglo prisoners to the tent of the local alcalde, Judge Scollan, who “refused to have anything to do with them,” and then started off toward Stockton. Stopping at a store along the road the next morning, the Chileans had breakfast but offered the Anglos only “a little cold coffee.” Meanwhile, “some of the Chilians . . . had either given out or vamosed.” By now, according to the correspondent, the Chileans began to fear an Anglo rescue attempt, and so they came to “an understanding with the Americans, and agreed to loosen their arms . . . provided they would intercede for them in case of an attempt at rescue by other Americans.” Deliverance came soon enough. The Anglo rescuers bound the Chilean captors and marched them back toward the Calaveras, while the freed Anglo captives went on to Stockton “and gave themselves up to the authorities.” The correspondent had heard that the eleven Chilean prisoners “unable from exhaustion to proceed to the Calaveras, were hung upon the road,” though he emphasized, “I give this as a rumor.”36

  Five days after this report, a final letter from the Stockton correspondent appeared in the Alta, detailing the efforts of an Anglo delegation from the Calaveras that had come to Stockton, as the correspondent put it, “for the purpose of laying before our citizens a correct account” of the conflict in the diggings. The delegation included four white men, all “most respectable and intelligent gentlemen,” who appeared before a meeting “of the citizens of Stockton.” These “gentlemen” succeeded in convincing the “citizens” that the Chileans, “by false swearing,” had obtained a writ of arrest from the Stockton judge for the Anglos, including Judge Collier, who had ordered Chileans out of the mines. “If this writ had been placed in the hands of a proper officer,” the correspondent explained, it would have been obeyed. Instead, “it was given to a parcel of the lowest order of Chileans—none of whom could speak a word of English—who . . . stole upon their unsuspecting victims in the dark . . . murdering all who offered the least resistance.” Those at the meeting passed resolutions applauding the conduct of the Anglos and offering to “unite with the miners to render any assistance they may desire in bringing the guilty to a just punishment.” The correspondent closed his letter by reporting that “there is no truth to the rumor that the [Chileans] were executed on the road,” and warned that those Chileans left near the Calaveras were reinforcing their position and might also be “endeavoring to induce the Indians in the neighborhood to join them.”37

  For readers of the Alta California, then, the Chilean War was a conflict that arose when “the lowest order of Chileans,” legitimately banned from Anglo diggings, sought the aid of corrupt Anglo officials, to whom the correspondent referred as “certain persons who would now wish to shirk from all responsibility.” In the end, for English-speaking readers, the event became a kind of warning against the possibility of “a general outbreak between the Americans and foreigners in the mines” or, alternatively, of a deadly alliance between Chileans and Indians in the diggings. Conspicuously absent in all of the Alta California articles was any mention of competing sets of labor relations or of conflict between the ideological underpinnings, for example, of Chilean patrón/peón practices versus small-scale Anglo mining partnerships.

  For John Hovey, one of the Anglo miners who participated in these events, recognition of distinctive Chilean labor relations
in the diggings was something of an afterthought. Hovey recorded what he observed in his diary, and also inserted a separately titled narrative, “Historical Account of the troubles between the Chilian & American Miners in the Calaveras Mining District.” According to Hovey, “the troubles” began when Anglo prospectors strayed into a mining area claimed by Chileans and were ordered to “vamos.” The Anglos, “for they were staunch men,” responded by organizing a mining district in which only “bona-fide citizens of the United States working for themselves” could take up claims. Significantly, the district laws included provisions for a “Military Captain” as well as a president, secretary, and judge. The president himself was no pacifist, and Hovey remembered that the white miners’ leader made a speech at the founding meeting in which he railed that “the foreigners, and especially the d[amne]d copper hides, every s[o]n of a b[itc]h of ’em, should be driven from our diggings.” When the Anglos of the newly created mining district approached the Chilean camp to enforce the new laws, they learned that many of the men there were “peons or slaves.” But nowhere did Hovey suggest that Anglos wanted to exclude Chileans because of unfree-labor practices. The point was to drive out foreigners, dark-skinned men, illegitimate sons of immoral women. The remainder of Hovey’s version of the events at the Calaveras roughly follows the chronology of other accounts, ending with the trial of Chileans, the execution of three patrónes, and the whipping of the peónes. The only Anglo act that seemed to give Hovey pause was the execution of one of the three Chilean leaders. This man had come to California with his son, who had taken ill. “Think of that little boys feelings,” Hovey exclaimed, “left alone in a foreign land sick without a friend and only eleven or twelve years of age.”38