An absence of concern about questions of free labor characterized the account of Ramon Jil Navarro as well. Navarro’s is by far the most elaborate and dramatic of the narratives, sparing nothing in its portrait of the aggrieved Chilean miners as men of high principle, uncommon bravery, and peerless hospitality. For example, Navarro pointedly distinguished Chileans in California from Mexicans, who, though perhaps the most skilled miners in the diggings, nonetheless “allowed themselves to be treated like cowards by the Americans.” As for his countrymen, Navarro boasted, “There is not a single example of a Chilean letting himself be forced off his claim without a struggle.”39 Navarro’s story begins as several groups of Chileans settle in for the winter of 1849–50, each building a cabin and hauling in supplies for the rainy months ahead. On December 10, however, Anglos in the area—having decided to “act as an authority independent of Calaveras County, the state of California, or even the United States itself”—issued an order to the Chileans to abandon their camp. As Navarro understood it, Anglos justified this act by arguing that it was wrong that “Chileans, as foreigners, not paying any fees, should exploit the mines at the expense of themselves who were citizens of the United States and who had come by land with so much toil and privation and who were rightful owners of mines bought from Mexico with Yankee blood.” The Chilean men who headed the companies, however, refused to leave, citing the severity of the winter, the law of the land, and “the right of possession, which was even more sacred in California.” Yet two days later, several Anglos walked into the Chilean camp, saying, “You, Chileno, largo de aquí” (get out of here). The leader of the group working in the placers, José del Carmen Téran, simply replied, “You, Yankees, largo de aquí.”40
The Anglo miner John Hovey’s rendering of the makeshift jail and courthouse where Chilean participants in the “Chilean War” met their fate. From the John Hovey Journal.
Reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
A few days after this incident, according to Navarro, hostilities moved beyond such mutual posturing, as Anglos infiltrated the Chilean camp, separating the men working in the diggings from their patrónes in the cabin area. Some Anglos hid among the trees nearby as the district’s alcalde, Judge Collier, and some unarmed Anglos approached the cabins in a seemingly friendly manner. The Chileans welcomed the Anglos, serving them “coffee and a light lunch.” Finally, on cue, the armed Anglos rushed in from the woods and surrounded the Chileans at gunpoint and then moved out to seize the men at work in the diggings. This accomplished, the Anglos robbed the Chileans, marched them to the Anglo camp, and forced the stronger captives to help stow the stolen goods in Anglo cabins. Navarro considered this the work of “bandits” and compared the Anglos unfavorably with highwaymen from Guadalajara or Apache raiders in northern Mexico, who, though they were thieves, never mistreated their victims with bodily insult or injury.41
In Navarro’s account, then, these are the provocations that forced the Chileans to seek help from officials in Stockton. There they received the sympathies of the judge, the sheriff, and the town’s leading merchants. So they returned to Judge Scollan, the appointed alcalde in Calaveras County, with the following order, which Navarro, himself the official translator for the Stockton court, interpreted for the Chileans:
By these presents, Messrs. Concha and Maturano are authorized to arrest and bring to Stockton either freely or by force all of the individuals residing in Calaveras who have defied the legal authority of this subprefecturate and who have recognized Mr. Coller as judge. They are authorized likewise to arrest and bring to Stockton all individuals who took part in the robbery, violence, and expulsion carried out against the aliens living in Chile Gulch. . . . The lawful judge of Calaveras, Mr. Scollen, will authorize the execution of this order by his presence.
Judge Scollan dutifully accompanied two of the patrónes to the Anglo camp and served the warrant, but when the Anglos refused to comply, Scollan claimed he could do no more.42
It was at this point that the Chileans took matters into their own hands, feeling the need, as Navarro put it, “to avenge their outraged honor.” Three of the Chilean patrónes—Terán and two others, named Ruiz and Maturano—led their parties into battle. There were only twenty men in all, the patrón named Concha having departed with his workers for Stockton. The tiny band of Chileans approached the Anglo camp, bursting through cabin doors and shouting, “Subprefecto orden, vamos for Stockton.” The Anglos went for their weapons and immediately felled one of the Chileans. In retaliation, Maturano and Ruiz killed an Anglo each. The struggle continued until the Anglos were finally subdued, and then, finding that the captured Anglos outnumbered the Chileans two to one, Terán reluctantly ordered that the “the most vicious of the Americans” be tied up. The Chileans further revealed “their generosity of character and their good hearts” by refraining from taking anything from the Anglo camp, not even the goods that had been stolen from Chileans days before.43
The Chileans then proceeded to Judge Scollan’s residence, to demonstrate their respect for legitimate government. There, they treated the wounds of those Anglos who had been injured, exhibiting tenderness, Navarro contended, to the point of tears. Then the captors and their captives continued toward Stockton, stopping for breakfast at a roadside store where “all sat down together at the same table without any ceremony and in perfect harmony.” According to Navarro, “a kind of intimacy had grown up” among the men by daybreak. Still, at each stop along the way, a few Chileans dropped out of the march, too “sick or too worn out to continue walking.” Finally, their numbers reduced, the Chileans encountered a band of a hundred armed Anglos at a roadside inn, and, unable to resist, the captors surrendered. The Anglos bound the remaining Chileans so tightly that the ropes drew blood. But what “distressed the Chileans most,” Navarro wrote, “was the vile ingratitude with which their good treatment of their prisoners was requited.” Some of the Anglos then started the Chileans back toward the Calaveras, while others “went on to Stockton to seize the subprefect” (who had already left for San Francisco).44
Navarro’s account continues in this vein, stressing the countless deeds of inhumanity the Anglos inflicted upon the Chileans, especially the refusal to feed the captives; once back in the diggings, the Chileans were herded into a cold room and “treated exactly the way captains of slaving ships treated the unfortunate Negroes who fell into their hands.” Soon enough, however, on December 31, the makeshift trial began. It did not last long. By ten o’clock that night, the sentences came down: Terán and two others were to be thrown off of Mokelumne Hill; three men were to be whipped, have their heads shaved, and their ears cut off; and several others were to be whipped and have their heads shaved. The last two groups of convicts asked to be shot rather than suffer such dishonoring punishments, but the Anglos refused their request.45 Before New Year’s morning arrived, however, Anglos from the Mokelumne mines intervened and demanded leniency for the Chileans. They succeeded only in protecting one man, Maturano, and in insisting that the death sentence for Terán and the two others be carried out in a more humane fashion. So it was that on January 1, 1850, three Chilean men died by firing squad; three others were whipped and shaved, and lost their ears to an Anglo’s knife; and the rest were tied to branches and “whipped so that blood spurted from their lungs.” Not even the “sobbing pleas” of the son of one of the dying men could “inspire pity” among the Anglos, “such men as they were.”46
Throughout, Navarro took pains to underline the manly stoicism of his Chilean protagonists, and particularly of the patrónes among them, who chose violence only when provoked but then were quick to defend their own honor to the death. At the same time, theirs was a style of manhood that mixed courage with compassion, as evidenced by the tender care and comradeliness (and especially the breakfast) they offered their Anglo captives, despite the Anglos’ rapacious acts. The Anglos, by contrast, were cheap hoodlums who knew nothing of either honor or
manhood, not to mention hospitality. As if to underscore the bankruptcy of Anglo gender in the diggings, Navarro placed at the scene of the final trial a woman, wife of one of the jurors. This Anglo woman, Navarro wrote, failed to act “in keeping with the mission of her sex” by consoling the prisoners and pleading on their behalf. Instead, she “was an endless torment to the Chileans.” She stood in the doorway at the trial, alternately drinking and swinging a noose at the prisoners, demonstrating “the horrible facial expressions they would have in their last agonies.” And then, when death called, she “watched the spectacle in as cold blooded a manner as the worst of the Yankees.”47 How better to represent the disorder of the diggings, where racial and ethnic violence cost men their honor, their ears, and their lives, than as a disorder of gender?
The final account of the Chilean War appears in the reminiscences of James J. Ayres, Gold and Sunshine, which he wrote fifty years after the events. The book, which was not published for another twenty-five years, opens as Ayres and his partners settle in for the winter of 1849–50 near the Calaveras River. Two miles away was a Chilean settlement, watched over by a Dr. Concha and several “lieutenants.” The military allusion was no accident. The rest of the camp was made up of peónes Concha and others had brought from Chile, who, according to Ayres, “stood in relation to the headmen as dependents, in fact as slaves.” Neither was the reference to slavery incidental.48 Conflict arose when “small parties of Americans” would discover new diggings, but then be “driven off by a superior body of these Chileans.” So the Anglos called a mass meeting and drew up mining laws. As Ayres put it, “In other mining districts where Americans from the South had brought their slaves with them, a law was adopted which prohibited masters from taking up claims for their slaves.” In the Calaveras diggings, this principle was applied to situations where Chilean patrónes took up claims for their peónes. Soon after the meeting, some Anglos were driven “under peculiarly aggravating circumstances” from a gulch they were working (one hears echoes of Terán’s mocking, “You, Yankees, largo de aquí”). The district’s alcalde, Judge Collier, called another meeting, which “came together in a temper of great exasperation,” adopted a resolution to order the Chileans out of the mines, and then “marched in a body to Chilean Camp, and served the notice upon the headman present.”49
According to Ayres, the Anglos had almost forgotten the “Chilean imbroglio,” when one evening their tent flaps flew back and they found a dozen guns aimed at them. Ayres was among those bound to a tree by the attacking Chileans. But because Ayres spoke some Spanish, the Chileans took him to another camp in case they needed an interpreter. This put Ayres in a cabin where two Anglos had been shot, and introduced him to the person he assumed had led the raid, a man Ayres thought the Chileans called Tirante. “He was not misnamed,” Ayres added. (Terán was at the center of Navarro’s narrative too, but as hero rather than tyrant.)50 Ayres numbered the Chilean captors at five dozen and the Anglo captives at thirteen. The party proceeded to the tent of Judge Scollan, who Ayres acknowledged was the “regularly appointed alcalde.” Ayres learned later that the Chileans had tried to persuade the alcalde “to give a tone of legality to their murderous proceedings by certifying to our arrest by the authority of a warrant that had been issued by Judge Reynolds, of Stockton.” The alcalde declined to intervene, so the Chileans pushed on with their prisoners toward Stockton. In the morning, when they stopped at a trading tent, Ayres noted that the Anglos were “allowed to get some coffee and food.” There Ayres learned that some Anglos were planning a rescue, and he also noticed that the Chileans had “diminished in numbers” along the way: “Some of the peons had dropped out from sheer exhaustion; others had furtively deserted.”51
As the remaining Chileans recognized their increasingly perilous situation, they began to argue among themselves about what to do. According to Ayres, “Tirante proposed that the prisoners be dispatched,” and that the Chileans disperse. But “a large, fine-looking Chilean called Maturano . . . opposed the proposition not only as cruel and inhuman, but as one that would surely bring upon them the vengeance of the whole American people.” Maturano won this debate, and Ayres vowed to repay him for “the manly and humane stand he took in this terrible crisis of our fate.”52 By evening, all were so weary that they stopped for the night and lay down around a campfire. Eventually the Chileans fell asleep, and the Anglos were able to loosen their ropes and quietly gather their captors’ weapons. On signal, then, the Anglos turned on the Chileans and tied them up. “The peons,” Ayres noted, “gave us no trouble when they saw that their patrones were in our power.” At daybreak, the Anglos marched their former captors toward Stockton, until they ran into a party of rescuers at a roadside inn along the way. After a grand reception and a good meal, the rescue team headed back toward the Calaveras with the prisoners, while Ayres was appointed “to go to Stockton and lay the facts before the people and the authorities”—but not before he paid his debt to Maturano. Ayres took Maturano aside and told him to escape by running for his life through the wild oats that grew near the inn. As Maturano prepared to leave, Ayres recalled, “he kissed my hand and thanked me.”53 Then Ayres went on to Stockton, finding “the community intensely excited” and particularly outraged at Judge Reynolds, who had issued the warrant for the Anglos’ arrest and who now had escaped to San Francisco. That evening, Ayres attended a mass meeting, where a nephew of Judge Collier “delivered a powerful, eloquent and impassioned address” that exonerated the Anglos of all wrongdoing. His good name cleared, Ayres headed back to the Calaveras, where he learned that miners from Mokelumne Hill had conducted a trial and pronounced the following sentences: “Tirante and two others . . . were sentenced to death; some four or five . . . were sentenced each to receive fifty to one hundred lashes on the bare back; and two . . . were condemned to have their ears cut off.”54
Such was the story of James Ayres—a story that, not surprisingly, frequently contradicts that of Ramon Jil Navarro. Yet even with a narrative structured to shed the best possible light on his own and other Anglos’ actions, half a century later Ayres felt compelled to write an apologia for the story, a brief chapter entitled “Obvious Observations upon the Bloody Episode.” What was obvious to Ayres by 1896 was that “mutilation can at no time nor under any circumstances be justified.” The death sentences, even the whippings, did not trouble Ayres so much as the act of cutting off Chilean ears, which he confessed had not troubled him at all in 1850. In what must have seemed a fitting argument to make in the 1890s, Ayres wrote, “This only goes to prove that our civilization is, after all, but a veneering, and our inherent nature is that of the savage, only requiring the proper circumstances, conditions, and surroundings to draw it out” (surroundings many called the frontier).55 Besides, Ayres had placed himself in Stockton at the time of the trial and had made other miners responsible for the brutal sentences.56 His conscience assuaged, Ayres went on to lay responsibility for the affair at the feet of the Stockton judge, who ignored local mining district laws. And, Ayres added, “If I am told that we had no right to forbid the Chileans to locate claims for their peons, the answer is obvious, that we had the same right . . . as the other districts had to forbid the slave owners among our own people to stake out claims for their black bondsmen.” He concluded by explaining that his purpose was to set the story straight not only in the United States but in Chile as well. A few years earlier, he noted, a mob in Valparaíso had “maltreated and killed sailors belonging to a United States cruiser” (this was the cruiser Baltimore). Chilean newspapers had identified this uprising as retribution for the 1849 “Chilean Massacre” in California. “This venomous spirit,” Ayres claimed, made its way even to the “higher orders of Chile, and at one time it looked as if we would . . . have to bring the peppery little republic to its senses by our national strong arm.” No doubt, such comments failed to endear Ayres to any Chilean reader who happened upon Gold and Sunshine after it finally was published in 1922.57
A
great deal is kaleidoscoped in Ayres’s brief justification of the Chilean War. First, there is the retrospective insertion of concern over Chilean peonage, which Ayres likened to slavery. Accounts generated during the Gold Rush—the Alta California coverage, John Hovey’s diary, and Ramon Navarro’s articles in El Correo del Sur—downplayed conflicts over labor relations and the ideas that informed them. Ayres and men like him may indeed have been concerned about questions of free labor in 1849. But such concerns were unlikely to produce a clear consensus among Anglos in the Southern Mines, where southern whites, some with black slaves in tow, were overrepresented. It seems likely, then, that aversion to unfree-labor practices was peripheral rather than central to the Chilean War of 1849–50. By 1896, however, when middle-class white northerners and southerners were mending all sorts of ideological fences, it would not have been unseemly for Ayres to map the “slavery question” onto other kinds of disputes that arose in the diggings.58
Second, there is the self-assured Anglo Americanism reflected in Ayres’s didactic use of the Gold Rush past to placate “peppery” Chileans who dared challenge U.S. imperial power—Chileans who had a historical memory all their own. Indeed, decades before the 1890 attack on U.S. sailors from the cruiser Baltimore, a Chilean author had claimed John Rollin Ridge’s Joaquín Murrieta as Chile’s own Gold Rush hero, christening him El Bandido Chileño. To an audience schooled in such Gold Rush tales of resistance, Gold and Sunshine shed little light on the subject. As the easy Chilean appropriation of Murrieta suggests, outside of the United States, battles over the meanings of the Gold Rush have been resolved less frequently in white Americans’ favor. As recently as 1966, for example, the Nobel Prize–winning Chilean poet Pablo Neruda transformed the Murrieta story into an anti-U.S. opera titled Fulgor y muerte de Joaquín Murieta (The Splendor and Death of Joaquín Murieta). The opera was translated into a number of languages and performed widely in Latin America, Eastern and Western Europe, and the USSR (and on some U.S. college campuses in 1968).59 In a song that introduced the opera, Neruda, like Ramon Navarro before him, reclaimed the Gold Rush for Chilean audiences:
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