Roaring Camp

by Susan Lee Johnson

  Accompanying this report was a memorial addressed to the governor of California and signed “by nearly every merchant in Stockton,” which complained that the foreign miners’ tax had succeeded only in stopping “the labor of thousands of miners,” destroying business, and creating “a feeling of disorder and discontent in the mines, where the most perfect order and harmony” had previously prevailed. The merchants argued—like the French, Chilean, and Mexican petitioners before them—that the tax ought to be set at a rate of five dollars a month instead of twenty. And the Stockton Times heartily endorsed the memorial, urging the governor to consider “the claims of the vast interests embarked in the district of San Joaquin, where the burden of the tax is most severely felt.”81 Indeed, merchants in the Southern Mines had taken the middle-class project of Gold Rush emigration one step farther, by plowing their profits into commerce in California rather than taking gold east to advance business prospects back home. Anglo American miners might want the Southern Mines all to themselves, but Anglo American merchants wanted customers. And in the Southern Mines, customers were just as likely to be Mexican or French or Chilean as they were to be white people from the eastern states. By the summer of 1850, then, just two years after the discovery of gold in the Sierra Nevada foothills, the meanings of Anglo dominance in the diggings had begun to bifurcate. What began here as diverging interests between white miners, on the one hand, and white merchants, on the other, would evolve into full-fledged class conflict in the years to come.82

  The protests of Mexican, French, and Chilean miners and—probably more important—the petitions of merchants in the Southern Mines eventually had their intended effect. On August 10, 1850, the Stockton Times announced that the foreign miners’ tax had been reduced from twenty dollars per month to twenty dollars for a four-month period. By March of the following year, the tax had been repealed altogether.83 Residents of the Southern Mines, however, knew it was far too late for the repeal to bring back old times in the diggings. Two years later, Anglo men still remembered “the long train of fugitives” leaving the mines: “Some were going North; some South; the great body was probably bound for home; some by way of the sea; others by Los Angelos and the Great Desert.” As early as July 20, 1850, the Stockton Times had reported a mass exodus from the area tributary to the San Joaquin River: “the evil is done—the foreign population, we mean the Mexicans, Sonorians and Chilians are on the march home. . . . The San Joaquin district will loose from twenty to thirty thousand of her working population in the space of a few months.”84 The newspapermen, allies more to Anglo merchants than to Anglo miners, mourned especially the departure of Mexicans, protesting that “the land of their adoption is no longer a land for them.” To those who doubted Mexican immigrants’ desire to settle in California, the newspaper challenged, “look at their wives and families; see them . . . becoming proprietors of lots for the erection of stores. Speak with them and learn their ultimate intentions.” For the Stockton Times, a tax on “foreign miners” was a “direct tax on labor,” and as such it impeded efforts to create “a permanent laboring population” in California. Members of what would become a middle class in the Southern Mines argued that it was customers and wage workers—not competitors for U.S. gold—who were driven off by the foreign miners’ tax.85

  Yet not all left, and those who stayed did not adjust easily to the tax and the relations of dominance it evoked. The Reverend Daniel Woods heard in July of 1850 that a dozen men had been murdered in and around Sonora in the space of a week. Woods imagined, “This state of things is no doubt owing in part, to the heavy tax imposed on foreigners, which deprives many of them employment. In consequence, they [are] destitute of the means with which to purchase their daily supplies. They are accordingly driven to steal and murder.” Woods probably exaggerated the extent to which the responsibility for mayhem in Sonora could be laid solely at the feet of disgruntled “foreign” miners, but his assessment of the situation was in fact more generous than that of many Anglos. Woods, unlike others, also recognized that the tax drove increasing numbers of the Mexicans who remained into wage labor.86 Violence and theft in the Southern Mines did seem to surge in the summer of 1850 and continue unabated at least into the following year, no doubt in part as a consequence of both the economic destitution and the ethnic tensions created by the foreign miners’ tax.87 In response to the turmoil, Anglos in Sonora gathered late in July at what one unsympathetic Anglo wag called “The great Greaser Extermination meeting.” Those in attendance voted for resolutions claiming that “the lives and property of the American citizens are now in danger, from the hands of lawless marauders of every clime, class and creed under the canopy of heaven.” Because the men gathered felt sure that they had in their midst “the Peons of Mexico, the renegades of South America, and the convicts of the British Empire,” they resolved that “all foreigners in Tualumne county, except persons engaging in permanent business and of respectable character, be required to leave the limits of said county, within fifteen days.” Five hundred copies of these resolutions were distributed throughout the county.88

  So it was that, by the summer of 1850, some Anglos in the Southern Mines had tried to drive French miners from French Bar, Chileans from Chilean Gulch, and Sonorans from Sonora, the town founded by northern Mexicans in 1848. From here on, struggles between Spanish- and French-speaking Gold Rush participants, on the one hand, and Anglo Americans, on the other, would not erupt into events observers could hyperbolize into “wars” or “revolutions.” For one, too many Chilean, French, and Mexican miners left the diggings for such skirmishes to continue unabated. In addition, two years of discriminatory and exclusionary practices—from the most local disputes over a single placer claim to the systematic, state-sanctioned persecution of “foreign” miners—had a profound effect on the strategies of resistance and accommodation remaining Spanish and French speakers pursued. Chileans had learned that civil authorities, however sympathetic to Chilean complaints about expulsion from the diggings, would not defy angry crowds of white Americans to offer Chileans protection. And French- and Spanish-speaking men alike had found that, without the backing of Anglo merchants, their challenges to extortionist legislation met with outraged reprisals from Anglo miners. In retrospect, even some white Americans recognized the horror that they, collectively, had visited upon Mexican, Chilean, and French Gold Rush participants. Benjamin Butler Harris, for example, invoking the name of the nativist Know-Nothing Party of the later 1850s, claimed that the foreign miners’ tax was “so outrageously extortionist in its terms as to make an angel weep or a Know-Nothing laugh.” And the man who called the exclusionist gathering in Sonora “The great Greaser Extermination meeting” penned a poem by that title which satirized a rabidly anti-Mexican speech delivered there by a man named John Cave:

  . . . that speech, it is sure to immortalize Cave,

  And I hope coming folks will take warning,

  And choose (if they would their property save)

  Some American place to be born in.89

  The warning Mexican, Chilean, and French Gold Rush participants took from the events of 1849 and 1850 led to new tactics of survival, evasion, and revenge. Many simply left. Others moved to or created camps and towns with non-Anglo majorities. Mokelumne Hill and nearby Jesus María, in Calaveras County, for example, retained an international appearance. An American dentist named John Baker lived there in the mid-1850s and described the population of Jesus María in particular as consisting of “Chilians, Mexicans, Americans, Peruvians, Dutchmen, Italians and Indians.” He added, with some trepidation, “they present to me a mixed mass, I can assure you. The principal language is Spanish.” Indeed, Baker had to learn Spanish in order to work in the area. Several years later, a German traveler to Mokelumne Hill found the French influence still strong there, though he noted an increasing number of German residents as well. The principal inn, the Hotel Leger, he described as “an establishment half way between a German beer hall and a French restaurant
,” perhaps not surprising, since the innkeeper was Alsatian. Farther south, in Mariposa County, the town of Hornitos became a place of refuge for a variety of non-Anglos, but particularly for Mexicans. A smug young Anglo woman visited there in 1857 and noted that she “wasn’t much taken with it. Most of the inhabitants are spaniards & Indians.” Four years later, another traveler noted of Hornitos that “to this day there seems to be an omnipresent struggle between the Mexican and American element . . . . Even the very signs seem to fight it out, or compromise. The stage house is the ‘Progresso Restaurant’; the bakery is a ‘panderia’; the hotels invite both in Spanish and English; the stores in Italian as well as American and Spanish; while Sam Sing or Too Chang outrival the ‘lavado y plan[c]hado.’”90 For some non-Anglos who stayed in the Southern Mines, living in camps and towns with non-Anglo majorities was a ticket to economic and cultural survival.

  Others fought Anglo dominance tooth and nail. When they did, often as not, they in turn faced dire legal or extralegal consequences. If the Stockton Times coverage of killing and stealing in the Southern Mines after the imposition of the foreign miners’ tax is any indication, it would seem that individual and anonymous retaliation against Anglo usurpers became more common over time than the earlier organized forms of resistance practiced in the Chilean War and the “French Revolution.”91 Response to such retaliation was swift and furious, and no doubt fell upon many a Mexican or Chilean who had not participated in and perhaps did not even countenance acts of violent retribution. The sheriff of Tuolumne County, for example, kept a record of his expenditures for 1851—the year after the exodus of Mexicans and Chileans—which indicates that of 115 suspects he arrested, over half had Spanish surnames.92 Just as often, however, “suspects” faced not a sheriff and a court hearing but a vigilante mob, sometimes organized enough to call itself a vigilance committee. Misbehaving white Americans were by no means exempt from the workings of lynch law in the Southern Mines, but for every well-publicized whipping or hanging of a suspected Anglo thief or murderer, probably several Mexicans met a similar fate. In the summer of 1851, for instance, when Sonora’s vigilance committee was most active, the hanging of a white man named Hill received the most publicity. But Enos Christman detailed in his diary just one week of the committee’s deeds: “the Sonora Vigilance Committee hung another horse thief. The following Sunday three Mexicans were tied to the whipping post, and each received twenty-five lashes well laid on. Another Mexican was found with a stolen horse . . . and sentenced to receive 150 lashes, to have one-half of his head shaved, and to leave the country in 48 hours under penalty of being hanged if he ever returned.”93 With such odds, it is little wonder that in some cases, strategies of individual and anonymous retribution evolved into instances of social banditry in the diggings, as they did with Joaquín Murrieta and his compatriots.94

  In the meantime, however, there was yet another population in the Southern Mines that interfered daily with the project of asserting Anglo American dominance in the diggings. Native people in the foothills—including both Sierra Miwoks and mixed bands of Miwoks, Yokuts, former mission Indians, and other peoples from the San Joaquin Valley—had adopted a variety of strategies in response to the unprecedented invasion of Miwok gathering and hunting grounds after 1848. The most important among these were placer mining and livestock raiding. Miwoks and their allies started mining long before the bulk of Anglo and European immigrants arrived in the Sierra foothills. In fact, on the day that Antonio Franco Coronel, Benito Pérez and his wife, Augustin, and the other “mute Indian” got to the Stanislaus diggings in the fall of 1848, they had barely settled in when “seven Indians, each one with little sacks of gold,” approached the campsite. One of these Indians, who were most likely Miwoks, took hold of Coronel’s saddle blanket—a worn cover that had cost only two pesos—and then pointed to a certain spot on his elongated sack of gold, indicating how much he was willing to offer for the purchase. Coronel hesitated, blankets being scarce in the mines, but relented when one of his peónes volunteered to make him a cover of woven grass. Coronel sold the blanket for more than seven ounces of gold (about $112), and then a second for more than nine ounces (about $144). Meanwhile, Benito Pérez sold another Miwok a New Mexican serape for two pounds, three ounces of gold (about $560).95

  Pérez, himself an experienced miner, marveled at how much gold the Miwoks carried in their sacks. He urged his patrón to send him and Augustin after the Indians to learn the whereabouts of their placers, and Coronel agreed. Pérez and Augustin followed the seven miners back to their ranchería, and camped a ways off so as not to be seen. The next morning, the two peónes trailed the Miwoks to their diggings and surprised them while they worked. According to Coronel, although the Indians “seemed hostile,” Pérez “insisted in digging in a place next to theirs.” In no time at all, Pérez had gathered three ounces of gold (about $48).96 When Pérez and Augustin returned and told their patrón the news, Coronel sent them back, along with the other “mute Indian,” to “take possession” of the most productive ground. Coronel came close behind, “followed by some of the Spanish people who had been there in camp.” Shortly, Californio patrónes, Indian peónes, and Sonoran gambusinos filled the ravine Coronel called Cañada del Barro (no doubt because of the barro, or clay, that made washing the gold so difficult). Coronel did not mention what became of the seven Miwoks who had led them to these extraordinarily rich claims; he himself mined there only for a couple of months before leaving the diggings for the winter.97 Mexicans, Californios, and mission Indians may often have introduced Anglo prospectors to profitable diggings, but long before, Spanish-speaking men and women themselves had followed Miwoks into the mines.

  Some historians have stressed the extent to which California Indians were incorporated into the placer mining economy as wage or contract laborers, following the pattern of Spanish Mexican use of native workers in the service of settlement. This practice, such historians argue, declined with the ascendancy of Anglo Americans in the diggings, who, as a group, pursued a policy toward Indians of extermination rather than incorporation and exploitation. And indeed, there were early examples in the Southern Mines of widespread white employment of native workers. John Murphy, for whom Murphys Camp in Calaveras County was named, struck it rich in 1848 and 1849 by contracting for Indian labor in the diggings in exchange for supplying the workers with clothing, blankets, and food. Murphy seems also to have cemented trade and labor relations by marrying a native woman. These laborers may well have been Miwoks, who were native to the area. But Murphy himself had come to the Southern Mines from Charles Weber’s camp farther north, where Yokuts Indians seem to have worked for Weber’s Stockton Mining Company. So it is possible that some of Murphy’s laborers were Yokuts as well.98 After establishing one work site, John Murphy and his brother Daniel moved on to nearby Angels Creek, where they took up a second set of claims, which became known as Murphys New Diggings (the spot from which Gerstäcker’s French “Amazons” would depart for Sonora a year or so later). The New Englander Leonard Noyes arrived at this camp in the fall of 1851, after the Murphy brothers had left, and heard “Fabulous Stories . . . of the amounts of Gold” taken there by Daniel Murphy, “who had all the Indians working for him.” Noyes recalled that Murphy had “had a trading post there [where] he sold Indians coarse white blouses or over shirts for their weight in Gold.”99

  But by far the most well-known early white employer of native labor in the Southern Mines was James D. Savage (the name prompted a French Gold Rush participant to insist that Savage had been kidnapped as a child and raised by Indians).100 Savage was actually an overland emigrant from Illinois who worked for a time at Sutter’s Fort before the Gold Rush began. But by the time the massive influx of immigrants started, in 1849, Savage was already established as an Indian trader to the south of Sutter’s Fort in the area that was becoming the Southern Mines. Eventually, he set up trading posts on the Fresno, Mariposa, and Merced rivers; learned a number of Indian dialects;
and married several native (probably Miwok and Yokuts) women. Everywhere Savage set Indians to work in the diggings, not only around his Mariposa County trading posts but also to the north at what would become Jamestown and Big Oak Flat in Tuolumne County. White observers consistently described Savage as the acknowledged “chief” of the native communities with whom he was associated, but given the difficulties whites had in understanding Indian habits of social organization, it seems likely that the relationship between Savage and the Miwok and Yokuts workers was more complicated. It is clear that Indians routinely exchanged with Savage the gold they gathered for clothes, blankets, and provisions, just as the native peoples to the north did with John and Daniel Murphy.101

  The reasons some Miwok and Yokuts people worked for Savage and the Murphy brothers are not hard to imagine. Increasingly, native peoples found themselves hungry and cold as a consequence of invasion and the subsequent decline of animal populations in the foothills. Likewise, they found themselves the target of harassment and violence from immigrant miners. The Reverend Daniel Woods visited one of Savage’s camps in the late fall of 1849 and warned that although the Indians there were “openly friendly,” they in fact harbored a “growing distrust of the emigrant miners,” who subjected Indians to “the most cruel and barbarous impositions.” Woods predicted that “the time will come when they will seek revenge.” He was right. In the meantime, although immigrants responded with outrage at the first signs of Indian resistance, most, like Woods, were well aware of the situation they had created for native peoples in the diggings. Lafayette Houghton Bunnell, who participated in the hostilities that eventually erupted, remembered, “We had sufficient general intelligence . . . to know that we were looked upon as trespassers on [Indians’] territory, but were unwilling to abandon our search for gold.” And the Stockton Times could not have been clearer about the causes of Indian-immigrant tensions in the Southern Mines: “The complaint on the part of the Indians is that the white men have driven the game from their accustomed haunts; that the rivers which aforetime so abundantly supplied them with fish, cease to afford them food; and that the Americans kill their young men.” In circumstances like these, working under the protection of a white man such as Savage and gaining access to immigrant trade goods made sense.102