Roaring Camp

by Susan Lee Johnson

  Whatever role native women and men played in the Mariposa War, some maintained remarkable dignity even in defeat. Benjamin Butler Harris, for example, recalled that when several bands gave themselves up to the troops, a very old woman among them was asked her age. She replied, knowing that her people were being sent to live on the plains, “I am the mother of all these mountains.” Surrenders such as these came slowly, however. Six bands signed treaties in March, and another fifteen in April, while others still eluded their pursuers. On hand to sign these treaties were federal Indian commissioners, who would return these and future agreements to the U.S. Senate for ratification.123 While the treaties showed little or no understanding of or respect for native cultures or modes of subsistence, neither were they stingy in what whites perceived as material benefits. As Eccleston recorded in his diary, the treaties proposed that the Indians settle in the San Joaquin Valley, “allowing them 10 years provision & clothing for 20 yrs, a pair of pants, shirt & blanket every four mo[nth]s to each Indian. They also give them 1 Farmer, a Carpenter, a Schoolmaster & Preacher, and a Blacksmith.” Eccleston noted as well James Savage’s assessment of such treaties. Savage predicted that not all of the native people would come down out of the mountains, but only “young men & fast travelling women.” These would accept government “presents” and build temporary shelters, but then “as soon as they get a good chance, steal a large band of horses & kill a few white men & run back to the mountains.”124

  It did not happen just this way, but Savage was correct to predict that, for the most part, Miwoks would not become reservation dwellers. For one, the treaties negotiated by the federal commissioners were never ratified by the U.S. Senate (in part because of resistance to the treaties from the California state government), though the vote against ratification would not come about until the following year. In the meantime, federal Indian agents and commissioners considered the treaties already in effect, and so spent freely on food and equipment, and granted licenses to traders to operate within the ill-fated reservations. James Savage was one of these licensed traders, and for a little more than a year he settled back into an uneasy peace with those Indians who had gathered, for the time being, down in the valley on the Fresno Reservation—most of them probably Yokuts.125 But in the summer of 1852, Savage became embroiled in a dispute with a competing trader, Walter Harvey, over native treaty rights; in this case, Savage seems to have taken the Yokuts side in the controversy. Harvey was furious with Savage not so much over their opposing views but over remarks Savage had made questioning his status as a gentleman. In a fight, Harvey shot Savage and killed him. Thus ended the career of the largest employer of native labor in the Southern Mines. As for Harvey, within a year he would join Harry Love’s state-sponsored rangers in pursuing the latest lion in the path of Anglo dominance in the diggings—Joaquín Murrieta.126

  The Mariposa War had a less profound impact on Sierra Miwoks and their allies than one might expect. In Calaveras County, for example, Miwoks continued to combine mining with customary subsistence strategies, using gold to buy what hunting and gathering could no longer supply and what contact with immigrant society made indispensable—especially clothing. When Indians did turn to reservation resources, one historian suggests, they often did so “as part of their seasonal round,” though this mixed economy became more difficult to sustain as the decade went by.127

  Events at Belt’s ferry and store on the Merced River illustrate another path Miwoks followed after the war. George Belt had received one of the coveted licenses to trade with native people, and later a contract to supply two groups of Indians with cattle and flour as stipulated by the soon to be unratified treaties of 1851. The native settlements located in and near the Merced Reservation included several bands of Miwoks and one of Yokuts. Sam Ward arrived there late in the summer of that year, anxious to cast his lot with the newest entrepreneurs in the diggings—those investing in quartz mining. Although Ward came from an old and affluent banking family in New York City, he had not been able to maintain family fortunes. On the advice of “an old Chilean miner who had once [overseen] similar works in his native country,” Ward and other Anglos eagerly bought shares in a quartz company. One of Ward’s fellow shareholders, Henry Drought, also became a partner of Belt’s ferry and store. Since Drought preferred to manage his business affairs from San Francisco, he enlisted Ward to watch over operations at the Merced River or, as Ward put it, to “see the hands played out which had been dealt to my friend in the double game of Indian trading at the river and of quartz crushing” at Quartzburg, a few miles east of the ferry and store.128

  Thus Ward settled in at Belt’s, where the Miwok and Yokuts bands had already established their ranchería and were hard at work placer mining. Indeed, when Ward first arrived, they had been so successful in the diggings that they had cleaned out the store’s shelves of all trade goods. So the proprietors were obliged to sell the Indians a small herd of cattle at reduced rates in order to prevent them from taking their business to a rival trading post. Once Ward assumed his duties, he assessed the situation and concluded, “Unlike most producers . . . our market lay under our eyes; the demand depended . . . upon the success of our consumers in their gold washings.” Hence, Ward decided to turn his attentions to “the habits and customs of the Indian tribe,” of which he now considered himself “the vicarious paterfamilias.” A chance visit by James Savage, who was en route to San Francisco and who spoke at length to the Indians at Belt’s in their native dialect, convinced Ward that he, too, must learn the Miwoks’ language: “My plans were soon formed to approach, if not to rival, the white Savage in this particular influence over the red.”129

  The Miwok miners tried to help Ward with his language lessons, just as they patiently watched him try to learn how to pan for gold sometime later, but there is little evidence that he was a particularly apt pupil. What Ward did learn, however, was how adaptable these native women and men were to changing economic circumstances. Ward taught some of the youngsters to grow melons, while their parents balanced gold digging with gathering, hunting, and fishing. In fact, when a dam built farther down the river prevented salmon from swimming up as far as the ranchería at Belt’s, Ward intervened on the Indians’ behalf and persuaded the immigrant men downstream to remove the obstruction. All over the Southern Mines, Indians like these negotiated their needs with interlopers like Ward. Native people turned immigrant commercial ventures to their immediate advantage when they could, and adjusted to the loss of autonomy gold-centered social and economic relations spelled when they could not. All in all, many Indians in California saw to it that the Gold Rush did not destroy native communities or ways of life, though the dislocations of the former and the transformations of the latter were often monumental in scale.130

  Miwoks were especially successful in this regard. The Belgian miner Jean-Nicolas Perlot learned this in the years following the Mariposa War, as he pushed up farther into the Sierra Nevada in search of gold. Indeed, while men such as Ward stayed in the foothills investing in quartz mines and trying to profit from licensed Indian trading and federal Indian contracts, Perlot worked to prolong the Gold Rush—a phenomenon centered on the quick exploitation of surface deposits—by ranging far and wide in pursuit of undisturbed placers. In his perpetual prospecting in Mariposa and Tuolumne counties between 1852 and 1854, Perlot found Indians there engaged in a wide variety of activities. During the hard winter of 1852–53, for example, Miwoks from the Tuolumne River area seized Perlot’s only pack animal (“alas! our donkey, our poor donkey,” Perlot recalled), and killed it for food, leaving only the head and hooves behind. And that spring, Perlot ran into three Miwok men who were hunting—safer work, when Indians could find it. After exchanging friendly greetings, Perlot realized that he had met one of the men many months before along the Fresno River, when the man had helped Perlot balance a heavy load of supplies on a mule.131 And in the fall, when camped along the Merced River, Perlot watched Miwok women gathering a cornuco
pia of seeds and berries in the neighborhood. One morning in October, however, Perlot awoke to the sound of native women and men “singing, and running with all the speed which with they were capable in the direction of the Merced.” This coming and going went on for two days, and Perlot began to worry that the Indians might be preparing for battle. But then two Mexican men passed by who understood something of the local Miwok dialect. They informed Perlot that the words of the song he kept hearing meant simply, “The acorn has fallen.” What Perlot was witnessing was the start of the annual celebration that marked the beginning of the acorn harvest. He was a bit chagrined: “Those whom we saw passing by . . . , so noisy and joyful, were therefore not animated by . . . bellicose intentions,” Perlot recalled, “they were going to celebrate the acorn festival.”132

  It was in the following year, however, 1854, that Perlot saw Miwok women regularly passing by his camp en route to Coulterville, in Mariposa County, or Garrote (later Groveland), in Tuolumne County. On their way to town, the women traveled unencumbered, but on their return they walked with heavy baskets of flour carried on their heads. Perlot concluded that these women must be coming from rich Indian placers located up in the mountains. So he decided to inquire about these diggings with Indians he knew—a man Perlot called “Flesno” (because this was the fellow who helped Perlot with his mule on the Fresno, which Perlot thought Miwoks pronounced “Flesno”) and one named Juan, with whom Perlot could communicate in Spanish. Juan and “Flesno” eventually led Perlot to these placers, where Perlot entered a world seldom encountered by white Gold Rush participants. It was here that he saw Miwok women at work in the mines, those who he thought ceded none of the gold they gathered to their husbands. It was here that he talked with the leader of a Miwok band—José, father of Juan and Scipiano—who had memorized his people’s treaty rights by heart. And it was here that he met with José’s son, Scipiano, who spoke his desires to Perlot with the hope that this relatively sympathetic white man might have some influence with those who lived below: “Look for l’olo (gold) where you want, let the Ochà (Indian woman) seek her seeds where they are and Oulai Nang-à Blanco (and the Indian will be the friend of the White).”133

  Of course, immigrants did not invade Miwok gathering and hunting grounds to find friends, but to get gold, and the mutual respect that came to characterize Perlot’s interactions with Miwoks—often a grudging respect on Perlot’s part—was the exception rather than the rule in the Southern Mines. Perhaps it was Perlot’s ascribed status as a “foreigner” in California that helped shape his own historical memory of Indian-immigrant relations there.134 For men like Perlot knew what it was either to steer clear of white Americans bent on economic dominance or to negotiate an interdependent existence on the margins of Anglo settlement—margins that were centers for those Miwok, Mexican, Chilean, and French people who survived the “wars” of 1850 and 1851. Still, European men—Belgians like Perlot along with the majority of French-speaking immigrants who came from France—stood a far better chance of insinuating themselves into the dominant culture and class of the Southern Mines, where law and custom barred Latin Americans, native peoples, and also African Americans from even the prospect of free participation in civic and economic life there. This would also be true for Chinese immigrants, who began to pour into the Southern Mines only in 1852, once these initial ethnic and economic tensions had been resolved largely in white Americans’ favor.

  After the Chilean War, the Mariposa War, and the “French Revolution,” middle-class Anglo men—for more and more there was a recognizable middle class in the mines—asserted control in a variety of ways. They bought up water rights and sold use of the water to men who persisted in the declining placers; they invested in quartz mining; and, perhaps most significantly, they sent for their wives and other female relatives from the East. Together, these white women and men would seek to realize their vision of “good and congenial society” in the Southern Mines. And they, particularly the men among them, would also remember the boom years of the Gold Rush in a manner that would obscure much of what these pages recall—that is, a Gold Rush in which some of the riches of the Southern Mines may have sailed off to Mexico in the hands of Rosa Felíz de Murrieta, widow of the late Joaquín.

  Part III

  Chapter 5

  Dreams That Died

  It was autumn 1852, and Miwok people were facing their fifth acorn harvest since Gold Rush immigrants had arrived in the foothills. The Mariposa War was over. The foreign miners’ tax had come and gone. In the town of Sonora, a local correspondent to the San Joaquin Republican, a Stockton newspaper, sat down to pen a column entitled “Enterprise at Sonora.” His was a booster’s prose, designed to lure even more settlers to the town “at the centre of the placer diggings.” He was writing about Sonora, but to speak of Sonora was to speak of the Southern Mines. And to speak of the Southern Mines in late 1852 was to speak of change—change that had occurred already, change that was now underway. From the correspondent’s point of view, change was all to the good. “Since the first settlement of this country by the Americans,” he wrote, “the southern mines have been filled with foreigners.” No more. Now, he bragged, “We see around us in every direction the results of the indomitable energy and perseverance of an American population.”

  What did American energy and perseverance look like? First and foremost, they looked like huge canals that took water from rivers such as the Stanislaus and Tuolumne and diverted it to the mines, so that paydirt could be washed not just during the rainy season, but in the dry summer months as well. American energy and perseverance had an urban look as well: towns like Sonora boasting broad streets and fireproof buildings. And there were churches, printing offices, newspapers, and express companies, which the correspondent thought spoke well “for the morality, intelligence and enterprise of our citizens.” In Sonora, there was a schoolhouse and a post office, as well as a hotel with “neat and well supplied tables,” “attentive and obliging servants,” and “clean and well appointed rooms.” Not only in Sonora but in the nearby communities of Jamestown, Columbia, Shaw’s Flat, and Springfield as well, there were “neat cottages, surrounded with gardens,” evidence of that which white miners had found lacking in the boom years of the Gold Rush: “domestic comfort.” Finally, American energy and perseverance looked like a world in motion. With pride, the correspondent described the four daily stages that arrived in Sonora from Stockton, and the innumerable conveyances that traveled on the hour between Sonora and surrounding towns, all of which gave “our mountain city an air of bustle and activity.”1 Elaborate waterworks in the diggings; permanent buildings, community institutions, and conventional family homes in the towns; transportation to the outside world; a population becoming more “American” than “foreign”—to more than one white man’s eye, these were welcome signs of change in the Southern Mines.

  All observers agreed that the mining regions were changing, but different observers measured the causes, extent, and consequences of change differently. Although the identity of the Sonora correspondent is lost to the historical record, that of a writer from Amador County who published in San Francisco’s The Golden Era is clear. Signing herself “Lenita,” Lorena Hays was an unmarried white woman who had accompanied her widowed mother from Illinois to California in 1853. She was twenty-seven years old when her columns first appeared in the paper. Writing in September 1854 about change in California, Lenita was less sanguine, and a good deal more prescriptive, than the Sonora correspondent.2 Of course, she was living in a mining camp called Cook’s Bar, not a thriving town like Sonora. And hers was not a booster’s voice, but rather a voice for reform in California. Still, some of the differences between her column and that of the Sonora writer are differences in perspective attributable to ideas about and experiences of gender that were becoming more common in the Southern Mines during the 1850s. These ideas and experiences originated among Anglo Americans who were struggling to constitute a middle class in the mines.
And struggle they did. White people who identified with the project of American nationhood generally took for granted that they should achieve and sustain economic and cultural dominance in the diggings, but they did not necessarily agree about the process. Sometimes their disagreements followed lines of gender.

  Recall that the Sonora correspondent, probably an Anglo American man, found the locus of change in the Southern Mines in such accoutrements as flumes, fireproof buildings, and family homes. Lenita took another tack. Advances in mining and construction were important, and Lenita remarked that Cook’s Bar boasted “a number of very good buildings.” Nonetheless, the water ditch in her neighborhood was under repair, and so miners were idle. The kind of “American energy and perseverance” that the Sonora correspondent heralded, in her view, was not enough to bring about change in California. For just as quickly as a flume could be built or a ditch dug, it could fail. Then men, whom Lenita did not hesitate to call “children of a larger growth,” had a surfeit of energy and a lack of employment, and got themselves into a world of trouble. The answer, for Lenita, was reform. Rhetorically, she asked, “Shall California be a ‘lesser light’ in the moral firmament?” Certainly not. Her adopted state would yet “become a light among nations”: “But where are we to look for this influence—the lever that is to set the ball in motion? Towards what point are we to look for the light that is to break forth as sunlight to purify, cleanse, and irradiate our moral atmosphere? Where is the star that is to illumine our social horizon?” The lever, the point of light, she boasted, was “WOMAN.” It was foolish to think that “man, all-powerful as he is,” could do the work of reform alone, while woman’s hands were “folded in luxury, thus tacitly giving consent to the vice and immorality in which our land abounds.” Privately, in her diary, Lorena Hays wondered what caused vice and immorality in California: “Is it because of our peculiar situation—the mixed and incongruous mass of our population or the predominance of the male element in society, or is the evil attributable to inefficient Legislation[?]” But publicly and privately, she was sure that “WOMAN”—by which she meant white, middle-class, Protestant women—would be instrumental in bringing about a cure.3