Between them, Lenita and the Sonora correspondent provide a good, if interested, introduction to the transformations that characterized the Southern Mines beginning in 1852 and intensifying throughout the rest of the decade. The changes hinged on two processes already in motion. The first was the consolidation of Anglo American dominance, which had been established through such conflicts as the Chilean War, the Mariposa War, and the “French Revolution.”4 The second was the decline of rich placer diggings, which encouraged some to develop new ways of seeking wealth. As important were the increasingly close ties between local political and economic contests, on the one hand, and national and international developments, on the other. It was by these developments that a gold rush which had been global in scope came to be seen as the Gold Rush, an episode in American nation building. As a part of this process, the Southern Mines began to slip from view.
The consolidation of Anglo dominance, the decline of the placers, and the tightening bond between the Southern Mines and eastern centers of power had different but complementary effects in the smaller world of the diggings and the larger foothill world within which gold-based economic practices were embedded. Because all of these causes and effects were so deeply interrelated, it is impossible to sort into neat categories things pertaining to mining and things pertaining to the complex human communities that emerged in and around the diggings. But by 1852, class relations indigenous to the Southern Mines had begun to take shape. These were relations rooted firmly in the productive process of gold mining. They were also relations rooted in the continuing—though slowly diminishing—demographic predominance of men in immigrant communities and in the tacit agreement among those men that mining was the “work” of the Gold Rush. Here, then, I return to the diggings, which white men scrambled to preoccupy, battling Chinese miners with one hand and Anglo “monopolists” with the other.
Consider first the consolidation of Anglo American dominance, an always unfinished process that required constant vigilance and considerable solidarity on the part of white Americans. Events such as the 1849 Chilean War and the imposition of the foreign miners’ tax in 1850 drove many Spanish- and French-speaking gold seekers from California altogether. But others stayed, especially in the Southern Mines. Among those who remained, some moved far out of the reach of Anglos, as when Jean-Nicolas Perlot headed up into the Sierra Nevada in search of Miwok placers or when Mexicans and Chileans—including, it is said, Joaquín Murrieta—congregated in Spanish-speaking communities such as Hornitos, in Mariposa County. As for native peoples, after the 1851 Mariposa War, most continued to combine mining and customary subsistence strategies, here walking to immigrant settlements to trade gold dust for flour, there fanning out among the oaks to gather acorns. But now a new population of Gold Rush participants appeared on the scene: immigrants from South China. Some Chinese had arrived in California as early as 1848, but the majority came beginning in 1852. Unlike Mexican and Chilean gold seekers, Chinese immigrants did not settle disproportionately in the Southern Mines, but instead spread out over all of California’s mining districts, including the Northern Mines and the Shasta-Trinity diggings in the far northwest. Nonetheless, they came in great numbers to the south. Indeed, by the end of the decade, Chinese immigrants made up one-fifth of the population of the four counties that constituted the Southern Mines.5
When they arrived in towns such as Mariposa and Mokelumne Hill or moved to remote camps in Amador and Tuolumne counties, they entered areas with a recent history of intense racial and ethnic conflict, conflict that had been resolved largely in Anglo Americans’ favor. So, like the Mexicans who built Hornitos or those Miwoks who pushed up into the mountains, many Chinese steered clear of white Americans (and sometimes of Mexicans and Miwoks as well), buying up placer claims that Anglos thought were played out or working in jobs that white people shunned. Chinese gold seekers could not, of course, avoid all conflict. They, too, would face a foreign miners’ tax, in addition to daily indignities at the hands of other Gold Rush participants. Their patterns of resistance and accommodation were predicated on the prior establishment of Anglo American dominance in the diggings; no “Chinese War” or “Chinese Revolution” ever disturbed the uneasy peace of the Southern Mines.
Consider as well the decline of the placers. Scholars who talk about change over time in western mining generally describe a steady progression from individualized, surface (placer) mining to industrialized, underground (vein or lode or quartz) mining. As an intermediate stage between placer and quartz techniques, they sometimes include the exploitation of deposits called deep gravels. Miners worked such deposits through tunnels, and they also turned to “hydraulicking”—a kind of glorified placer mining in which men shot extraordinarily powerful streams of water against hills thought to be rich in gravels. In California, the Northern Mines roughly followed this trajectory of industrialization. The Southern Mines, on the other hand, industrialized only by fits and starts. There were notable exceptions, especially in Mariposa and Amador counties. But relatively sparse deposits suitable for hydraulic or quartz mining meant that industrialization was the exception rather than the rule. That is, quartz mines financed by moneyed men and worked by hired hands did not come to characterize mining in the south nearly so much as in the north. Instead, persistent placers were the rule.
The world of surface mining, however, did change substantially after the boom years. One key transformation involved the increasing number of Chinese at work in the placers. There was another shift, too. Anglo American entrepreneurs, frustrated by declining yields and weary of backbreaking work, hit on a moneymaking scheme tailor-made for the Southern Mines, which early on had been known as the “dry diggings.” Such businessmen banded together to form water companies, building systems of ditches and flumes and then selling use of the water they tapped to placer miners, who needed it to wash gold-bearing dirt. These water company officials became part of the first real Gold Rush elite. Company directors, along with mining town merchants and professionals, were among the first Anglo men to send for their female relatives from the East, and so gender and race relations took on new class meanings as well.6 All of this inaugurated a set of social relations that pit groups of white men against one another. Independent white miners, a dying breed, took to struggling against “water monopolies” and “striking” for lower water rates. But the culture of placer mining and the decline of rich diggings put limits on collective resistance. As a result, truncated class formations emerged, and miners set their sights on new bonanzas elsewhere in the North American West.
Finally, consider the ways in which the transformations of the 1850s tied the Southern Mines ever more tightly to the political and economic capitals of Anglo America in the East. The diggings continued to draw emigrants not just from the eastern United States but from around the world. Increasingly, however, newcomers, relative old-timers, and native peoples alike were incorporated into, and sometimes excluded from, communities on the basis of political and economic cultures that took their cues from the East. Local representatives to state and national legislatures, large water companies, county court systems, quartz mining investors, even a local landowner who ran for president: these entities and these people demonstrated that the Southern Mines—no matter who lived there—was becoming not just a more Anglo American place but a place obliged to eastern centers of power. That is to say that Gold Rush participants and observers began to map local relations of domination onto national relations of gender, race, economics, and politics—as explosive as these were in the decade before the U.S. Civil War. But social relations in the Southern Mines were crucially different from those in eastern places. This in part is why they have proven so difficult to remember in the century and a half that has passed since.
The social relations of gold seeking, always in flux, convulsed in the early 1850s. First, Chinese men burst into a world of work already fraught with contention and inequity. Second, white entrepreneurs began to channel river water t
hrough flumes and sell use of the water to struggling miners. Many expected a third shift, too: a transition from placer mining to the exploitation of quartz gold and deep gravels. This shift never took hold in the Southern Mines the way it did in the Northern Mines, because there were fewer such deposits in the south. Unaware of this geologic disparity, however, miners to the south lived in anticipation of a boom in quartz or gravels. In a few isolated spots, their hopes (and fears) were realized. The most noted of these was the Mariposa Estate, owned by the famed explorer John C. Frémont. There the dream of unlocking subterranean wealth turned for many to a local nightmare, in which bogeymen from eastern and European capitals haunted the Southern Mines.
All of these changes, both actual and anticipated, were caught up in the steady decline of rich surface deposits, which began just as soon as gold seekers swarmed into Miwok hunting and gathering grounds in 1848. By 1852, the average daily yield for placer miners was less than a third of what it had been in 1848—just $6, down from a high of $20 in the year following the gold discovery. Frustrated miners were sure the decline was even steeper. In 1851, for example, A. W. Genung wrote home from Tuolumne County that he had given up on making his “pile” quickly, complaining, “It can be done only by a slow and laborious process.” Genung believed that “the first digging of the river banks and beds of the creeks . . . gave from four to six ounces a day,” or $64 to $96. Provisions ran $5 a day, and a glass of whiskey cost $2. “The second digging and washing,” he wrote, “which I arrived in time to get a parting glance at, gave from one to 2½ ounces per day,” or $16 to $40. Daily provisions went for $3, and a glass of whiskey sold for 50 cents. Now, he thought, an individual miner made only $4 or $5 each day. Daily provisions cost him a dollar, and a glass of whiskey set him back 12 or 13 cents. Genung nonetheless predicted that the area would “all be worked over again at one or two dollars per day,” adding, “I don’t wish to be here then.” An 1853 correspondent to the San Joaquin Republican put such disillusionment in similarly blunt terms: “California, is herself, no more. The mines are much too crowded for all to do well.”7
Most Chinese gold seekers arrived in California during this season of dashed hopes, taking up placer claims others abandoned. Perhaps because they had missed the earliest days of the Gold Rush, or perhaps because most could not communicate easily with their disappointed neighbors, or perhaps because circumstances in their homeland were dire, Chinese miners did not seem to share white men’s pessimism. By all reports, this lack of pessimism served them well. As late as 1858, an Amador County newspaper reported that Chinese men were digging gold not at some remote foothill stream but at the creek that ran right through the center of Jackson, the county seat. Although this was ground that had been “worked over at least a dozen times,” the paper said, the men were making “from $2.50 to $8 per day to the hand” and showing off specimens that weighed from an ounce to six ounces each. Similar reports appeared in newspapers from other counties in the Southern Mines. In 1854, for example, a Mariposa County paper noted that the Guadalupe mining district had “gone over to China,” and that the men there were making from $3 to $5 per day. And in Calaveras County in 1856, a newspaper remarked that in just three months, Chinese miners had bought up over $21,000 worth of claims along the Mokelumne River. Employing the name Anglo Americans used for all Chinese men in California, “John Chinaman,” the paper noted that such purchases proved the value of area mines, since “John is a good judge of diggings, a close prospector, and a successful miner.” These, of course, were reports of especially fortunate Chinese miners, but they indicate that a “slow and laborious process” could still yield plenty of gold a good half dozen years after A. W. Genung penned his complaints.8
Chinese men took much of that gold out of claims such as those staked out along the Mokelumne River in 1856. Over the course of the 1850s, in fact, river mining increasingly became the province of Chinese gold seekers. In the last days of 1850, for example, Timothy Osborn, mining along Little Humbug Creek in Tuolumne County, noted in his diary that a group of Chinese men had set up camp nearby. This early-arriving Chinese party mined in the same area and probably used the same methods Osborn did, shoveling bucket after bucket of gold-bearing dirt and washing it out in a rocker. As for himself, though he had been in the diggings only six months, Osborn was tired of it all: “I am sick . . . of the dog life of a miner . . . and would give all I have to be at home . . . and forget the word California and never hear it spoken again!!” He left the diggings for good just days later, settling in the supply center of Stockton. Meanwhile, Chinese men poured into the areas white men like Osborn left behind. Some continued to work at out-of-the-way spots such as the Little Humbug, but more and more, Chinese miners turned their attention to claims along the major rivers of the Southern Mines—the Cosumnes, the Mokelumne, the Calaveras, the Stanislaus, the Tuolumne, and the Merced. Indeed, by late 1853, Osborn wrote from Stockton that the Chinese had a “‘life lien’ upon the rivers” of his old stomping grounds. And just as Chinese miners had bought up the claims along the Mokelumne River in 1856, a Mariposa newspaper noted in 1857 that Chinese men were busy working the bed of the Merced: “The whole flat along the river has been staked off by them.” Rumor had it, in fact, that these miners recently had unearthed a seven-pound piece of gold. Such a lump would have been worth almost $1,800.9
True or not, reports like these must have galled white men who had given up on gold as well as those who hung fire in the mines. For those, like Timothy Osborn, who left the diggings, Chinese miners’ accomplishments belied the Anglo axiom that the placers were all but played out. For those who stayed but complained about decline, Chinese success made white men seem like whiners. Anglos knew that the river claims Chinese men mined already had been worked by teams of Americans and Europeans, who diverted water by means of dams and flumes and then washed out the gold-bearing dirt in exposed riverbeds using rockers, long toms, or sluices. It must have been hard to see Chinese men come in and repeat this labor to good account, sometimes using pumps to help remove water that lingered in the riverbed.10 After all, many Anglos had struggled during the first years of the Gold Rush to circumscribe both the presence and the activities of non-Anglos so as to gain, as far as it was practicable, preemptive access to California’s riches.11 Once reasonably secure in that access, however, Anglo miners found that digging gold simply was not as easy as it had been in 1849. In response, many left altogether, while others adapted not only labor practices but their own expectations in order to cope with changed conditions. But just as they made this transition, a new group of gold seekers arrived on the scene. The “wars” and “revolutions” of 1850 to 1851 were fresh in Anglo men’s minds—conflicts in which Miwoks, Mexicans, Chileans, French, and other Europeans in the Southern Mines tried to stand their ground against white Americans. So Anglo response to the influx of Chinese and to their enterprise in the diggings was swift indeed.
Some white men were content to deny that enterprise altogether, ridiculing Chinese mining practices as crude and inefficient. One effective way to do this was to feminize Chinese men, as the Scottish writer and artist J. D. Borthwick did when he published his account of an 1852–53 tour of the diggings. Borthwick claimed that the “individual labor” of Chinese men “was nothing compared with that of other miners.” He maintained that the Chinese lacked the “force” and “vigor” of the Americans and Europeans, that they handled their mining tools “like so many women, as if they were afraid of hurting themselves.” Indeed, Borthwick noted, American men called Chinese mining methods “scratching.”12 Some of this was sheer silliness, as Chinese involvement in large-scale river mining showed. But there was some truth to the contention that many Chinese men mined in ways that differed from those of than other gold seekers. Many did, for example, limit their gold-washing tools to the smaller rocker rather than the larger long tom or sluice.13 They did so in large part because of discrimination. Chinese soon learned that whites would not hesitate t
o expel groups of Chinese men from mining claims. Smaller tools simply were easier to gather up and cart to new diggings when the need arose—hence the reputation for the “backwardness” of Chinese placer mining.14 Calling the use of such techniques womanish, of course, was deeply ironic, since these were techniques most white men had used—sometimes only months earlier. Where Chinese men only “scratched” the surface, they learned to do so chiefly from white men, who also guaranteed by their discriminatory actions that the portable rocker would become the Chinese miner’s stock-in-trade.
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