Roaring Camp

by Susan Lee Johnson

  Joseph Pownall’s letter to the company secretary also sheds light on how the quarrel between white miners and the TCWC was connected to an emerging Anglo American political culture in the Southern Mines. Pownall told the secretary that he thought the price of water “must necessarily come down,” “however galling” it might be for the company to “succumb to such rascals as Palmer [and] Coffroth.” In naming John A. Palmer and James W. Coffroth as adversaries, Pownall looked backward as well as forward. Palmer, as we have seen, was a leader among white miners early on, both when they agitated for Chinese exclusion in 1852 and when they protested TCWC water rates starting in 1853. Coffroth, on the other hand, for many embodied the Tuolumne County of the future. Though he was only twenty-six, he was already a veteran of California’s legislature, having won his first election to the state assembly in 1851; he later became a state senator. Locally, Coffroth was known as “Columbia’s favorite son.” He was a frequent orator at community events, and his poetry appeared in area newspapers (given his famous verbal felicity, one might attribute to Coffroth that well-turned epithet—“the controling cormorants of this monster monopoly”). He was also—and this is what most galled TCWC managers—president of the rival Columbia and Stanislaus River Water Company. Not all in Columbia and the vicinity, then, were so taken with James Coffroth. In his letter to the TCWC secretary, for example, Pownall reported that a “deputation” had “waited on the miners” in Montezuma, asking for their cooperation. These deputies, no doubt, came either from the CSRWC or from the protesting Columbia miners. Pownall told the secretary that he thought the Montezuma miners would refuse to cooperate with the deputation, adding sarcastically, “they are perfectly aware that the interests of the dear people here are not much cared for by Columbias favorite son, poet [and] ‘song-clad [seraph]’”—referring, perhaps, to Coffroth the legislator as much as to Coffroth the water company president.47

  What Coffroth represented was a particular kind of political actor in the Southern Mines—a Democrat who claimed the mantle of Jacksonian Democracy by championing the cause of independent white miners. In the process, he secured his own political, and perhaps economic, fortunes. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party in the diggings, as elsewhere in the United States, was in turmoil, wracked by disputes over slavery and by the growth of the American, or Know-Nothing, Party. The full extent to which the battle between the TCWC and the white miners reflected the machinations of party politics is a topic for a different—and necessary—kind of history of the Southern Mines. But there are clear indications that a local political crisis was implicated in the battle.48 According to Joseph Pownall, the disfavor into which the TCWC had fallen by 1855 resulted from “the wire pullings of harpies who for years have been hovering about Columbia ready to pounce upon and fleece the unfortunate who may have been caught in their toils.”49 The “unfortunate,” of course, were the aggrieved white miners. The “harpies,” no doubt, were their grassroots leaders, such as Palmer, as well as their powerful political ally, Coffroth. What Pownall was saying was that Columbia’s miners had been hoodwinked into fighting the TCWC by such men. What Pownall was not saying was that the TCWC had its own friends in high places. Chief among them was another Tuolumne County Democratic legislator, James W. Mandeville. Mandeville was a quieter brand of Democrat than Coffroth, but one who also kept his thumb in the local pie, searching about for a golden plum. From the start, Mandeville was a stockholder in the TCWC. Indeed, his incoming correspondence from 1852 on is filled with answers to what must have been repeated queries about the company’s prospects. In 1854, Mandeville was elected a trustee of the TCWC.50 Two Democratic politicians in Tuolumne County, then, lined up squarely behind two rival water companies: James Coffroth as the highly visible president of the CSRWC, and James Mandeville as the more circumspect stockholder in and trustee of the TCWC.

  A stock certificate from the Tuolumne County Water Company, 1854. Most stockholders were white men, but the owner of this share was an Elisabeth Klemm. Note the signature of the Democratic politician James W. Mandeville.

  Courtesy of the Bancroft Library.

  The full texture of this rivalry may be lost to the historical record, but surviving pieces of the fabric hint at what it all felt like in the hands of varied participants. Just as the politics of water spilled over into the politics of state, so too did it seep into the everyday politics of sex, of race, and of gender. For example, a month after the Columbia miners called the TCWC’s bluff and won lower water rates, newspapers reported that CSRWC President Coffroth had challenged TCWC President Alexander M. Dobie to a duel. Now the issue was not water but character. “A certain lady,” according to Dobie, had informed him that Coffroth had made remarks “derogatory to [Dobie’s] character.” Not to be outdone, Dobie told the woman that Coffroth himself was a “frequenter of houses of ill-fame in Columbia.” Coffroth, in turn, demanded “gentlemanly satisfaction” of Dobie. Dobie refused, smugly reminding Coffroth the lawmaker that dueling was not only “barbarous and inhuman” but illegal.51 For some, such crossing of swords made life in Tuolumne County read like a Shakespearean drama. After the miners’ strike in March of 1855, Coffroth broke loose from his Democratic moorings and drifted briefly into the Know-Nothing Party, which was making significant inroads into California politics. On the one hand, mainstream Democrats excoriated Coffroth. One partisan newspaper, for instance, racially taunted the nativist Know-Nothings by denouncing “the late political somerset of Mr. Coffroth into the embrace of the Hindoos.”52 On the other hand, not all Know-Nothings welcomed Coffroth into the fold, particularly not those who had ties to the TCWC. One of the original stockholders in the TCWC, who had recently left the diggings, wrote to Joseph Pownall several months after the miners’ uprising, anxiously inquiring about the state of his business affairs in Columbia. He also expressed glee that California had “gone K[now] N[othing]” in the late elections. “Hip Hip Huzza,” he penned, adding, “I hope however that our mutual friend the Hon J W Coffroth has been consigned to the ‘tomb of the Capulets.’”53 It was no accident that this TCWC stockholder identified Coffroth with Juliet’s family line rather than that of Romeo. When it came to white men hurling insults in the Southern Mines, manhood as well as whiteness were always on the side of the detractor.

  All of these circles of intrigue, interest, and meaning, then, came to swirl around an economic contest between white miners, who had fought hard for exclusive access to the placers, and white water company managers, who had created a commodity out of the one thing placer miners most needed if that access was to translate into hard cash. In their opposition to the TCWC, the Columbia miners questioned not a company’s right to put a price on water but rather its right to set that price without regard for what white men reasonably could be expected to spare out of their daily earnings. Whatever the original intentions of the CSRWC managers, then, when the miners fell in behind them in 1855, the rival water company did indeed evolve into a different kind of animal. The TCWC, for example, had been incorporated with a capital stock of $220,000, divided into 275 shares of $800 each.54 The CSRWC, however, was organized with a capital stock of $300,000, divided into 1,500 shares of $200 each, allowing many more to become shareholders for much less.55 What is more, when striking miners threw their support to the CSRWC, a good number left their long toms and sluices and went to work digging ditches for the new company, accepting CSRWC stock in lieu of wages.56 This action not only forced the TCWC to accede to the miners’ demands (lest the old company continue to lose ground to the new); it also gave white miners a very real stake in the fortunes of the CSRWC. Newspapermen sympathetic to the miners—and to the miners’ allies—wrote in glowing terms of what became known as the “Miners’ Ditch”:

  This ditch is one of the most magnificent achievements of enterprise which the records of California industry can produce. Conceived under . . . a pressing demand, . . . the work . . . was commenced by private enterprise and individual labor, and without the aid of a sin
gle dollar from the treasury of the organized company. In giving . . . encouragement to labor, Hon. J. W. Coffroth . . . deserves distinguished praise, as through his eloquent representations, he induced scores of laborers to shoulder their picks and shovels and march to the line of labor, with no other promise of remuneration than that which would arise from the profits of the ditch, after its completion. And yet, perhaps, the greater credit is due to the hardy sons of toil. . . .

  Seldom, this editor concluded, did “individual enterprise, without the aid of capital” succeed in completing “a work as grand and extensive” as the CSRWC ditch.57

  In fact, the work was not completed for three more years. When it finally was finished, Columbia turned itself out as never before.58 On November 29, 1858, the CSRWC faithful and their friends assembled in a grand procession that wended its way through the town, replete with brass bands, military and fire companies, carriages carrying company officials and town dignitaries, as well as hundreds and hundreds of men on foot—among them, those who had helped dig the “Miners’ Ditch.” Many carried banners, including one that pictured two miners sitting at a roughly hewn table, a barrel of pork and a sack of beans at their side; one man pointed to the provisions, declaring, “In these we trusted.” Some men marched together under the banner of a “Miners’ Union”—though sources are frustratingly opaque as to the origins and activities of this group.59 Finally, all assembled in the center of town, where James Coffroth held forth to the teeming crowd on the history of the CSRWC. A free public dinner followed and then, to end the day, a spectacular display of fireworks and an elaborate ball.

  What must have appeared at the time as the triumph of independent white miners, however, looks in retrospect like a swan song for a dying breed. Plentiful, cheap water, the miners learned, was not enough to ensure their independence. There had to be gold in the ground. As they had since the beginning of the Gold Rush, placer yields continued to decline over the course of the 1850s. Indeed, in 1858, when the Columbia miners celebrated the completion of their ditch, California’s gold production was only 57 percent of what it had been in 1852, when the TCWC stockholders signed their incorporation papers.60 The CSRWC, then, having come of age in this climate, slipped into arrears. Columbia area miners again came to the aid of the company, staging demonstrations, threatening violence, and demanding that the “Miners’ Ditch” remain “a lasting monument of the energy and perseverance of the laboring class of Tuolumne County.” But in 1860, creditors forced the sale of CSRWC properties at a public auction. The purchaser of the “Miners’ Ditch” was that “monster monopoly,” the TCWC.61

  By then, California was no longer the only field where aspiring white men could establish themselves as “independent miners.” In British Columbia, word of gold at the Fraser River drew thousands of California miners northward in 1858. More promising still was the discovery of both gold and silver in Nevada’s Carson River basin in 1859. Thousands more rushed east across the Sierra Nevada to that destination. News of gold in almost every western territory followed in subsequent years, creating a patchwork of western places where Anglo American men might escape the economic dependence that both eastern places and played-out western placers seemed to portend. Never mind the demise of the “Miners’ Ditch,” then; there would always be another gold rush.

  Over the course of the 1850s, dramas similar to these played themselves out elsewhere in the Southern Mines, though perhaps nowhere with as much swagger and flair as in Columbia, an exceptionally rich gold district that was known as the Gem of the Southern Mines. Far less common in the south was a trajectory that came to characterize much of the Northern Mines in the 1850s, as men with capital turned their attention away from the placers and toward gold that was buried deeper beneath the earth’s surface. These deposits included quartz or vein gold as well as deep gravels. Yet such deposits were relatively scarce in the Southern Mines, at least when compared with the diggings to the north. Of course, there were crucial exceptions to the rule. Much of the gold mined in the vicinity of Columbia, in fact, came out of a rare patch of ancient gravels that had never been buried by debris. Likewise, substantial quartz gold turned up at the northern reaches of the Southern Mines, in Amador County, and far to the south as well, in Mariposa County. But these deposits paled in comparison with the spectacular veins and gravels of the Northern Mines.62

  Many residents of the Southern Mines and the supply town of Stockton refused to believe, or at least to admit, that the diggings to the north held this advantage. As early as 1850, the Stockton Times denounced as “anti-south” an Alta California article which implied that “the probable amount of metaliferous quartz in the southern mines” was limited. Boosters for the southern diggings shot back that the area boasted “mountains of auriferous quartz,” which were “already, with eminent success, being worked by companies.”63 By the mid-1850s, some Mariposa County residents, in particular, insisted that “the richest quartz veins in California” were found within their county lines.64 Later, in 1857, one writer claimed that the quartz resources of Tuolumne County alone, “if the proper appliances existed for their development,” could “supply the whole world with gold . . . for a century—perhaps a dozen centuries to come.” Despite the hyperbole, this last statement actually reflects a decline in confidence that characterized the Southern Mines in the later 1850s. The writer nowhere said that Tuolumne County quartz deposits were greater than those elsewhere in the state, and he was careful to add that their development would require “proper appliances.” In fact, the writer’s purpose was to caution residents against a “quartz mania,” whereby “men rush heedlessly [into quartz mining], expecting sudden and fabulous profits without preliminary investment of capital or labor, or both.”65 By the end of the 1850s, then, if none conceded the advantage of the Northern Mines in quartz mining, at least fewer insisted that the diggings to the south had the edge.

  One man who especially hoped that the Southern Mines were concealing a buried treasure in quartz was John C. Frémont, the nationally acclaimed explorer. As luck would have it, Frémont had become a major landowner in the area just before gold was discovered in 1848. His career in the Southern Mines—along with that of Jessie Benton Frémont, his wife—illustrates something of the fortunes of quartz mining there, while also illuminating a much wider set of concerns. Stories about the Frémonts invariably encompass a panoply of themes in U.S. history, generally, and the history of westward expansion, in particular. Those set in 1850s California are no exception. In just a dozen years, the Frémonts’ lives became touchstones of not only far-flung capitalization in western mining but the disposition of Mexican land claims; the administration of the U.S. public domain; the pursuit of wealth through contracts to provision dispossessed Indians; the spread of black slavery into the territories; the making of national reputations through western ventures; the transformation of U.S. political parties; the rise in white women’s political participation; and the local emergence of racialized and gendered class relations that reflected both national and international economic upheavals.

  It all began before the Gold Rush. John C. Frémont’s third western expedition took him to California on the eve of the U.S.-Mexican War, where he participated first in the Bear Flag Rebellion against Mexico. Ultimately, U.S. Brigadier General Stephen Watts Kearny marched Frémont back east in the summer of 1847, after Frémont placed himself on the wrong side of a struggle between Kearny and Commodore Robert F. Stockton over whether Stockton legitimately could appoint Frémont as governor of occupied California. Frémont was court-martialed for mutiny and disobedience. Before he left California, however, he had purchased—with the assistance of Thomas O. Larkin, U.S. consul in Mexican California—a vast tract of land known as Las Mariposas from the prominent Californio Juan Bautista Alvarado and his wife, Martina Castro de Alvarado.66 Located in what would become Mariposa County, the tract was a “floating grant” that Alvarado had received in 1844 from California’s governor (because of Mexican commu
nity property law, Castro de Alvarado also gained an interest in the property). The boundaries of the grant were not specified—only that it was to cover ten leagues between the Sierra Nevada to the east and the San Joaquin River to the west, and between the Merced River to the north and the Chowchilla River to the south. Alvarado had hoped to survey this stretch of land and take possession of the ten leagues that best suited his needs, but the resistance of native peoples foiled his plans.67

  But for the gold discovery, Frémont’s claim to the land might have met the same fate. Like all of what became the Southern Mines, Las Mariposas was within the hunting and gathering grounds of Sierra Miwoks, among whom had settled other Indians who were escaping the twin scourges of malaria in the Central Valley and missions on the coast. Frémont met up with these mixed bands late in 1845, after crossing the Sierra Nevada into California. The outcome was not a happy one for the explorer. The native peoples who had joined up-country Miwoks in the decade before the Gold Rush, as Frémont knew, included many who were adept horse raiders. So when Frémont entered the land that he would later purchase and saw signs of horses, he sent out four scouts (two white men and two Delaware Indians) to track down the responsible “Horse-thief Indians,” as he called them. The plan backfired. Not only did the local band surround the scouts, separating them from their horses and shouting at them in Spanish, even when Frémont’s men retrieved the scouts and their mounts, the Indians circled the explorer’s camp and, as Frémont remembered,