Roaring Camp

by Susan Lee Johnson

  harangued us, bestowing on us liberally all the epithets they could use, telling us what they would do with us. Many of them had been Mission Indians and spoke Spanish well. “Wait,” they said, “Esparate Carrajos [sic]—wait until morning. There are two big villages up in the mountains close by; we have sent for the Chief; he’ll be down before morning with all the people and you will all die. None of you shall go back; we will have all your horses.”

  Frémont and his men slipped away, out of the foothills, before the local people could make good on their threat. He did not return to the neighborhood for over three years. In the meantime, Frémont had gained title to the land, though Indians repelled four early attempts by his representatives to take possession.68 It took the Gold Rush for him to be able to return to the scene of this particular humiliation.

  And return he did, though in the long run Frémont’s greeting by gold seekers who invaded Miwok lands proved only marginally warmer than his reception by Indians. It did not help that he was the largest landowner in the Southern Mines, and that his title to the land and its gold was contested. It did not help that Jessie Benton Frémont was a daughter of the powerful Thomas Hart Benton, expansionist Democrat from Missouri, and that Benton alternately championed and then shunned his peripatetic son-in-law (who had eloped with Jessie when she was but seventeen).69 It did not help that John Frémont’s loyalty to the Democrats—the majority party in the Southern Mines—proved a good deal more brittle even than that of James Coffroth, the local Democrat who only briefly abandoned his party for the Know-Nothings. Frémont, by contrast, became the first presidential candidate of the new Republican Party in 1856. All things considered, newspapers exaggerated only slightly in saying that Frémont had “no friends in the mines.”70

  The enmity started early. By the end of 1849, California had ratified its constitution and elected its first officials. The new state legislature, in turn, elected Frémont as one of two U.S. senators, though he drew a short two-year term in Washington. While in office, Frémont introduced a number of bills, but none were more important to Californians than those involving mines and land claims. Frémont’s land bill proposed a board of commissioners to examine land titles established under Mexican law. Frémont did not stay in the Senate long enough to shepherd the measure through Congress, but his foes suspected that the bill would have favored his own interests, as the holder of a Mexican land grant, as well as those of Californios over the interests of Anglo Americans.71

  “Frémont’s Gold Bill,” as it was called in the press, generated even greater resistance. A Stockton newspaper took Frémont to task for trying to restrict mining privileges to U.S. citizens, reminding readers of how the late foreign miners’ tax had depopulated the Southern Mines. The editor accused Frémont of “basely pander[ing] to what he supposes to be the prejudices of the miners in the San Joaquin region.”72 A newspaper correspondent from Tuolumne County denounced the provisions of Frémont’s bill that would have sent federal agents to the diggings to grant miners permits for thirty-foot-square “placer lots” (or two-hundred-plus-foot-square lots for quartz mines). The agents also would have managed local juries appointed to settle mining disputes. The Tuolumne correspondent protested, “[F]or nearly three years we have peaceably and quietly settled our own difficulties . . . and my opinion is that a jury of six practical miners will adjust any disputes . . . as efficiently as a man with a fat salary, sent out from the old states, who does not know a quartz vein from a slate lead.”73 Finally, Frémont’s neighbors in Mariposa County drafted a memorial to the U.S. Senate, complaining that the bill’s provisions would drive them “to a fugitive life, having so small a quantity of soil apportioned to each, in the placer diggings.” Likewise, they argued, the lot size for quartz mines, which were worked by large companies, was insufficient: “no company can be formed limited to so small a portion of any vein yet found in California.”74 Indeed, criticisms of the bill were so varied that taken together they seem to represent resistance to any interference whatsoever in the affairs of California miners by the federal government. Frémont himself asked Californians to believe that his sole intent had been “to exclude all idea of making national revenue out of the mines—to prevent the possibility of their monopoly by moneyed capitalists—and to give to natural capital, to LABOR and INDUSTRY, a fair chance in fields of its own choosing.”75 It was perhaps too much for Frémont to ask, since he was so deeply identified with national interests—through his government expeditions, his Senate seat, and his family connections—and, through his promotion of Las Mariposas, with moneyed capital.

  Las Mariposas, in fact, was only one of Frémont’s schemes for making his fortune in California. He owned or claimed interest in a number of other properties, including Alcatraz Island, three San Francisco city lots, the orchards of Mission Dolores, land along the San Joaquin River, and ranchos in present-day Kern and San Joaquin counties.76 In addition to these properties, Frémont made money from beef contracts with the federal Indian commissioners who were sent to California in 1851. Although the U.S. Senate never ratified the treaties these agents negotiated with native peoples, the agents went ahead and made contracts to provide Indians with the beef the treaties promised, and then paid contractors with drafts drawn on the Secretary of the Interior. The contracts themselves were plagued by fraud and speculation, and California Indians were hardly the chief beneficiaries of all the meat and money that changed hands. Frémont himself took in over $180,000 worth of the commissioners’ drafts, all of which the federal government at first refused to honor. Through a special authorization by Congress, however, Frémont was able to collect on his drafts, plus interest, which amounted to $58,000.77 Unlike his other economic and political ventures, Frémont’s beef contracts drew but little criticism. Years later, a former member of the Mariposa Battalion, the mostly white volunteer force that had fought in the Mariposa War, charged a “California Indian Ring” with profiteering off such contracts. He claimed to have warned no less an Indian trader than James Savage, who received much contracted beef, that Savage was surrounded by “sharp men” who were using him “as a tool to work their gold mine.”78 Few others seemed to care that “sharp men” such as Frémont may have fleeced Indians to finance quartz mines.

  In the end, it took more than beef contracts to keep Las Mariposas up and running. The difficulties Frémont faced were deep, many, mutable, and always compounded by his inexperience in business. In 1864, he lost control of the property altogether. In the meantime, Frémont was sitting, quite literally, on a gold mine. He discovered as early as 1849 that the Mariposa Estate, as it was called by English speakers, included a gold-studded quartz vein over five miles in length—this in addition to the hundred pounds of placer gold Sonoran miners were washing out each month and dividing equally with Frémont, who had engaged the Mexicans to work on his behalf.79 Quickly, Frémont turned to a system whereby he leased often unlocated portions of the vein to whoever agreed to mine it and to return to him one-sixth of all gold found. He also took on partners to attract Europeans to the property, with the hope that British capitalists, in particular, would jump at the chance to finance the concentration of men and machinery required to extract gold from solid rock. His representative in England, David Hoffman, was often exasperated with Frémont. Hoffman complained that Frémont failed to keep him informed of developments in California and that he allowed other interested parties to complicate what Hoffman saw as an exclusive business arrangement. In 1851, Thomas Hart Benton himself stepped in and tried to force the sale of Las Mariposas, arguing that his son-in-law was “not adapted to such business.” The sale was stopped, but not before John and Jessie Benton Frémont traveled to London to put matters aright. This 1852 trip started out pleasantly enough, with Jessie presented to Queen Victoria. But as John boarded a carriage one evening, he was arrested for drafts he had drawn on the federal government during the war with Mexico; the drafts had been sold to a British concern and had gone unpaid. Hoffman posted b
ail for Frémont—after the famous American spent the night in lockup. Affairs such as these made attracting and retaining European capital for Mariposa’s mines no small task.80

  To make matters worse, Frémont’s title to the estate was in constant jeopardy. When gold was discovered in the Sierra Nevada foothills, miners quickly fanned out over the entire area. This included Las Mariposas, virtually the only tract of land that was not, according to provisions of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, part of U.S. public domain. But gold seekers treated it as if it was, setting up tents, staking claims, and digging paydirt on land that Frémont claimed, or would later claim, as private property. Some eventually took up leases with Frémont, but many did not. Locally, then, the stage was set for battles between an often absentee landowner and those who worked on the land in question. These local contests were overlaid with legal contests that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Following the multiple paths of these struggles is not easy. The historian who has followed them most carefully explains that the overlapping systems of mining law in California are perplexing enough: “Compound the situation with a superimposition of . . . claims and claim jumpers, leases and subleases, original companies and reorganized companies, sales of both mineral claims and surface lands, authorized agents and unauthorized,” she writes, and reconstruction becomes a herculean task.81 That the original grant to Juan B. Alvarado was a “floating grant” only complicated matters further. Without definite boundaries, for example, Frémont was able to claim one tract of land in 1852 and then a substantially different tract in 1856. The 1852 Mariposa Estate was shaped like a pan with a long handle; it included a circle of gold mines up in the foothills and then followed the Mariposa River downstream to the San Joaquin Valley. The 1856 Mariposa Estate dropped the handle, and then increased the size of the pan to include the rich quartz mines of upper Bear Creek Valley.82

  Frémont’s claim to Las Mariposas was the first case considered under the provisions of the Land Act of 1851—though this bill is perhaps best known for the role it played in the dispossession of the Spanish Mexican elite in California. The land commissioners confirmed Frémont’s title in 1852. The District Court for the Northern District of California, however, reversed the commission’s decision in 1854. So Frémont took the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, where, the following year, he won on appeal. In its decision, the Supreme Court ordered a new survey of Las Mariposas, which inaugurated another round of legal maneuvers. In the meantime, Frémont completed the required survey, by which he claimed important new mineral lands in Bear Valley. But with the legality of the survey in question, Frémont was still without final certification and a patent from the federal government. The case returned to the Supreme Court once more. Finally, on February 19, 1856, President Franklin Pierce signed the patent for Las Mariposas and, in a White House meeting, personally handed it to Frémont. By then, it was widely known that Frémont himself was a potential candidate for the presidency of the United States.83

  Observers in the Southern Mines and the supply town of Stockton kept close tabs on these proceedings. Some actually wished Frémont well, arguing that “when quartz mining companies can get title to their claims, a large amount of capital will be brought into the country.”84 More common, though, were the sentiments expressed in Stockton’s Democratic newspaper, the San Joaquin Republican, which took Frémont to task at every turn. There was the issue of foreign capital. As early as 1852, the Stockton paper exclaimed that Frémont had “actually leased a portion [of Las Mariposas] to a French company” and that it was his intent “to move Heaven and Earth to possess himself of that immense tract of land.” Six months later, the editors were more direct about what it was they thought Frémont was doing to foreign, and especially British, investors, choosing a metaphor that had fond associations in the homosocial world of Gold Rush California: “Col. Fremont has ‘diddled’ John Bull . . . sliding into his ‘tender affections’ in the slickest manner imaginable.”85 And then there was Frémont’s title to the land itself, which the San Joaquin Republican took as a symbol of capitalist greed. If confirmed, Frémont’s claim would sound the death knell of the independent Anglo American miner:

  The once independent miner is cut off . . . by the title of the capitalist; he cannot work “on his own hook” . . . ; he must either rent a tract of land, or he must go to work . . . at the wages offered; and if there should be a large increase in the labor market, his wages must necessarily [fall] until they reach the level of labor in other countries. Doubtless, all this time, the capitalist is growing richer and is making gigantic improvements: but, what boots it? Labor is his footstool; labor is the sacrifice.86

  Anglo American labor as his footstool, foreign capital as his bedfellow: Frémont’s appendages were everywhere they ought not to have been.

  In 1856, when the title to Las Mariposas was confirmed and Frémont became the Republican presidential candidate, critics shifted gears, now tying his financial and political ambitions together into a single oppressive bundle—one that was destined to land squarely on white miners’ shoulders. “It must be admitted,” taunted the Stockton paper, “that John Charles Mariposa Claim Fremont . . . possesses great claims to the suffrages of the people of California, particularly the miners.” The article went on to explain why it would be “perfect madness” for miners to support Frémont, reminding them of the legislation he proposed while senator and of the leasing he promoted on Las Mariposas. In a stunning prediction, the newspaper argued that Frémont as president would abolish “free mining” altogether and enforce the sale or leasing of mineral lands, which would “either create a civil war or cause to be instituted the worst system of white slavery ever known.”87

  Critics also linked Frémont’s ambitions to the aspirations of those who stood outside the customary circle of Jacksonian Democracy—particularly women and African Americans. The new Republican Party actually embraced a range of antislavery views, from abolitionism, at one end, to opposition to the westward expansion of slavery, at the other. Frémont himself was chosen as candidate in part because his views on slavery were less well known than those of other potential nominees. Nonetheless, Democrats in the Southern Mines painted Frémont as the consummate race traitor. Taking issue with a Sacramento newspaper that supported Frémont because of his western explorations, the San Joaquin Republican answered in the language of antiblack race hatred. That Frémont had once “regaled himself on horse flesh,” the Stockton editors retorted, did not entitle him to “his present woolly horse ride for the Presidential stakes.” Other explorers were more deserving of the honor—“even,” the editors mocked, “Jim Beckwith,” the famous black fur trapper.88 Democrats in California, as elsewhere, also identified Frémont with the woman movement, in part because of the active role Jessie Benton Frémont played in his campaign (a role that seemed all the more remarkable because her father, Thomas Hart Benton, campaigned against John). Indeed, back east, Republicans sported ribbons emblazoned with slogans such as “Jessie’s Choice,” and woman suffragists, both prominent and obscure, championed John. In all of this, Anglo American women entered into the fray of national party politics as never before, much to the horror of many.89 Even in the Southern Mines, reform-minded women took courage from the “Frémont and Jessie” campaign. An Amador County white woman, for example, sat down to her diary and penned confidently, “I go in for Fremont and freedom.” Meanwhile, local Democrats found themselves forced to reckon with Jessie, who, they complained, “declare[d] herself to be a black republican!” What was worse, according to many, was that her declaration mattered.90

  In the end, since the Republican campaign failed (though it surely succeeded in launching the new party into a national orbit), no one learned what a Frémont presidency might have meant for women, abolitionists, blacks, California miners, or other Americans. But Frémont, along with his creditors, still owned the Mariposa Estate, and so the Southern Mines had not seen the last of him. In fact, with the election over and his ti
tle to the land secured, Frémont returned to California to manage his property. In 1858, he traveled east, and then west once again, now accompanied by Jessie Benton Frémont and their children. By that time, the stage had been set in Mariposa County for a showdown between John Charles Frémont and his local detractors. His claim to the land might be secure, but claiming the minerals that land contained was another matter. This was not, after all, a land rush. It was a gold rush. And “gold” was a fighting word.

  Almost as soon as Frémont received the patent to Las Mariposas, critics began to argue that his title to the land, because it was based on a grant made under Mexican law, did not include title to the mines.91 And, in fact, in Spanish and then Mexican law, minerals did occupy a peculiar place. That is, if one person discovered and then exploited a mine on land that had been granted to another, or even if one person took up a mine that had been abandoned by another, then in either case, the person working the mine could rightfully lay claim to it. In Frémont’s case, the size of the original grant to Alvarado, the abundance of gold therein, and Frémont’s infrequent presence on his property before 1857 all worked together to ensure that claimants to the mines of the Mariposa Estate would be many and restive. In addition, when Mariposa County residents learned that the 1856 federal patent to the estate included rich diggings in Bear Valley that Frémont had never before claimed, the simmering pot began to boil. When Frémont began to press his claim to these mines, all hell broke loose.