Roaring Camp

by Susan Lee Johnson

  Much of the controversy surrounded the quartz mines and mills of the Merced Mining Company (MMC). On the last day of 1856, for example, one of Frémont’s agents sent a notice to MMC officials demanding possession of their reduction works at Mount Ophir. As many Mariposa County residents recognized, this was simply an opening salvo in Frémont’s campaign to expropriate the gold of Bear Valley. They responded accordingly, forming a miners’ and settlers’ association in the first weeks of 1857. Those gathered resolved that

  in the event of John C. Fremont [or his associates] attempting to interfere with, molest, or eject any number of, or even one Miner, Settler, or resident upon [land claimed as part of the Mariposa Estate], we do hereby solemnly pledge ourselves to make common cause against him, or them—for the plundering of one is that of all, and a blow at one is an aim at each and all, Miners and Settlers, upon said tract.92

  Making common cause against Frémont, however, was easier said than done. This because he rarely used force to interfere with, molest, or eject miners and settlers from Bear Valley, but rather a series of legal maneuvers. The MMC responded in kind, until, by March of 1857, as many as twenty suits between the two parties were wending their way through Mariposa County’s district court—not to mention those that had gone or were going all the way to the California supreme court. Especially important were MMC injunctions to stop Frémont from seizing ore and other property, and injunctions by Frémont and his agents to prevent the MMC from pursuing their work on land that Frémont claimed.93

  From the complicated matrix of suit and countersuit, a ground zero emerged for the fight between Frémont and his detractors: Bear Valley’s Josephine and Pine Tree mines. The MMC had worked these sites longer, but Frémont now claimed them. Despite pending lawsuits, both parties continued extracting gold from the mines, though through separate tunnels. In October of 1857, for example, the Mariposa Gazette reported that “men in the employ of both the Fremont and Merced Mining Companies are working in close proximity to each other at the Pine Tree vein.” MMC employees had just received a writ of injunction ordering them to stop mining there, but they persisted nonetheless. “No serious disturbance has yet occurred,” the Gazette noted, but then added that “the prospect looks squally at the ‘seat of war.’”94 Squalls came and went throughout the fall and winter. In February of 1858, the Gazette found both companies “still busily engaged in quarrying, hauling and crushing quartz from the celebrated vein near Bear Valley,” and reported with relief that the “excitement which . . . has threatened to end in violence between the rival companies, has cooled down to a healthy temperature.”95

  When summer came, tensions and temperatures rose. By now Jessie Benton Frémont had arrived in Bear Valley, bringing to the summer’s events their best chronicler. She brought with her the three Frémont children—Lily, Charley, and Frank—as well as two maids, women identified in Jessie’s letters only as Mémé and Rose.96 Although many residents of the Southern Mines hated the Frémonts and all they represented, there were enough supporters in the valley to offer the family a rousing welcome. As Jessie wrote to her friend and distant cousin Elizabeth Blair Lee, “They had a great bonfire on Mount Bullion the night we got in & they fired off quicksilver flasks which sounded just like cannon echoing through the hills grandly.”97 Indeed, the mountain itself had been named for her father, who was called “Old Bullion” for his hard-currency views. (Sadly, Jessie’s father, with whom she had reconciled after John’s presidential bid, died in Missouri just as the Frémonts arrived in San Francisco on their way to the mines, though Jessie did not learn of his death until she was settled on the Mariposa Estate.)

  At Bear Valley, the family took up residence in a modest whitewashed cottage, but one that was filled nonetheless, according to Jessie, with “velvet carpets & a fine piano, bronze clocks, [and] marble-topped furniture.”98 Mémé, who probably had come to the United States after a Frémont sojourn in France, and Rose attended to the children and to the well-appointed cottage. In addition, a Spanish-speaking black woman from the West Indies came by the day to do the Frémonts’ laundry.99 Meanwhile, two menservants long associated with John, both experienced frontiersmen, labored on the grounds and took a special interest in young Charley and Frank. One was Albert Lea, a free black man whose mother had worked for Jessie’s father and who himself had served on one of John’s western expeditions. The other was a man named Isaac, whom Jessie called “a spare, wiry Tennessee Indian with enough colored blood to have been a slave,” but who she imagined had seized his own freedom “sharply.”100 Although Jessie claimed that this retinue offered her “slender working power,” it actually was rare for white Americans in the mines, even those of the emerging middle class, to have so many servants; this much help was a mark of unusual affluence.101 Perhaps in part because she anticipated less household service than she enjoyed back east, Jessie had long resisted settling at Las Mariposas. Only seven years earlier, she had declared, “The Mariposas is no place for me—Indians, bears & miners have made it lose its good qualities as a country place.”102

  The home of John C. Frémont and Jessie Benton Frémont at Bear Valley on the disputed Mariposa Estate, or Las Mariposas.

  Courtesy of the Bancroft Library.

  Once resident on the Mariposa Estate, Jessie accustomed herself to Indian neighbors, who lived in a large village nearby. And she encountered bears only when she set out on horseback to explore the Sierra Nevada.103 But miners were still quite capable of destroying the “good qualities” of the Frémonts’ “country place.” In July of 1858, just as Jessie was coming to terms with her father’s death and learning to live in her foothill home, she penned an agitated letter to the family friend and political adviser Francis Preston Blair (Elizabeth Blair Lee’s father), announcing “news of our broken peace in this valley which was to have been our place of refuge against bad passions and bad climate.” (She was referring to the “bad passions” of the 1856 presidential campaign and the “bad climate” of the eastern seaboard, which exacerbated the Frémonts’ frequent respiratory ailments.) A week earlier, having just returned from San Francisco, Jessie found herself “waked from my first sleep after the journey by the alarm of regular border ruffian warfare.” From that moment, she told Blair, all was “merged into one thought—how to save life & keep off the impending fight.”104 This was the fight that had been brewing for so long between John and his agents, on the one hand, and the Merced Mining Company, on the other. The MMC, in turn, had the support of many Mariposa County men, some of whom had organized themselves into a group called the Hornitos League.

  A Miwok ranchería near the Frémont house on Las Mariposas. Describing her home, Jessie Benton Frémont wrote, “Near by was a large Indian village, some hundreds settled there. The young women from it came constantly to our house and sat about on the grass chatting together of us and laughing as they watched our doings with frank curiosity. We were their matinée.” See Far-West Sketches (Boston: D. Lothrop, 1890), 103.

  Courtesy of the Bancroft Library.

  The Hornitos League, like the earlier miners’ and settlers’ association, included individual placer miners and others who faced dispossession when the title to Las Mariposas was confirmed.105 This organization of Anglo men shared a name—Hornitos (literally, “little ovens”)—with the largest Mexican town in Mariposa County. In the years since the first foreign miners’ tax, Hornitos had become a refuge for those Mexicans who refused to leave the southernmost reaches of the Southern Mines.106 The members of the Hornitos League may have been from this town.107 But it also seems possible that in calling themselves the Hornitos League, white miners ironically were likening themselves to those besieged Mexicans who had carved out a place for themselves in defiance of exclusionary practices. The naming, then, may have been double-edged. It may have invoked not only common anti-Mexican sentiments but a kind of grudging respect: these white men were not about to be pushed around as Mexican miners had been, and yet, if push did come to shov
e, the Anglos would stand their ground just as the residents of Hornitos had. The irony deepens when one remembers that these white men’s mining claims were threatened by decisions made in American courts that had confirmed an Anglo man’s title to a Mexican land grant. It deepens even further when one considers that Jessie Benton Frémont called her husband’s opponents “border ruffians”—a capacious term with a rich historical resonance for Anglo Americans, and one that took on new meanings as U.S. borders expanded to include what so recently had been Mexico’s northern frontier.108

  “Border warfare” erupted in this manner. According to newspapers, as MMC employees and Frémont’s miners bore down on each other through separate tunnels that exploited the same quartz vein, the MMC men insisted that “the Fremont Company were taking out the golden quartz from the other end of what they considered their property, at a rate which they did not feel justified in allowing.”109 One day early in July, the MMC miners, who had been laboring in the Josephine tunnel, approached the entrance to the Pine Grove tunnel, where Frémont’s men were at work. The MMC men demanded possession of the mine, but Frémont’s men refused to leave. The next morning, members of the Hornitos League joined the MMC miners, until some seventy men held the entrance to the Pine Tree Mine, with a handful of Frémont employees still holed up inside.110 Jessie Benton Frémont wrote that the usurpers at first refused to allow her husband’s workers food. One of John’s men, however, was married to the woman who boarded the Pine Grove miners. According to Jessie, this “little woman,” Elizabeth Ketton, “took a revolver & a basket of provisions & presented herself at the mouth of the mine.” The boardinghouse keeper said that if the combined forces of the MMC and the Hornitos League “offered to touch her,” she would shoot. This was no small threat, since the “men in the drift had laid a train & put their tools & old iron & blasting powder near the entrance & were ready to [make] a blast at the sound of firing.” In other words, with one shot, mine and miners alike would have been blown up. After this, Ketton was allowed in twice daily, “carrying food in her hands & under her clothes pistols & powder & caps.”111

  Meanwhile, according to Jessie, the MMC men had threatened to burn down the Frémont cottage, and so Albert Lea and Isaac stood guard there. John moved back and forth between the cottage, the occupied mine, and his quartz mill, which he also kept under armed watch since it was filled, Jessie said, with “gold in amalgam & some coined & much machinery.” Jessie minimized her own participation in all this to Francis Preston Blair, saying only, “whenever Mr. Frémont was in sight I was very brave.”112 According to her biographer, however, Jessie later insisted that she herself, driven by Isaac and accompanied by Mémé, had taken the note that contained the threat to her cottage and haughtily handed it back to hostile miners headquartered at a nearby saloon. Afterward, as Isaac turned the wagon toward home, Jessie recalled, “I fully expected to be shot in the back.”113 Though Jessie may have exaggerated her derring-do in hindsight, such action is quite in keeping with contemporary descriptions of her behavior. Abraham Lincoln, for example, who disliked the Frémonts, called Jessie “quite a female politician.” And the Reverend Thomas Starr King, who adored Jessie, depicted her as “a she-Merrimack, thoroughly sheathed, and carrying fire in the genuine Benton furnaces”—a match, and then some, for the “little ovens” tippling in a Bear Valley saloon.114

  John, for his part, appealed to California officials for firepower. Governor John B. Weller’s third wife was a cousin of Jessie’s, a connection that could only have helped when the Frémonts found themselves in such a dangerous fix. At John’s request for aid, Weller telegraphed military companies in Columbia, Sonora, and Stockton “to hold themselves in readiness” in case armed conflict broke out in Mariposa County. John also appealed to men he called “friends in San Francisco” for muskets and ammunition.115 Shortly thereafter, the San Joaquin Republican reported that four cases of muskets were headed up to Bear Valley, “being forwarded by the United States Marshall.”116 State governors and federal marshals were truly good friends to have. Despite widespread animosity toward the Frémonts in Mariposa County, men of the Hornitos League simply could not claim such powerfully situated friends or useful family connections. In the end, these individual miners and settlers, along with the Merced Mining Company, had to back down. The court battles dragged on, and local controversy continued to erupt. Now and then, newspapers printed items with inflammatory titles such as “The Fremont Outrage.”117 But the Bear Valley War, as it is sometimes called, was more bluster than muster.

  At the height of these hostilities, Jessie Benton Frémont had written a forty-four-page will and testament “in case,” as she put it, “of loss of life.”118 But what actually died in Mariposa County in the summer of 1858 was what would expire in the town of Columbia after the celebrated completion of the “Miners’ Ditch.” What ended as the Hornitos League gave up its siege of the Pine Tree Mine was a local dream among white men of maintaining exclusive access to a boundless resource that would ensure their continued independence. The dream would continue for half a century in other western places where placer rushes beckoned men who felt betrayed by the promise of industrialization—Nevada, Arizona, Montana, Colorado, Idaho, Dakota, and Alaska territories in the United States, and British Columbia and the Yukon in Canada. It would continue in a diminished fashion even in western mining areas that moved much more quickly, decisively, and successfully than the Southern Mines did from individualized placer mining to industrialized hardrock mining. In such places, hardrock miners, who were often staunch union men, kept placer mining tools close at hand in their cabins or in union halls, always hoping against hope that a rich strike in their off-hours might suddenly yield them the fabled independence of white men during California’s golden days.119 Few remembered how amazingly short-lived that “independence” actually had been—and how deeply rooted in the dispossession of other Gold Rush participants, especially, in the Southern Mines, Miwoks, Mexicans, Chileans, French, and Chinese.

  Chapter 6

  The Last Fandango

  At the turn of the twentieth century, John Robertson was growing old in New York State. But in the 1850s, he had mined in Calaveras County with his friend Wade Johnston, who went on to live near San Andreas for the rest of his life. The two white men struck up a correspondence when they were in their seventies, in which they reminisced about the Gold Rush years. Wade also filled John in on the changes that had taken place over the decades in and around their old haunts. John was struck by the transformation: “In my time,” he recalled, “things were some what loose.” A recent letter from Wade had convinced him that people in Calaveras County eventually tightened up: “Your letter goes to show,” John wrote back to Wade, “that after I left they began to live in a more civilized way—got married, settled down, raised families, instead of keeping them selves in hot water striveing to make a pile and leave; they settled down and lived like white folks.”1

  Living “in a more civilized way,” however, was not a simple matter of settling down. For John Robertson, civilization involved a broad range of social, cultural, and economic practices by which people of European descent became “white”: women and men, clearly two separate human categories, consummated (ideally) exclusive intimate relationships that were sanctioned by the state; they conceived offspring and reared them in (ideally) cohesive social units called families; they kept one place of residence for a long period of time, perhaps even a lifetime; and there they engaged in economic activity, activity that allowed for the steady accumulation of capital and the reproduction of a labor force, which in turn allowed them to continue to live in the place called home. No matter that a wide variety of peoples engaged, or tried to engage, in some or all of these practices. No matter that some people of European descent rejected or were unable to engage in some or all of them. For John Robertson and many other Gold Rush participants, the pursuit of such activities constituted whiteness, and the ascendance of such activities constituted a ra
cial triumph.2

  To triumph, however, one must engage in a struggle and ultimately exercise greater power than those over whom one triumphs. In an event as celebrated as the California Gold Rush, it is the struggle and the exercise of power that is forgotten, the triumph that is remembered. The most sophisticated stories told about the Gold Rush recognize that there were precious few individual triumphs in the diggings; many sought, but few made, their “pile.” These stories incorporate the Gold Rush into larger narratives about nation building. But even such narratives often downplay the conflict and coercion inherent in nation building, particularly where nations are assumed to be built on a foundation of certain social, cultural, and economic practices.3 During the Gold Rush, nowhere were conflict and coercion more evident than in the Southern Mines.

  Here, then, I turn to a second set of struggles, a second broad exercise of power that helped transform the Southern Mines after 1852. Just as change emerged within the sphere of mining labor, it erupted as well across the terrain of domestic and personal service work and especially across the landscape of leisure. Outside the mines themselves, particular sites became emblematic of the transformation—saloons and fandangos, to be sure, but also the dusty streets and clapboard cottages of Jackson and Sonora and Mariposa. Particular historical actors took center stage in these dramas, especially women from every group of Gold Rush participants—Indian and immigrant; Spanish, French, English, and Cantonese speaking. But men of all descriptions were also key players—gamblers and fighters, dancers and drinkers, lovers and legislators. In the process, an earlier social world of possibility and permeable boundaries began to give way to more entrenched forms of dominance rooted in Anglo American constructions of gender, of class position, and of race, ethnicity, and nation—that is, in particular ideas about what it meant to live “like white folks.”