Roaring Camp

by Susan Lee Johnson

  Indeed, the older and newer social worlds of the Gold Rush started on a collision course in 1852. Recall that a Sonora newspaper correspondent saw the upheaval as a victory for “American energy and perseverance,” exhibited in such structures built by white men as flumes and fireproof businesses. Meanwhile, Lorena Hays, writing under the pen name Lenita, saw the upheaval differently. For Lenita, it was the ongoing struggle of white women—working alongside, or perhaps a step ahead of, their menfolk—to illuminate California’s “social horizon.”4 Still other residents of the Southern Mines saw the collision not as the imminent triumph of markets and morals but as an assault on their livelihoods and their comforts as well. These residents could include, for example, those who worked in or frequented gambling houses and dance halls, those who toiled in the dwindling placers, or those who found intimacy outside of marriage. Non–Anglo Americans were overrepresented among those for whom the decline of the Southern Mines meant a decline of possibility, but disappointment touched all manner of Gold Rush participant. Thus a Mexican woman who ran a fandango or a French woman who dealt monte might be put out of work by the efforts of reform-minded Anglo women—themselves often the wives of merchants, professionals, or water company managers. At the same time, a married white woman who had enjoyed the attentions of too many lonely men at “respectable” balls and parties might find herself in divorce court; then she, too, could lose her livelihood. And we have seen that those squeezed by the demands of water company officials or quartz mining magnates were often as not Anglo miners. Still, the transformation of the Southern Mines weighed most heavily on those who could not claim the mantle of whiteness.

  Nowhere did change weigh more heavily than on the newest and oldest residents of the region—Chinese immigrants and native peoples. In addition to exclusionary and regulatory practices in the mines, Chinese faced other pressures that were predicated on the earlier resolution of racial and ethnic conflicts to the benefit of white Americans as well as on the arrival of increasing numbers of Anglo American women. Most Chinese women, who began to come to the Southern Mines a couple of years after Chinese men started to arrive, worked as prostitutes, and the brothels in which they worked quickly became targets for white men’s brutality. Chinese men, on the other hand, frequently faced off in violent conflict with one another. The battles they planned and sometimes fought were rooted both in storms that raged in South China and in local disputes that pitted groups of immigrants against one another in a region of dwindling resources. These conflicts, in turn, became a gruesome spectator sport for white Americans in the mines, indicating, as one scholar puts it, “the casual value placed on Chinese life” as well Anglo attraction to the “perceived exoticism of Chinese culture.”5 Around the same time, Sierra Miwoks were learning to turn white spectatorship to their advantage. Already, because of the decline of animal populations and the constriction of grounds available for gathering plant foods, Miwok people were purchasing meat and flour in immigrant settlements. By the later 1850s, groups of Miwoks began to travel to towns such as Sonora and Agua Fria for a new purpose: dressed in ceremonial regalia, they danced in the streets, collecting cash from passers-by. In so doing, Indians invented new traditions for a world invaded by gold-based social relations. Whether or not various residents of the diggings could profit from the gaze of white gold seekers, increasingly the ubiquity and power of that gaze structured social relations in the Southern Mines.

  Perhaps the most emblematic site of change in the Southern Mines was the ubiquitous fandango. Before the Gold Rush, “fandango” was a term that referred not to a place for dance but to a particular kind of dance event—one popular among poorer Spanish Mexicans in California. The “fandango house,” often called simply a “fandango,” was a Gold Rush innovation.6 By 1851, a newspaperman in Tuolumne County could write a tongue-in-cheek tribute to his town’s most popular site of public amusement, titling it “The Fandango in Sonora.” His was a romp of an article that compared Sonora’s dance halls to the boulevards of Paris and the parks of New York City. Claiming that Sonora boasted five “fandango saloons,” the writer described two, one French and the other Mexican. The French fandango was in “a stylish room, brilliantly lighted,” where patrons danced a polka. In the tight embrace and unison gyration of couples, the writer detected “a Gallic fraternization”; only when the music stopped was it clear that “there were really two persons in the performance.” The reader could not be sure whether the “two persons” were male and female respectively or, as was common in the early 1850s, both male. Next, the writer moved on to the Mexican fandango. In this saloon, it was dim and smoke filled the air. But the dancers were “going at it with a perfect looseness,” urged on by a “brawny guitarist” whose music “lustily horrifie[d] the night.” It was more likely here that men danced with women, since when the music ended, each “caballero” led a “fair dulcina” to the bar for refreshment. The caballeros, however, just as often as they were Mexicans, were “Sydney convicts” (that is, Australians), perfumed local officials, and youths who looked like mercantile clerks. It was the dancing women who made this fandango Mexican, women who, according to the writer, were “brown in complexion” and “blue” in moral character. At the night’s end, each man left with one of the dancers, and the newspaperman drew the curtain, noting, “We only promised to daguerreotype the fandango, and would not outrage decency by introducing after scenes.”7

  Soon, Gold Rush journalists decided that describing the fandango itself—let alone the “after scenes”—was an outrage to decency. In the same issue of the Stockton newspaper that reprinted “The Fandango in Sonora” from the Sonora Herald, there also appeared a frightful account of a murder that had taken place at Casa de los Amigos, a Stockton fandango. Apparently, two men, Caleb Ruggles and James McCabe, had quarreled over which of them would go home with a woman named Luz Parilla. A bowie knife, a pistol, drunken men, and Luz Parilla herself, shuttling between her angry would-be lovers, all figured in the account, which ended with Jim McCabe dead from a gunshot wound and Caleb Ruggles dismissed on grounds of self-defense.8 After the summer of 1851, the Stockton paper would print many more articles of this type about dance halls—articles that directly or indirectly condemned fandangos as sites of vice and violence—and none at all of the celebratory type from the Sonora paper.9 Even the next piece on fandangos reprinted from the Sonora Herald sang a new tune: a year after Sonora’s newspapermen winked at the town’s most popular resorts, they ran an approving notice of a new city ordinance that prohibited fandangos, declaring, “the majority of the people are decidedly opposed to all such vile exhibitions.”10

  This was wishful thinking. There were plenty of people in Sonora, as elsewhere in the Southern Mines, who were decidedly attracted to such exhibitions, both patrons and workers. But the ordinance, along with a flood of newspaper reports about murder and mayhem in the dance halls, was evidence of a push that began in 1852 to curtail public amusements that had thrived in the early months and years of the Gold Rush, including not only fandangos but brothels and gambling saloons as well. This push was the consequence of two major transformations in the Southern Mines. The first involved the racial and ethnic conflicts, primarily among men, that had occurred between 1848 and 1851 and that had been resolved largely in Anglo Americans’ favor—the Chilean War, the “French Revolution,” and the Mariposa War.11 The second involved an influx of Anglo American women, particularly women with family ties to men who were helping constitute a middle class in the more well-established towns of the Southern Mines. The resolution of the racial and ethnic clashes provided the engine for an assault on dance halls, gaming tables, and houses of prostitution. The arrival of white women from the eastern United States provided the fuel.

  Census figures give an outline of the demographic change. In 1850, the non-native population of the Southern Mines was less than 3 percent female—about 800 women in an enumerated immigrant population approaching 30,000. By 1860, an influx of women brought
that figure up to nearly 19 percent—over 9,000 women in an enumerated immigrant population of almost 50,000.12 This was not a random increase. Although some women came to California on their own in the 1850s, many more came to join husbands or brothers or fathers already resident in the diggings. And those men in the best economic and social position to summon their wives or sisters or daughters to California were men who had weathered successfully the initial racial and ethnic strife of the Gold Rush—that is, Anglo Americans. Among Anglos, not all were equally able to send for their womenfolk; merchants, professionals, and water company officials, for example, were more able than most miners. Such shopkeepers, lawyers, and managers were the progenitors of a homegrown middle class in the Southern Mines. But class making in the nineteenth century was a family affair, and this was nowhere more true than in the diggings. Only when women joined these men in California did a middle class begin to take root.13

  One such woman was Mary Harrison Newell, the baker’s daughter from Delaware who in 1854 joined her upstate New York husband, William, in the town of Columbia.14 William Newell had been in California for five years and early on had become secretary of the Tuolumne County Water Company (TCWC).15 By the time Mary came, he had abandoned the company, sold some of his stock, and entered into partnership with a man named Marcellus Brainard. The two white men kept a store that William described to Mary in one of the last letters they exchanged before she went west: “it is the same as a Common Country Store at home Groceries Provisions Hardware Clothing Dry goods Mining Tools Rum and Tobacco fill a prominent place.” Once Mary arrived, with all her enthusiasm for moneymaking in California, she entered easily into the world that William had described to her in letters: “Society is now growing a great deal better here a good many merchants and miners and others are sending for their Families.”16

  The wife of William’s business partner, Clementine Brainard, was especially excited about Mary’s arrival, noting in her diary on July 2, 1854, “Mrs. Newell arrived very unexpectedly this evening accompanied by her father: think I shall like her much.” Although William Newell and Marcellus Brainard did not remain in partnership long, Mary and Clementine continued their round of visiting with one another and with women married to other up-and-coming white men in Columbia. Mary must have been a particular comfort to Clementine, as Mary’s self-assurance in household and business matters was matched by young Clementine’s awkwardness at domestic tasks and her astonishment at the pace and content of commerce in Columbia. Mary was an experienced baker, for example, while Clementine thought that learning to cook was “a bitter pill”—not surprising, since in one attempt at frying doughnuts she “came near setting the house on fire.” Clementine also bemoaned her husband’s frequent business trips to San Francisco, and worried over the liquor he sold in his store—a worry Mary did not seem to share.17 Much as the growing number of comfortably situated families, then, such female friendships helped anchor the emerging white middle class of the Southern Mines.

  The Newell family, however, was not long for this world. Just over a year after Mary arrived, William died. Now Mary turned her own sights to business, plotting with her sister, who was on her way west from Delaware, to open a store of their own. In the end, although Mary briefly went into partnership with her father selling paint, wallpaper, and glass—her father also went west after William’s death—she soon found another road to economic security. A year or so later, Mary Harrison Newell married Joseph Pownall, the collector of water rents for the TCWC who had challenged the trustees during the miners’ strike of 1855.18 By the time they married, in 1857, Pownall himself was both a trustee and the secretary of the water company. For his part, Pownall had worried over his bachelor state for years (he was nearly forty). He must have been pleased at long last to take his rightful place in the changing Gold Rush world he had described to a friend in 1854: “This country . . . is fast settling up with families of respectability wives daughters & other permanent fixtures of this class which assist so much in giving character & a healthy moral tone to the machinery regulating what is termed society.”19 Unlike Clementine Brainard, Mary Pownall never seemed that concerned about Columbia’s “moral tone.” But the social transformation of places like Columbia did not require all the “respectable” wives and daughters of the white middle class to tinker with “the machinery regulating what is termed society.” To a certain extent, it was enough that white women simply were present. Their presence, in turn, served as a reminder of middle-class cultural expectations whereby women acted as moral arbiters of society, thus encouraging men to exercise self-control.

  But Mary Pownall aside, some white women did bring with them a recognizable impulse for social reform. The impulse was recognizable, of course, because the social ills that white, middle-class women saw in the diggings—especially drinking, gambling, and sexual commerce—all existed in eastern places and had become targets of reform there.20 So those who sought to do battle with public amusements in the Southern Mines came armed with an ideological arsenal—a discourse of reform, if you will. Consider, for example, Elizabeth Gunn, who joined her husband in California in 1851. Gunn’s mother was an antislavery woman, Elizabeth Le Breton Stickney, who after the death of her first husband was (unhappily) married to the abolitionist Henry Clarke Wright. So young Elizabeth grew up surrounded by antislavery Quakers and other antebellum reformers in Philadelphia, and then she married an abolitionist, Lewis Gunn, as well.21 By 1850, however, Lewis was in California, working as editor of the Sonora Herald—the paper that first printed the tongue-in-cheek tribute to the fandango in July of 1851. Elizabeth arrived in Sonora just weeks later. If one can judge by the articles reprinted from her husband’s paper in the Stockton press, the Sonora Herald soon assumed a disapproving tone on the subject of fandangos. It is not clear what role Elizabeth played in this, but it is clear where she stood on such issues. In a letter to her mother and sisters, Elizabeth wrote that although there were “some good Anti-slavery and Temperance men” in Sonora, there were also many “of a different sort, lawyers and merchants who gamble and go to houses of ill fame and keep mistresses, mostly Mexican women.” She went on to denounce a judge in town who had sold his house to prostitutes and who himself “kept” a native woman. It must have been evident to Elizabeth Gunn that women who worked in dance halls, gambling saloons, and brothels, as well as those who cohabited with men, had found viable livelihoods in Sonora. Up the hill from her own house, one of the finest and best situated in town, was another built by a young French woman—just seventeen years old—for herself, her mother, and her younger brother and sister. Elizabeth wrote that this woman earned her living “by going to the gaming houses and dealing out the cards to the players.”22 Reform-minded women had their work cut out for them.

  Most white women who remonstrated against public amusements in the Southern Mines were not so well-connected as Elizabeth Gunn. Some, like Clementine Brainard, had had little experience in eastern reform circles, but felt that social conditions in the diggings demanded their attention.23 Another such woman was Lorena Hays. It was Lorena Hays who wrote for The Golden Era under the pen name Lenita, worrying over “vice and immorality” and looking to “WOMAN” as the star that would finally brighten California’s “social horizon.” She was also the woman who noted in her diary during the 1856 presidential election that she favored “Fremont and freedom.”24 Her father had died in 1848, when she was twenty-two. In 1853, her widowed mother decided to leave Illinois and follow siblings west, taking along her four unmarried daughters. When they arrived in Amador County, the Hays women supported themselves by taking in boarders and by teaching. Immigrating as they did after the initial boom, their financial situations were always precarious. So one by one, each of the women married, including Lorena’s mother.25

  As for herself, Lorena mourned her lot. She longed to attend school in Sacramento, but could not afford it. As consolation, she devoured every book and periodical she could find, from the Water-Cure Journ
al to Hopes and Helps for the Young of Both Sexes. Then she met an editor for The Golden Era, the first California publication to call itself “A Family Newspaper.” He invited her to write a column, and she obliged, publishing seven letters in The Golden Era between 1854 and 1857. None of this altered Lorena’s profound despair over her lack of schooling, which she had hoped would fit her to move in better social circles. Like her mother and sisters, she too married, though only after anguished indecision. Her suitor, John Clement Bowmer, was a man whom she “never really admired . . . as a lover,” though she came to “love him for his goodness.” Once married, she knew, “Friends, name, fame, all are given to husband—to one.” She wondered if “in that one” she would find “an equivalent.” She did not. In fact, after a brief period of bliss that probably coincided with her deepening sexual relationship with her husband, Lorena slipped back into despair over lost opportunities in her life. Her husband, it seems—though “noble” and “good” and capable of satisfying her in his “loving embrace”—shared none of her spiritual and intellectual passions. Lorena found an outlet for those passions by writing for publication.26

  That she chose Lenita as her pen name for The Golden Era, borrowing Spanish speakers’ practice of creating diminutive, affectionate forms of female names, suggests a curious process of identification, projection, and reversal. It was only as Lenita that Lorena could express her deepest longings. Somehow, Lorena had come to identify her otherworldly passions with what she understood as the worldly passions of her Mexican and Chilean neighbors, in whom she took a great interest. Indeed, Lorena tried to learn Spanish as soon as she arrived in California, and she tutored a young Chilean who wanted to improve his English. Likewise, one of her longest journal entries denounced the reign of terror local vigilance committees had visited upon Mexicans and Chileans in Amador County after a small band of robbers assumed to be Mexican had killed several Anglos at a remote camp. As Lorena put it, “We fear a great deal more disturbance from these committees and white greasers than from the Mexicans who have been driven from their homes.” “Greaser,” of course, was a racial slur Anglos routinely hurled at Mexicans; calling Anglo men “white greasers,” then, was the ultimate insult. Nonetheless, although Lorena identified with Spanish-speaking people and projected upon them unfettered passions, the reforms she so wished for in California necessarily spelled a narrowing of opportunities for Mexicans and Chileans, and especially for those women whose livelihoods depended on the worldly passions of a still disproportionately male social arena. In calling for such reforms, Lorena Hays gave voice to sentiments common among white women who were helping constitute a middle class in the Southern Mines.27