Still other Anglo women were less concerned about what Lenita called California’s “moral atmosphere” than about the ways in which social conditions in the Southern Mines intimately impinged upon their everyday lives. In a divorce case in Amador County, for example, Chloe Cooper complained that when her husband, James, left their home in New York State in 1849 and went to California, “he commenced to visit fandango houses . . . and kept company with divers women of ill fame of the Spanish race . . . and did commit adultery, and have carnal connection with them in said houses of ill fame.” What was worse, when Chloe joined James in 1854, he continued his carousing. His behavior finally came to her attention, Chloe said, in 1857, and she left him.28 Another case told a similar tale. Even though Mary Jane Anderson went west along with her husband, James, once in California this James too “spent his time among idle and dissolute persons, and frequenters of gambling saloons and brothels,” and he slept with women Mary Jane called “spanish prostitutes” as well.29 Likewise, Mary Ann Hayes called her husband, Nicholas, “a frequenter of houses of ill fame” in her divorce complaint, and Tuolumne County acquaintances backed her up. A teamster said he had seen Nicholas go off into private rooms with a “Spanish” prostitute in Sonora. And a neighbor claimed he had seen Nicholas at a brothel in Columbia asking a Mexican woman “what she charged.” The neighbor recalled that the woman had said “three Dollars,” and that the two had disappeared for half an hour thereafter.30 There is no evidence that women such as Chloe Cooper, Mary Jane Anderson, and Mary Ann Hayes participated in campaigns to shut down public amusements in the Southern Mines, but one can imagine that they did not stand in the way.
What did these campaigns look like? Interestingly enough, it is easier to find complaints about public amusements than to find evidence of action against them. Actual reform efforts on the part of Anglo American women and their menfolk were limited. Despite their increasing cultural, economic, and political power, Anglos, according to the 1860 federal census, constituted less than half of the total population in the Southern Mines, ranging from a low of 37 percent in sparsely populated Mariposa County to a high of 49 percent in more populous Amador County. Since these figures do not include native peoples, and since non-Anglo populations in general often were underenumerated by census takers, the actual percentages of white Americans in the southern diggings may have been even lower.31 By definition, then, Anglos in the Southern Mines pursued reform from a precarious position. And, by the mid-1850s, the white American population was fractured by growing class divisions. Furthermore, Anglo men were sharply divided over the need for reform, since many were enthusiastic participants in the leisure worlds reformers decried. Nonetheless, there were sporadic attempts to bring such worlds to an end, which took shape in temperance organizing, in campaigns for Sunday business closings and Maine-style liquor laws (which would prohibit the sale and manufacture of alcohol), and in local initiatives against dance halls, gaming tables, and houses of prostitution.32
White women took an active role in these efforts. Women’s diaries from the mid-1850s suggest that some merchants’ wives worked behind the scenes, encouraging their husbands to give up selling liquor or to close their stores on the Christian Sabbath. Clementine Brainard, for instance, prayed in her diary that her husband Marcellus would “come to the determination soon that by the help of God he will deal in no intoxicating drinks whatever.” She added, “may he feel that it is not good for his soul if it is for his purse.” Clementine may have made Marcellus feel that it was not good for his marriage, either.33 Likewise, Lorena Hays Bowmer assumed a triumphant mood when her husband, John, “at last effected a settlement of his business” so that his store remained closed on Sunday, suggesting that she, too, had been an advocate for reform within her own home.34 But there were organized efforts among white women as well. In 1855, for example, the Stockton press noted that the “ladies” of Campo Seco, in Calaveras County, were the “prime movers” in advocating a Maine law. In 1856, a Tuolumne County newspaper observed that the “Ladies of Columbia” were petitioning merchants there to close their shops on Sunday. And in the same year, the Weekly Ledger in the Amador County town of Volcano poked fun at women’s support of Sabbatarianism, suggesting that petitions to the state legislature in that town “were put in circulation by [marriageable] but not married ladies, in order to give the young ‘lords of creation’ one day in the week to devote at the shrine of bright eyes and bewitching ringlets.”35 Even where white women were not distributing petitions, they were understood within their own social circles to be both inspiration for and prime beneficiaries of reform. The Weekly Ledger may have teased those with “bright eyes and bewitching ringlets” about their interest in a Sunday law, but the same newspaper routinely called on women readers to serve as moral beacons, whether by drawing men to church through their own regular attendance or by lending their aid in establishing schools for children and lyceums for adults. In the end, it was thought, this would all redound to the benefit of “ladies,” as they would be able to walk peaceful streets that had once been “monopolized by rowdyism of every grade.”36
The behavior of some Anglo women in the Southern Mines belied such middle-class cultural assumptions, which connected ladyhood, whiteness, and morality as interlocking links in a single chain. In addition to assaults on polyglot sites of public amusement, one of the means by which white women and their menfolk tried to redirect the leisure energies of Gold Rush participants was by creating alternatives to saloons, fandangos, and brothels. Among these alternatives were balls sponsored by community organizations and parties thrown by members of the emerging white middle class. These balls and parties often seem to have had the desired effect. But they could also become sites of contestation. In March of 1854, for example, Clementine and Marcellus Brainard received an invitation to what they thought would be such an event in Columbia. They intended to go to the party, but then Marcellus took sick. In the end, Clementine was relieved, noting in her diary, “I am very thankful something has happened to prevent our going . . . as I understand some are invited that are not fit for decent people to associate with.” Her worst fears were realized when she learned that some had left the party in protest when a man named Cazneau arrived with a woman to whom he was not married. The next day, two separate duels threatened between Cazneau and the men who had departed when he arrived. (Neither fight actually materialized.) Clementine Brainard did not identify the woman who accompanied Cazneau to the party, but an 1852 court record provides a clue. In that year, an emigrant from Maine named Phoebe Quimby divorced her husband on grounds of cruelty; once, for instance, while she was pregnant, her husband had thrown her across a room. Phoebe’s husband countered that Phoebe had been sleeping with Thomas Cazneau for almost a year, and that she had moved in with Cazneau after filing for divorce. Despite these accusations, Phoebe won the divorce. In 1852, it seems, a white woman could leave a cruel husband and cohabit with another white man with relative impunity. But by 1854, a couple such as Phoebe Quimby and Thomas Cazneau could no longer go to a party attended by “decent people” without trouble erupting.37 Times were changing.
Phoebe Quimby was not the only Anglo woman who failed to advance the cause of reform. Divorce records from the 1850s are replete with accusations against unruly white women. Such charges are hardly unique to the Southern Mines or to the Gold Rush era. One historian, for example, has studied divorce in two nonmining counties of California between 1850 and 1890. He finds that although both women and men charged estranged spouses with adultery, husbands did so at twice the rate of wives. Accusations of adultery do not necessarily reflect how often women had sex outside their marriages. Instead, the charges represent a complex interaction among actual instances of extramarital sex, legal restrictions on admissible grounds for divorce, and cultural ideas about what constituted the most egregious affronts to marital vows for women.38 None of this is unique to the diggings. But charges of marital infidelity in the diggings did reflect the pa
rticularities of changing social relations there. Some white women seem to have initiated extramarital romance, for instance, at the very balls and parties that other white women hoped would stem the tide of Gold Rush patterns of leisure.
Because there were still five times more men than women in the Southern Mines as late as 1860, even gatherings middle-class people thought of as “respectable” could become arenas of contact between single men looking for women’s attention and women looking for intimacy outside their marriages. The story of Mary Ann Chick is a case in point. When Mary Ann joined her husband, Alfred, in Calaveras County in 1855, their relationship quickly deteriorated. Mary Ann filed for divorce in 1859, charging Alfred with cruelty and violence. Alfred countered, however, that Mary Ann had taken up with a boarder in their household, Frank Averill, with whom she attended balls and parties and from whom she accepted “valuable presents.” That social events organized by middle-class people could become sites of moral ambiguity is also suggested by the divorce case of Emily and O. S. Davis. Emily charged her husband with extreme cruelty, and a neighbor backed her up, testifying that Mr. Davis called his wife a “damned stinking Shit ass” and a “damned wasteful bitch of Hell.” Significantly, the same neighbor praised Emily by insisting that “she does not go out as other women do to balls and parties.”39 Those “other women,” then—women such as Mary Ann Chick—must have used balls and parties to bask in the attentions of unmarried men.
While some white women dallied with men at “respectable” gatherings, others profited by Gold Rush gender divisions of labor, which took husbands away from family homes for much of every day and sometimes for even longer stretches of time. Sarah Philbrick of Amador County, for instance, tried to divorce her husband, William, for cruelty and violence. But William retorted that when he “was away from home at work on a Quartz lode,” Sarah would visit an unmarried man named Bayerque. Furthermore, William charged, Sarah did this at night, often “dressed in men’s apparel.” William thought she wore men’s clothing “so as to prevent being detected while on the streets.” Whatever Sarah’s reasons for cross-dressing when she visited her lover, according to William’s friends, she showed no remorse for her actions. After Sarah gave birth to a child, for example, William complained that the baby was not his, but rather “a certain Frenchman’s at Volcano.” Sarah shot back that, in fact, the child did “[look] like the Frenchman.” William’s brother said that this kind of wrangling was common between William and Sarah. The brother recalled that when William accused Sarah of “kissing a man,” she rejoined that she “would do it again.” So William slapped her. In the end, the judge disallowed the divorce, arguing, “Courts of equity cannot allow a woman who boldly avows her own turpitude to her husband to complain of her husband’s anger when thus provoked.”40
Likewise, in Tuolumne County, Joseph Hall complained that his wife, Celia, had “established a system of telegraphing or signalizing to inform her paramours” whenever Joseph was away from the house working. Joseph named three men with whom he was sure Celia had been intimate. One of these men, Charles Knight, testified that he indeed had slept with Celia. He also said he had seen one of the other men in bed with her as well. Charles explained that the first time he and Celia had sex, he had gone to the Halls’ house to dig a cellar while Joseph was off at work. When Charles went inside for a drink of water, he said, Celia “began to sing bawdy songs.” Then she locked Charles in the house. He was able to escape, but when he went back inside later, Charles insisted, “she seized hold of me and forced me to have intercourse with her.”41 Celia, it seems, would not take “no” for an answer.
We cannot know whether the relationships between the determined Celia Hall and the reluctant Charles Knight or between cross-dressing Sarah Philbrick and the French man Bayerque bore much resemblance to the descriptions deponents provided in divorce proceedings. But the descriptions in and of themselves, because they were designed to influence the court, had to tell stories that made sense to judges and jury members (all of whom were white men). To those who heard them, stories about married white women cavorting with men at parties or forcing men to copulate when husbands were off at work made all too much sense. That such stories made sense probably said as much about white male anxieties as about white female activities. But it also suggests that while there were plenty of white, middle-class women advocating reform in the Southern Mines, there were others whose actions threatened those efforts. This would help explain why narratives of unruly, aggressive Anglo women who took advantage of Gold Rush social relations were so prevalent in the 1850s. At the very least, such stories suggest that keeping the chain linking ladyhood, whiteness, and morality in good repair required constant vigilance. The work of discursive repair must have sometimes frustrated the social practices of reform.
But there were other reasons why streets in the Southern Mines often remained stubbornly “monopolized by rowdyism.” Put most simply, some Mexican, Chilean, and French women wanted it that way, for a rowdy street was a path to a living. These women had helped create not only a domestic marketplace but also a commercial sphere of public amusements in the Southern Mines. Because the early exclusions and extortions of the Gold Rush, especially the 1850 foreign miners’ tax, were aimed primarily at non-Anglo miners, those non-Anglos who toiled at different pursuits were less likely to leave the diggings. Women were overrepresented among those who worked in other sectors of the boom economy, and thus were overrepresented among those who stayed on in the gold regions. They carved out for themselves economic niches that exclusionists—whose goal was to reserve the placers for white American men—at first ignored. Such women’s work did not threaten the “independence” of Anglo miners. In fact, some white men came to define their access to the services French, Mexican, and Chilean women provided as part and parcel of their manly “independence.” The patronage of Anglo miners, as well as that of those Latin Americans and Europeans who remained, offered a measure of economic security to women who worked in the heterosocial leisure world of the diggings.42 Recall, for example, Elizabeth Gunn’s neighbor, a French teenager, who by dealing cards in Sonora had made enough money to build a house for her entire family.
French women such as Gunn’s neighbor were ubiquitous at gaming tables throughout the Southern Mines. Documents from an 1856 grand jury investigation of gambling saloons in Tuolumne County make this clear. As a result of its investigation, the grand jury filed a number of indictments against both women and men who worked at gaming tables. Just as grand jury members indicted a “John Doe” and a “Richard Roe” for gambling, so too did they indict a “French Mary,” vaguely accusing such a woman of opening a “certain . . . game of chance called Monte” in a “certain house in Columbia.”43 They may have had a specific monte dealer in mind, but they made the indictment ambiguous enough that any one of a number of French women could have found herself in court. Women from France did not content themselves with just working in saloons, either. Many owned or managed such establishments. In the mid-1850s, for instance, court records show that several French women ran saloons in the town of Mariposa, including a Madame Clement, a Madame Follet, and a Madame Henry.44 Emilie Henry seems to have been especially well situated. In 1856, the San Francisco merchants Mills and Vantine sued Henry for failing to pay them for what they claimed was almost $800 worth of supplies for her business. In the course of the suit, the court attached Henry’s property, and the schedule of her belongings revealed an impressive collection of barroom furnishings in addition to large quantities of champagne, wine, brandy, port, and ale. For her part, Henry sniffed that the goods she received from Mills and Vantine were “not of the quality contracted for” and “not of the value charged.”45 When middle-class Anglo women worried about the relative affluence of women who worked in saloons, then, these worries were not sheer flights of fancy.
And it was not only French women who owned and managed sites of public amusement in the Southern Mines. Mexican and Chilean women did so as
well. A woman named Isabel Ortis is a notable case in point. It is not clear when Ortis arrived in the Southern Mines, or even whether she came from Chile, from northern Mexico, or from elsewhere in Mexican California.46 She was at least minimally literate, as she signed her own name in legal documents. Her business acumen must have been considerable. A variety of court records for a single year, 1858, show that she managed two separate fandangos in Amador and Calaveras counties. An inquest into the death of a Portuguese-born man who had emigrated to California from Chile, for example, places Ortis as the proprietor of a dance hall at Camanche Camp, in Calaveras County, and as the owner of a house there. According to the inquest, the deceased had visited the dance hall one night and had later retired with a woman at Ortis’s home, where he took sick and died. Ortis was among those called to testify before the jury of inquest. She was quick to point out that the man “did not eat or drink anything in the dance house.”47 (No charges were brought against her.) In addition, Amador County records reveal that Ortis leased a building on Main Street in the town of Jackson that she used as a saloon and dance house. The building belonged to a Mexican or Chilean woman, Natividad Shermenhoof, and her German-born husband, John. When Natividad divorced John in 1856, he retained control of their common property, including the dance house on Main Street. So in 1858, Natividad sued John for her share of their property, claiming that he had earned $1,000 in rent from Isabel Ortis since the lease began. Natividad won the case, and she got her share of Isabel’s rent money.48 For both Isabel Ortis and Natividad Shermenhoof, then, the Gold Rush commercialization of leisure spelled profit, though Isabel probably reaped the most direct rewards.
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