Roaring Camp

by Susan Lee Johnson

  So accomplished a businesswoman was Isabel Ortis that at least one Anglo American, a man named John McKay, tried to hide his failings behind her success. John may have been Isabel’s lover; at least that is what one of his creditors maintained. In 1856, John McKay had joined with the attorney Armsted Brown in building a livery stable on a lot that McKay already occupied on Main Street in Jackson, down the road from Ortis’s fandango. Brown supplied the capital for the stable, and McKay mortgaged his half of the property to Brown in order to secure the loan. But McKay fell behind in his payments, and, in early 1858, he applied to the court as an insolvent debtor. In the meantime, however, he quietly had transferred his interest in the livery stable to Isabel Ortis. According to the attorney Brown, McKay did this in order to shield the property from creditors. But Ortis, in turn, perhaps in order to defeat the mortgage, purchased title to the lot on which the stable stood from the prominent Californio Andrés Pico.49 Pico was among those landowning Spanish Mexicans who had led the resistance against Anglo Americans during the conquest of 1846–48 (his brother, Pio Pico, was California’s governor when the conquest began). After the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, however, Andrés Pico took his place in the new political order as a state legislator, while struggling to retain his landholdings.50 His claim to the lot in Jackson where the livery stable stood rested in his Arroyo Seco land grant, which dated from the Mexican period and was as yet unconfirmed.51 The Arroyo Seco case was making its way through the legal system as slowly and tortuously as was John C. Frémont’s claim to the Mariposa Estate. Frémont received far more attention nationally than Pico did, but locally white miners and settlers in Amador County denounced the Arroyo Seco grant just as their counterparts to the south vilified Las Mariposas.52

  Armsted C. Brown, attorney at law, who tangled with Isabel Ortis and her lover John McKay in court.

  Courtesy of Charles Schwartz, Ltd., New York.

  In trying to nail down her interest in Amador County real estate by linking it to a Mexican land grant, then, Isabel Ortis entered a juridical maelstrom.53 When Armsted Brown turned to foreclose the mortgage on the stable and to challenge John McKay’s claim of insolvency, the attorney went after Isabel Ortis with a vengeance, making legal mincemeat of her appeal to the Arroyo Seco grant and dragging her character through the mud as well. As he prepared for McKay’s insolvency hearing, Brown drew up questions for McKay designed to expose both McKay and Ortis as morally, not materially, bankrupt: “Were you at the time [you sold Ortis a half interest in the livery stable] living and cohabiting with her . . . ? Who is this Isabel Ortiz—where does she live and what does she follow for a living?” And among his notes about issues to bring before the court, Brown wrote, “McKay has for a long time and still does keep live with and maintain a Woman of Spanish [descent] known as Isabel Ortiz the Mistress of a Dance House and house of ill fame in Jackson.” The attorney’s notes continued, arguing that if McKay “has incurred any losses since commencing his business of stable keeping . . . they have been lavished upon his said Mistress and not in payment of [his] debts.” Brown, then, planned to use the intimate relationship between Ortis and McKay as a way of discrediting McKay’s legal claims—not to mention his social claims to respectability. And Brown threw in Ortis’s status as a dance hall proprietor for good measure.54

  According to the argument Brown was going to make in court, McKay had squandered money on his “mistress” rather than losing it in legitimate business. Here Brown was disingenuous about who was keeping whom in this relationship, since it was Ortis who stayed afloat while McKay sank deeper into debt. But the attorney’s argument would have been an effective one among the Anglo American men who heard it in court: a white man ought to remain master of his own resources and not spend those resources recklessly on a “mistress” of “Spanish” descent. What was the point of the military and economic conquest of California, whereby Anglo American men asserted dominance over Spanish Mexican men, if Latin American women could turn around and exact tribute from Anglo men with impunity?55 By taking Ortis to court, then, Brown drew her into an arena of power that could re-create her as a representative of a cultural category—a “kept” woman of “Spanish” descent, the “mistress” of a notorious fandango. Thus categorized, she could be dismissed.

  It is not clear from the historical record what happened to Isabel Ortis. But she may have met her match in Armsted Brown. According to a local historian, Brown was not only a prominent lawyer but also “an inveterate buyer of real estate.” Indeed, when fire swept through Jackson in 1862, four years after Ortis and McKay tangled with him in court, Brown lost thirty separate properties in town. A native of Missouri but an emigrant from the lead mining districts of Wisconsin, Brown arrived in 1849 at the camp that would become the town of Jackson. Soon thereafter, he returned to Wisconsin for his wife, Philippa, a native of Cornwall, and their six offspring; they would have five more children as well. The Browns were one of the first white families in town. A Whig who turned Democrat when the Whig Party collapsed, Armsted Brown held public office in the town, county, and state off and on throughout his life. Deep pockets, family ties, legal skills, political power: this was not a happy combination to find in an Anglo neighbor if one was a Mexican or Chilean fandango manager trying to hold on to one’s livelihood in the Southern Mines. Indeed, the arrival of people like the Browns presaged the end of an era. Whatever happened to Isabel Ortis in the short term, then, the long-term outcome is clear enough. Left standing after the 1862 fire in Jackson was the Browns’ impressive two-story brick home built atop the town’s most prominent hill. One can still visit that home today; it is now the Amador County Museum, which preserves official collective memory of Jackson and its environs. Armsted and Philippa Brown are remembered there; Isabel Ortis and the hapless John McKay are not.56

  For every Isabel Ortis in Jackson and every Emilie Henry in Mariposa, there must have been dozens of Mexican, Chilean, and French women in the Southern Mines who worked in fandangos, saloons, and brothels without owning or operating them. Dancing with men, dealing them cards, servicing their bodies—these were not easy ways to make a living, and each grew more difficult as the 1850s progressed. Consider, for instance, the problems Laura Echeverria faced in Sonora. She had married Juan Echeverria there in 1851. It is unclear from the historical record where Laura and Juan grew up, though evidence suggests that Juan came from Monterey County in California, where he worked a rancho near Mission San Juan Bautista. Laura and Juan did not stay together long. By 1852, Laura was on her own in Sonora. In 1857, she sued for divorce, claiming that Juan, though he was worth at least $4,000, had failed to provide for her. Juan countered that since their separation he had given Laura some $6,000, which she, in turn, had “squandered in dissipation.”57

  Those who testified on Laura’s and Juan’s behalf, respectively, fell in behind them. Several men backed Juan up, arguing that he had given Laura money out of the proceeds of livestock he had sold and that he had allowed her to collect rent on properties he owned in Sonora as well. When asked why Laura and Juan separated, a man named Pedro, who may have worked for Juan, answered bluntly, “I believe it was the woman’s fault.” Pedro acknowledged, however, that Laura had lost her livelihood when the reform bug bit the Southern Mines, explaining that “she dealt [cards at the Long Tom Saloon] until the gaming law was enforced.” Another man, named Bartolomé, was scandalized when he saw Laura with a child that could not have been Juan’s: “I told her at the time that she was in for it,” he said. According to Bartolomé, Laura retorted “that she was young and could not live without a man.”58

  Some of the men and all of the women who testified took a more charitable view of Laura. They insisted that she had worked hard in the years she had been on her own, sometimes taking in washing and sewing, sometimes keeping a restaurant, sometimes working in a dance hall, sometimes selling “cold suppers” at the Long Tom Saloon, and sometimes dealing cards there. One of her coworkers at the dance
hall was a French woman named Anne Lyons. Anne explained how Laura’s work life had evolved since the Echeverrias’ separation, which occurred while Laura was pregnant: “In 1851,” Anne testified, Laura was “in a family way, and she was cooking at her sister’s house.” Anne continued, with markedly French syntax, “after [Laura’s] confinement she was during two months sick. I lent her then two hundred dollars. She went over to the [L]ong [T]om and used to make up cold suppers; afterwards she was washing and sewing and afterwards she has worked with me for a long time.”59 As this testimony suggests, French, Mexican, and Chilean women struggled to earn a living, moving back and forth from work in the domestic marketplace to work in commercialized leisure to work in their own households. They also relied on one another—female relatives and fellow employees, women from their homelands and women from half a world away. Indeed, when Laura Echeverria was “in a family way” and after she gave birth, not only her sister but a French coworker stepped in to help.

  The women who testified on Laura’s behalf during the divorce bristled at the lawyers’ questions. Rose Cartier, for example, had been Laura’s employer. When asked “what kind of business” she ran, the French woman replied simply, “I keep an establishment in Sonora.” Only when pressed would she say that the business was a “Dance house and bar room.” When asked what kind of work Laura had done at the Long Tom Saloon, Anne Lyons answered that Laura prepared meals there. When asked if Laura also gambled, Anne retorted, “I do not know as I have never been inside a gambling house.” When asked what kind of business went on at the Long Tom, among the most notorious gaming saloons in Sonora, Anne claimed not to know. Most obstreperous, however, was Laura’s sister, Matilda, who was angry both with her brother-in-law Juan and with the attorneys attending the divorce case. Matilda insisted that her sister was often ill and that Juan “never contributed to her support at those times.” Instead, Matilda said, she herself labored to support Laura and Laura’s child, until Laura’s health improved and the sisters were able to work together. When Laura asked Juan for money, Matilda fumed, Juan told his wife that “she might make tortillas to maintain herself.” Disgusted, Matilda explained how hard the sisters had worked to support themselves. When asked if Laura gambled, Matilda acknowledged that Laura had “had a bank” but claimed that Laura “never bet herself,” adding, “that was the only mode she had of maintaining herself in Sonora.” When asked if this was a monte bank, Matilda rejoined, “I don’t know. I never paid any attention to it. I don’t recollect.” And when pressed to reveal her own occupation, she shot back, “That has nothing to do with my sister’s affairs. It is nobody’s business.”60

  The exasperation these women felt is palpable in their exchanges with the lawyers who handled the Echeverrias’ divorce. Their anger is not hard to understand. Here were well-heeled Anglo men putting non-Anglo women’s work lives under a magnifying glass, arching an eyebrow at all they saw. Perhaps the attorneys themselves were patrons of Rose Cartier’s dance hall and the Long Tom Saloon. Perhaps they were not. But it would have been easy for the women to see these men as representing a cultural category, the existence of which had once assured Spanish- and French-speaking women of a livelihood. Anglo men in and around Sonora had been among the best customers of local saloons and fandangos. Now some such men—no doubt backed by their womenfolk—threatened to bring about Mexican, Chilean, and French women’s dispossession. All Gold Rush participants had the power to re-create others as representatives of cultural categories. But, more and more, that power was working disproportionately to the benefit of Anglo Americans.

  Indeed, it would only be a matter of time before women such as Laura Echeverria, Rose Cartier, Isabel Ortis, and Emilie Henry would drift away from the Southern Mines altogether. Gold Rush social relations persisted into the 1860s, but they began to be overshadowed by a new social order as early as 1852, when the Sonora Herald wrote approvingly of the city ordinance that prohibited fandangos. The arrival of women such as Mary Newell, Clementine Brainard, Elizabeth Gunn, and Lorena Hays presaged the changes. At the same time, the divorces of women such as Chloe Cooper, Mary Jane Anderson, and Mary Ann Hayes, who accused their husbands of keeping company with Mexican and Chilean women in the late 1850s, show just how protracted the struggle was between older and newer styles of heterosocial relations in this multiracial, multiethnic social world. It was protracted in part because white, middle-class women, perceived as those who both inspired and benefited from reform, were few in number; because white men were ambivalent about whether change should even occur; and because a handful of white women themselves rather liked the old order, which gave them intimate access to a wide range of lonely men. Just as important, however, was the will of Spanish- and French-speaking women to earn a living in the context of conquest.61 The avenues that many of them followed—owning, managing, and working in dance halls, gambling saloons, and brothels—were wide open in the initial gold boom, and they narrowed only gradually over the course of the 1850s. It was not easy work and it would not last forever; but then neither would much of what constituted Gold Rush labor. Casa de los Amigos down in Stockton, Sonora’s Long Tom Saloon, the fandango Isabel Ortis ran in Jackson, Madame Clement’s saloon in Mariposa—for a time, these were places where California gold found its way out of the hands of men from around the world and into the hands of women from Mexico, Chile, and France. When these buildings closed their doors, just as surely as when the placers pinched out, the Gold Rush was over.62

  Sometimes you could even see it happening. One fall day in 1858, a stage driver came to the office of a Stockton newspaper with word of a fire that had just ravaged the main street of Jamestown, near Sonora in Tuolumne County. It began, the driver said, “in an unoccupied building formerly used as a fandango house.” The blaze spread quickly down both sides of the street, consuming all but the small number of fireproof structures. Many of the buildings that burned were hastily constructed wooden saloons. Next door to the boarded fandango house, however, was a dwelling that was still occupied. A woman lived there, the stage driver said, and when the fire started, she rushed out into the street with a trunk containing $3,000. In the fright and confusion that followed, the trunk was spirited away. According to the driver, many believed that whoever stole the trunk had anticipated all of this, that “the fire was started with the view of having the money thus exposed.”63 The historical record reveals nothing else about this woman. But it would not be far-fetched to imagine that she had worked in the fandango, or maybe in one of the saloons that burned nearby. Her earnings neatly stored in a trunk, perhaps she was hoping to leave the diggings with assets for a new life. The fire would have destroyed those dreams. Most women did not end their careers in the Southern Mines in so dramatic a fashion, but a fandango in flames was surely a sign of the times.

  In the end, Anglo American, middle-class people did not succeed in ridding the diggings of commercialized forms of leisure in which men purchased proximity to women. Increasingly, though, the work done in that leisure sphere was performed not by self-supporting Mexican, Chilean, and French women but by indentured and enslaved Chinese women, who reaped little direct benefit from their labor. Indeed, at the same moment that French- and Spanish-speaking women were riding west in stagecoaches bound for Stockton or Sacramento en route to San Francisco, Cantonese-speaking women were riding east up into the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. By 1860, almost 450 Chinese women lived in the four counties that constituted the Southern Mines, roughly 4.5 percent of the Chinese population.64 While a handful of these women may have been servants or merchants’ wives, most worked as prostitutes. The lives of Chinese women engaged in sexual commerce, then, serve as part of a coda to stories of transformation in the Southern Mines during the 1850s. White spectatorship of two other sets of social practices complete the postscript. In the first, Chinese men faced off against each other in armed conflict. In the second, groups of Miwoks paraded into immigrant settlements, making music and dancing for townspeople, a
nd collecting cash on the side. On the one hand, these three final topics suggest just how deeply entrenched forms of Anglo power had become in the Southern Mines by the late 1850s. On the other hand, each demonstrates how incomplete and unstable any such relations of domination remained, so long as a will to both survival and dignity existed among those with less access to power.

  First, then, the world of Chinese sexual commerce: historians have demonstrated that Chinese women who sold sex for cash exercised far less control over their labor and earnings than did other women employed in Gold Rush leisure establishments, including non-Chinese prostitutes. Many died on the job, stricken by sexually transmitted disease or cut down by violence at the hands of clients or employers. Cantonese-speaking women also came to California under circumstances different from those of most of their menfolk. Chinese men often emigrated independently or under the credit-ticket system, whereby a man repaid the cost of travel out of the money he earned in the diggings. In contrast, most Chinese women arrived in San Francisco already indentured or enslaved. Secret societies, or tongs, which had roots in underground, antigovernment movements in South China, emerged in California as the major organizers of Chinese prostitution. It was a profitable business for procurers, importers, and brothel owners, if not for prostitutes. In any given year, for example, a brothel owner could make much more money off an individual woman’s labor than a male Chinese worker could hope to earn. It followed, then, that Chinese prostitutes lived under strict surveillance and control.65