Roaring Camp

by Susan Lee Johnson

  Many Gold Rush participants were accustomed to the gaze of those who held greater social, cultural, economic, and political power in the Southern Mines. That gaze could, as in the case of white men who watched Chinese battles, dehumanize; it could also exoticize, fetishize, and romanticize. Sometimes, people who were the objects of such scrutiny could profit thereby, thus becoming subjects of their own survival. Spanish- and French-speaking women who worked in saloons, dance halls, and brothels were among these Gold Rush participants. So were a significant number of native people. As early as 1853, small groups of Indians dressed in ceremonial regalia began occasionally to file into immigrant towns, where they danced and made music for passersby. The native performers collected coins from the immigrant spectators, and then filed back out of town. One of the first recorded of such events took place at Mokelumne Hill in September of 1853, around the time of the acorn harvest. Miwoks were meeting about a mile away from that town for a grand celebration, and while some Indians prepared a campsite for the gathering, a local newspaper reported, “a band of nine came into town and performed a dance through the streets.” Each dancer sported body paint and a feather headdress and carried a wand decorated with feathers, bones, shells, or beads. One played a whistle that sounded to white listeners like “the sharpening of a saw heard in the distance,” and to this music the others “performed a dance, their motions being quick and well-timed.” After each dance, they “passed round a hat . . . and obtained liberal contributions.”89

  This image of Miwok dancers on Washington Street in Sonora may date from as late as the 1880s, but the Miwok practice of dancing in immigrant towns began in the late Gold Rush era. Craig D. Bates, curator of ethnography for the National Park Service Museum in Yosemite National Park, first reproduced this image in “Miwok Dancers of 1856: Stereographic Images from Sonora, California,” Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology 6, no. 1 (1984), but has since learned that the image may have been made later.

  Courtesy of the Yosemite National Park Research Library, National Park Service.

  Newspaper accounts of such events are rare, but immigrants who later wrote about their Gold Rush experiences frequently recalled native performances. White children seem to have been especially impressed by what they saw. Anna Lee Marston, the daughter of Sonora’s reform-minded couple, Elizabeth and Lewis Gunn, was only eight years old when her family left the diggings for San Francisco in 1861. But one of her most vivid memories from an early childhood in the mines was of Miwoks dancing in front of her house: “They wore high feather head-dresses and had grotesque stripes painted on their chests, and would grunt and dance and whistle through long reeds until we threw down some dimes.”90 George Bernhard, the son of a German storekeeper at Upper Agua Fria, in Mariposa County, grew up there in the late 1850s and early 1860s. Like Marston, Bernhard recalled later in life,

  Twice a year 25 or 30 [Indian] men & women with their face striped red & blue the squaws had black rings in their ears & nose . . . visited all of the towns, they would form a circle in front of the store 5 or 6 had tin pans or wash basins they would beat them with a stick then 3 or 4 others would get into the [center] of the ring & dance up and down & sing. . . . if there were any miners at the store they would toss them [coins]. . . . they would keep this up for an hour, then go to Princeton, Mt. Ophir, Bear Valley & Hornitos.91

  One New Englander who was an adult during the Gold Rush, living at Murphys in Calaveras County, had similar memories. Leonard Noyes wrote that every so often, eight or ten Indians decked out in paint and feathers would “get in a line and run blowing [reed] whistles . . . arround from one Mining Camp to another occasionaly comeing to a stop and chanting some mornefull song of theirs.” Then the performers would collect contributions before heading off to the next town. Noyes recalled that he “never learned why” his native neighbors did this.92

  Indians probably did this to help supplement their dwindling means of subsistence, just as they had taken up placer mining.93 Animal populations that Miwok people relied on for food had diminished drastically since the Gold Rush began, and immigrant mines, roads, and towns had proliferated across customary grounds for gathering wild greens, seeds, and nuts. In response, Sierra Miwok people—among whom lived former mission Indians as well as refugees from disease in the Central Valley—began to purchase food and other supplies from immigrant settlements. Placer mining provided much of the cash Indians needed to buy beef when they could not hunt deer and flour when they could not gather acorns. Dancing for immigrant audiences provided even more money.

  Miwoks must have realized early on that immigrant peoples would pay to watch common native cultural practices. Leonard Noyes thought that Indians who lived around Murphys learned this when they saw their first traveling circus in 1854. They were especially taken with the elephant, which they called the “animal with a tail at each end,” but they also noted that immigrants paid admission to see the spectacle. Afterward, the Miwoks held a large gathering for which they built a round assembly house, a semisubterranean structure supported by posts and beams and covered with thatch and earth in which people danced and gambled. According to Noyes, the “Young Indians taking the que from what they had seen at the circus concluded to make something out of the show so they stationed themselves at the opening demanding 2 bits each admittance, saying white man all same as Indian 2 [bits].” White men apparently paid the price, but when a native person entered, he or she handed over the cash and then, once inside, sent another Indian back out with the money so that the fee could be passed on to another native participant.94 Thus in this instance, Miwoks in Calaveras County used market-based relations with outsiders to their own advantage without at the same time substantially altering ceremonial and social practices for themselves.95

  Performing for audiences in immigrant towns represented a more profound accommodation to gold-based social relations than this, since it removed native dances from native communities altogether. Nonetheless, such performances seem to have been infrequent; George Bernhard remembered seeing only two a year, and Leonard Noyes recalled that Indians filed into town to dance and sing only “at times.”96 And native people controlled the location, timing, and content of the events; this was a far cry from taking up wage labor in immigrant homes or industries. Furthermore, photographic evidence suggests that the dancers may have dressed in a manner that changed key parts of Miwok ceremonial regalia. This would have neutralized the sanctity of their costumes when they performed for non-native peoples, whose gaze might otherwise have disrupted the power of Miwok ritual practices.97 So while Miwok street dances represented deeper accommodations to changes underway in the foothills, they also represented astute perceptions of those changes. The white gaze might dehumanize, exoticize, fetishize, or romanticize, but it was clear to Indians that white people would put money where their eyes wanted to be, just as it was clear that human life in the Sierra foothills now required money. Sierra Miwoks understood, then, what immigrants such as George Bernhard thought about watching Indians dance in the street: “We kids enjoyed it,” he wrote later in life, “it was as good as a Nigger Minstrel or a Circus to us.”98 That Indians acted on such racialized understandings, as older ways of maintaining communities began to fail, is hardly surprising.

  By the late 1850s, social relations in the Southern Mines had metamorphosed to accommodate the presence of new Gold Rush participants, the departure of others, and the continuing needs and desires of those who stayed on in the foothills. White women and Chinese women and men were among the latest arrivals. Mexicans, Chileans, and French—and especially the women—were among those who were starting to leave. So too were a wide variety of men frustrated by the declining placers and flush with the promise of bonanzas elsewhere. Other men stayed, convinced that veins, gravels, and placers would yet yield still greater treasures, or that profits were possible in different pursuits. Miwok women and men lingered as well, perhaps hoping that the decade-long invasion of the foothills by immigr
ants might somehow reverse. An Indian man whom Anglos in Amador County knew as Captain Jack, for example, told a white acquaintance in 1858 that he thought the Fraser River rush could depopulate the town of Jackson. The newspaperman who recounted Jack’s story did so with all the arrogance and condescension of those accustomed to uncontested narrative power.99 Rendering Captain Jack’s speech using diction that reflected white imagination as much as Indian utterance, the newspaperman nonetheless conveyed something of Miwok dreams: “Purty soon white man vamose—Ingin git him big house, heap grub, plenty blanket! White man vamose Frazer river!”100

  White men, along with their womenfolk, had different dreams, as well as disproportionate access to the power that could make those dreams come true. That power increased manyfold when white women from the eastern United States began to join their menfolk in the mines and set about supplanting with “respectable” gatherings popular recreations that had catered to men and provided work for polyglot women. As early as 1853, the Sonora Herald noted the increasing numbers of “the gentler sex dispersed among the hill-sides and ravines,” as evidenced by the “female habilements in many directions hanging out to dry.”101 Like flags flying, such recognizably white women’s garments announced a consolidation of Anglo American dominance in the diggings.

  By 1856, the picture seemed even more promising. When white miners, white merchants, and white managers of the Columbia and Stanislaus River Water Company (CSRWC) allied themselves to ward off what they saw as the monopolistic threat posed by the Tuolumne County Water Company (TCWC), they produced a booklet entitled the Miners and Business Men’s Directory for Tuolumne County.102 It was filled with advertisements, mining districts laws, names of governmental representatives and community organizations, as well as lists of all who counted as “miners and business men.” The directory studiously avoided mentioning the TCWC—even though that company’s system of flumes, ditches, and reservoirs represented the county’s greatest business enterprise—and shamelessly promoted the interests of the CSRWC.103 In addition, the Miners and Business Men’s Directory included narratives detailing the history and prospects of camps and towns throughout the county. The narrative for Columbia—home of the reform-minded Clementine Brainard as well as the monte-dealing “French Mary”—was particularly revealing of Anglo American aspirations:

  This place is fast filling up with families—a surety of a permanent population and of improvement in society. The barberous amusements, introduced by Spanish customs, have long since ceased to disturb the peace of the community, while other Spanish customs that tend so much to the spread and continuance of immorality are fast dying, and in a short time will only be known as things that belonged to the past. The gambling saloon no longer, by its music, attracts the unsophisticated to squander their money on “dead things,” and those who were connected with such houses have gone to other parts, or sought other occupations. . . . And as the Mexican population, and the class that are ever congregated around gambling houses are removed from our midst, the security of life and property may be soon considered equal to that afforded in most places in the older States.104

  Things that belonged to the past; things that belonged to the future: the editors of the Miners and Business Men’s Directory were hopeful that “Spanish customs” and Mexican people, rowdy gambling saloons and the monopolistic TCWC were all of the past, and that (white) families, secure property, and the CSRWC “Miners’ Ditch” were all of the future. Things that belonged to the past were “dead things.” Things that belonged to the future were alive. Already, the editors noted, forward-looking residents were planting fruit trees and vines around homes and ranches. It would not be long, the writers predicted, “before most of our citizens will sit under their own vines and fig trees, with none to molest them or make them afraid.”105

  The Miners and Business Men’s Directory was wrong about much: neither “Spanish customs” nor Mexican people nor French monte dealers disappeared so easily, and even where they did begin to depart, “Chinese customs” and Chinese people often stood in their stead. What is more, gambling saloons and the TCWC maintained a robust health throughout the rest of the decade, while the CSRWC collapsed. And women, on whom the increase of conventional families depended, still constituted less than one-fifth of the population as late as 1860. But white women and men together did begin to turn much of the Southern Mines into a place where few dared to “molest them or make them afraid.” What they could not create was a world in which, for example, no Chinese woman would fly “American colors,” straining the links among ladyhood, whiteness, and morality, and rattling the social, economic, and discursive chains that bound their own lives. Neither could immigrants prevent Indians from learning the economy of conquest and turning that knowledge to sustenance. Nor could Anglo Americans deflect the stray bullets that now and then knocked them unceremoniously off their high horse.

  Epilogue

  Telling Tales

  In the 1990s, a travel writer for the New York Times encouraged readers to visit the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. Her article, “Exploring the Mother Lode,” begins with a spare but serviceable two-sentence history of the California Gold Rush:

  In 1848, a carpenter named James Marshall noticed flecks of gold shining in the tailrace of the sawmill he was building for John Sutter on the American River in California. Though the discovery did neither Marshall nor Sutter any good, it spurred tens of thousands of fortune hunters to struggle by land and sea, hoping to find its riverbeds strewn with the stuff of dreams.

  The author goes on to assure her readers that now anyone can visit this land of dreams, “with less discomfort,” by taking a three-day tour along California’s Highway 49, which traverses the gold region. She recommends that tourists restrict themselves to the northern half of the highway, since it “offers a greater concentration of mining sites, museums and Victorian architecture.” The southern half, she explains, “is the least densely populated part of the gold country,” with the exception of the state park at the reconstructed town of Columbia and the modern county seats at Mariposa and Sonora. With the Southern Mines dispatched in two sentences (save a brief mention of towns in Amador County, which has always straddled the divide between north and south), the author goes on to detail the historical, technological, and architectural sites that dot the northern Mother Lode.1

  Why are the Northern Mines so memorable, the Southern Mines so forgettable? It is my contention that the Southern Mines have been neglected because the area fits dominant cultural memory of the Gold Rush—as it has evolved in the United States—less well. First, the south was by far the more demographically diverse region, in that Native Americans, Latin Americans, African Americans, East Asians, and Europeans frequently outnumbered Anglo Americans there. Second, it was the area that was less successful in following what came to be the expected trajectory of industrialization in western mining. The unruly history of the Southern Mines has proven more difficult to enlist in American narratives of success, stories of progress and opportunity that are linked to financial gain and identified with people racialized as white and gendered as male. An adequate account of the century-and-a-half-long process by which dominant cultural memories have evolved and have been contested by countermemories could easily fill another book about the California Gold Rush. But an account of the origins of those discursive struggles must start here—else one key purpose of the layering of historical particularities in the preceding chapters will go unrealized.

  At the same time that social relations in the Southern Mines were changing in the 1850s, dominant meanings of the California Gold Rush were beginning to take shape. Although these were contemporaneous developments, the meaning-making process that occurred on a national level in the United States almost guaranteed that social change in the Southern Mines would not capture eastern imaginations, and hence would not figure in a reimagined, now continental American nation.2 Close readings of four texts published during and just after this period show ho
w lived social relations in the Southern Mines, popular representations of the Gold Rush, and the project of nation building were interrelated. The first two texts—both obscure and each superficially similar to the other—illustrate the start of this interrelationship. These are pamphlets produced in the 1850s that purport to document crime and its consequences in the Southern Mines. The second two texts—well-known stories written in the 1860s by California’s premier teller of tales, Bret Harte—are more tangentially related to the historical past of the Southern Mines. But the direction of those tangents indicates much about the process by which the United States claimed the Gold Rush as cultural property over and against the claims of other nations, and by which some Americans asserted ownership over and against the proprietary rights of other Americans.