Roaring Camp

by Susan Lee Johnson

  What sort of situation could lead a woman to carry a fetus to term, only to smother the baby after birth? We do not know, of course, that the mother killed the infant. But with death following so quickly after birth, the mother seems a likely suspect. There is no record by which we can assess individual motivation, but there is copious evidence of the parameters within which a person would have made choices in 1858. A pregnant woman, probably unmarried, living at this moment faced overwhelming constraints. First, she lived in an economic world that provided few opportunities for a woman to support even herself, to say nothing of a child. Second, she lived in a social and cultural world in which married, middle-class women from the eastern United States were increasingly setting the standards for acceptable behavior. These two constraints were intertwined. The arrival of married, middle-class women also brought an assault on some of the work—dealing cards, pouring drinks, selling sex—most readily available to unmarried women, further narrowing economic opportunities. Third—if the woman was, in fact, Chilean—she lived in a place where the number of Chileans was shrinking, not growing, and where there was now a decade of bad blood between her people and Anglo Americans. Finally, whatever this woman was facing, it seems likely that she was facing it on her own, that the man who fathered the baby had, as Anglo miners liked to put it, “vamosed.” Under such circumstances, nurturing an infant and then raising a daughter might well have seemed an impossible task.

  There is little else in the historical record to help us link these details together into a story. But there is one other piece of information we can glean from the Calaveras County inquest report: the baby from Murphys Flat was thrown in a mining shaft. Again, we have no direct evidence of the meaning a mother might have attached to such an act. But tossing a baby’s body down a mining shaft seems a grim commentary on a historical moment that has come to be as celebrated as the California Gold Rush. We cannot know for sure the nature of this commentary any more than we can know for sure who committed this act. But it seems safe to suggest that the act did not constitute a compliment—to the father of the child, to men who were miners, to the Gold Rush itself. The depth of meaning embedded in a woman’s gruesome decision to throw her infant daughter’s dead body down a shaft toward the Mother Lode, la veta madre, is equal to anything we can plumb in a Bret Harte story.

  But if I show that a document as thin as an inquest, when examined through the thick lens of historical context, can yield a past as richly textured as that portrayed in any great American short story, then I may seem to be straying from a commitment I made many pages ago—a commitment to write within the tension between history and memory rather than trying to resolve it. This was what I did when I told the tale of Joaquín Murrieta and Rosa Felíz de Murrieta, who are figures of memory just as surely as they are figures of history. Now I may seem to be saying that history tells better stories than memory because historians use documents and tell the truth while writers of fiction lie about our collective past. In fact, however, I offer my history as food for memory, and make only modest truth claims about the past I have constructed herein. In these final pages, I purposely have explored historical documents that are frustratingly fragmented, in order to turn back to my initial arguments—arguments that are not mine alone—about the similarity between the work of history and the work of memory. History and memory alike begin with fragments, with filaments, and then weave those filaments together into a fabric of the past intelligible to human eyes in the present. That fabric may not always be pretty, but if it is to be preserved, it must be useful. Because as human beings, we insist on wrapping ourselves in the mantle of the past; we warm our feet at old fires. If academic history and collective memory alike arise out of an impulse to know ourselves in the present by knowing our past, then there is little good to be gained by setting one way of knowing over or against the other.40

  Nonetheless, I do believe that historians have a key contribution to make to our collective project, a distinctive dish to bring to the table. Historical perspectives on the workings of memory are crucial. Take, for example, Bret Harte’s fiction, which for a century and a half has constituted square one for popular memory of the California Gold Rush in the United States. As such, it demands our attention, for it demonstrates who certain Americans have imagined themselves to be—particularly Americans who are white and male or who at least aspire to such social categories of dominance. It also yields clues about how the American nation itself has been conceived. In “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” Sandy and Stumpy and Kentuck need no modifiers attached to their monikers; we assume they are white and American and male, quintessential Gold Rush participants. (Cherokee) Sal and (French) Pete and (Kanaka) Joe are, quite literally, other stories, other narratives, other nations. Harte’s fiction, then, does not tell us much of anything about the people whom quintessential Gold Rush participants—quintessential Americans—have imagined themselves not to be.41 After all, one can rummage around in stories such as “The Luck of Roaring Camp” only just so long searching for the shadow story of people who were not white and American and male. The tales of Sal and Joe and Pete remain embedded in solid rock, no matter how one tries to crush it and get at the gold. This is because it was not Harte’s intention to make of Gold Rush gender and race relations much more than a quirky, colorful background to high-spirited portraits of Anglo American men.42 Historians, however, can help turn backgrounds into foregrounds, portraits of individuals into pictures of crowds—now contending, now cooperating, now careening into artistic and political spaces heretofore unimagined.

  But we must also ask for help, not only from one another but from all creators of collective memory—who are often better tellers of tales than are academic historians. We must turn in particular to those who are producing countermemories, stories and images and built environments doing battle with dominant narratives that reinscribe social inequities. My own understanding of California’s Southern Mines, for example, has been informed not only by the work of countless other scholars but by sites of countermemory that I have visited or attended or otherwise encountered.43 One of these was a gathering held in 1991 in what was once Nisenan country but is now Marshall Gold Discovery State Historic Park—the spot where white and native workers for John Sutter found gold in 1848. The gathering was called “Return to Gold Mountain: A Chinese American Pioneer Festival,” and its purpose was both to rededicate two Chinese buildings in the park and to educate Californians about the earliest Chinese immigrants to the state. This was the first-ever commemoration of Chinese participation in the Gold Rush held in what is now called the gold country, and it took more ethnic Chinese up into the foothills than had been there for over a hundred years.44 Another of these sites of countermemory is the Del Rey Mural, a panel painted by the Chicano muralist Antonio Bernal in 1968 on the wall of the United Farm Workers’ Teatro Campesino Cultural Center. The six-by-fifteen-foot painting features eight leaders, historical and contemporary, held in esteem by participants in the Chicano movement of the 1960s. The two central figures in the mural are Cesar Chávez, leader of the United Farm Workers, and Joaquín Murrieta, scourge of the Southern Mines.45 Yet another site of countermemory is Chaw’se, or Indian Grinding Rock State Historic Park, near Jackson in Amador County. This remarkable site, which is built around an outcrop of rock where native women once ground acorns, was constructed in part by Sierra foothill Indians in the late 1960s. It features both an indoor museum and an outdoor park with a reconstructed Miwok village from times past. The site includes a ceremonial roundhouse and gathering places for contemporary native people; each fall, for example, witnesses a “Big Time” celebration that marks the customary time of the acorn harvest.46 These sites of countermemory offer up a Gold Rush that cannot just be grafted onto dominant collective memory, for they both people and plot the past anew. They offer a past in which all are repositioned; at the same time, they embody a hope for a more just and equitable future.

  As we begin the second century and
a half since the California Gold Rush began, we would do well to recognize that we live in an era of concentrated human diversity and congealed human inequity not wholly unlike that faced by gold seekers a hundred and fifty years ago, especially in the region that was known as the Southern Mines. There is so much that we have not yet learned from the Gold Rush. If we can remember it differently, perhaps we can use that memory to different ends.

  Notes

  Prologue: Joaquín Murrieta and the Bandits

  1. Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations, no. 26 (Spring 1989): 7–25, esp. 19. This is the introduction to Nora’s multivolume collaborative work on French collective memory, Les Lieux de mémoire (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1984–), which has been translated as Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1996–). I am grateful to Dorothy Fujita Rony for conversations and suggested readings on history and memory.

  2. Charles Howard Shinn, Mining Camps: A Study in American Frontier Government, ed. Rodman Wilson Paul (1884; reprint, Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1970); Josiah Royce, California, from the Conquest in 1846 to the Second Vigilance Committee in San Francisco: A Study of American Character (1886; reprint, Santa Barbara: Peregrine, 1970); Rodman W. Paul, California Gold: The Beginning of Mining in the Far West (1947; reprint, Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1965); John Walton Caughey, The California Gold Rush (1948; reprint, Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1975) (originally titled Gold Is the Cornerstone); J. S. Holliday, The World Rushed In: The California Gold Rush Experience (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981); Ralph Mann, After the Gold Rush: Society in Grass Valley and Nevada City, California, 1849–1870 (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1982); David Goodman, Gold Seeking: Victoria and California in the 1850s (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1994); and Malcolm J. Rohrbough, Days of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the American Nation (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1997).

  3. Natalie Zemon Davis and Randolph Starn, “Introduction,” Special Issue: Memory and Counter–Memory, Representations, no. 26 (Spring 1989): 1–6, esp. 5. Cf. David Thelen, “Memory and American History,” Special Issue: Memory and American History, Journal of American History 75, no. 4 (March 1989): 1117–29. More recently, the American Historical Review published a forum on history and collective memory, with articles by Susan A. Crane, Alon Confino, and Daniel James. James’s essay, “Meatpackers, Peronists, and Collective Memory: A View from the South,” advances the arguments most relevant to my concerns here. See American Historical Review 102, no. 5 (Dec. 1997): 1371–412, esp. 1404–12.

  4. On the gold regions, see Paul, 91–115.

  5. Writings on Joaquín Murrieta are legion. For a succinct summary, see Stan Steiner’s entry in Reader’s Encyclopedia of the American West, ed. Howard R. Lamar (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 782–83; and the updated entry by Raul Ramos in The New Encyclopedia of the American West, ed. Howard Lamar (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1998), 748. The latest film rendition of the life of Murrieta is The Mask of Zorro (1998), starring Antonio Banderas as the brother of Joaquín. In this film, Murrieta is relocated in a vague Mexican-era California prior to the Gold Rush.

  6. Frank F. Latta, Joaquín Murrieta and His Horse Gangs (Santa Cruz, Calif.: Bear State Books, 1980). By far the most exhaustively researched account of Murrieta—Latta traveled extensively in the state of Sonora interviewing Murrieta associates and descendants, and he carefully studied written records as well—this book lacks the scholarly apparatus of footnotes and bibliography and is organized and written in a manner many academics will find exasperating. For its oral interviews alone, however, the book is worth the patience required to use it. Most of my references to this work are to information Latta gathered in interviews, though I have also made use of facsimile reproductions of documents therein.

  7. See Pedro Castillo and Albert Camarillo, eds., Furia y muerte: Los bandidos chicanos, Monograph no. 4 (Los Angeles: Aztlán Publications, Chicano Studies Center, Univ. of California, Los Angeles, 1973), esp. 32–51. Castillo and Camarillo draw on the formulation of social banditry developed in E. J. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movements in the 19th and 20th Centuries (New York: Praeger, 1959), and Bandits (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969). The argument in Furia y muerte has been developed in Robert J. Rosenbaum, Mexicano Resistance in the Southwest: “The Sacred Right of Self-Preservation” (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1981). For an excellent survey of the fate of Hobsbawm’s thesis in Latin American history, and for useful suggestions for future research, see Gilbert M. Joseph, “On the Trail of Latin American Bandits: A Reexamination of Peasant Resistance,” Latin American Research Review 25, no. 3 (1990): 3–53.

  8. Latta, esp. 145–50, 167, 186, 213, 215–16.

  9. Frank Latta, who gathered oral histories of Murrieta descendants from the 1920s through the 1970s, must also have had a hand in constructing this familial, male-oriented past.

  10. Latta, 208, 212–13. On the order in which the earliest emigrant groups reached the diggings, see Paul, 20–35; Caughey, 17–24; J. M. Guinn, “The Sonoran Migration,” Historical Society of Southern California Annual Publications 8 (1909–11): 31–36; Doris M. Wright, “The Making of Cosmopolitan California: An Analysis of Immigration, 1848–1870,” parts 1 and 2, California Historical Society Quarterly 19, no. 4 (Dec. 1940): 323–43, and 20, no. 1 (March 1941): 65–79; Richard H. Peterson, Manifest Destiny in the Mines: A Cultural Interpretation of Anti-Mexican Nativism in California, 1848–1853 (1965; rev. ed., San Francisco: R and E Research Associates, 1975), 24–31.

  11. Latta, esp. 177, 208, 212–14. On Mexican women emigrants, see, e.g., Paul, 26–27; Guinn, 32; Leonard Pitt, The Decline of the Californios: A Social History of the Spanish-Speaking Californians, 1846–1890 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1966), 72; William Perkins, Three Years in California: William Perkins’ Journal of Life at Sonora, 1849–1852, ed. Dale L. Morgan and James R. Scobie (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1964), 103–4, 130–31, 251, 268, 292.

  12. The Southern Mines were the first logical stopping point for emigrants traveling north from Mexico. Then, too, the Anglo majority in the Northern Mines early on became known as especially inhospitable to Spanish-speaking women and men, further encouraging Californios, Mexicans, Chileans, and Peruvians to concentrate in the southern region. See Paul, 106–15; Pitt, 48–68, 73–74; Dale M. Morgan and James R. Scobie, “Introduction,” in Perkins, 1–57, esp. 32; Sister Colette M. Standart, “The Sonoran Migration to California, 1848–1856: A Study in Prejudice,” Southern California Quarterly 58, no. 3 (Fall 1976): 333–57; Richard H. Peterson, “Anti-Mexican Nativism in California, 1848–1853: A Study of Cultural Conflict,” Southern California Quarterly 62, no. 4 (Winter 1980): 309–27, esp. 310.

  13. Walter Colton, Three Years in California (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1850), 276, 304.

  14. Paul, 54–55.

  15. At $16 an ounce, the gold would have been worth well over $3,000. Antonio Franco Coronel, “Cosas de California,” trans. and ed. Richard Henry Morefield, in The Mexican Adaptation in American California, 1846–1875 (1955; reprint, San Francisco: R and E Research Associates, 1971), 76–96, esp. 93–94. My thanks to Michael González for calling my attention to this translation of the original Coronel manuscript, which is at the Bancroft Library, Univ. of California, Berkeley.

  16. Perkins, 106; R. A. Appling to John, March 31, 1853, transcript in Appling Family File, Mariposa Museum and History Center, Mariposa, Calif.

  17. Perkins, 157–58, 268.

  18. Latta, 30, 145–50, 167, 178, 227. On Indian-Mexican relations, see Edward H. Spicer, Cycles of Conquest: The Impact of Spain, Mexico, and the United States on the Indians of the Southwest, 1533–1960 (Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press, 1962), 46–85 (Mayos and Yaquis), 105–17 (Seris), and 229–61 (Western Apaches). On how U.S. expansion exacerbated conditions in northern Mexico, see David J. Weber, “American Westward Exp
ansion and the Breakdown of Relations between Pobladores and ‘Indios Bárbaros’ on Mexico’s Far Northern Frontier,” New Mexico Historical Review 56, no. 3 (July 1981): 221–38, and The Mexican Frontier, 1821–1846: The American Southwest under Mexico (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1982), 83–105. On the relationship between these conditions and Sonoran emigration to California, see Standart.

  19. See Albert L. Hurtado, Indian Survival on the California Frontier (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1988).

  20. See Spicer, 279–367.

  21. These exclusionary and extortionate practices are detailed in chap. 4, “Mining Gold and Making War.” See also Pitt, 48–68, and “The Beginnings of Nativism in California,” Pacific Historical Review 30, no. 1 (Feb. 1961): 23–38; Morefield, Mexican Adaptation and “Mexicans in the California Mines, 1848–53,” California Historical Society Quarterly 35, no. 1 (March 1956): 37–46; William Robert Kenny, “Mexican-American Conflict on the Mining Frontier, 1848–1852,” Journal of the West 6, no. 4 (Oct. 1967): 582–92, and “Nativism in the Southern Mining Region of California,” Journal of the West 12, no. 1 (Jan. 1973): 126–38; Standart; Peterson, Manifest Destiny and “Anti-Mexican Nativism.”