84. Parins, 61–75; Wilkins, 343–44; E. Raymond Evans, “Following the Rainbow: The Cherokees in the California Gold Fields,” Journal of Cherokee Studies 2, no. 1 (Winter 1977): 170–75; and the documents in “The Cherokee Trail,” in Southern Trails to California in 1849, ed. Ralph P. Bieber (Glendale, Calif.: Arthur H. Clark, 1937), 325–50.
85. John Rollin Ridge to Stand Watie, Sept. 23, 1853, quoted in Evans, 172. Original in Frank Phillips Collection of Southwestern History, Univ. of Oklahoma, Norman.
86. Ridge, 7–12.
87. Walter Nobel Burns, The Robin Hood of El Dorado (New York: Coward-McCann, [1932]). See Joseph Henry Jackson, “The Creation of Joaquin Murieta,” Pacific Spectator 2, no. 2 (Spring 1948): 176–81, Bad Company, 3–40, and “Introduction,” in Ridge. Jackson carefully traces the proliferation of Murrieta tales, though his argument differs from my own, in that he contends that the development of the “myth” of Murrieta is proof positive that no “actual” Murrieta ever existed. My own emphasis is on the interplay between history and memory, rather than on an opposition between mythic and actual pasts. See also Hector H. Lee, “The Reverberant Joaquín Murieta in California Legendry,” Pacific Historian 25, no. 3 (Fall 1981): 39–47. On Hollywood’s Murrieta, see Allen L. Woll, “Hollywood Bandits, 1910–1981,” in Bandidos: The Varieties of Latin American Banditry, ed. Richard W. Slatta (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987), 171–79. There is something of a cottage industry in popular publications on Murrieta, which are sold especially in California gold country book and museum stores. See, e.g., William Secrest, Joaquin: Bloody Bandit of the Mother Lode (Fresno, Calif.: Sage-West Publishing, 1967); Remi Nadeau, The Real Joaquin Murieta: California’s Gold Rush Bandit: Truth v. Myth (Santa Barbara: Crest Publishers, 1974).
88. Mrs. Lee Whipple-Haslam, Early Days in California: Scenes and Events of the ‘50s as I Remember Them (Jamestown, Calif.: Mother Lode Magnet, [1925]), 13, 18. Portions of this account were reprinted recently in Ruth B. Moynihan et al., eds., So Much to Be Done: Women Settlers on the Mining and Ranching Frontier (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1990), 28–37.
89. Ridge, 158.
90. Ridge to Watie, and Ridge to Sarah Northrup Ridge, Oct. 5, 1855, quoted in Evans, 172–73. Originals in Frank Phillips Collection of Southwestern History, Univ. of Oklahoma, Norman.
91. See Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America (London: Verso, 1987), 3–4.
92. “Editor’s Preface,” in Ridge, 4
93. See Renato Rosaldo, “Imperialist Nostalgia,” Representations, no. 26 (Spring 1989): 107–22, esp. 107–8.
94. Earle Ennis, “My Grandfather Debunks Murietta, Who Was a Sissy,” San Francisco Chronicle, April 17, 1936. Ennis wrote a daily column for the Chronicle. For the Chronicle’s report on the opening of The Robin Hood of El Dorado in San Francisco, see “Wild Murietta to Live Again,” San Francisco Chronicle, April 21, 1936. My thanks to Katherine Morrissey for tracking these articles down for me when I did not have access to them.
95. Cf. Robert E. McGlone, “Rescripting a Troubled Past: John Brown’s Family and the Harpers Ferry Conspiracy,” Journal of American History 75, no. 4 (March 1989): 1179–200. When Raymond F. Wood tried to retrace some of Latta’s steps in Sonora several decades later, Wood found that many whom Latta had interviewed had died or moved away. Those who were left had much vaguer recollections of their connection with Joaquín Murrieta. See Wood, “New Light on Joaquin Murrieta,” Pacific Historian 14, no. 1 (Winter 1970): 54–65, esp. 63.
96. See Castillo and Camarillo; and cf. Rosenbaum. For an analysis of later critiques of this scholarly approach to banditry, see Joseph. For a thoughtful discussion of “social banditry” in the broader history of the U.S. West, see Richard White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 334–37.
97. I have benefited in this analysis from Michael M. J. Fischer, “Ethnicity and the Post-modern Arts of Memory,” in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1986), 194–233.
98. Rodolfo Gonzales, I Am Joaquín—Yo soy Joaquín: An Epic Poem (1967; reprint, New York: Bantam Books, 1972), esp. 6, 44, 100. For discussion, see Bruce-Novoa, Chicano Poetry: A Response to Chaos (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1982), 48–68; Julio A. Martínez and Francisco A. Lomelí, Chicano Literature: A Reference Guide (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985), 221–28; Marcienne Rocard, The Children of the Sun: Mexican-Americans in the Literature of the United States, trans. Edward G. Brown, Jr. (1980; Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press, 1989), 260–61.
99. An important aspect of ethnic memory not discussed here is the corrido, the Mexican cultural practice of narrative balladry. Not surprisingly, Murrieta is the hero of a particularly anti-American corrido. See Alfred Arteaga, “The Chicano-Mexican Corrido,” Journal of Ethnic Studies 13, no. 2 (Summer 1985): 75–105; and, for the corrido itself, John Donald Robb, Hispanic Folk Music of New Mexico and the Southwest: A Self-Portrait of a People (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1980), 165–66. The folklorist Hector Lee provides some preliminary notes on memory of Murrieta among California Mexican Americans in Lee, 45–46.
100. I may as well cite my own memory for this: while doing research between 1985 and 1990, I ran across numerous mentions of Murrieta, but seemed not to hold on to that information until I recalled a presentation on Castillo and Camarillo by Christine Marín in a graduate course during spring term 1980. The class on “frontier minorities” was taught by the historian Robert Trennert at Arizona State Univ., Tempe. Marín directs the Chicano Studies Collection at Arizona State’s Hayden Library, and I have benefited from her support of my work for many years.
101. Paul, e.g., discusses all three California gold regions (Northern, Southern, and northwestern mines), but the story he tells of technological innovations developed to exploit first placers, then deep gravels, then quartz veins, and the corresponding evolution of social and political institutions, is a story that describes the Northern Mines best of all. Two recent scholarly works on the Gold Rush, by Mann and Holliday, focus explicitly on the Northern Mines. I owe my interest in the Southern Mines to conversations with Howard Lamar, and in part to questions suggested by Jean-Nicolas Perlot, Gold Seeker: Adventures of a Belgian Argonaut during the Gold Rush Years, trans. Helen Harding Bretnor and ed. Howard R. Lamar (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1985).
102. I have developed these arguments in greater detail in “‘A Memory Sweet to Soldiers’: The Significance of Gender in the History of the ‘American West,’” Western Historical Quarterly 24, no. 4 (Nov. 1993): 495–517, reprinted in Clyde A. Milner II, ed., A New Significance: Re-envisioning the History of the American West (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996), 255–78. I use terms like “women,” “men,” and “people of color” advisedly here, understanding their constructed nature and wanting to avoid the essentializing impulse that often accompanies their uncritical use. A problem more specific to their use in this setting arises from the fact that some nondominant peoples in California were not peoples of color in the sense in which that term generally is understood at the turn of the twenty-first century. In the Southern Mines, e.g., French-speaking immigrants were also targeted by the foreign miners’ tax and sometimes allied themselves with Spanish-speaking miners in contesting Anglo dominance. My use of racial and ethnic labels is grounded in an understanding of how groups of people have been racialized and have racialized themselves in particular historical contexts. Other historians of western peoples and places have put this process of racialization at the center of their analysis. See, e.g., Lisbeth Haas, Conquests and Historical Identities in California, 1769–1936 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1995); Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1998). I also will have occasion to discuss a Calaveras County “hermaphrodite,” who represent
s only the most obvious challenge to dominant oppositions between male and female in the Gold Rush. Exemplary collections of articles on gender relations in other U.S. historical contexts include Ava Baron, ed., Work Engendered: Toward a New History of American Labor (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1991); Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber, eds., Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1992); and Margaret S. Creighton and Lisa Norling, eds., Iron Men, Wooden Women: Gender and Seafaring in the Atlantic World, 1700–1920 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1996).
103. I place this in quotation marks partly in deference to its use in another (though not entirely unrelated) context: see Nancy K. Miller, “Changing the Subject,” in Coming to Terms: Feminism, Theory, and Politics, ed. Elizabeth Weed (New York: Routledge, 1989), 3–16.
104. Important influences on my work here include Elsa Barkley Brown, “Polyrhythms and Improvization: Lessons for Women’s History,” History Workshop Journal 31–32 (1991): 85–90; Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, “African-American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race,” Signs 17, no. 2 (Winter 1992): 251–74; and Antonia I. Castañeda, “Women of Color and the Rewriting of Western History: The Discourse, Politics, and Decolonization of History,” Pacific Historical Review 61, no. 4 (Nov. 1992): 501–33.
105. Latta, 619–25.
106. Ibid., 619–22, 633–37, quotation on 636. Latta provides a plausible argument that the “compañero” was Joaquín Manuel Carillo Murrieta (half brother to Joaquín, El Famoso), known to Anglos as Joaquin Carillo. I am agnostic. See 633, 640, 643–48.
107. I have been influenced in my reading of Rosa’s constrained choices by the unsentimental analysis of widowhood in Deena J. González, “The Widowed Women of Santa Fe: Assessments on the Lives of an Unmarried Population, 1850–1880,” in Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women’s History, ed. Ellen Carol DuBois and Vicki L. Ruiz (New York: Routledge, 1990), 34–50 (first published in On Their Own: Widows and Widowhood in the American Southwest, 1848–1939, ed. Arlene Scadron [Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1988]), and, in my understanding of how women can live in critical dialogue with discourses of “honor,” by Abu-Lughod. I have also benefited from Sueann Caulfield’s helpful and generous comments on these issues.
Chapter 1: On the Eve of Emigration
1. Although I use the term “emigrant” here, since I am talking about the process of leaving homelands, for the most part I use the term “immigrant” in this study and I use it with a particular meaning. An “immigrant” is any non-native person in the Southern Mines, which is to say that people who came to California from elsewhere in the United States were “immigrants,” as surely as, e.g., French and Chilean Gold Rush participants were. All who came to the area in response to the gold discovery were interlopers in Indian territory.
2. The quoted phrase, of course, is from J. S. Holliday, The World Rushed In: The California Gold Rush Experience (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981), which consists of the edited diaries and letters of William Swain, letters to Swain from his family in New York State, and interpolations from other Anglo American forty-niners whose writings help illuminate Swain’s. It is one of the best Anglo personal accounts of the Gold Rush, and easily the most ingeniously edited. But the extravagance of the title bears little relationship to the wonderful particularities of the text, which documents primarily one white, eastern family’s twenty-two-month Gold Rush experience.
3. For a good contextualization of the Gold Rush in global economic history, see E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, 1848–1875 (1979; New York: New American Library, 1984).
4. See Ralph J. Roske, “The World Impact of the California Gold Rush, 1849–1857,” Arizona and the West 5, no. 3 (Autumn 1963): 187–232; Doris Marion 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. Like most who hazard into thinking about global connections, I have benefited from Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1982); and the work of Immanuel Wallerstein, e.g., “The Rise and Future Demise of the World Capitalist System: Concepts for Comparative Analysis,” in The Capitalist World-Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979), 1–36, though I am no doubt more influenced by the former than the latter. For an excellent critique of the world-systems approach in the Latin American and Caribbean context that stresses the importance of local developments, see Steve J. Stern, “Feudalism, Capitalism, and the World-System in the Perspective of Latin America and the Caribbean,” American Historical Review 73, no. 4 (Oct. 1988): 829–72, and commentary, 873–97.
5. For immigrant population figures in 1852, see U.S. Bureau of the Census, The Seventh Census of the United States: 1850 (Washington, D.C., 1853), in which is also printed “Population and Industry of California by the State Census for the Year 1852.” For Miwok populations around the time of the Gold Rush, see Richard Levy, “Eastern Miwok,” in Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 8, California, ed. Robert F. Heizer (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1978), 398–413, esp. 402.
6. Clearly there were other important historical actors in the Southern Mines—Hawaiian, British, Yokuts, Peruvian, German, Australian, Cherokee, Irish, e.g.—many of whom I mention herein. But those identified with the groups I have highlighted were key participants in the stories I have chosen to tell in this book.
7. See, e.g., Leonard Pitt, The Decline of the Californios: A Social History of the Spanish-Speaking Californians, 1846–1890 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1966); Jay Monaghan, Chile, Peru and the California Gold Rush of 1849 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1973); Wright, part 1; Stuart F. Voss, On the Periphery of Nineteenth-Century Mexico: Sonora and Sinaloa, 1810–1877 (Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press, 1982), 33–74, 80–120; Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, Dependency and Development in Latin America, trans. Marjory Mattingly Urquidi (1971; Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1979), 29–41, 52–54; Tulio Halperín Donghi, “Economy and Society in Post-Independence Spanish America,” Frank Safford, “Politics, Ideology and Society in Post-Independence Spanish America,” Jan Bazant, “Mexico from Independence to 1867,” and Simon Collier, “Chile from Independence to the War of the Pacific,” in Cambridge History of Latin America, vol. 3, From Independence to c. 1870, ed. Leslie Bethell (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985), 299–470, 583–613.
8. I owe much of the following discussion of conditions in Sonora before and after Mexican independence to Voss. See also Oakah L. Jones, Jr., Los Paisanos: Spanish Settlers on the Northern Frontier of New Spain (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1979), esp. 177–95; David J. Weber, The Mexican Frontier, 1821–1846: The American Southwest under Mexico (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1982); and Cynthia Radding, Wandering Peoples: Colonialism, Ethnic Spaces, and Ecological Frontiers in Northwestern Mexico, 1700–1850 (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1997).
9. Voss, 1–32. See also Evelyn Hu-DeHart, Missionaries, Miners and Indians: Spanish Contact with the Yaqui Nation of Northwestern New Spain, 1533–1820 (Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press, 1981); Jones, 177–91.
10. Voss, 33–47.
11. Ibid., 48–54, 64–72; Weber, 83–105; Evelyn Hu-DeHart, Yaqui Resistance and Survival: The Struggle for Land and Autonomy, 1821–1910 (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 18–55.
12. Voss, 80–111; Hu-DeHart, Yaqui Resistance, 56–67.
13. Voss, 111; Sister M. Colette Standart, “The Sonoran Migration to California, 1848–1856: A Study in Prejudice,” Southern California Quarterly 58, no. 3 (Fall 1976): 333–57; Wright, part 1; Richard H. Peterson, “Anti-Mexican Nativism in California, 1848–1853: A Study in Cultural Conflict,” Southern California Quarterly 62, no. 4 (Winter 1980): 309–27.
14. Hu-DeHart, Yaqui Resistance, p. 66.
15. Standart; Pitt, 48–68. On Coronel’s cook, see prologue, “Joaquín Murrieta and the Bandits.
” Coronel’s peónes had already migrated once from Sonora to Southern California.
16. Standart cites these figures from El Sonorense (Ures), April 26, 1850. See 343.
17. Ibid., 338, from El Sonorense, May 4, June 15, 1849.
18. Sylvia Marina Arrom, The Women of Mexico City, 1790–1857 (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1985), 105–11; Elizabeth Kuznesof and Robert Oppenheimer, “The Family and Society in Nineteenth-Century Latin America: An Historiographical Introduction,” Journal of Family History 10, no. 3 (Fall 1985): 215–34, esp. 226.
19. Arrom, 110–11, 154–205.
20. For Mexico City, see ibid., 129–34. For Latin America in general, see Kuznesof and Oppenheimer, 224, 226. I have not found direct confirmation of the prevalence of female–headed households in Yaqui pueblos. It is implied by Voss, and in Hu-DeHart, Yaqui Resistance.
21. The image of “cities of women” is suggested by Arrom and borrowed from Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986).
22. I owe this summary to Brian Loveman, Chile: The Legacy of Hispanic Capitalism (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1979), esp. 9–115. See also 2d ed. (1988). Page numbers cited herein are to 1st ed.
23. Ibid., 42–149.
24. Arnold J. Bauer, “Chilean Rural Labor in the Nineteenth Century,” American Historical Review 76, no. 4 (Oct. 1971): 1059–83; and see Loveman, 97–98; Collier, 597–98.
25. Bauer, esp. 1069–74; Loveman, esp. 89, 145, 164; Collier, 597–98.
26. Monaghan, esp. 5–6; Abraham P. Nasatir, “Chilenos in California during the Gold Rush Period and the Establishment of the Chilean Consulate,” California Historical Quarterly 53, no. 1 (Spring 1974): 52–70, esp. 61; George Edward Faugsted, Jr., The Chilenos in the California Gold Rush (1963; reprint, San Francisco: R and E Research Associates, 1973), esp. 16–17; Edwin A. Beilharz and Carlos U. López, “Introduction,” in We Were 49ers! Chilean Accounts of the California Gold Rush, trans. and ed. Beilharz and López (Pasadena, Calif.: Ward Ritchie Press, 1976), xi–xx, esp. xiii–xv.
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