Roaring Camp

by Susan Lee Johnson

  27. On Pérez Rosales, see Monaghan, 32–34, 55; Beilharz and López, eds., 1; and the writings of Pérez Rosales himself, esp. Diario de un viaje a California, 1848–1849 (Buenos Aires: Editorial Francisco de Aguirre, 1971). And see California Adventure, trans. Edwin S. Morby and Arturo Torres–Rioseco (San Francisco: Book Club of California, 1947). I have relied primarily on a translated selection of his work, including a fragment of his manuscript diary from the Chilean Archivo Nacional, entitled “Diary of a Journey to California,” in Beilharz and López, eds., 3–99, spot-checking Diario de un viaje for translations. For background on the Chilean independence and early national periods, see Loveman, 116–49.

  28. Monaghan, 22, 32–34, 55; Beilharz and López, eds., 1; Loveman, 116–49.

  29. Pérez Rosales, “Diary,” 3, and California Adventure, 4, 9. The manuscript diary (in Beilharz and López) and the published version (trans. Morby and Torres-Rioseco) at first seem to contradict each other about whether Pérez Rosales took along two, three, or five laborers. Closer analysis suggests, though, that there were altogether five workers who accompanied the brothers—two tenant and three contract laborers.

  30. Pérez Rosales, “Diary,” 6, 46, 48, 50, 57, 58. Cf. Pérez Rosales, California Adventure.

  31. Pérez Rosales, “Diary,” 5, 27, 30. The Latin American historian Sueann Caulfield suggests that the péon whom Pérez Rosales called the “mulatto” may have been an Argentinean soldier or descendant.

  32. Ibid., 6, 7, 11, 26, 56.

  33. Ibid., 3–4, 6, 11, 12, 20.

  34. I depend here on the research of the Tuolumne County historian Carlo M. De Ferrari. See “A Brief History of Stephen Spencer Hill: Fugitive from Labor,” in Gold Spring Diary: The Journal of John Jolly, ed. De Ferrari (Sonora, Calif.: Tuolumne County Historical Society, 1966), 125–42.

  35. See, e.g., Eugene D. Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South, 2d ed. (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1989), esp. “The Origins of Slavery Expansionism”; Gavin Wright, The Political Economy of the Cotton South: Households, Markets, and Wealth in the Nineteenth Century (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978).

  36. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Seventh Federal Population Census, 1850, National Archives, Washington, D.C., RG-29, M-432. See esp. the manuscript census schedules for Mariposa County, reel 35. Mariposa County had the highest proportion of African Americans of the three counties that constituted the Southern Mines in 1850 (Mariposa was nearly 5 percent black, while in Calaveras and Tuolumne less than 1 percent of the population was black). See U.S. Bureau of the Census, Seventh Census of the United States: 1850 (Washington, D.C., 1853), for composite figures.

  37. For context, see Thomas R. Hietala, Manifest Design: Anxious Aggrandizement in Late Jacksonian America (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985). On the slavery question specifically in California, see Eugene H. Berwanger, The Frontier against Slavery: Western Anti-Negro Prejudice and the Slavery Extension Controversy (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1967), 60–77; and Rudolph M. Lapp, Blacks in Gold Rush California (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1977), 126–57. See also Quintard Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998).

  38. Berwanger, 64–77.

  39. John Paul Dart, “A Mississippian in the Gold Fields: The Letters of John Paul Dart,” ed. Howard Mitcham, California Historical Society Quarterly 35, no. 3 (Sept. 1956): 205–31, esp. 219, 221, 222, 223, 225.

  40. Jefferson Martenet to Mother [Aug. 1853], Jefferson Martenet Collection, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif. (hereafter cited as Huntington Library).

  41. See, e.g., Bruce Laurie, Artisans into Workers: Labor in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), 58.

  42. Jason P. Chamberlain to Mary E. Griswold, Oct. 12, 1899, Jason P. Chamberlain Letters, Huntington Library.

  43. Diary entries, June 11 and 12, Aug. 2, 1903, Jason Chamberlain Diary no. 42, John Amos Chaffee and Jason Palmer Chamberlain Papers, Bancroft Library, Univ. of California, Berkeley.

  44. For local accounts, see, e.g., Mrs. Robert Thom, comp., Memories of the Days of Old, Days of Gold, Days of 49 ([Sonora, Calif.: The Banner Print, c. 1923]), 8; James G. White, “The Death of Tennessee’s Pardner: The True Story of the Death of Jason P. Chamberlain,” Tuolumne County Historical Society Quarterly 4, no. 3 (Jan.–March 1965): 122–24. On Bret Harte, see Kevin Starr, Americans and the California Dream, 1850–1915 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973), esp. 49–50. On the connection between Chamberlain and Chaffee and Harte’s story, see Fred Stocking, “The Passing of ‘Tennessee’ and his Partner,” Overland Monthly, 2d ser., 42 (1903): 539–43; Fletcher Stokes, “Fred Stocking and His Service to California Literature,” Overland Monthly, 2d ser., 59 (1912): 105–14; and Jessie Heaton Parkinson, Adventuring in California, Yesterday, Today, and Day before Yesterday, with Memoirs of Bret Harte’s “Tennessee” (San Francisco: Harr Wagner, 1921), 7–8, 42–43, 59–119. The later lives of Chamberlain and Chaffee and the significance of Bret Harte’s story are addressed in the epilogue, “Telling Tales.”

  45. Laurie provides an excellent summary of nineteenth-century social and economic change that synthesizes earlier works; see esp. 15–112. For references to the scholarship he synthesizes, see his bibliographic essay, esp. 223–31. On the language of class as male, see Joan Scott, “On Language, Gender, and Working-Class History,” in Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1988), 53–67; and cf. Stansell, esp. 130–54. See also Ava Baron, “Gender and Labor History: Learning from the Past, Looking to the Future,” in Work Engendered: Toward a New History of American Labor, ed. Baron (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1991), 1–46.

  46. See Jonathan Prude, The Coming of Industrial Order: Town and Factory Life in Rural Massachusetts, 1800–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983). My thanks to David Montgomery for helping me clarify this key argument.

  47. Nathan Chase to Jane Chase, March 5, 1852, Nathan Chase Letters, Beinecke Library, Yale Univ., New Haven.

  48. These suggestions are based on the analysis developed in Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981), esp. 145–85; and Laurie, esp. 57. As for Chamberlain’s and Chaffee’s lifetime of labor, the fifty years of diaries kept by Chamberlain are primarily a record of their mining and agricultural work, as well as of occasional use of their skills as carpenter and wheelwright.

  49. The summary of the lives of Mary and William Newell from 1849 to the mid-1850s is based on letters exchanged between family members found in the Joseph Pownall Papers, Huntington Library. All of the letters from this period are in boxes 1–4. For the mining association agreement, see Agreement for Mining Gold, Jan. 23, 1849, PW 276, box 1, Pownall Papers.

  50. See, e.g., Mary Newell to William Newell, June 13, 1849, PW 762, Benjamin Harrison to William Newell, June 18, 1849, PW 342, box 1, Pownall Papers, as well as numerous references to the family bakery scattered throughout letters in boxes 1–4.

  51. See, e.g., letters cited above; Benjamin Harrison to William Newell, Aug. 13, 1849, PW 343, Norman Newell to William Newell, March 17–28, 1850, PW 511, June 27, 1852, PW 512, box 1; William Newell to Mary Newell, Feb. 24, 1853, PW 522, box 2; William Newell to Mary Newell, Jan. 20, 1854, PW 514, box 3, Pownall Papers.

  52. See Benjamin Harrison to William Newell, Aug. 13, 1849, PW 343, Oct. 31, 1849, PW 344, William Newell to Mary Newell, May 15, 1850, PW 518, box 1, Pownall Papers.

  53. William Newell to Mary Newell, Feb. 4, 1851, PW 519, [Nov. 26, 1852], PW 521, box 1, Pownall Papers.

  54. See, e.g., Nancy Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1977); and Ryan, esp. 232 (for “launching pad”).

  55. See, e.g., Benjamin Harrison to Mary and William Newell, Jan. 4, 1855, PW 350, Feb. 4, 1855, PW 351, box 4; William Newell to Mary Newell, Dec
. 12, 1853, PW 526, box 2, Pownall Papers. The analysis here depends heavily on arguments developed in Ryan.

  56. See, e.g., Benjamin Harrison to Children, June 1, 1854, PW 346, July 10, 1854, PW 347, box 3; Mary Newell to Lucy Harrison, March 29, 1855, PW 765, Mary Newell to Benjamin Harrison, June 11, 1855, PW 790, Mary Newell to Lucy Harrison, Aug. 13, 1855, PW 766, Sept. 2, 1855, PW 767, Mary Newell to Benjamin and Lucy Harrison, Dec. 18, 1855, PW 795, box 4, Pownall Papers.

  57. For more on Mary Harrison Newell and her family after William Newell’s death, see chap. 6, “The Last Fandango.”

  58. See 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), esp. 130–31, 218–19, 238, 243–44, 250, 251, 268, 303–4, 341, 343 (quotation on 243).

  59. See Laura Echeverria v. Juan Echeverria (1857), District Court, Tuolumne County, Sonora, Calif.; S. R. Mills and James Vantine v. Madame Emilie Henry (1856), District Court, Mariposa County, Mariposa, Calif. For more examples of this sort, see chap. 6, “The Last Fandango.”

  60. I owe this summary of French regulationism to Jill Harsin, Policing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1985), esp. xv–xxv. See also Alain Corbin, Women for Hire: Prostitution and Sexuality in France after 1850, trans. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1990).

  61. See Harsin, 282–307. While I rely on Harsin here for the evidence she has gathered of same-sex eroticism in brothels, I am troubled by her analysis of these ties, which depicts them as sordid and unrelentingly coercive.

  62. I am indebted to Reeve Huston for helping me find a concise way of conceptually linking the events of 1848. See also E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848 (New York: Mentor/New American Library, 1962).

  63. This summary is based on André Jardin and André-Jean Tudesq, Restoration and Reaction, 1815–1848, trans. Elborg Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983), esp. 191–204; Roger Price, ed., Revolution and Reaction: 1848 and the Second French Republic (London: Croom Helm, 1975), esp. the editor’s introd., 1–72; John M. Merriman, The Agony of the Republic: The Repression of the Left in Revolutionary France, 1848–1851 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1978), esp. xv–xxx, 1–24.

  64. Merriman, passim.

  65. Ibid., 4–5, 14, 162–63, 193–94.

  66. Henry Blumenthal, “The California Societies in France, 1849–1855,” Pacific Historical Review 25, no. 3 (Aug. 1956): 251–60; Gilbert Chinard, “When the French Came to California: An Introductory Essay,” California Historical Society Quarterly 22, no. 4 (Dec. 1943): 289–314; Abraham P. Nasatir, “Introductory Sketch,” in French Activities in California: An Archival Calendar Guide (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1945); Rufus Kay Wyllys, “The French of California and Sonora,” Pacific Historical Review 1, no. 3 (Sept. 1932): 337–59; Howard R. Lamar, “Introduction,” in 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), xv–xxxii, esp. xvii–xxi.

  67. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852; New York: International Publishers, 1963), 84–85; A. P. Nasatir, “Alexandre Dumas fils and the Lottery of the Golden Ingots,” California Historical Society Quarterly 33, no. 2 (June 1954): 125–42.

  68. Murder of M. V. B. Griswold by Five Chinese Assassins; Fou Sin—the Principal. Together with the Life of Griswold, and the Statements of Fou Sin, Chou Yee and Coon You, Convicted, and Sentenced to Be Hung at Jackson, April 16, 1858. Illustrated with Correct Likenesses of the Murderers (Jackson, Calif.: T. A. Springer, 1858), 16.

  69. Ibid., 16–17.

  70. Ibid., 17.

  71. Ibid., 16; Frederic Wakeman, Jr., Strangers at the Gate: Social Disorder in South China, 1839–1861 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1966), 179–80; Yong Chen, “The Internal Origins of Chinese Emigration to California Reconsidered,” Western Historical Quarterly 28, no. 4 (Winter 1997): 520–46, esp. 533–38.

  72. See Sucheng Chan, This Bittersweet Soil: The Chinese in California Agriculture, 1860–1910 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1986), 7–31; Yen Ching–Hwang, Coolies and Mandarins: Chinese Protection of Overseas Chinese during the Late Ch’ing Period, 1851–1911 (Singapore: Singapore Univ. Press, 1985).

  73. I owe this summary to Wakeman, Strangers at the Gate, and “The Canton Trade and the Opium War,” in The Cambridge History of China, vol. 10, Late Ch’ing, 1800–1911, part 1, ed. John K. Fairbank (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1978), 163–212; and Jonathan D. Spence, The Search for Modern China (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), 120, 128–32, 147–64, and God’s Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996).

  74. See Wakeman, Strangers at the Gate; John K. Fairbank, “The Creation of the Treaty System,” and Philip A. Kuhn, “The Taiping Rebellion,” in Fairbank, ed., 213–63, 264–317; and Spence, Search for Modern China, 158–64, 168–78.

  75. Earlier interpretations of Chinese emigration stressed the hardships created by overpopulation and western incursion (best symbolized by the Opium War) as major causes. See Chan; and June Mei, “The Socioeconomic Origins of Emigration: Guangdong to California, 1850 to 1882,” in Labor Immigration under Capitalism: Asian Workers in the United States before World War II, ed. Lucie Cheng and Edna Bonacich (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1984). More recently, Chen has argued convincingly that South China was “home to one of China’s oldest and best developed market-oriented economies. Such an economy prepared merchants and experienced wage-earning laborers to voyage to the new market economy in gold-rush California” (quotation on 522).

  76. Chan, 7–31; Mei; Chen.

  77. Murder of M. V. B. Griswold, 15–31.

  78. Ibid. On the development of water companies in the Southern Mines, see chap. 5, “Dreams That Died.” For a full analysis of the crime pamphlet Murder of M. V. B. Griswold and for an account of what became of Fou Sin, Chou Yee, and Coon You, see epilogue, “Telling Tales.”

  79. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population of the United States in 1860; Compiled from . . . the Eighth Census (Washington, D.C., 1864). See returns from Amador, Calaveras, Mariposa, and Tuolumne counties in Calif. On Chinese prostitutes, see Lucie Cheng Hirata, “Free, Indentured, Enslaved: Chinese Prostitutes in Nineteenth-Century America,” Signs 5, no. 1 (Autumn 1979): 3–29; Sucheng Chan, “The Exclusion of Chinese Women, 1870–1943,” in Entry Denied: Exclusion and the Chinese Community in America, 1882–1943, ed. Chan (Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1991), 94–146; and Judy Yung, Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1995), esp. 26–37. Conversations with Yukiko Hanawa about the practice of “selling daughters” in twentieth-century Japan have influenced my thinking about the emigration of nineteenth-century Chinese women.

  80. Perlot, 84, 181–90, 223. Perlot was sure that Scipiano, or Cypriano, was leader of the Yosemites, a mixed band of Miwoks, Paiutes, and Yokuts. But by most accounts, the famous Tenaya was the Yosemite chief at this time. George Harwood Phillips, Indians and Indian Agents: The Origins of the Reservation System in California, 1849–1852 (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1997), gives the clearest information on the identity of various foothill bands in this period. On the Yosemites and Awals, see esp. 37–38, 68–91, 141–44 passim.

  81. Perlot, 84, 181, 224, quotation on 224.

  82. The following summary of pre–Gold Rush Miwok history is based largely on Albert L. Hurtado, Indian Survival on the California Frontier (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1988), esp. chaps. 1–5, except where noted. See also Phillips, Indians and Indian Agents and Indians and Intruders in Central California, 1769–1849 (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1993); and, for the larger regional context, Weber. The notion of Great Basin Indians as living on the “other side of the sky” comes from Scipiano’s speech in Perlot, 224. The editor How
ard Lamar explains that Miwoks “believed that the sky rested on the . . . Sierra Nevada; beyond that, another sky . . . extended to another chain of mountains and so on indefinitely.” Although Scipiano mentioned only Monos as trading partners, a white woman who lived farther north in Tuolumne County remembered that Miwoks there traded with Paiutes as well. See Mrs. Lee Whipple-Haslam, Early Days in California: Scenes and Events of the ’50s as I Remember Them (Jamestown, Calif.: Mother Lode Magnet, [1925]), 19.

  83. On the Bay and Plains Miwoks, see Levy, esp. 398–400, 402. On the malaria outbreak, see Hurtado, 46; and Phillips, Indians and Intruders, 94.

  84. See Perlot, 182.

  85. From here on, I most often use the term “Miwok” to designate the Indians of that portion of the Sierra Nevada foothills in the drainage of the San Joaquin River. But it should be remembered that the “Miwok” bands to which I refer were often mixed groups of Sierra Miwoks, Plains Miwoks, mission Indians, and sometimes other peoples, such as Nisenans and Yokuts. A helpful model for describing such mixed communities, which formed as a consequence of conquest, is Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991), esp. 1–50.

  86. Hurtado, 34–54; Weber, 60–68.

  87. Weber, 198–99; Hurtado, 47–48.

  88. Weber, 199, 204–5; Hurtado, 49, 55, 73–74.

  89. Hurtado, 48, 55–71.

  90. Ibid.

  91. Ibid., 15–20, 69; Levy, 398, 402, 410–11.

  92. Levy, 402–5; Hurtado, 15–20.

  93. The significance of such non-Indian observations is discussed in chap. 2, “Domestic Life in the Diggings.”