94. Hurtado, 15–20; Levy, 402–5. Perlot, 260–61, describes a Miwok deer hunt. On divisions of labor, cf., e.g., William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), 39–40, 44–48, 52–53. For more evidence of male power among Miwoks as well as of male-female interdependence, see a speech apparently made by Cypriano, in which he carefully implores his womenfolk to “refrain from vice” and to be “obedient” to their husbands. San Joaquin Republican, July 7, 1853.
95. Perlot, 230–32.
96. Ibid.
Chapter 2: Domestic Life in the Diggings
1. Helen Nye to Mother, Jan. 6, 1853, Helen Nye Letters, Beinecke Library, Yale Univ., New Haven (hereafter cited as Beinecke Library); Journal entry, Nov. 12, 1849, William W. Miller Journal, Beinecke Library; Daniel B. Woods, Sixteen Months at the Gold Diggings (London: Sampson Low; New York: Harper and Brothers, [1851]), 86; Charles Davis to Daughter, Jan. 1, 1852, Charles Davis Letters, Beinecke Library.
2. Edmund Booth, Edmund Booth, Forty-Niner: The Life Story of a Deaf Pioneer (Stockton, Calif.: San Joaquin Pioneer and Historical Society, 1953), 22, 31, 33.
3. See Denise Riley, “Am I That Name?”: Feminism and the Category of “Women” in History (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1988), esp. 6; and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, “African-American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race,” Signs 17, no. 2 (Winter 1992): 251–74, esp. 253–56.
4. My thinking here has been influenced by a growing literature on questions of male gender, including Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981); essays collected in J. A. Mangan and James Walvin, eds., Manliness and Morality: Middle-Class Masculinity in Britain and America, 1800–1940 (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1987), and Mark C. Carnes and Clyde Griffen, eds., Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1990); E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993); George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994); and Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1995).
5. Much of the important scholarship on this and related points is summarized and critiqued in Thomas C. Holt, “Marking: Race, Race-Making, and the Writing of History,” American Historical Review 100, no. 1 (Feb. 1995): 1–20. See esp. Barbara Jeanne Fields, “Ideology and Race in American History,” in Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward, ed. J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982).
6. Much of my thinking on this and related issues was originally influenced by Mrinalini Sinha, “Gender and Imperialism: Colonial Policy and the Ideology of Moral Imperialism in Late Nineteenth-Century Bengal,” in Changing Men: New Directions in Research on Men and Masculinity, ed. Michael Kimmel (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1987), 217–31. My emphasis on gender and race here, to the seeming exclusion of class, requires explanation. In the boom years of the Gold Rush, relations of class were often obscured or even subsumed by the day-to-day salience of gender and race. This was in part because the means of getting gold during the initial boom was by placer (surface, individualized) mining rather than quartz (underground, industrialized) mining. Placer mining required almost no capital and did not necessarily entail a hierarchy among workers. Later, entrepreneurs in the Northern Mines developed hydraulic mining, a more capital-intensive means of exploiting surface deposits, whereby men shot powerful streams of water against hills assumed to be rich in “deep gravels.” When hydraulic mining and quartz mining took hold, they were accompanied by an elaboration of class hierarchies. Class relations followed a different course in areas—like much of the Southern Mines—where insufficient water and underground deposits thwarted the development of hydraulic and quartz mining. For class making in the Southern Mines, see chap. 5, “Dreams That Died,” and chap. 6, “The Last Fandango.” The developments described in these chapters did not begin until about 1852. During the boom years in the Southern Mines, class contests and class solidarities often had as much to do with immigrants’ memories of class in their homelands as with actual social relations structured through divisions of labor in the mines.
7. Analyses of productive versus reproductive labor particularly characterized Marxist-feminist thought of the 1970s and early 1980s. A culminating explication and critique appears in Joan Kelly, “The Doubled Vision of Feminist Theory,” in Women, History, and Theory (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1984), 51–64. See also the essays collected in Zillah Eisenstein, ed., Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979); and Heidi Hartmann, “The Family as the Locus of Gender, Class, and Political Struggle: The Example of Housework,” Signs 6 (Spring 1981): 366–94. For a trenchant analysis of the gendering of work in a different historical context, see Dana Frank, Purchasing Power: Consumer Organizing, Gender, and the Seattle Labor Movement, 1919–1929 (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994). And for a crucial analysis of how reproductive work is not only gendered but also racialized, see Evelyn Nakano Glenn, “From Servitude to Service Work: Historical Continuities in the Racial Division of Paid Reproductive Labor,” Signs 18, no. 1 (Autumn 1992): 1–43.
8. See Glenn; and Joan Scott, “Deconstructing Equality-versus-Difference: Or, the Uses of Poststructuralist Theory for Feminism,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 1 (Spring 1988), 33–50. For other discussions of domestic themes in the Gold Rush, see David Goodman, Gold Seeking: Victoria and California in the 1850s (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1994), 149–87; Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp, Religion and Society in Frontier California (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1994), esp. 148–80; Malcolm J. Rohrbough, Days of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the American Nation (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1997), esp. 91–105.
9. 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. 408–9. The Canadian observer is 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), 122. The Belgian observer is 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), 188. See also The Journals of Alfred Doten, 1849–1903, 3 vols., ed. Walter Van Tilburg Clark (Reno: Univ. of Nevada Press, 1973), 1:212–13; Friedrich W. C. Gerstäcker, Narrative of a Journey round the World (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1853), 218.
10. Woods, 121. “Wigwam” was a term of Abenaki and Massachuset origin that described dwellings of eastern Indians, which often had an arched wooden framework overlaid with bark, rushes, or hides.
11. Ibid.; Journal entry, July 18, 1852, John Wallis Journal, Holt-Atherton Center for Western Studies, Univ. of the Pacific, Stockton, Calif.; Perkins, 103; Doten, 1:76.
12. J. D. Borthwick, The Gold Hunters (1857; Oyster Bay, N.Y.: Nelson Doubleday, 1917), 291. Cf. George W. B. Evans, Mexican Gold Rush Trail: The Journal of a Forty-Niner, ed. Glenn S. Dumke (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1945), 244.
13. See, e.g., Journal entry, Jan. 10, 1851, George W. Allen Journals, Beinecke Library; Journal entry, March 28, 1853, Angus McIsaac Journal, Beinecke Library; Doten, 1:76–77 (Doten writes, “we vamosed aqui for the rich gulsh”).
14. Borthwick, 252, and see 143, 302; Enos Christman, One Man’s Gold: The Letters and Journal of a Forty-Niner, ed. Florence Morrow Christman (New York: Whittlesey House, McGraw-Hill, 1930), 132.
15. John Doble, John Doble’s Journal and Letters from the Mines: Mokelumne Hill, Jackson, Volcano and San Franc
isco, 1851–1865, ed. Charles L. Camp (Denver: Old West Publishing, 1962), 40, 54.
16. Perlot, 100–1, 153.
17. Harvey Wood, Personal Recollections of Harvey Wood (Angels Camp, Calif.: Mountain Echo Job Printing Office, [c. 1878]), 16; Leonard Withington Noyes Reminiscences, Essex Institute, Salem, Mass., transcription at Calaveras County Museum and Archives, San Andreas, Calif., 37.
18. Journal entry, Dec. 18, 1852, McIsaac Journal.
19. Journal entry, Feb. 26, 1853, ibid.; Jesse R. Smith to Sister Helen, Dec. 23, 1852, Lura and Jesse R. Smith Correspondence, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif. (hereafter cited as Huntington Library).
20. See Perkins, esp. 333. When Perkins left California in 1852, he did not return east, but sailed to Chile, where he eventually married a Chilean woman. In 1860, he moved with his family to Argentina, and there spent the rest of his life as a businessman, journalist, and tireless promoter of Argentinean economic development. See “Introduction,” 48–56.
21. Ibid., 101, 103. On Orientalism, see Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978).
22. These generalizations are based on wide reading in Gold Rush personal accounts that describe household organization; an adequate citation of the evidence would run several pages. But see, e.g., Moses F. Little Journals, Beinecke Library, items 12 and 14, passim; John Amos Chaffee and Jason Palmer Chamberlain Papers, Bancroft Library, Univ. of California, Berkeley (hereafter cited as Bancroft Library), Chamberlain Journals 1 and 2, passim; Doten, 1:91–250 passim; Perlot, 89–292 passim. Secondary accounts that address such issues include Rodman W. Paul, California Gold: The Beginning of Mining in the Far West (1947; reprint, Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1965), 72–73; John Walton Caughey, The California Gold Rush (1948; reprint, Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1975), 177–201; Ralph Mann, After the Gold Rush: Society in Grass Valley and Nevada City, California, 1849–1870 (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1982), 17. Although I have not undertaken a full statistical analysis of the 1850 census, even a spot-check through the microfilm reels for Calaveras, Tuolumne, and Mariposa counties supports my contentions about household size: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Seventh Federal Population Census, 1850, National Archives and Records Service, RG-29, M-432, reels 33, 35, 36.
23. See, e.g., Journal entries, Oct. 20–Nov. 3, 1849, Miller Journal; Journal entry, Jan. 16, 1853, McIsaac Journal; Journal entries, June 11–29, 1850, Allen Journals; Perlot, 215, 259–61; Doten, 1:76, 81; Doble, 94.
24. See, e.g., Doble, 38–39; Doten, 1:115–27 (Doten was keeping a store in Calaveras County, and these pages record, in particular, the patronage of Chinese, Mexicans, and Chileans); Helen Nye to Mother, Jan. 6, 1853, Nye Letters (Nye’s husband was merchant at Don Pedro’s Bar in Tuolumne County); Account book entries, 1852–53, Little Journals, item 13.
25. Leonard Pitt, The Decline of the Californios: A Social History of the Spanish-Speaking Californians, 1846–1890 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1966), 54, 104–5; Albert Camarillo, Chicanos in a Changing Society: From Mexican Pueblos to American Barrios in Santa Barbara and Southern California, 1848–1930 (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1979), 26. For Anglo observations of the Californio cattle trade in the Gold Rush, see, e.g., Journal entries, July 3 and Sept. 10, 1850, Timothy C. Osborn Journal, Bancroft Library (a 1932 transcription of the handwritten journal by Daniel Harris, entitled “The Heart of a 49er: The Diary of Timothy Osborn,” is also available).
26. See sources cited n. 24 above, and Charles Davis to Daughter, Jan. 5, [1852], Davis Letters; Perlot, 153, 154, 159–60; Howard C. Gardiner, In Pursuit of the Golden Dream: Reminiscences of San Francisco and the Northern and Southern Mines, 1849–1857, ed. Dale L. Morgan (Stoughton, Mass.: Western Hemisphere, 1970), 95, 107, 164–65; Doble, 58.
27. Perlot, 56–57; cf. Evans, 200.
28. Gardiner, 95; cf. Perkins, 106.
29. Vicente Pérez Rosales, “Diary of a Journey to California,” in We Were 49ers! Chilean Accounts of the California Gold Rush, trans. and ed. Edwin A. Beilharz and Carlos U. López (Pasadena, Calif.: Ward Ritchie Press, 1976), 3–99, esp. 70–77. For background on Pérez Rosales, see chap. 1, “On the Eve of Emigration.”
30. Journal entries, Oct. 20, Nov. 15, and Dec. 19, 1852, Little Journals, item 12.
31. Perlot, 155–60. For similar troubles among Anglos, Mexicans, and French at San Antonio in Calaveras County, see A. Hersey Dexter, Early Days in California (Denver: Tribune-Republican Press, 1886), 20–26.
32. Journal entries, Dec. 21, 24, 25, 1852, Little Journals, item 12; Journal entries, Nov. 25, 27, 1851, Osborn Journal.
33. Journal entries, Oct. 13–Dec. 25, 1849, passim, Miller Journal. These friendly parties of black and white miners faced opposition from neighboring white southerners who resented the presence of free blacks in the area. See chap. 4, “Mining Gold and Making War.” See also Perlot, 272. Leonard Withington Noyes hunted frequently and sold venison to a neighboring Mexican camp; see Noyes, 37. On the decline of game animals near Sonora over the early years of the Gold Rush, see Perkins, 261–62. For examples of men fishing, particularly during the fall salmon run, see Journal entries, Oct. 16–19, 1850, Allen Journals; Journal entry, Oct. 18, 1850, Osborn Journal; Journal entry, Oct. 19, 1852, P. V. Fox Journals, Beinecke Library.
34. Perlot, 272.
35. Journal entry, Nov. 26, 1849, Miller Journal; Woods, 123; A. W. Genung to Thomas, April 22, 1851, A. W. Genung Letters, Beinecke Library. On other gardens, see Doten, 1:85, 147–48, 151; Doble, 94.
36. Evans, 260–61. For other references to scarce vegetables and resulting health problems, see Perkins, 262; Borthwick, 57; Doble, 58; Journal entries, Aug. 12–24, 1851, Chamberlain Journal no. 1; Benjamin Butler Harris, The Gila Trail: The Texas Argonauts and the California Gold Rush, ed. Richard H. Dillon (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1960), 123 (on scurvy among Mexican miners); Lucius Fairchild, California Letters of Lucius Fairchild, ed. Joseph Schafer (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1931), 48, 63; Étienne Derbec, A French Journalist in the California Gold Rush: The Letters of Étienne Derbec, ed. Abraham P. Nasatir (Georgetown, Calif.: Talisman Press, 1964), 121–22, 140–41.
37. Perlot, 260; Doble, 245; Journal entries, Aug. 24, Sept. 6, 1852, Little Journals, item 12.
38. Journal entries, Oct. 24, Nov. 22, 24, 1852, ibid.; Journal entries, July 14, 1850, Jan. 12, Feb. 9, 1851, Allen Journals. And see Journal entry, Aug. 8, 1852, Fox Journals.
39. Journal entries, Dec. 22, 30, 1849, Jan. 1, 4, 5, 1850, Miller Journal.
40. Borthwick, 255–56, 302–3.
41. John Marshall Newton, Memoirs of John Marshall Newton (n.p.: John M. Stevenson, 1913), 48–50.
42. Gardiner, 166. Although Gardiner spent most of his time in the Southern Mines, this actually took place in the Northern Mines.
43. Journal entry Aug. 23, 1850, Osborn Journal; Josiah Foster Flagg to Mother, March 9, 1851, Josiah Foster Flagg Letters, Beinecke Library.
44. Journal entries, Aug. 23 and Oct. 14, 1850, Osborn Journal. For more on slavery in the gold fields, see chap. 1, “On the Eve of Emigration,” and chap. 4, “Mining Gold and Making War”; and Rudolph M. Lapp, Blacks in Gold Rush California (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1977), esp. 64–77.
45. Pérez Rosales, 46–56. On other instances in which sick or injured men took on added domestic tasks, see, e.g., Journal entries, Sept. 8–17, 1852, Little Journals, item 12. Timothy Osborn indicated men’s fear of being seen as weak when he refused to stop working on an extraordinarily hot day, all so that no one could say “he was too delicate” to mine. Journal entry, Aug. 16, 1850, Osborn Journal.
46. Perlot, 258–71, esp. 259–60, 271. One other instance of white men forgoing weekly cooking rotations appears in the journal of Ben Bowen. Bowen—who worked a claim in present-day Amador County along with his father, brother Dave, and two other miners—reported a novel division of domestic labor: “Father and I do the cooking: he does the dishwashing part. Dave pays for his board
at the rate of four dollars per week.” Journal entry, Sept. 3, 1854, Ben Bowen Journal, Bancroft Library.
47. 1850 manuscript census, reel 35; Samuel Ward, Sam Ward in the Gold Rush, ed. Carvel Collins (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1949), 28, 149–52, 167; Charles Davis to Daughter, Jan. 5, [1852], and Jan. 6, 1854, Davis Letters. Julia Ward Howe would become a prominent participant in the U.S. woman movement and the author of “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
48. Charles Davis to Daughter, Jan. 5, [1852], and Jan. 6, 1854; Ward, 149, 152, 167; Fairchild, esp. 103–4; Christman, esp. 187.
49. Journal entry, April 18, 1852, Fox Journals; Ward, 168. Cf. Journal entry, July 3, 1850, Osborn Journal; Journal entry, March 30, 1851, Allen Journals. Mrs. Lee Whipple-Haslam (first name unknown), who came overland to California as a child, remembered, “The wonder and admiration of the Flat was our cow. Mother could have sold milk at any price.” See Early Days in California: Scenes and Events of the ’50s as I Remember Them (Jamestown, Calif.: Mother Lode Magnet, [1925]), 11. On women in dairy and poultry production, see, e.g., Joan M. Jensen, Loosening the Bonds: Mid-Atlantic Farm Women, 1750–1850 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1986), and “Cloth, Butter, and Boarders: Women’s Household Production for the Market,” Review of Radical Political Economics 12, no. 2 (Summer 1980): 14–24; John Mack Faragher, Women and Men on the Overland Trail (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979), esp. 51, and Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1986), esp. 101–5.
50. On domestic failures, see, e.g., Journal entry, Dec. 22, 1849, Miller Journal; Doble, 54.
51. Christman, 126; William H. Newell to Mary Harrison Newell, Feb. 4, 1851, Joseph Pownall Papers, Huntington Library; Woods, 148; Journal entry, July 12, 1850, Osborn Journal.
52. Frank Marryat, Mountains and Molehills; or, Recollections of a Burnt Journal, ed. Robin Winks (1855; Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1962), 136; Dexter, 23–24; Borthwick, 342–44.
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