Roaring Camp

by Susan Lee Johnson

  35. Quotations appear in Charles Davis to Wife, May 17, 1850, Charles Davis Letters, Beinecke Library; Woods, 97, 102; and Lucius Fairchild, California Letters of Lucius Fairchild, ed. Joseph Schafer (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1931), 186–87. Other references to prayer, hymn singing, and devotional reading include Derbec, 142; Journal entries, March 21, 1852, Feb. 27, March 9, 23, 1853, Fox Journals; Journal entries, July 18, Aug. 1, Oct. 10, 1852, Moses F. Little Journals, Beinecke Library; Christman, 144; Journal entry, Jan. 4, 1853, John Wallis Journal, Holt-Atherton Center for Western Studies, Univ. of the Pacific, Stockton, Calif.

  36. Journal entry, Aug. 3, 1850, Allen Journals.

  37. Journal entry, Dec. 3, 1851, Fox Journals.

  38. Woods, 187–91.

  39. For a good discussion of the practice of diary keeping in the nineteenth century, see Cott, 15–16.

  40. Background on the men comes from Doten, 1:xviii–xx; Doble, xiii; the information provided by Emma B. Harris with the transcription of the Osborn Journal that is kept with the original; and from the three journals themselves.

  41. Doten, 1:3–4, 84, 105, 107, 111, 112, 125, 141.

  42. Reading these references is especially complicated because a relative of Doten’s, after his death in 1903, saw fit to start erasing explicit descriptions of sexual activity in the fifty years of journals Doten left behind. The censor never completed the project, and hence the later diaries are filled with sexually explicit material. But the earlier volumes, which cover the Gold Rush years, are substantially altered. Still, the three references mentioned remain, if in abbreviated form, and they may stand for a greater number of sexual encounters in the mines. Ibid., 1:xii–xiii, 125–26, 150, 195.

  43. Ibid., 1:125–26. On the Miwok practice of cutting hair when in mourning, see, e.g., Levy, 407; A. L. Kroeber, Handbook of the Indians of California (1925; reprint, St. Clair Shores, Mich.: Scholarly Press, 1976), 1:452; S. A. Barrett and E. W. Gifford, Miwok Material Culture, Bulletin of the Public Museum of the City of Milwaukee, vol. 2, no. 4 (Milwaukee, 1933), 222.

  44. Most ethnographic works on Miwoks are concerned only with marriage practices and are silent about nonmarital sex. For an overview of the meanings of Indian-white cross-racial sex in the Gold Rush, see Hurtado, Indian Survival, 169–92, which, however, does not shed light specifically on Miwoks. Hurtado focuses on “alliances of convenience,” prostitution, and forced sex. While influenced by Hurtado’s careful work, I think the situation described here may allow for other interpretations as well. See also Hurtado, “When Strangers Met: Sex and Gender on Three Frontiers,” in Writing the Range: Race, Class, and Culture in the Women’s West, ed. Elizabeth Jameson and Susan Armitage (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1997), 122–42; and Antonia I. Castañeda, “Sexual Violence in the Politics and Policies of Conquest: Amerindian Women and the Spanish Conquest of Alta California,” in Building with Our Hands: New Directions in Chicana Studies, ed. Adela de la Torre and Beatríz M. Pesquera (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1993), 15–33.

  45. Doten, 1:75, 121, 122, 128, 130–34, 150, 152, 195, 243–51. (Doten refers to his hometown sweetheart as “M,” for Martha, in journal entries here. His California sweetheart was also named Martha.) Marion Goldman has chronicled Doten’s later life on the Comstock Lode in Nevada, and her research indicates that the old Doten was finally revived in the new mining area. See Gold Diggers and Silver Miners: Prostitution and Social Life on the Comstock Lode (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1981), 51–56.

  46. Doble, 47, 114.

  47. Ibid., 132, 178–81.

  48. Ibid., 70, 83, 114, 149.

  49. Journal entries, July 11, 18, Aug. 18, 24, Oct. 19, Nov. 16, 1850; Jan. 6, 1851, Osborn Journal. Osborn called his shorthand “phonography.”

  50. Ibid., e.g., Journal entries, Sept. 9, Oct. 18, 1850.

  51. Ibid., Journal entries, Aug. 8, Sept. 17, Oct. 2, 1850. The Miwok man named Juan, e.g., explained to the Belgian miner Jean-Nicolas Perlot that his people tried to conceive children so that they would be born between March and June, and thus benefit in the early months of their lives from the natural abundance of spring, summer, and fall in the Sierra foothills. See 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), 230.

  52. Journal entries, Oct. 10, 1850, April 25, 1851, Osborn Journal.

  53. Ibid., e.g., Journal entries, July 7, 11, Aug. 24, 25, 1850.

  54. Ibid., Journal entry, Sept. 15, 1850. Similar, though more ambiguous, entries occur in the journal of Angus McIsaac, where constant references to the moon—once called the “horny moon”—and its silver light may signify ejaculation, or else simply fond memories of home. See Journal entries, Dec. 26, 1852, Jan. 22, 24, 25, Feb. 14, 15, 1853, McIsaac Journal.

  55. Journal entries, Aug. 24, Dec. 10, 19, 1850, Osborn Journal.

  56. 1850 Census. By 1852, the population in the Southern Mines had more than doubled, to over 60,000, but male-female breakdowns are not available for all three counties in the aggregate statistics from the 1852 state census, which are published in the same volume as those from the 1850 federal census. In 1860, women still made up only about 19 percent of the population of the Southern Mines. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population of the United States in 1860; Compiled from . . . the Eighth Census (Washington, D.C., 1864). As for markets in heterosocial pleasures, one anonymous reader of an article-length version of this chapter has noted that such markets “flourished with full participation” by white men in the East as well—particularly, no doubt the reader means, in urban areas. S/he, of course, is correct. What was different about the Gold Rush was the physical absence of “respectable” middle-class white women, which meant that such “markets” could more easily stand in for “society” in the mining camps and supply centers of California. And what was unique about the Southern Mines, in particular, was a demography in which Anglo men barely constituted a majority. On markets in pleasure in the East, see Timothy J. Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790–1920 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992).

  57. Christman, 179, 198. On the “Model Artists,” see also 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), 219–20.

  58. Doten, 1:92, 227–28 (and cf. his description of the Fiddletown event to the Plymouth Rock, which ignores the dance hall stop, 1:232–33); Journal entry, Jan. 16, 1852, Wallis Journal; Doble, 104, 108. See also Journal entry, Dec. 30, 1850, Osborn Journal, on Stockton dance houses. My discussion of fandangos here focuses on male patrons. For a discussion of female workers in such establishments, see chap. 6, “The Last Fandango.”

  59. On the impact of the foreign miners’ tax on Sonora, see chap. 4, “Mining Gold and Making War.”

  60. Perkins, 127–28.

  61. Ibid., 161, 163, 201–2, 221–23, 305. Perkins is introduced in chap. 2, “Domestic Life in the Diggings.”

  62. Ibid., 103–4, 130–31, 218, 303–4. Elsewhere I have examined informal union among Mexican immigrant women, linking it to earlier cultural practices that proved particularly appropriate to mining areas. See “Sharing Bed and Board: Cohabitation and Cultural Difference in Central Arizona Mining Towns, 1863–1873,” in The Women’s West, ed. Susan Armitage and Elizabeth Jameson (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1987), 77–91. For a useful critique of this essay, see 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, esp. 512, n. 21.

  63. Perkins, 242–45, 268.

  64. Ibid., 161–62, 218–19, 242–43, 260, 268. On women in Santa Fe, see Deena J. González, “La Tules of Image and Reality: Euro-American Attitudes and Legend Formation on a Spanish-Mexican Frontier,” in de la Torre and
Pesquera, eds., 75–90. French women’s monopoly over the bars and gaming tables seems not to have lasted, and it may even have been peculiar to the town of Sonora. Sources from the mid to late 1850s show that Spanish-speaking women in the Southern Mines frequently did such work. See chap. 6, “The Last Fandango.”

  65. English-speaking women—and they were few in number—Perkins dismissed altogether, calling the “loose” women from Australia and the United States “vulgar, degraded and brutish.” Perkins, 243.

  66. For the comparison to New York, see Gilfoyle.

  67. Perkins, 251–52, 314. Perkins made this remark in response to the arrival of Elizabeth Le Breton Gunn, the wife of Lewis Gunn, a doctor and the publisher of the Sonora Herald, in 1851. For more on the Gunns, see chap. 6, “The Last Fandango.” For the perspective of Elizabeth Gunn, see Lewis C. Gunn and Elizabeth Le Breton Gunn, Records of a California Family: Journals and Letters of Lewis C. Gunn and Elizabeth Le Breton Gunn, ed. Anna Lee Marston (San Diego: n.p., 1928). As this collection of family papers makes clear, the woman whom Perkins called a “descendant of the Puritans” descended from both English and French immigrants, hence her maiden name, Le Breton. Enos Christman, who worked for and lived with Lewis Gunn, was more enthusiastic about Elizabeth Gunn’s arrival, noting that a “woman about a house produces a new order of things.” See chap. 2, “Domestic Life in the Diggings,” and Christman, 187.

  68. My thanks to Yukiko Hanawa for helping me clarify my interpretation in this section.

  69. Borthwick, 314–15; Perkins, 314. On Jewish merchants, see Robert E. Levinson, The Jews in the California Gold Rush (New York: KTAV Publishing, 1978), 23–60. Levinson notes that Perkins was also in competition with these merchants (p. 27).

  70. Doble, 89–90; Perlot, 246. For more on Perlot, see chap. 1, “On the Eve of Emigration.”

  71. Friedrich Gerstäcker, Narrative of a Journey round the World (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1853), 236–37, 251.

  72. Borthwick, 351; Harris, 112–13, 123; Journal entry, Aug. 4, 1850, Osborn Journal.

  73. Ibid., Journal entries, Aug. 4, 25, 1850; John Marshall Newton, Memoirs of John Marshall Newton (n.p.: John M. Stevenson, 1913), 34, 36, 48.

  74. 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), 216; Doten, 1:116.

  75. There is one other possible clue, but it comes from a document generated almost three years after Doten’s diary entry. Given the geographic mobility of Gold Rush participants, I hesitate to suggest that the individual to which the later source refers is the same person Doten called the “Chileno hermaphrodite.” But s/he might be. In March of 1855, a storekeeper at Rich Gulch (the area Doten visited during his drunken spree in May 1852) named Eben Brooks was murdered. During the inquest into Brooks’s death, authorities interviewed a number of men who lived nearby, though a jury ultimately concluded that Brooks “came to his death by wounds inflicted by some person or persons unknown.” One man interviewed, a Mexican miner named Marshall Gómez (from Matamoros, along the Rio Grande near Texas), testified that he had visited Brooks’s store with two Anglos on the eve of the murder. Before he left, Gómez testified, “two Spaniards came into the store” and asked after “a Spaniard who had a large woman.” Gómez told them that “there had been such a man below here.” It is this “large woman” who I suggest may be Doten’s “hermaphrodite.” The conversation at Brooks’s store was likely to have been conducted in Spanish, because although Gómez was in the store with two Anglos, the visitors directed their inquiry to him. Gómez himself was bilingual, and so he translated this conversation into English during the inquest. The Spanish term most likely to have been translated into English as “large woman” is mujer grande. If the “Spaniards” had meant to refer to a plump woman, they probably would have said mujer gorda or, more politely, gordita. So it seems unlikely that the “Spaniards” were simply looking for a rotund person. All of this suggests that it is possible that the “Spaniard who had a large woman” was a man who lived with an ambiguously gendered person who to some seemed a “hermaphrodite” and to others a “large woman,” or mujer grande. What is strikingly similar about the evidence from 1852 and 1855 is that both Doten’s “hermaphrodite” and Gómez’s “large woman” were well known along the Mokelumne River and sought out by visitors—perhaps s/he was something of a spectacle in a social world filled with gender trouble. See Inquest, Eben N. Brooks (1855), Inquest Records, Calaveras County, Calaveras County Museum and Archives, San Andreas, Calif. I am grateful to Camille Guerin-Gonzales for helping me analyze this evidence.

  76. See Judith Butler’s reading of Michel Foucault, ed., Herculine Barbin, Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth Century Hermaphrodite, trans. Richard McDongall (New York: Colophone, 1980), in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 93–106. On women who passed as men in this period, see San Francisco Lesbian and Gay History Project, “‘She Even Chewed Tobacco’: A Pictorial Narrative of Passing Women in America,” in Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, ed. Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey, Jr. (New York: Meridian/Penguin, 1989), 182–94; and the chapter entitled “Passing Women: 1782–1920,” in Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A., ed. Jonathan Ned Katz (New York: Thomas E. Crowell, 1976), 209–79. On cross–dressing men, see, e.g., Gilfoyle, 135–38; and, for the late nineteenth century, George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 33–45.

  77. Journal entries, Dec. 19, 25, 1849, William Miller Journal, Beinecke Library. “The tallest kind of dancing” is Alfred Doten’s phrase: Doten, 1:192.

  78. Doten, 1:122, 167–68.

  79. Derbec notes that even in San Francisco some dance halls were frequented only by men (p. 168).

  80. Borthwick, 303–4; Harris, 140. Leonard Noyes also confirms the use of flour sacks for patches. See Leonard Withington Noyes Reminiscences, Essex Institute, Salem, Mass., transcription at Calaveras County Museum and Archives, San Andreas, Calif., 54. Hinton Rowan Helper discusses Haxall flour in The Land of Gold: Reality versus Fiction (Baltimore: Henry Taylor, 1855), 78–79.

  81. Despite the recent profusion of scholarship on same-sex eroticism, the study of nineteenth-century sexual interactions between men is still in its early stages. In the late 1980s, the historians John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman provided a useful overview of the boundaries and meanings of same-sex intimacy, spelling out the myriad evidentiary and interpretive problems in studying a phenomenon that did not become intelligible as a cultural category of “inversion” or “homosexuality” until decades later. More recently, Jonathan Ned Katz has begun to explore “the abundance of nineteenth-century American terms for men’s affectional and sexual relations with men,” which suggest “the possibility of an equally large, unmapped variety of relationships.” See John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, 2d ed. (1988; Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1997), 121–30; Jonathan Ned Katz, “Coming to Terms: Conceptualizing Men’s Erotic and Affectional Relations with Men in the United States, 1820–1892,” in A Queer World: The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Martin Duberman (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1997), 216–35, esp. 231.

  82. Katz, “Coming to Terms,” 219. The term comes from the diaries of the sailor Philip Van Buskirk, quoted and analyzed in B. R. Burg, An American Seafarer in the Age of Sail: The Erotic Diaries of Philip C. Van Buskirk, 1851–1870 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1994), esp. 75.

  83. D’Emilio and Freedman, 123.

  84. Hanna Allkin v. Jeremiah Allkin (1856), Calaveras County, District Court, Calaveras County Museum and Archives, San Andreas, Calif.

  85. Doten, 1:68–69, 108, 109, 110, 173, 174. Similar references appear in diary entries on 75, 103, 12
7, 205, 213. For Whitman’s language, see D’Emilio and Freedman, 123.

  86. Cf. John Mack Faragher, Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1986), 153–54; Martin Duberman, “‘Writhing Bedfellows’ in Antebellum South Carolina: Historical Interpretation and the Politics of Evidence,” in Duberman et al., eds., 153–68; and E. Anthony Rotundo, “Romantic Friendship: Male Intimacy and Middle-Class Youth in the Northern United States, 1800–1900,” Journal of Social History 23, no. 1 (1989): 1–25, and American Manhood, esp. 84–85.

  87. On such practices in northern Mexico, see Oakah L. Jones, Jr., Los Paisanos: Spanish Settlers on the Northern Frontier of New Spain (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1979), esp. 32, 61, 75, 106, 251. I am grateful to María Teresa Koreck for conversations on these matters.

  88. See chap. 4, “Mining Gold and Making War.”

  89. 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. 79–80, 88–89.

  90. See Ann Vincent Fabian, “Rascals and Gentlemen: The Meaning of American Gambling, 1820–1890” (Ph.D. diss., Yale Univ., 1982), 53–59, and, more generally, Fabian, Card Sharps.

  91. My thanks to William Cronon for helping me clarify this argument.

  92. Noyes, 57. On the Murrieta family, see prologue, “Joaquín Murietta and the Bandits.”

  93. Noyes, 53–57.

  94. Doten, 1:98–104.

  95. Ibid., 1:88; Noyes, 51; Christman, 199–200; Journal entry, Nov. 7, 1852, Fox Journals.

  96. Borthwick, 276–85, 336–37; Perkins, 273–77; Helper, 116–30, esp. 124; Frank Marryat, Mountains and Molehills; or Recollections of a Burnt Journal, ed. Robin Winks (1855; Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1962), 131; Noyes, 51; Christman, 199–200; Journal entry, Nov. 7, 1852; Fox Journals. A key difference between Clifford Geertz’s Balinese cockfight, on the one hand, and California bull and bull-and-bear fights, on the other, was women’s participation in the latter and the liminality that participation signaled in the realm of Gold Rush gender relations. See Geertz, “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 412–53, esp. 417–18, n. 4.