Roaring Camp

by Susan Lee Johnson

  91. Stockton Times, esp. June–July 1850, passim.

  92. Account of Expenditures for 1851, Tuolumne County Sheriff George Work, PW 1029, Joseph Pownall Collection, Huntington Library.

  93. For reports on Sonora’s vigilance committee in the summer of 1851, see San Joaquin Republican (the Stockton Times became the San Joaquin Republican in May 1851) and Alta California, June–July 1851, passim, and esp. San Joaquin Republican, July 16, 1851; Heckendorn and Wilson, 44; Perkins, 224–42; and Christman, 189–98, quotation on 197.

  94. See prologue, “Joaquín Murrieta and the Bandits.”

  95. Coronel, 77.

  96. Ibid., 77–78.

  97. Ibid., 78–82.

  98. See James J. Rawls, “Gold Diggers: Indian Miners in the California Gold Rush,” California Historical Quarterly 55, no. 1 (Spring 1976): 28–45, esp. 32, and Indians of California: The Changing Image (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1984), 115–33, esp. 121–22. Albert L. Hurtado contends that Weber’s employees were Miwok, not Yokuts. Given that white observers tended to identify Indians by band location or name of a presumed chief, it is often difficult to tell from contemporary sources which Indians were present in a given situation. The restructuring of native communities that accompanied missionization, secularization, and widespread disease complicates identification further. See Hurtado, Indian Survival on the California Frontier (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1988), 112.

  99. Noyes, 45. On the locations of the Murphy brothers’ camps, see Gudde, 132–33.

  100. Étienne Derbec, A French Journalist in the California Gold Rush: The Letters of Étienne Derbec, ed. Abraham P. Nasatir (Georgetown, Calif.: Talisman Press, 1964), 148.

  101. See Rawls, “Gold Diggers,” 37, and Indians of California, 124–25; Hurtado, 112–14; and Annie R. Mitchell, “Major James D. Savage and the Tulareños,” California Historical Society Quarterly 28, no. 4 (Dec. 1949): 323–41.

  102. Woods, 83; Lafayette Houghton Bunnell, Discovery of the Yosemite and the Indian War of 1851 Which Led to That Event (1880; Yosemite National Park, Calif.: Yosemite Association, 1990), 243; Stockton Times, Jan. 1, 1851.

  103. For background, see chap. 1, “On the Eve of Emigration.”

  104. Journal entries, Aug. 10, Sept. 17, Oct. 4, 1850, Osborn Journal; Gerstäcker, Narrative, 218.

  105. Samuel Ward, Sam Ward in the Gold Rush, ed. Carvel Collins (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1949). Ward is introduced in chap. 2, “Domestic Life in the Diggings.” As noted, Julia Ward Howe was a participant in the nineteenth-century woman movement and author of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Brother Sam was married for a time to Emily Astor, the granddaughter of the fur trade capitalist John Jacob Astor, but she had since died in childbirth. At the time of the Gold Rush, Sam Ward was unhappily remarried and had lost his family’s banking fortune. See “Introduction” in Ward, 3–16.

  106. Ward, esp. 23–25. For more on Ward among the Indians, see George Harwood Phillips, Indians and Indian Agents: The Origins of the Reservation System in California, 1849–1852 (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1997), 111–17, 127–31; and my discussion below.

  107. Ephraim Delano to Wife, April 2, 1851, Ephraim Delano Letters, Beinecke Library; Perlot, 218.

  108. Perlot, 218–19.

  109. J. D. Borthwick, The Gold Hunters (1857; Oyster Bay, N.Y.: Nelson Doubleday, 1917), 275. On the pre–Gold Rush history of Sierra Miwoks, see chap. 1, “On the Eve of Emigration.”

  110. Woods, 86; Evans, 219–22; and see Bunnell, esp. 243.

  111. Doten, 1:67.

  112. Journal entry, March 8, 1850, Miller Journal.

  113. Stockton Times, Jan. 8, 29, 1851.

  114. Derbec, 23; Gilbert Chinard, “When the French Came to California: An Introductory Essay,” California Historical Society Quarterly 22, no. 4 (Dec. 1943): 289–314, esp. 312; Abraham P. Nasatir, trans. and ed., “Alexandre Dumas fils and the Lottery of the Golden Ingots,” California Historical Society Quarterly 33, no. 2 (June 1954): 125–42, esp. 128; Lucius Fairchild, California Letters of Lucius Fairchild, ed. Joseph Schafer (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1931), 99–100. For the skirmish in which Indians participated, see Hovey, “Account of the troubles between the American Miners and the Frenchmen.” For the newspaper quotations, see Stockton Times, Jan. 1, 1851.

  115. Stockton Times, Jan. 8, 29, 1851.

  116. Noyes, 39.

  117. Ibid., 39–40.

  118. Hurtado, 114; Mitchell, 325–27; Phillips, 37–56; Harris, 147–48; Stockton Times, Jan. 1, 4, 22, 1851; Robert Eccleston, The Mariposa Indian War, 1850–1851: Diaries of Robert Eccleston: The California Gold Rush, Yosemite, and the High Sierra, ed. C. Gregory Crampton (Salt Lake City: Univ. of Utah Press, 1957), iii–iv, 15–26, 131–41; and Bunnell, esp. 1–16.

  119. The other personal narrative of these events is Lafayette Houghton Bunnell’s reminiscence (cited above), first published in 1880.

  120. Eccleston, 25–111 passim; Stockton Times, Jan. 29, 1851; cf. Bunnell, passim.

  121. Eccleston, e.g., 15, 49, 67–68, 69–70, 86; cf. Bunnell, 74–76. On the Yosemites, see Phillips, 37–38.

  122. Eccleston, 48, 64; and Bunnell, 49.

  123. Harris, 148; Eccleston, 79, n. 15; Hurtado, 136; Francis Paul Prucha, The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians (1984; abridged ed., Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1986), 130–31.

  124. Eccleston, 28–29; Hurtado, 136; Prucha, 130–31.

  125. Hurtado, 114–15, 136–37; Prucha, 130–31; Perlot, 124–25; Mitchell, 327–34; Phillips, 132–54.

  126. Hurtado, 115–16; Mitchell, 334–49; Phillips, 144–50. On Murrieta, see Prologue, “Joaquín Murrieta and the Bandits.”

  127. Hurtado, 153–57.

  128. Ward, 19–49, quotations on 31, 46–47; Phillips, 111–17. On the Ward family, see “Introduction” in Ward, 3–16.

  129. Ward, 44–45, 53, 55–64, quotations on 53, 55, 62–63.

  130. Ibid., 125, 126–27, 136–40, 161–63. It is the historian Albert Hurtado who has made the most convincing arguments about Indian survival in California; see Indian Survival on the California Frontier.

  131. Perlot, esp. 161, 165–66.

  132. Ibid., 169–70.

  133. Ibid., 181–235, quotation on 224. For more on this interaction, see chap. 1, “On the Eve of Emigration.”

  134. Indeed, writing his reminiscences many years later in his native Belgium, Perlot waxed romantic about the Miwok people he had once known, wondering what had became of them: “It could be that today . . . they dress, live, speak, and think like us: they would then have succeeded in becoming civilized, or rather would have exchanged their civilization for ours. If that is the case, alas! what have they gained?” See Perlot, 235.

  Chapter 5: Dreams That Died

  1. San Joaquin Republican (Stockton), Sept. 25, 1852. The identity of this correspondent is unknown, but internal evidence suggests that it was an Anglo American man.

  2. The Golden Era (San Francisco), Sept. 17, 1854. For background on Lorena Hays, see the editor’s summaries in To the Land of Gold and Wickedness: The 1848–59 Diary of Lorena L. Hays, ed. Jeanne Hamilton Watson (St. Louis: Patrice Press, 1988), 1–14, 198–229.

  3. The Golden Era, Sept. 17, 1854; Hays, 261.

  4. Chap. 4, “Mining Gold and Making War,” details these conflicts, each of which has been named rather extravagantly as a “war” or “revolution” by participants or later chroniclers. I use these exaggerated terms as a shorthand to identify what were actually more limited and localized conflicts. Only the event known as the Mariposa War came close in scale to living up to its sobriquet.

  5. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population of the United States in 1860; Compiled from . . . the Eighth Census (Washington, D.C., 1864) (hereafter cited as 1860 Census).

  6. The impact of the arrival of aspiring middle-class white women in the Southern Mines is detailed in chap. 6, “The Last Fandango.”

  7.
For average daily yields, see Rodman W. Paul, California Gold: The Beginning of Mining in the Far West (1947; reprint, Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1965), 116–23, 349–52. Interestingly, Paul notes that his estimates “do not apply to the Chinese” (p. 349). For quotations, see A. W. Genung to Friend Thomas, April 22, 1851, A. W. Genung Correspondence, Beinecke Library, Yale Univ., New Haven (hereafter cited as Beinecke Library); San Joaquin Republican, Feb. 2, 1853. Genung did not say whether his estimates for the yields of the first and second diggings were for an individual or a team of miners.

  8. A good account of the hope California represented for emigrating Chinese appears in Ronald T. Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (Boston: Little, Brown, 1989), 31–42. For the quotations, see San Joaquin Republican, Dec. 10, 1858 (reprinted from the Jackson Sentinel), June 26, 1854 (reprinted from the Mariposa Chronicle), and Dec. 21, 1856 (reprinted from Mokelumne Hill’s Calaveras Chronicle). As for use of the name John, Chinese men returned the favor. One 1850s pictorial lettersheet (illustrated stationery used for letters sent home) depicts a group of Chinese miners passing a white man on a trail, and the text reads, “Strings of Chinamen pass, and greet you in broken English with ‘how you do, John?’—we are all Johns to them, and they to us” (see illustration p. 304). California Lettersheet Facsimiles, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif. (hereafter cited as Huntington Library). This mutual name-calling, of course, was not reciprocal in meaning, since Chinese were greeting Anglos with a name common among Anglos, while Anglos were addressing Chinese with a foreign sobriquet.

  9. Journal entries, Dec. 11, 26, 27, 1850, Dec. 16, 1853, Timothy C. Osborn Journal, Bancroft Library, Univ. of California, Berkeley (hereafter cited as Bancroft Library); San Joaquin Republican, Oct. 10, 1857 (reprinted from Mariposa Democrat). See also Paul, 130; Ping Chiu, Chinese Labor in California, 1850–1880: An Economic Study (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1967), 17; and Stephen Williams, The Chinese in the California Mines, 1848–1860 (1930; San Francisco: R and E Research Associates, 1971), 38–40.

  10. According to Makoto Kowta of California State Univ., Chico, Chinese miners, drawing on knowledge of traditional Chinese water-lifting devices, may have contributed significantly to the development of new technology used to remove water from riverbeds. Personal communication, March 12, 1999. An 1858 newspaper article described another use for such pumps: “In the bed of Jackson creek . . . a company of Chinamen . . . have sunk a large hole, and run two tom heads of water into it, for the purpose of washing the pay-dirt at the bottom without raising it out. All the water thus thrown into the hole, besides the considerable quantity which otherwise collects, is thrown out by a pump driven by tread-mill power. Three Chinamen are employed to tread the mill.” San Joaquin Republican, July 9, 1858 (reprinted from Jackson Sentinel).

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

  12. J. D. Borthwick, The Gold Hunters (1857; Oyster Bay, N.Y.: Nelson Doubleday, 1917), 144, 254–55.

  13. See, e.g., Mrs. Lee Whipple-Haslam, Early Days in California: Scenes and Events of the ’50s as I Remember Them (Jamestown, Calif.: Mother Lode Magnet, [1925]), 30.

  14. See Chiu, 23–25. In addition to those discussed below, see, e.g., expulsions at Clinton and Agua Frio documented in the San Joaquin Republican, Sept. 13, 1854 (from the Jackson Sentinel), and April 29, 1856, respectively.

  15. Some scholarly works cite an even earlier—1849—expulsion of Chinese from Chinese Camp in Tuolumne County. See, e.g., Chiu, 12. From what I have been able to determine, most rely for this information on an undocumented account published in Theodore H. Hittell, History of California, vol. 4 (San Francisco: N. J. Stone, 1898), 102. I have found no contemporary documentation of this event (from newspapers, letters, diaries, or reminiscences), and so have chosen not to consider it here. Hittell’s account is of a party of sixty Chinese miners employed by British men (and supervised, interestingly, by Sonorans). There is contemporary documentation of British men early on bringing a smaller party of Chinese under contract to Tuolumne County, but this account has the Chinese miners leaving their British employers of their own volition. See Stockton Times, March 23, 1850. Ping Chiu has also found good evidence of instances where British employed Chinese on a contract basis (see pp. 12, 147, n. 10). Nonetheless, I can find no contemporary documentation of such contract laborers’ being expelled from the mines in 1849 or 1850.

  16. For the Columbia location of the 1850 conflicts, see chap. 5, “Mining Gold and Making War.” For Bigler’s message, see California Legislature, Journal of the Senate, Journal of the Third Session of the Legislature of the State of California (San Francisco, 1852), 373–78.

  17. Daily Alta California, May 15, 1852. For another mention of this meeting, see San Joaquin Republican, May 19, 1852. Similar disturbances took place in the Northern Mines in May 1852. See Ralph Mann, After the Gold Rush: Society in Grass Valley and Nevada City, California, 1849–1870 (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1982), 54–56.

  18. Daily Alta California (San Francisco), May 15, 1852. On the “discovery” of gold at Columbia, see, e.g., J. Heckendorn and W. A. Wilson, Miners and Business Men’s Directory for the Year Commencing January 1st, 1856. Embracing a General Directory of the Citizens of Tuolumne . . . Together with the Mining Laws of Each District, a Description of the Different Camps, and Other Interesting Statistical Matter (Columbia, Calif.: Clipper Office, 1856), 6; Hero Eugene Rensch, “Columbia, a Gold Camp of Old Tuolumne: Her Rise and Decline, Together with Some Mention of Her Social Life and Cultural Strivings” (Berkeley, 1936, for State of California, Department of Natural Resources, Division of Parks, under auspices of Works Progress Administration), 5–7; and Edna Bryan Buckbee, The Saga of Old Tuolumne (New York: Press of the Pioneers, 1935), 90–91.

  19. This argument, so far as it concerns the racialization of class in nineteenth-century California, is hardly new. Alexander Saxton advanced it in The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1971). By now consideration of how class has been constructed in racial terms is de rigueur, though many historians unfamiliar with U.S. western racial politics have conceived of race largely in black/white terms. See, e.g., David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991). Alexander Saxton has greatly expanded and usefully updated his arguments in The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (London: Verso, 1990). What is new about my argument is that it pushes the process Saxton describes (in Indispensable Enemy) for the later nineteenth century backward in time, locating white men’s antipathy to Chinese workers in a period before either white or Chinese men were employed routinely as wage laborers. More predictably, what is also new is that my argument sees class formation in gendered as well as racialized terms. Here I follow the lead of feminist scholars such as those represented in Ava Baron, ed., Work Engendered: Toward a New History of American Labor (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1991).

  20. For the measures considered in the state legislature, see California Legislature, Journals of the Senate and Assembly (1852), passim, especially material related to “An Act to enforce contracts and obligations to perform work and labor,” “An Act to prevent coolie labor in the mines, and to prevent involuntary servitude,” “A Bill to protect the State of California against the introduction of foreigners of bad character,” “An Act to prevent foreigners becoming chargeable to the State of California,” and “An Act to protect mining interests, and to prevent excessive emigration from Asia to the State of California.” Also relevant are “Report of the Committee on Mines and Mining Interests” (appendix, pp. 829–35); “Report of the Committee on the Governor’s Special Message, in Relation to Asiatic Emigration” (appendix, pp. 731–37); and “Minority Report of the Select Committee on . . . ‘An Act to enforce contracts and obligations to perform work and labor’” (appendix, pp. 669–75
). The foreign miners’ tax was proposed in the senate as “An Act to provide for the protection of foreigners, and to define their liabilities and privileges.” It became law on May 4, 1852.

  21. San Joaquin Republican, April 21, 1852.

  22. There was a sharp decrease in Chinese immigration the year after the foreign miners’ tax was imposed (1853), but immigration rates shot back up the following year and remained steady throughout the rest of the 1850s. See Chiu, 142.

  23. San Joaquin Republican, Feb. 11, June 24, July 6, 1855.

  24. George H. Bernhard Reminiscences, Bernhard-Patterson Family File, Mariposa Museum and History Center, Mariposa, Calif. (there are two versions of Bernhard’s brief reminiscences in this file; these quotations are from the 1944 version).

  25. San Joaquin Republican, Aug. 7, 1856.

  26. Alta California (weekly edition), May 15, 1852.

  27. E. Sawtell to James W. Mandeville, Jan. 30, 1853, James Wylie Mandeville Papers, Huntington Library. Mandeville was not only Sawtell’s assemblyman but his creditor as well. See letters from Sawtell dated April 5, 1853, and Sept. 18, 1854, and the deed to a mining claim dated April 13, 1853, all in the same collection.

  28. Takaki, 82. For a detailed account of the actual revenue received from the foreign miners’ tax, see the tables in Chiu, 23, 28, 29.

  29. Daily Alta California, May 15, 1852; Sucheng Chan, This Bittersweet Soil: The Chinese in California Agriculture, 1860–1910 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1986), 25–26; Takaki, 35–36.