Roaring Camp

by Susan Lee Johnson

  30. San Joaquin Republican, April 28, 1852.

  31. I follow Chiu’s lead here and introduce new evidence that further documents his contentions about the connections between anti-Chinese and anticapitalist agitation. See Chiu, esp. 12–16. Chiu probably overstated white miners’ anxiety over the coming of “company mining” in the Southern Mines. Water companies, more than mining companies, were the entrepreneurial venture of choice in the Southern Mines.

  32. Alta California (steamer edition), May 15, 1852; Rensch, 67–68; San Joaquin Republican, Aug. 7, Oct. 6, 1852.

  33. Certificate of Incorporation of the Tuolumne County Water Company (TCWC), Sept. 4, 1852, PW 1030, Joseph Pownall Papers, Huntington Library.

  34. Two early summaries of water companies in Tuolumne County appeared in the San Joaquin Republican, Aug. 7, Oct. 6, 1852, and an updated report appeared Oct. 9, 1855. The Tuolumne County Water Company was the largest venture of its kind in the Southern Mines. Another sizable company was organized in Calaveras County in June of 1852, which came to be known as the Mokelumne Hill Canal and Mining Company. See Paul, 161–62; San Joaquin Republican, June 30, 1852, Feb. 24, 1856.

  35. San Joaquin Republican, March 14, 16 (from the Columbia Clipper), 1855; Rensch, 68–77; [Herbert O. Lang], A History of Tuolumne County. Compiled from the Most Authentic Records. (San Francisco: B. F. Alley, 1882), 166–67.

  36. Within weeks of the meeting, e.g., newspaper subscribers in Sonora, Stockton, and even San Francisco all were reading that “the Tuolumne County Water Company . . . refuse water on anything like reasonable terms.” As a result, readers learned, “the miners are almost all provoked and indignant.” Alta California, Feb. 11, 1853; cf. San Joaquin Republican, Feb. 16, 1853 (from the Sonora Herald).

  37. These anti-Chinese activities are described and analyzed in chap. 6, “The Last Fandango.”

  38. The following narrative and analysis concentrates on events in Tuolumne County, in part because of the rich documentation available and in part because the TCWC was the most extensive of the water companies established in the Southern Mines. For evidence of a miners’ strike against the Mokelumne Hill Canal and Mining Company, see, e.g., San Joaquin Republican, Feb. 23, 24, March 5, 9, 1856.

  39. TCWC List of Land Transactions, 1852–92; and TCWC List of Reservoir Locations, 1855–56, PW 1170, Pownall Papers, Huntington Library.

  40. TCWC Account Book, 1852–53, PW 972; and, e.g., TCWC Payroll for Week Ending Jan. 22, 1853, PW 1081, Pownall Papers, Huntington Library.

  41. See, e.g., TCWC Salary Resolutions for Jan. 1, 1858, Feb. 1, 1858, PW 1214 and PW 1215, Pownall Papers, Huntington Library.

  42. San Joaquin Republican, March 16, 1855.

  43. Ibid.

  44. John Jolly, Gold Spring Diary: The Journal of John Jolly, and Including a Brief History of Stephen Spencer Hill, Fugitive from Labor, ed. Carlo M. De Ferrari (Sonora, Calif.: Tuolumne County Historical Society, 1966), esp. 81, 87, 102–3, 104. John Jolly, who was British, was one of the allies of Stephen Spencer Hill, the black man who purchased his freedom from his white master Wood Tucker in 1853. When an agent of Tucker’s tried to re–enslave Hill and seize his property the following year, Jolly and others rallied on Hill’s behalf. Jolly’s commitment to “free labor” in the diggings seems to have run deeper than that of most white men. See chap. 4, “Mining Gold and Making War.”

  45. Petition of Columbia “Traders, Mechanicks and business men” to the TCWC, March 18, 1855, PW 229, Pownall Papers, Huntington Library. An interesting outcome of this alliance between miners, merchants, and the CSRWC was the publication in 1856 of Heckendorn and Wilson, Miners and Business Men’s Directory, which avoided, so far as possible, mention of the TCWC, while giving wide exposure to the CSRWC. See esp. 6–7, 25, 33.

  46. Joseph Pownall to [R. A. Robinson], March 19, 1855, PW 555, and Joseph Pownall, Journal and Letterbook, 1849–54, PW 553, Pownall Papers, Huntington Library. Another TCWC manager who may have been ambivalent about company policies is William Newell, who early on worked as company secretary. Newell left the TCWC in spring 1853, not long after the Columbia miners first protested high water rates. There is no direct evidence that he did so because of the protests. But when the CSRWC formed, Newell’s father-in-law (who had been to Columbia and knew the local business and political climate) wrote to his daughter and son-in-law, “I kept expecting to see in the Columbia Papers that William had joined the New Water Company, but I dont see his Name as yet.” This suggests that William may have been sympathetic to the miners’ demands—and also well qualified for a job with a rival company. See, e.g., William Newell to Mary Newell, April 24, 1853, PW 523, and Benjamin Harrison to Mary and William Newell, Feb. 4, 1855, PW 351, Pownall Papers, Huntington Library. For more on the Newells, see chap. 1, “On the Eve of Emigration,” and chap. 6 “The Last Fandango.”

  47. Joseph Pownall to [R. A. Robinson], March 19, 1855, PW 555, Pownall Papers, Huntington Library. On Coffroth, see, e.g., Buckbee, 83–88.

  48. Since Democrats constituted the majority party in the diggings, this crisis was by definition a crisis among Democrats. For scholars interested in this topic, and in its connection to the local politics of water companies, there would be no better place to begin research than in the Mandeville Papers and the Pownall Papers, both at the Huntington Library.

  49. Joseph Pownall to [R. A. Robinson], March 19, 1855, PW 555, Pownall Papers, Huntington Library.

  50. Minutes of the TCWC Stockholders’ Meetings, 1852–1900, PW 975, Pownall Papers, Huntington Library. The following document Mandeville’s role as TCWC stockholder and trustee; all are located in the Mandeville Papers, Huntington Library: Receipt from TCWC to Mandeville, July 17, 1852; Andrew Jay Hatch to Mandeville, March 4, 1853; Hamilton Ellerson to Mandeville, March 7, 1853; Samuel R. Goddard to Mandeville, March 20, 1853; Cyrus Lennan to Mandeville, Sept. 12, 1853; R. A. Robinson to Mandeville, Jan. 10, 1854 (here TCWC Secretary Robinson sends Mandeville a dividend check and assures him that the miners’ complaints against the company are “nothing but a flash in the pan”); George S. Evans to Mandeville, March 20, 1855; John McGlenchy to Mandeville, March 25, 1855.

  51. Union Democrat (Sonora, Calif.), April 21, 1855, cited in Buckbee, 87–88. James Mandeville, too, faced such a challenge, though the dispute seems to have been unrelated to water company politics. In 1854, a Sonora businessman challenged Mandeville to a duel for calling him an “abolitionist” and a “defaulter.” Mandeville refused, denouncing the practice of dueling in terms similar to those of TCWC President Dobie. He also retracted his insults, admitting, “I have no personal knowledge of your sentiments in relation to the first accusation, nor of your condition in relation to the second.” D. A. Enyart to Mandeville, March 8, 1854; Mandeville to D. A. Enyart, March 15, 1854; and Mandeville to Benjamin S. Lippincott, April 3, 1854, Mandeville Papers, Huntington Library.

  52. San Joaquin Republican, Aug. 8, 1855.

  53. T. B. Dryer to Joseph Pownall, Oct. 20, 1855, PW 284, Pownall Papers, Huntington Library. For newspaper coverage of both Coffroth’s “somerset” and Know-Nothing challenges and victories, see San Joaquin Republican, July 14, Aug. 15, Sept. 16, 1855, Feb. 21, 1856.

  54. Certificate of Incorporation of the Tuolumne County Water Company, Sept. 4, 1852, PW 1030, Pownall Papers, Huntington Library.

  55. I have not located business papers for the Columbia and Stanislaus River Water Company. These figures appeared in the San Joaquin Republican, Oct. 9, 1855.

  56. See, e.g., Heckendorn and Wilson, 7; Rensch, 77.

  57. San Joaquin Republican, Nov. 27, 1856.

  58. The following description is derived from Rensch, 88–90; and Buckbee, 273–75.

  59. This “Miners’ Union” is significant because historians routinely cite a later date—1863, to be precise—for the beginnings of organized labor in western mining. It was in 1863 that hardrock miners formed a union on Nevada’s Comstock Lode. See, e.g., Richard E. Lingenfelter, The Hardrock Miners: A
History of the Mining Labor Movement in the American West, 1863–1893 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1974). I note this mention of a “Miners’ Union” with the hope that future researchers will be able to find more than passing reference to it, and thus analyze its relationship to the labor movement that later developed in western hardrock mining.

  60. See Paul, 345–52.

  61. This summary relies on Rensch, 90–92; and Buckbee, 280–81. The quotation is from the Sacramento Union, May 10, 1859, quoted in Rensch, 91. Documentation for the TCWC purchase appears in TCWC List of Land Transactions, 1852–92; and TCWC List of Reservoir Locations, 1855–56, PW 1170, Pownall Papers, Huntington Library. The purchase price was $149,307.18.

  62. The best explanation of the geographic distribution of gold deposits in California is in Paul, 91–115. Mann provides the best account of the placers-to-gravels-and-quartz trajectory in the Northern Mines in general and Nevada County in particular, and of the social consequences of that trajectory.

  63. Stockton Times, Oct. 5, 12, 18, 1850. For later arguments, see Stockton Times, Jan. 29, April 9, 1851, and San Joaquin Republican, April 3, 1852.

  64. San Joaquin Republican, Jan. 24, 1854, April 17, 1855. Another article claimed such superiority for Calaveras, Tuolumne, and Mariposa counties collectively. See Sept. 25, 1855.

  65. San Joaquin Republican, Oct. 15, 1857.

  66. For a copy of the document by which the Alvarados conveyed Las Mariposas to Frémont, see John Charles Frémont, The Expeditions of John Charles Frémont, vol. 2, The Bear Flag Revolt and the Court-Martial, ed. Mary Lee Spence and Donald Jackson (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1973), 2:297–300. The purchase price was $3,000. As Leonard Pitt has shown, Larkin forced Alvarado into conveying this property to Frémont in order to satisfy prewar debts. See Pitt, The Decline of the Californios: A Social History of the Spanish-Speaking Californians, 1846–1890 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1966), 36.

  67. J. C. Frémont, 2:299.

  68. Ibid., 2:34–38, 299, quotation on 35.

  69. For speculations about Jessie Benton Frémont that are beyond the scope of this chapter, see my essay “The United States of Jessie Benton Frémont: Corresponding with the Nation,” Reviews in American History 23, no. 2 (June 1995): 219–25, which is a review of the fine collection The Letters of Jessie Benton Frémont, ed. Pamela Herr and Mary Lee Spence (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1993). The overview of Benton Frémont’s life and the introductions to each section of letters in this collection are indispensable (for the period covered here, see esp. xvii–xxx, 3–10, 63–70, 187–91). See also Herr, Jessie Benton Fremont (New York: Franklin Watts, 1987).

  70. San Joaquin Republican, Aug. 6, 1856.

  71. Here I rely on the analysis of the historian Mary Lee Spence. See J. C. Frémont, The Expeditions of John Charles Frémont, vol. 3, Travels from 1848 to 1854, ed. Mary Lee Spence (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1984), 3:xxxvi–xxxvii. The bill that actually passed, the Land Act of 1851, was introduced by Frémont’s fellow senator from California, William Gwin. It permitted appeals on Land Commission decisions, a provision that was seen as favorable to Anglo Americans.

  72. Stockton Times, Nov. 23, 1850. The editorial suggested that where Frémont wanted to “immortalize himself by eradicating the Aztec from North America,” Anglos should instead embrace Mexicans in California as unrivaled “hewer[s] of wood and . . . drawer[s] of water.”

  73. Ibid., Dec. 7, 1850.

  74. Ibid., Jan. 1, 1851.

  75. Alta California, Dec. 24, 1850, reprinted in J. C. Frémont, 3:213–20.

  76. This summary, too, relies on Spence’s work. See J. C. Frémont, 3: lxx–lxxiii.

  77. Ibid., 3:xxxix–xliv. See also Albert Hurtado, Indian Survival on the California Frontier (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1988), 140–41.

  78. Spence notes these remarks of Lafayette Houghton Bunnell, J. C. Frémont, 3:xliii. See Bunnell, Discovery of the Yosemite and the Indian War of 1851 Which Led to That Event (1880; Yosemite National Park, Calif.: Yosemite Association, 1990), esp. 232, 242–44. On the Mariposa War and on Savage, see chap. 4, “Mining Gold and Making War.”

  79. J. C. Frémont, 3:xliv–xlv, 51–53; Bayard Taylor, Eldorado or Adventures in the Path of Empire (1850; Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1988), 84–85.

  80. For an excellent account of Mariposa business affairs, see Spence’s summary in J. C. Frémont, 3:xliv–lii. Benton is quoted on xlix. By 1853, Hoffman no longer worked on Frémont’s behalf. Spence suggests that Frémont never paid Hoffman for his services. See also Spence, “David Hoffman: Frémont’s Mariposa Agent in London,” Southern California Quarterly 60 (Winter 1978): 379–403.

  81. J. C. Frémont, 3:xliv. Spence has succeeded in this task beyond all reasonable expectations.

  82. Ibid., 3:lix, lxiii, lxix, and see survey maps reprinted on lxiv–lxv, lxviii.

  83. Ibid., 3:lix–lxiii, lxix.

  84. San Joaquin Republican, April 7, 1855.

  85. Ibid., Jan. 10, June 30, 1852.

  86. Ibid., Nov. 13, 1852.

  87. Ibid., Aug. 6, 1856. For another conflation of Frémont’s financial and political aspirations, see ibid., July 20, 1856: “Col. Fremont’s political principles are as much a matter of uncertainty as the extent and value of the gold mines on his Mariposa claim.”

  88. Ibid., Aug. 24, 1856. Cf. Sept. 16, 1856 (reprinted from the Calaveras Chronicle): “A well known colored resident of Mokelumne Hill, named Peter Sykes, has been missing for the past few weeks, and much anxiety was felt by lovers of gumbo on account of his mysterious absence. It is now ascertained that Peter is stumping the state for Fremont. . . . It required some persuasion to start Pete on his mission as he announced himself more in favor of draw poker than Fre–monte.”

  89. See J. B. Frémont, 67.

  90. Hays, 270; San Joaquin Republican, July 20, 1856.

  91. See, e.g., San Joaquin Republican, Aug. 31, 1856, June 24, 1857, July 30, 1858.

  92. Ibid., Jan. 25, 1857.

  93. Ibid., June 24, 25, Oct. 8, 1857, March 6, 17, June 25, 1858.

  94. Ibid., Oct. 16, 1857 (from Mariposa Gazette); see also Bunnell, 284.

  95. San Joaquin Republican, Feb. 6, 1858 (from Mariposa Gazette).

  96. See J. B. Frémont, 193, 194–95.

  97. Ibid., 195, 199; San Joaquin Republican, April 24, 1858.

  98. J. B. Frémont, 187, 195.

  99. Ibid., 194–95. The editors of Jessie’s correspondence indicate that the Frémonts brought two maids back from France in the mid-1850s, and Mémé may have been one of these. She is mentioned frequently in Jessie’s correspondence as the children’s nurse. See ibid., 62, n. 7, 126, 135, 143, 162, 183. I can find nothing in Jessie’s published correspondence to indicate who Rose was or when she entered the Frémonts’ employ.

  100. On Albert Lea, see ibid., 54, 55, n. 3, 194, 195, 203, 206. In the fall of 1860, Lea was convicted of murdering his estranged wife in San Francisco, and the Frémonts campaigned to get his death sentence commuted to life imprisonment. Jessie herself wrote a long letter on his behalf to the Alta California (printed Feb. 27, 1861, reprinted in J. B. Frémont, 235–37). The Frémonts’ campaign failed, and Lea was hanged. See Herr, 317–18. On Isaac, see J. B. Frémont, 199, 201, n. 2 (here, the editors quote Jessie from her own Souvenirs of My Time [Boston: D. Lothrop, 1887], 196–98), 206, 215, 216, 229–30.

  101. J. B. Fremont, Letters, 195. Cf. Mann, 111–12, 247, tables 26 and 27. Mann’s figures show the small number of servants at work in middle-class homes in the Northern Mines. I have not done a comparable statistical analysis for the Southern Mines, but extensive reading in letters, diaries, and reminiscences of aspiring middle-class people there suggests a similar underreliance on servants when compared with middle-class homes in the East. In Far-West Sketches (Boston: D. Lothrop 1890), Jessie Benton Frémont indicates that she also employed Indian women to do domestic work (112–13). Cf. Albert L. Hurtado, “‘Hardly a Farmhouse—a Kitchen wit
hout Them’: Indian and White Households on the California Borderland Frontier in 1860,” Western Historical Quarterly 13 (1982): 245–70.

  102. J. B. Frémont, Letters, 43.

  103. Ibid., 198–99; J. B. Frémont, Far-West Sketches, 103–5.

  104. J. B. Frémont, Letters, 205–8, quotations on 205.

  105. Indeed, the miners’ and settlers’ association and the Hornitos League may have been one in the same, or else the former may have developed into the latter. See ibid., 188, 207–8, n. 1; Herr, 295–300; Andrew Rolle, John Charles Frémont: Character as Destiny (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 181–82.

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

  107. Jessie Benton Frémont thought that the miners who opposed her husband were from Hornitos. See Far-West Sketches, 59.

  108. For Jessie Benton Frémont, the term “border ruffian” no doubt had a very specific referent. It would have evoked the pro-southern Missourians who had struggled to secure Kansas as a slave state starting in 1854. The Missourians were led by David Atchison, U.S. senator and bitter rival of Jessie’s father, Thomas Hart Benton. I am indebted to the historian Ralph Mann for pointing this out. As Mann notes, calling opponents of her father and husband “border ruffians” reduced them to the status of southern “white trash,” thereby negating their legitimacy. For contemporary analyses of the category “white trash,” see Matt Wray and Annalee Newitz, eds., White Trash: Race and Class in America (New York: Routledge, 1997).

  109. San Joaquin Republican, July 14, 1858.

  110. Ibid.; J. B. Frémont, Letters, 207–8, n. 1.

  111. J. B. Frémont, Letters, 206.

  112. Ibid., 205–7.

  113. Herr, 298–99. According to Herr, Jessie “described this confrontation only in her unpublished memoirs. While she may have dramatized the story, Lily [Jessie’s daughter], eighteen at the time, corroborates it in her Recollections, adding that she accompanied her mother to the tavern” (p. 466, n. 13). See Elizabeth Benton Frémont, Recollections of Elizabeth Benton Frémont, comp. I. T. Martin (New York: F. H. Hitchcock, 1912). Jessie Benton Frémont’s unpublished memoirs are located at the Bancroft Library, but throughout this section, I am relying on the careful readings of these memoirs by her biographer Herr and the historian Mary Lee Spence. Benton Frémont does not mention the visit to the saloon in Far-West Sketches (see pp. 53–83).