Roaring Camp

by Susan Lee Johnson

  57. Laura Echeverria v. Juan Echeverria (1857), Tuolumne County District Court Records.

  58. Ibid.

  59. Ibid.

  60. Ibid.

  61. For historiographical context, see Camille Guerin-Gonzales, “Conversing across Boundaries of Race, Ethnicity, Class, Gender, and Region: Latina and Latino Labor History,” Labor History 35, no. 4 (Fall 1994): 547–63.

  62. Throughout, my argument has been guided by the work of Elsa Barkley Brown and Evelyn Nakano Glenn, particularly as it relates to the relational nature of differences among women. See, e.g., Brown, “Polyrhythms and Improvization: Lessons for Women’s History,” History Workshop Journal 31–32 (1991): 85–90; and Glenn, “From Servitude to Service Work: Historical Continuities in the Racial Division of Paid Reproductive Labor,” Signs 18, no. 1 (Autumn 1992): 1–43.

  63. San Joaquin Republican, Oct. 8, 1858.

  64. 1860 Census.

  65. See Lucie Cheng Hirata, “Free, Indentured, Enslaved: Chinese Prostitutes in Nineteenth-Century America,” Signs 5, no. 1 (Autumn 1979): 3–29, esp. 13–18; 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. My account of Chinese prostitution in the Southern Mines relies on the analysis in these groundbreaking works. See also Takaki, 118–19.

  66. According to Lucie Cheng Hirata, it was in 1854 that the secret societies gained control of Chinese prostitution, inaugurating a period of organized trade that peaked around 1870 but lasted into the early twentieth century. The Hip Yee Tong monopolized the trade in the years under consideration here. See Hirata, 8–13. On the relative importance of tongs and other social organizations among Chinese immigrants, see Eve Armentrout-Ma, “Urban Chinese at the Sinitic Frontier: Social Organization in United States’ Chinatowns, 1849–1898,” Modern Asian Studies 17, no. 1 (1983): 107–35.

  67. San Joaquin Republican, Sept. 18, 22, Oct. 2, 1854.

  68. Ibid., Aug. 27, 28, Sept. 16, 1857, June 4, 5, 6, 7, 12, Aug. 10, 1858. The details of the Columbia fire appear in the Aug. 27 and 28, 1857, articles. For more on western perceptions of Chinese opium use, in particular, see Jonathan D. Spence, The Chan’s Great Continent: China in Western Minds (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998.)

  69. San Joaquin Republican, Oct. 9, 1854.

  70. Receipt Issued by the Jackson Town Marshal’s Office, Sept. 15, 1854; and The People v. A. C. Brown, E. H. Williams, Hiram Allen, T. Hinckley, and Ellis Evans (1854), Amador County Court of Sessions, Amador County Archives, Jackson, Calif. My thanks to Larry Cenotto for pointing out these materials to me. See also Cenotto, 1:39, 53, 60.

  71. The People v. Chinaman John (1856), and The People v. John Doe a Chinaman (1856), Tuolumne County Court of Sessions Records; Mary Babbit v. Horace Babbit (1858), Amador County District Court Records; Amador Weekly Ledger, June 26, 1858.

  72. See, e.g., Yung, 33–34.

  73. Hirata, esp. 13, 19.

  74. Amador Weekly Ledger, July 3, 1858. Cf. San Joaquin Republican, June 15, 1858.

  75. Yung, 31.

  76. Amador Weekly Ledger, May 2, 1857. An account of a marriage ceremony for a Chinese woman and man—called by the editor “a John and a Johness, with unwritable names”—appears in the same newspaper on May 8, 1858. Significantly, this couple chose to marry according to Anglo American law in Amador County, with a local judge presiding.

  77. Ibid., July 18, 1857.

  78. For an excellent preliminary survey of the sources, both primary and secondary, on the Weaverville War, see Rony. This unpublished essay also provides interpretive themes that have influenced my analysis. I am grateful to Dorothy Fujita Rony for sharing her work with me.

  79. The San Joaquin Republican followed all of these conflicts, often drawing on reports from local correspondents and on articles published in smaller papers in the Southern Mines such as the Calaveras Chronicle (Mokelumne Hill), the Mariposa Gazette, the San Andreas Independent, and the Union Democrat (Sonora). For accounts in the San Joaquin Republican, see May 29, 31, June 9, 1854; Jan. 26, Feb. 3, 8, Sept. 25, 26, Oct. 26, 28, Nov. 13, 1856.

  80. See, e.g., Rony; Armentrout-Ma; Sucheng Chan, This Bittersweet Soil: The Chinese in California Agriculture, 1860–1910 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1986); Gunther Barth, Bitter Strength: A History of the Chinese in the United States, 1850–1870 (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1964); June Mei, “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); Yong Chen, “The Internal Origins of Chinese Emigration to California Reconsidered,” Western Historical Quarterly 28, no. 4 (Winter 1997): 520–46.

  81. In addition to sources cited above, see Frederic Wakeman, Jr., Strangers at the Gate: Social Disorder in South China, 1839–1861 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1966). That conflicts were rooted in local disputes as well as homeland strife is suggested by an account of an 1856 battle at Knight’s Ferry, on the border between Stanislaus and Tuolumne counties. Although a correspondent wrote to the San Joaquin Republican (Sept. 26, 1856) that the fight was “Hongkong vs. Canton,” his letter indicated that “the trouble grew out of a mining dispute.”

  82. Isaac Cox, Annals of Trinity County (1858; Eugene: Univ. of Oregon Press, 1940), cited in Rony; see esp. n. 6.

  83. See Wakeman.

  84. San Joaquin Republican, May 29, 31, June 9, 1854.

  85. On the apparently aborted Bear Valley fight, see ibid., Jan. 26, Feb. 3, 8, 1856.

  86. San Joaquin Republican, Oct. 26, 28, Nov. 13, 1856. One reader of this chapter suggested that perhaps fights such as these among any group of Gold Rush participants would have been seen as entertainment—that spectatorship of these battles may not have been as racialized as I argue it was. I have not, however, found reference to such ritualized spectatorship of conflicts among any other group, and the language of these white spectators is overtly and virulently racialized.

  87. Ibid., Feb. 3, Sept. 26, 1856.

  88. See chap. 3, “Bulls, Bears, and Dancing Boys.”

  89. San Joaquin Republican, Sept. 20, 1853 (from the Calaveras Chronicle). The dentist John Baker wrote to his wife about a similar demonstration in Mokelumne Hill a month later: “about 20 or 30 Indians with sticks and bones, dressed in all manner of fantastic shapes went through the town stopping in front of the largest houses and singing, drumming with sticks & c, dancing meanwhile in the rudest Indian manner.” John Baker to Julia Ann Baker, Oct. 21, 1853, Baker Correspondence, Holt-Atherton Center.

  90. Marston, 249.

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

  92. Leonard Withington Noyes Reminiscences, Calaveras County Museum and Archives, San Andreas, Calif. (typescript transcription of original from Essex Institute, Salem, Mass.), 75.

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

  94. See Noyes, 73. Noyes thought these Miwoks had built a sweat lodge, but his description of the structure and its use makes it sound much more like an assembly house. See S. A. Barrett and E. W. Gifford, Miwok Material Culture (1933; Yosemite National Park: Yosemite Natural History Association, n.d.), 200–206.

  95. That such tactics proved advantageous not only in the short run but in the long run is evident in the continuous occupancy of Miwok villages in this area well into the early twentieth century. Six Mile Rancheria, for example, which was four miles from the immigrant town of Murphys, was occupied by Sierra Miwoks from the 1830s until the 1930s. Murphys Rancheria, which was even closer to the immigrant to
wn, seems not to have been an established village during the Gold Rush, but Miwok people lived there from the 1870s to the 1910s. People at both villages continued to combine customary subsistence practices with market-based strategies: men worked in the mines; women worked as domestics in private homes; and Miwok families raised vegetable gardens. In addition, residents of Murphys Rancheria continued to welcome non-Indians to ceremonial gatherings called kote (in English, these are generally referred to as “big time” festivities). See James Gary Maniery, Six Mile and Murphys Rancherias: A Study of Two Central Sierra Miwok Sites, San Diego Museum Papers, no. 22 (San Diego: San Diego Museum of Man, 1987).

  96. Bernhard (1944 version); Noyes, 75.

  97. See Craig D. Bates, “Miwok Dancers of 1856: Stereographic Images from Sonora, California,” Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology 6, no. 1 (1984): 6–18, esp. 15, 17. This article reproduces excellent stereographic images of Miwoks who danced in the streets of Sonora (note that one of these illustrations is also reproduced in this chapter).

  98. Bernhard (1944 version). On the meanings of blackface minstrelsy, see Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (London: Verso, 1990), 165–82; and Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993).

  99. That is to say that few Miwoks in the 1850s were able to read newspapers and talk back to printed immigrant representations of native peoples.

  100. Amador Weekly Ledger, Jan. 26, 1858.

  101. San Joaquin Republican, Feb. 9, 1853 (from the Sonora Herald).

  102. J. Heckendorn and W. A. Wilson, Miners and Business Men’s Directory, for the Year Commencing Jan. 1st, 1856. Embracing a General History 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).

  103. On the rivalry between the TCWC and the CSRWC and its implications for class formation in the Southern Mines, see chap. 5, “Dreams That Died.”

  104. Heckendorn and Wilson, 8.

  105. Ibid.

  Epilogue: Telling Tales

  1. Carol Von Pressentin Wright, “Exploring the Mother Lode,” New York Times, Sunday, May 16, 1993, Travel section.

  2. This argument, of course, relies on Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983); and also on thoughts provoked by essays collected in Cultures of United States Imperialism, ed. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1993).

  3. See, e.g., David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), 171–77. See also Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America (London: Verso, 1987).

  4. Two Eras in the Life of the Felon Grovenor I. Layton. Who Was Lynched by the Vigilance Committee, at Sonora, Tuolumne County, California, June 17th, 1852. For Robbery, Murder, and Arson, He Having Robbed Three Chilians, Two Men and One Woman, of Ten Thousand Dollars in Gold Dust, at Mormon Gulch, Murdered and Burned Them, Together with Their Cabin, May 28th, 1852 (New Orleans, Charleston, Baltimore, and Philadelphia: A. R. Orton, 1852); 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). T. A. Springer also published the Amador Weekly Ledger.

  5. Two Eras in the Life of the Felon Grovenor I. Layton, 1–32.

  6. Ibid., 32–36.

  7. Ibid., 36–38.

  8. Ibid., 38–39.

  9. I won’t cite all of the places where I haven’t found Grovenor Layton in the historical record, but they are numerous. My thanks to Mary Coomes for double-checking the San Joaquin Republican for me, and to Martin Ridge and Peter Blodgett for helping me think of even more places not to find Grovenor. For newspaper reports of Sonora vigilance committee activity in the summer of 1851, see the San Joaquin Republican and the Alta California (San Francisco), June and July 1851, passim, and esp. San Joaquin Republican, July 16, 1851. 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), 224–42; and 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), 189–98. I would like to argue as well that on the very day Grovenor was supposed to have been hanged (June 17, 1852), sources show that the town of Sonora was still smoldering from a destructive fire that had broken out just after midnight—making it not a good day for a lynching. But, in fact, sources differ as to whether the fire broke out just after midnight on June 17 or June 18. See, e.g., Alta California, June 20, 1852; Journal entry, June 18, 1852, John Wallis Journal, Holt-Atherton Center for Western Studies, Univ. of the Pacific, Stockton, Calif.; Perkins, 219; 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), 37; and [Herbert O. Lang], A History of Tuolumne County. Compiled from the Most Authentic Records. (San Francisco: B. F. Alley, 1882), 86. So it goes.

  10. Analytically, the distinction may be a small one, but historically, it means the difference between lives and deaths imagined, on the one hand, and lives and deaths experienced, on the other. As for the subject of gain in the nineteenth century, I rely on Ann Vincent Fabian, Card Sharps, Dream Books, and Bucket Shops: Gambling in Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1990).

  11. For multiple references to the crimes of Hill and the murder of Snow, see the sources cited in n. 9 above. For the quotation, see Perkins, 237. For more on the historical context for this vigilance activity, see chap. 4, “Mining Gold and Making War.”

  12. The only more unlikely last straw would have been the cheating and killing of Mexican or Indian gold seekers. Given the recent U.S.-Mexican War and centuries of Indian-white conflict, even eastern readers probably would have balked at a story that ended with a white man lynched for such crimes. Unlike Mexicans and Indians, Chileans were largely unknown to eastern audiences, and so were more likely to fill the curious narrative niche they fill in this pamphlet.

  13. For this argument, see William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991).

  14. See Fabian; and Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981). For a wonderful example of the worries gold seeking provoked, see E. L. Cleaveland, Hasting to Be Rich. A Sermon Occasioned by the Present Excitement Respecting the Gold of California, Preached in the Cities of New Haven and Bridgeport, Jan. and Feb. 1849 (New Haven, Conn.: J. H. Benham, 1849). My thanks to Ann Fabian for introducing me to this sermon.

  15. Murder of M. V. B. Griswold by Five Chinese Assassins, 5–6.

  16. Ibid., 6–11.

  17. Ibid., 12.

  18. Ibid., 13–14.

  19. Ibid., 15–31, esp. 15–17. For more on Fou Sin’s life story, see chap. 1, “On the Eve of Emigration.”

  20. Ibid., 18–22.

  21. Ibid., 22–27.

  22. Ibid., 12, 14–31.

  23. The pamphlet does not record information about the district origins of Fou Sin, Chou Yee, Coon You, and Coon See as carefully as one would wish. The writer thought that Fou Sin said he was born in “Canton county,” and elsewhere notes that both Fou Sin and Chou Yee “were originally from the Canton district” (ibid., 14, 16).
Similarly, the writer thought that Coon You said that he “belonged to the Cheung people,” which I have taken to mean that he was from Xiangshan (Heungshan or Chungshan). Elsewhere the writer notes that both “Coon You and Coon See belonged to the Yin Foo party or company of Chinamen” (ibid., 14, 30). I have been unable to find reference in Chinese American historiography to any district organization, secret society, or surname association that approximates the designation “Yin Foo.” The closest is the district organization (huiguan or hui-kuan) formed by immigrants from Xiangshan in 1852, variously transliterated as Yeung-wo, Yanghe, and Yang-ho. Nonetheless, the pamphlet consistently suggests that Fou Sin and Chou Yee shared a native place, as did Coon You and Coon See. For the district origins of Chinese emigrants and on social organization in Chinese America, I rely on Eve Armentrout-Ma, “Urban Chinese at the Sinitic Frontier: Social Organizations in United States’ Chinatowns, 1849–1898,” Modern Asian Studies 17, no. 1 (1983): 107–35, esp. 109–19; June Mei, “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), 219–45, esp. 224–27; Sucheng Chan, This Bittersweet Soil: The Chinese in California Agriculture, 1860–1910 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1986), 16–26, and Asian Americans: An Interpretive History (Boston: Twayne, 1991), 63–67; Ronald I. Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (Boston: Little, Brown, 1989), 118–19; and Gunther Barth, Bitter Strength: A History of the Chinese in the United States, 1850–1870 (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1964), esp. 87–90.

  24. For the quotation, see the “Advertisement” printed on the pamphlet’s first page of text: Murder of M. V. B. Griswold by Five Chinese Assassins, 3 (unnumbered). For the date the pamphlet went on sale and the postage-paid purchase price, see Amador Weekly Ledger (Jackson), April 10, 17, 1858.

  25. For Kilham’s orchard and garden and for the crowd at the hangings, see Amador Weekly Ledger, May 2, Aug. 22, Sept. 12, 1857, April 17, 1858.