History 1302/1301

VA Foundation for the Humanities | Gold Rush MASTER

NATHAN: Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for

the Humanities, the University of Virginia, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial

Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.

JOANNE: From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is BackStory.

ED: Welcome to BackStory, the show that explains the history behind today's headlines. I'm Ed

Ayers.

JOANNE: I'm Joanne Freeman.

NATHAN: And I'm Nathan Connolly.

JOANNE: If you're new to the podcast, we're all historians and each week we explore the history of one

topic that's been in the news.

NATHAN: And we're going to start off today in Coloma, California a little town up in the foothills of the

Sierra Nevada. 170 years ago this month, a man named James Marshall was working outside

a sawmill. He saw something about the size of a pat of butter glinting under the water flowing

from the mill. He called to a man named James Brown, who was working on the mill.

MALE SPEAKER: Mr. Marshall called me to him. I went and found him examining the bedrock. He said, "this is a

curious rock, I'm afraid that it will give us some trouble." Said I to him, "What makes you think

so?" He said he had seen the blossom of gold.

JAMES

DELGADO:

That sun-struck speck of gold would spark the biggest mass migration of humanity by sea

since the Crusades.

ED: That's maritime archaeologist James Delgado, and that mass migration he's talking about,

that's, of course, the California Gold Rush. Over the course of the gold rush, more than

300,000 people arrived from all over the world. They were trying to strike it rich, either in the

goldfields or in the new boom-towns springing up across California. And no place saw miners

or change arrive faster than San Francisco. By 1860, it would be a city of 60,000 people. But

when gold was first discovered, it wasn't quite so bustling.

JAMES San Francisco in January of 1848 was a small village perched on the end of a muddy cove,

DELGADO: and a population of about 400 people. It was a sleepy little outpost at the edge of the world.

Between January 1, 1849 and the end of the year, 764 ships just left American ports alone,

and there were probably some 500 more that sailed from everywhere else around the world,

including Hong Kong, Valparaiso, Chile, France, Great Britain, Denmark, Australia, you name

it. Everybody came by sea. And so, as the ships started to come in, at first in the dozens and

then up to 90, to 100 ships in any given week, it just simply overwhelmed San Francisco. One

observer literally felt it was a forest of ships masts.

JOANNE: That forest of mass grew thicker each week. Because, while dozens of new ships were coming

into the harbor, almost none were leaving. Most sailors jumped ship as soon as they arrived,

eager to find gold themselves and captains couldn't find anyone willing to take their places. So

the ships stacked up in the Bay making it harder by the day to unload people and goods. On

the shore, men crowded into makeshift tents wherever they could basically find a scrap of

land. In other words, it was a mess.

JAMES

DELGADO:

San Francisco suddenly became this central hub, this [INAUDIBLE], this place in which all the

shipping of the world was descending. You needed facilities to house, feed, water these

people and to sell them what you thought or what they thought they'd need. So, how do you

do that when lumber is $1 a foot, when a nail cost $0.25, when a brick's $1? And we're talking

on a scale of times 10 in today's money, if not more.

JOANNE: Some entrepreneurial ship owners saw an opportunity. They couldn't leave, but all of a sudden

there might be a profit in staying put. All they had to do was beach their ships in the mudflats

on the edge of the village.

JAMES

DELGADO:

275 of them were converted into floating buildings. They turned them into warehouses, they

turned them into a bonded storage facilities for the government. They turned them into offices,

they turned them into hotels, even private residences. There was a restaurant in one and the

town jail was in a tiny little ship named Eufemia that was more right in the heart of the

waterfront.

JOANNE: Almost over night, that forest of masts had transformed into a strange new floating city.

JAMES

DELGADO:

A Venice, as one guy called it, built of pine rather than marble. The only city in the world that

he had visited other than Venice itself where Main Street was only visible at low tide and the

entire central part of the city noticeably swayed as the tide and the wind moved the water.

JOANNE: As the years passed, San Francisco stabilized in more ways than one. A city government

formed, tents and ships were replaced by timber homes and warehouses, and city fathers

were desperate for more land to build on. So sand and rocks and trash were pushed out to fill

the muddy Cove with solid land.

JAMES

DELGADO:

75 of those ships ended up buried beneath the rapidly increasing and encroaching waterfront.

The city front extends until finally, by order of the state, they pass a law stopping the filling

because otherwise, they argued, San Francisco Bay would have been completely filled and

Oakland would have been a suburb of the city. In that way, this "Venice of Pine" ultimately

becomes solid ground by 1855.

JOANNE: Those boats are still buried under San Francisco's downtown today. Delgado has excavated a

few of them himself. He says it's easy to look at the story of the ships as mere curiosity, but

they reveal something deeper about what Americans were looking to claim when they came to

San Francisco. And it wasn't just gold.

JAMES

DELGADO:

The story of San Francisco is a metaphor for the gold rush, but it is not an accident. When

gold was discovered, it tapped into longstanding American desires to take San Francisco Bay

as this great port in the Pacific. To use it as a springboard for expanding into the Asian market,

and, as well, to fulfill the dreams of manifest destiny and move the country from sea to shining

sea. And it leaves us with a lasting legacy that, to this day, is somewhat mythologized.

ED: For today on the show, we're going to delve into the many legacies of the gold rush. Some

mythologized, some forgotten.

NATHAN: We'll learn about the consequences of vigilante justice in a mining boom-town, explore the

day-to-day lives of miners, and look at the devastating impact of the gold rush for California's

native peoples.

ED: But first, let's step back and explore why men from all over the world were drawn to California

in the first place, the gold.

HW BRANDS: They tended to call themselves Argonauts, after Jason and the Argonauts who were going

after the Golden Fleece.

ED: This is historian HW Brands. He says that while many Argonauts didn't strike it rich, there

really was an enormous amount of gold in California.

HW BRANDS: You go from the discovery of gold in California in 1848 through, say the next 25 years,

essentially, the world gold supply doubled in that 25 years. So if you took all the gold that had

ever been dug out of the ground from the earliest pre-history until 1848, as much again was

dug out in the next 25 years.

ED: But there was another enticement for fortune seekers. When gold was found, the region was

in a kind of legal limbo.

HW BRANDS: California was being transferred from Mexican ownership to American ownership. California at

this point had no territorial government, had no state government. It basically had no

government at all. And the attitude of the federal government, the attitude of American culture

at the time, was that there are these resources that are in the public domain, but we would

rather they be in private hands as quickly as possible. So the government was selling off land

on a regular basis as far as it related to precious metals like gold. The prevailing ethos was,

it's there for the taking, quite literally. People could become wealthy if you got there first.

ED: So what do you mean by that?

HW BRANDS: Well, it is called the gold rush precisely because people had to rush to get there. They knew

that the people who got there first would have the best claims, would have the best opportunity

to lay their hands on gold. If you got there more slowly, then all the good spaces would be

taken, you'd be pushed to the margins.

Now the reason for this is that over tens of millions of years, gold had gradually been washing

out of the Sierra batholith, this big chunk of granite that underlies the Sierra Nevada

Mountains. Gold being heavier than gravel and sand, the gold would sink to the bottom of

streams and collect in the bottoms behind rocks, beneath gravel, and all this stuff. So all you

had to do at first was just separate out the heavy gold from the comparatively light sand and

gravel. And you'd do that by scooping up a shovelful or a handful of this stuff, swirling some

water around, the water would wash away the light stuff and leave the heavy gold.

And that would take you probably, well the first time you did probably take five minutes, when

you got good at it, it'd take you a minute or 30 seconds, and you'd repeat, and repeat, and

repeat, and repeat, and you'd do this from morning until night. And at least at first, it was open

season. You get there, you get the gold, you put in your pocket, you can walk away.

ED: So were the first people who got there, did they become the richest people in California? Were

they able to leverage that early access to the trough into position and wealth?

HW BRANDS: There were two models of business success in California in response to the discovery of gold.

The first was, get your hands on as much gold and as many claims of gold property as you

can, and it behooves you to keep it secret as long as you could until you got as much of the

gold cornered as possible. The other model was, don't worry so much about mining the gold,

instead mine the miners. And there was another guy named Sam Brannen who had a general

store in the vicinity of the goldfields, and that's exactly what he did. And he was the one, in

fact, who publicized the discovery of gold in California. So he heard that there was gold up in

the mountains and he managed to get his hands on enough to fill up a small jar. And he went

to San Francisco, which was a very sleepy village at the time, but there were a lot of ships that

would stop in to re-provision. And he started running around the streets of the village yelling,

gold, gold on the American River.

And his thinking was, everybody who comes to California goes off to the mines is going to

have to buy shovels, are going to have to buy bread, they're going to have to buy boots and all

this stuff, and that's the way I will make my money.

ED: So let's say that I'm an Argonaut going out to the gold fields of California, how much money

would a miner have spent? How much was required to sustain yourself while you were trying

to strike it rich?

HW BRANDS: If you were mining gold, panning gold and you made $10 a day, that was a good day. But, you

would probably have to pay at least half of that to support yourself. Because flour was

expensive, and boots were expensive, and everything was expensive. So when you put

numbers on it, a 10-pound bag of flour cost $1.25. That's not going to sound very daunting

because a 10-pound bag of flour today costs $5. Except that $1.25 was the weekly salary of a

manual laborer in New York. So Sam Brannen, the merchant who sold stuff to the miners, he

very shortly was the wealthiest man in California. So in answer to the question, did the people

who came to California, did they get rich? Some of them did. And become wealthy was a

comparative concept. Most of them were thinking, I'm going to go to California for a season

and earn enough money to buy the farm that I wanted. Or I'll earn enough money to be able to

get married. Or I'll earn enough money to start the business. They didn't want to become

insanely wealthy, they just wanted to get a jump on life.

ED: So the gold rush would have ended by when, would you say Bill?

HW BRANDS: So, by the end of the 1850s, it was no longer the case that a single individual without capital

could get a start in the gold industry. Because by then, it had become industrialized, it had

become corporatized. The gold was first discovered in active streams. Eventually, those good

stream-beds were pretty well picked over, and so you could make much money doing that.

And so the good holdings, in many cases, now were underground mines. These were put

together by corporations, by banks, by speculators with lots of money. And so if you are going

to become a miner, you almost always were a paid employee of an industrial corporation and

you were working underground. You wouldn't see the daylight, it wasn't anything like what the

first miners went through. You might as well be working in a steel factory back in Pittsburgh,

except you were in California, and you're deep underground.

ED: It sounds even more dangerous than a steel mine or a steel mill.

HW BRANDS: Yeah it certainly was. And one of the striking things about California is the way it accelerates

American history. So the Industrial Revolution in the east unfolded over 50 years. In California,

it unfolded over about six or eight years.

ED: So, obviously, the California Gold Rush had an enormous impact on the United States. What

were its other consequences?

HW BRANDS: I think California changes American attitudes toward what constitutes success and what are

the prerequisites of success. Before California, I think in terms of the Benjamin Franklin

Puritan model of success. And that is you have to exhibit the right kind of attitudes, traits of

character. And your success, or more precisely, if you fail, there's probably something wrong

with you. You better look inside and see how you can get right with your soul, with your

creator.

People go to California and they discover that model doesn't apply at all. Because two minors

who are standing waist-deep in a rushing stream, freezing, the sun's beating down on them,

and one guy reaches down and picks up a rock. And the guy who is 20 feet away and the next

claim of reaches down and picks up a gold nugget. And the guy who picked up the rock

doesn't beat his breast and hang his head and say, what did I do wrong? He said, I've got to

go find a different claim.

And so the California model was that you try and you fail, and you try again, and you fail, and

you try again, and you fail, but eventually you keep trying long enough, you'll succeed. And

this became the model for the modern Silicon Valley phenomenon and the venture-capital

this became the model for the modern Silicon Valley phenomenon and the venture-capital

industry is based on this model. Where you invest in 10 different ideas and nine of them turn

out to be busts, but the 10th one pans out and you'll make a fortune.

ED: HW Brands is historian at the University of Texas-Austin. His book on this subject is the "Age

of Gold, the California Gold Rush and the New American Dream." We also heard from James

Delgado, author of "Gold Rush Port, the Maritime Archeology of San Francisco's Waterfront."

Joanne, Nathan, I've certainly learned a lot conducting those two interviews. And I'm just

wondering what strikes you about the place of the Gold Rush in the broader span of American

history?

NATHAN: Ed, I can't help but think about how compressed the history of the United States is and how it

gets replicated in the history of California between the 1850s and really the turn of the 20th

century. I mean you have this mass migration of Europeans who are going out west, you have

massive declines in indigenous populations, and the impact of the gold rush on culture, on

economics, on the land of California. Again, are all happening in ways that feel very similar to

the United States kind of writ long.

ED: That's really interesting, Nathan, and I was struck in these interviews about how all these

things that we think of as being a sequence are kind of piled on top of each other in California.

NATHAN: It's true, I mean you have, just as one example, obviously the economic impact of the gold

rush is going to be profound. Not just in terms of number of tons of gold that then are removed

from the mountains of California, but the way that the local economies there are dramatically

changed. You'll see a dozen eggs costing you the equivalent of like $90 by today's prices or

like $3,000 for a pair of shoes in today's money. And it's not just stuff around the house or

food items, you think about the ways in which women are coming out and they're either

working as comfort workers or domestics. And you think about even extermination of Native

Americans gets monetized in this period. Where people are paying $25 for a scalp, or $5 for

the part of an indigenous woman or child. It can get really macabre but the point is, everything

seems to be for sale in a way that is far more dramatic than what was happening even 10

years earlier.

JOANNE: And it touches on a larger thread, not just in American history but certainly in American history.

Just thinking about the Gold Rush made me think about a different kind of a rush at the end of

the 18th and at the beginning of the 19th century. And that was a sort of land rush when there

was this wild craze of people who wanted to buy up land. At that time, it was called land mania.

The states at the end of the revolution began selling off Western lands, and there was a craze

of people rushing around trying to, essentially, find a way to make value, make money and

have instant gain based on something that they hadn't known that they could have before.

Which is the same impulse as the gold rush and in that sense, what really strikes me about the

gold rush and this land mania craze, is the emotion driving it. I mean you used 'drastic,' I think

and we've been saying 'extreme.' Even the words that we're using to talk about it really drive

at value.

The idea that there's something out there that you can have that has great value, and you can

transform yourself. All you have to do is find a way to get it. The emotion that drives that takes

over from whatever the logic is of seeking it in the first place. And I think a rush or a mania

ends up building on itself.

ED: Listening to you folks talk, I hear echoes of the current day as well. It seems that California

was not only sort of a bellwether or an accelerated American history back in the 19th century,

but in some ways it still seems to be doing that today.

JOANNE: Well, certainly, I mean, if you think about the mix of big bucks and big emotion and all of the

fervor and churning of energy that goes into something like Silicon Valley, even in the same

location, it really makes you realize that although we're talking about the gold rush as though

it's in the ancient past, that we're talking about a mix of things that we're still seeing in a

different form.

NATHAN: And I would absolutely contend that California still has a lot of the attributes that one might

associate with the Gold Rush period. I mean it's one that has to do with racial and ethnic

diversity, it certainly is a place that people consider to be wide open, to be a place of populism.

And there's certainly a sense, too, that California is still a land of great possibility. I mean the

old adage, "go west young man" still holds true for a lot of people. You think about California

as a place where movies are made and other kinds of gold I guess in those hills now today.

JOANNE: Well great possibility, and then gets us right back to great scarcity. I mean, if you think about

the West Coast generally, but in particular northern California, and how hard it is now and how

expensive it is now to try and actually live there, much like the 1840s and 50s. I mean, you

might say that real estate is the California Gold of the 21st century.

NATHAN: I would not argue with that.

JOANNE: We heard about how the California Gold Rush was a global phenomenon, drawing Argonauts

from Asia, Europe, South America, Australia and the US. So it should be no surprise that the

mining camps could be pretty diverse.

SUSAN LEE

JOHNSON:

Large numbers of Chilean, Mexican, European, particularly French miners, later Chinese

miners, and of course, also, it was home to indigenous people in this area, primarily Miwok

Indians.

ED: This is historian Susan Lee Johnson. While the miners came from all over the world, most had

one thing in common, they were all men.

SUSAN LEE

JOHNSON:

Out in the mines, the population was 97% male.

ED: And those men had to adjust to a world without women.

SUSAN LEE

JOHNSON:

Who was going to do the domestic work? In virtually all of the immigrant populations, Anglo-

American, Chinese, French, Chilean, Mexican, this was work that was generally done by

women. So men had to take up this work themselves and they came up with really innovative

ways to do this. Created cook-weeks where group of men who lived in a tent or cabin together,

one man would do that work for a week and then turn it over to another man.

But also, men sometimes hired other men to do this work for them. So as Chinese started to

move into the mines, they filled a niche and became laundry workers. And laundry was not

work that men did in South China, this was a California phenomenon. Men also started to

associate certain kinds of skills with different groups. So Frenchmen were known as being

particularly good cooks, so Anglo-American men tended to sort of feminize Frenchmen in the

way that they talked about them and their domestic skills.

So it was in gender terms it was sort of a world turned upside-down. And also, because when

one is living in a world turned upside-down, one talks about it, one writes about it. So it's

something that's very easy to research because men in their letters home to their loved ones,

in their diaries, comment on this because it is so different than what they're used to.

ED: But that's a long time, really, for there not to be many women around. What was the

consequence of that for camp life?

SUSAN LEE

JOHNSON:

Well, they would have had to create their own leisure world. By getting up dances, maybe just

with a fiddle and sometimes men would create a female dancing partner by just designating a

man who had a patch on his pants as the female partner for a dance. And there is

considerable evidence of intimacy between men. That at a time when homosexuality as a

category of human experience didn't really exist. I don't mean to suggest that the California

Gold Rush was some sort of queer paradise, it was not, certainly same sex intimacy was

considered a sin or a vice, but not a particular kind of sin or vice. The same, not so different as

sex outside of marriage. So there was a lot of sin and a lot of vice and this was just another

option.

ED: So you talked before about how people would describe this and write letters home. I'm

assuming they didn't talk about this as much. Did they talk about it in different kind of

language?

SUSAN LEE

JOHNSON:

Well they talked about it, but generally when they were writing home, especially when men

were writing to their female relatives, it was never the man writing the letter who was engaged

in this behavior. It was always other men who were doing these things. Once in a while, a man

writing to a brother or a male friend would intimate that things were pretty wild in California.

But, generally, when men wrote about these things, they were talking about other men

engaging in them.

Now sometimes men did write about these things in their diaries. It's kind of needle-in-a-

haystack work to try to find these passages in diaries. But they are there. And, certainly, it's

evident in, for example, divorce records. Because, sometimes, women would join their

husbands and their husbands would head to California. Wives would come a year, two, three,

four years later, find that their husbands had been engaged in visiting brothels or even in one

case, a woman accused her husband of sleeping with men. And they weren't very happy

about this. So sometimes in divorce records, one sees evidence of what has gone on in the

absence of wives before they arrive in California.

ED: So you describe this really kind of a free-wheeling society that begins there soon after gold is

discovered. How long does that maintain that form?

SUSAN LEE

JOHNSON:

I mean when I think about the Gold Rush, I think of a Gold Rush decade from about 1848 to

1858. But the really free-wheeling period lasts about half that long. So maybe about five years.

So it's very short-lived. What's interesting, though, is that this pattern repeats itself all over the

west for another 50 years, all the way up to Alaska and actually in parts of Canada for a good

half-century.

ED: Susan Lee Johnson is a historian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She's the author of

"Roaring Camp, the Social World of the California Gold Rush."

JOANNE: Men certainly dominated Gold Rush California, and that had a lot of consequences for the

women who did live there. Consider this famous incident that took place in a town called

Downieville, about an hour from Sacramento. On July 4, 1851 the people of Downieville

gathered to celebrate Independence Day.

MAYTHEE ROJAS:Which is the first year that California gets to celebrate the 4th of July as being part of the

Union of the United States of America.

JOANNE: This is literary critic Maythee Rojas, she says the town had geared up for a big party.

MAYTHEE ROJAS:There's a lot of drinking, there is a lot of parades and just a lot of fun that people are having.

When I say people, I mean mostly men, because that's what makes up the majority of the

population, and in terms of who's actually doing the celebrating, it's mostly white men.

NATHAN: Including Frederick Cannon, an Australian miner. After a night of drinking, he and some other

miners ended up outside the house of a Mexican couple. Their names were Jose and

Josepha. Cannon knew Josepha, who worked in a saloon.

MAYTHEE ROJAS:Some people describe her as having a particularly wild eye. That it sparkles and it was a, I

don't know, a glean to it. I feel like it's kind of hinting at, again, sort of her devilish nature. She's

described as small, and by that I mean petite. But really the most common word used is

'beautiful.'

NATHAN: In that evening, Cannon saw that Josepha was home alone.

MAYTHEE ROJAS:As he's stumbling by, and I say stumbling because that is the way it's recorded by various

eyewitnesses of that time, he decides to go knock on the door and eventually knocks the door

down off its leather hinges and enters.

NATHAN: No one knows what happened inside Josepha's home that evening. Cannon went in alone as

his friends waited outside. Eventually he emerged and he and his companions went on their

way.

ED: Next morning, Cannon headed back to Josepha's neighborhood.

MAYTHEE ROJAS:Because this is also the same street that a doctor lives on that offers hangover medication to

miners who have drank too much. And so, as he passes by her door, her husband who's now

home rushes out very upset and starts demanding that Frederick pay for the door.

ED: They argued and Josepha soon joined in on her husband's side.

MAYTHEE ROJAS:And then what's really interesting is then the conversation turns to Spanish. So at some point,

the people who are witnessing it don't actually know what's being said. But, because Frederick

seems to have enough of a handle of the language to be able to argue with them, but it does

grow incredibly heated.

ED: A small crowd gathered. One person later said that Josepha seem more agitated than her

husband. But the argument took a fateful turn when Cannon

MAYTHEE ROJAS:Apparently calls her a whore or something of the like and she then demands that he repeat

those words to her inside of her own home. And he follows and she has a knife and stabs him

with it inside the home. Stabs him in the heart, and he stumbles out and it's a deep enough

wound that he dies almost immediately.

ED: One eyewitness would write that Cannon fell with one last groan at the feet of the beautiful

woman who threw her knife, dripping with blood, on the ground.

MAYTHEE ROJAS:And, of course, this creates great chaos. Everyone's thrown into a moment of panic. There

was a great sense of injustice. How could this miner have been killed by a Mexican woman?

There's just so much indignation about It

JOANNE: Downieville, like many Gold Rush towns, didn't have a formal legal system at this time.

Nevertheless, the townspeople threw together a hasty jury trial.

MAYTHEE ROJAS:Several of the reports refer to the person who heads up the jury as judge Lynch. It's very

vigilante.

JOANNE: A few people tried to come to Josepha's defense, but the angry mob would have none of it.

MAYTHEE ROJAS:And, within a few hours time, Jose is run out of the town completely, he's exiled, and Josepha

is sentenced to death.

ED: She was hanged, but not before getting in some famous last words.

MAYTHEE ROJAS:Perhaps this is just dramatic, but it's interesting that it shows up in multiple accounts. They say

that she said, "if I had to do it again, I would."

The editors at the San Francisco papers don't believe it. They just can't wrap their minds

around the fact that a community would kill a woman. I mean it's such a scarcity to have

women present and the story just seems rather outrageous.

ED: It was outrageous even for the people of Downieville. Days, months, and even years after the

fact, eyewitnesses were still publishing accounts of the lynching. Rojas has analyzed many of

these narratives, most of which were written by white men. She says that some of the details

are different in each one, but the basic outline remains the same.

MAYTHEE ROJAS:So the story goes back to this idea that it's a really tragic thing and people are ashamed of it.

The men, specifically, are ashamed of it, but then they feel really torn because they feel that

this woman should never have done what she did. Like this was monstrous, that women don't

do things like that. She shouldn't have gotten so angry, and she had this hot-blooded temper

and it just always got her in trouble and it just finally reached its boiling point.

ED: Rojas contends that the recollections of the young woman's death give us more than a strange

nugget of Gold Rush Lore. She says that Josepha's death is revealing of a key moment in

California's history.

NATHAN: Only a few years before Josepha's hanging, California had been a Mexican territory. But

Mexico lost California and most of the southwest following the Mexican-American War.

MAYTHEE ROJAS:There's a great deal of animosity between the US and Mexican residents. Particularly on the

US side, you see individuals writing very, very ugly things about Mexicans and about Mexico

as a country, and really feeling incredibly entitled about this land that they now possess by

being Americans and that no one else had rights to it.

NATHAN: And that extended to who should enjoy the benefits of the Gold Rush. Mexicans, naturally,

were among the first to reach California's goldfields. In 1850, the state legislature of California

passed a miner's tax that levied a $20 per month fee on foreigners. This was an incredibly

steep fine that shut many Mexicans out of the mining industry.

JOANNE: But for a woman like Josepha, the conflict was more personal. Remember, the night before

she stabbed him, Frederick Cannon broke into her home while she was alone.

MAYTHEE ROJAS:Given the desire that women in general generated being such a scarce commodity in that

area, and given the nature of how he approached her in her home, and given the history that

we've seen since then in terms of how Mexican women, how women of color in general have

been treated by white men, especially around the area of power, many have believed that

some sort of sexual issue took place that was non-consensual and likely violent. And that was

in part what made her so upset. I mean, if you think about it, to be called a whore on top of

maybe having been sexually assaulted, that's a lot for someone.

JOANNE: Rojas says that all of these factors fed into that explosive moment in Downieville. MAYTHEE

ROJAS: I think that's what's really important to recognize about it. Is that it's not isolated. It's

not just a hot-tempered woman or a mistaken situation over what actually took place. Or even

just a lonely, drunk miner. That property and women's bodies were definitely seen as 'for the

taking' by white men.

JOANNE: And maybe, that's why Josepha committed the horrific crime that led to her death.

MAYTHEE ROJAS:I think her bravery in speaking out, in defending herself, defending her honor, it was a kind of

resistance.

ED: Maythee Rojas is a professor of Chicano and Latino studies at California State University-Long

Beach.

NATHAN: Now we've spent quite a lot of time on this show today talking about the people who came to

California during the Gold Rush. But what about the people who lived there for centuries?

Before becoming a US territory, California had been colonized by Spain, Russia, and Mexico.

Colonization had been devastating to native peoples.

Those living along the coast were often forced to convert to Catholicism, into labor in the

Spanish missions, or on private ranches. Overworked and underfed, many died of infectious

diseases.

ED: By the 1840s, perhaps 150,000 native people remained in California. The majority lived in the

rich Central Valley, or in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, the very places where miners would

soon be heading to find their fortunes. I recently spoke with historian Benjamin Madley, he

says that as Americans arrived, they brought a new, targeted violence against the California

tribes. That violence was inflicted by the state and federal governments as well as by everyday

people. They all justified enslaving and killing native peoples as the unavoidable consequence

of American expansion.

BENJAMIN

MADLEY:

Once gold is discovered, the killing accelerates quite rapidly. Particularly as an influx of

prospectors and forty-niners moved south from Oregon. And these Oregonians saw them as a

dangerous problem to get rid of, an obstacle between them and the gold. But, the turning point

is really in late 1849, early 1850. There were these two white slaveholders living on the shores

of Clearlake named Stone and Kelsey and they routinely raped California Indian women,

tortured them to death, reportedly shot them to death for entertainment.

And so the Pomo and Wappo people, who were living under their rule, rose up and killed the

two of them. And so, in response, vigilantes first murdered and massacred large numbers of

California Indian ranch workers and farm workers in the Sonoma and Napa Valley. And then

the United States Army launched two separate genocidal killing campaigns.

ED: And why was that the turning point?

BENJAMIN

MADLEY:

That was the turning point because the initial vigilantes who killed large numbers of California

Indian people in Napa and Sonoma counties became the subject of the very first case of the

new California State Supreme Court. And all eight men were released on bail. So this

communicated a strong message to the people of California about how the state legal system

was going to respond to the mass murder of Indians. And that was by granting Indian killers a

pass.

ED: So what did the government do other than sanction this? Other than look the other way?

BENJAMIN

MADLEY:

California governors authorized 24, that's two dozen, separate state militia expeditions against

California Indians between 1850 and 1861. And these expeditions killed at least 1,340

California Indian people. At the same time, the state raised three separate bills that raised

over $1.5 million. A huge amount of money at this time in history for Indian hunting militia

operations.

And so these state militia expeditions then inspired, I think, over 6,400 murders of California

Indian people by vigilantes. And when I first began the research, I thought that the killers must

have been some kind of rogue element. But state endorsement for this genocide was only

very thinly-veiled. In 1851, California's first governor Peter Bernet declared and I quote, that "a

war of extermination will continue to be waged until the Indian race becomes extinct."

ED: So making a race extinct is almost the exact definition of genocide right?

BENJAMIN

MADLEY:

Yes, and between 1846 and 1873, California's indigenous population plunged from perhaps

150,000 people to just 30,000. So we know that diseases, dislocation, and starvation caused

many of these tens of thousands of deaths, but then near-annihilation of California's Indian

population was not, as it is often described, the unavoidable result of two civilizations coming

into contact for the first time.

This was actually a case of genocide. Sanctioned, paid for, and facilitated by state and federal

officials. For example, in 1852, California's US Senator John Weller, who later became the

state's governor in 1858, he told his colleagues in the United States Senate that California

Indians and I quote "will be exterminated before the onward march of the white man." And he

insisted that the interest of the white men demands their extinction. So this was not a crime

that was hidden. This was something that you could read about almost every week in every

little newspaper up and down the state of California.

ED: So do the indigenous people fight back?

BENJAMIN

MADLEY:

They do but it's difficult for them to do so and I'll tell you why. So attackers frequently

surrounded California Indian villages and opened fire at dawn or under moonlight when Indian

people were asleep. Once most of the men had died trying to protect their village, the

attackers closed in for the final exterminatory executions which they carried out with sabers or

bayonets or hatchets or simply with rocks or sometimes their bare hands.

ED: I'm assuming that women and children were also killed in these raids.

BENJAMIN

MADLEY:

They were often killed but they had a value, so they tried generally not to kill them but to sell

them into slavery.

ED: So it's hard not to notice the irony of California entering the United States as a free state at the

same time that it is deeply implicated in a different kind of slavery.

BENJAMIN

MADLEY:

Well one thing to understand about California is that while it entered the Union as a free state,

it had a very strong and vocal pro and free-labor movement. So not only were there hundreds,

and perhaps even thousands, of African-American chattel slaves brought into California by

Southerners, by 1860 the state has passed a law that allows for the indenture of any Indian.

And that could be a child, a woman, a prisoner of war, anybody. They've also put into effect a

system of prisoner-leasing. So, for example, people could be arrested for public drunkenness

if they were an Indian under California law. White people would then hire them as leased

prisoners by paying the judge for a week of their labor. And then at the end of that week, they

would give them hard alcohol and then they would immediately be rearrested for public

drunkenness and then leased out again, often to that very same person who had incriminated

them by giving the alcohol in the first place.

ED: Wow. So as everyone knows, back in the east, people are arguing passionately about African-

American slavery. Do people draw analogies from one way or the other to that trade and that

subjugation?

BENJAMIN

MADLEY:

Absolutely. One of the really interesting things that happens in California is that sometimes

Free Soilers, the very people who are arguing for the abolition of slave labor, they seek to

justify the massacre of California Indians as the erasure of California's preexisting unfree labor

economy under Mexican rule.

ED: So let me get this straight. So they're actually engaging in this genocidal behavior because

they want to erase slavery.

BENJAMIN

MADLEY:

That was sometimes the case.

ED: Do you think the gold rush appreciably changed this history? Did it accelerate it? Did it give a

rationale for all this killing? Or is this something that would have happened anyway?

BENJAMIN

MADLEY:

The Gold Rush was absolutely central to the genocide of California Indian people. It attracted

the largest mass migration of the 19th century in the United States to California. Before the

Gold Rush, there were perhaps 13 or 14,000 non-Indian people in California. By 1860, that

number exceeded 360,000 individuals. So there was a huge influx of manpower to carry out

the actual killing. By the same token, the gold in California's natural environment provided a

huge amount of money with which to carry out the killing. California politicians knew, from the

beginning, that the federal government would reimburse them for the money they had

expended on killing California Indian people because California's mining operations were

providing so much money. A massive injection of capital to the national economy and to the

federal treasury.

ED: My sense is this is not a central feature of the story of the Gold Rush. Did I just miss those

days of school?

BENJAMIN

MADLEY:

You did not miss anything. What has changed very recently was that the governor of

California, Jerry Brown, acknowledged that what happened in California was in his words, "an

actual genocide."

ED: Does that have practical consequences?

BENJAMIN

MADLEY:

One of the big questions is, will state officials tender public apologies along the lines of the

ones issued by presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush in the 1980s for the forcible

relocation and imprisonment of some 120,000 Japanese-Americans during the Second World

War. Should state officials offer compensation along the lines of the more than $1.6 billion that

Congress has now paid these Japanese-Americans and their heirs.

Another question for the state and federal government bureaucracy is whether or not they're

going to change the names that commemorate and valorized some of the perpetrators of this

genocide. And these investigations are going to be painful. We can't bring back the dead. But

they're going to help all of us, both native and non-native, to make more accurate sense of our

past and ourselves.

JOANNE: Benjamin Madley is a professor of history at UCLA and the author of "An American Genocide,

the United States and the California Indian Catastrophe 1846 to 1873."

NATHAN: That's going to do it for us today. But you can keep the conversation going online. Let us know

what you thought of the episode or ask us your burning history questions. You'll find us at

BackStoryradio.org. Or send an email to [email protected]. We're also on Facebook,

Tumblr, and Twitter at BackStory Radio. Whatever you do, don't be a stranger.

ED: This episode of BackStory was produced by Nina Earnest, Emily Gadek and Ramona

Martinez. Jamal Millner is our technical director. Diana Williams is our digital editor and Joey

Thompson is our researcher. Additional help came from Angelique Bishosh, Sequoia Carrillo,

Emma Gregg, Courtney Spanya, and Erin Teeling

Our theme song was written by Nick Thorburn. Other music in this episode came from Ketza,

Paddington Bear, and Jazaar. Special thanks this week to Kelly Jones and Joey Thompson,

who lent us his voice as well as his research. And, as always, thanks to the Johns Hopkins

Studios in Baltimore.

JOANNE: BackStory is produced at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. Major support is provided

by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the provost's office at

the University of Virginia, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur

Vining Davis Foundations.

FEMALE

SPEAKER:

Brian Balogh is Professor of history at the University of Virginia and the Dorothy Compton

professor at the Miller Center of Public Affairs. Ed Ayers is Professor of the Humanities and

President Emeritus at the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is Professor of History and

American Studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate

Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University. BackStory was created by Andrew

Wyndham for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.