history essay

The Social World of the

California Gold Rush

SUSAN LEE JOHNSON

W. W. Norton & Company New York London

Hiapfer 4

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I Mining Gold and Making War P;"

1day-to-day world of fiddles and fandangos, fresh greens I Wand frijoles, tensions arose that turned the entire Southern p Mines into an arena of conflict that came to favor certain contenders I struggles were bound up not only in the daily act of I digging gold—the presumed "work" of the Gold Rush—but in daily I acts of nursing and laundering, whoring and hymn singing as well. I Most stories of the mining boom in California tie turmoil tightly to | contests over gold—who would have access to it and who would I profit by its acquisition.! This makes good historical sense for a I period in which a key state legislative act taxed "foreign" miners, in I which litigation over mining claims clogged county court dockets as I quickly as courts could be established, and in which some miners I exchanged picks and shovels for knives and rifles at the drop of a hat. I What is lacking in many stories, however, is sustained attention to I the social contexts and cultural meanings of battles over mining I labor and its product, gold. I For in the end, if one is to understand something of what hap- I pened in the Sierra Nevada foothills after 1848, there can be no sena-

J pie"gnfgola; shared fopd, or played ^rds. Alliances might be forged over a deer hunt organized cooperatively, over a dance performed a mirably, or over a water ditch dug in common so that miners could wash gold-bearing dirt. Central to all of these enmities and alliances were gendered and racialized notions of what it meant to live appro-

185

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priately in a gold msh. And central to the ways in which observers have seen (and not seen) such enmities and alliances are gendered and racialized notions of what a gold rush is.

So while I reintroduce herein what many take to be at the center of Gold Rush history—that is, the work of mining and the conflicts it provoked among miners—it is not happenstance that this set of sto­ ries follows rather than precedes those already told. In ordering my narrative in this manner, I have not meant to suggest that digging gold was less important, in relative terms, than were other daily activities in constituting what came to be called the Gold Rush. But I have meant to dis-order customary accounts of the period so that the salience of gender and race, both in what happened and in how those events have come to be remembered, would be more evident.

Here, then, the shovel hits the dirt, the woven basket swirls the water, and women and men look over their shoulders to see who might be gathering more gold than they, and where, and how. And they think about how much gold might be enough gold for whatever reason they started getting it in the first place, and, in some cases, about who might help them get that amount, and what that help might cost. All of these stories placed end to end would not together constitute an adequate Gold Rush narrative; but no adequate Gold Rush narrative can be constructed without them. These are tales that arise out of the complex set of mining labor relations that evolved in the Southern Mines—relations based on the work habits and social practices of diverse immigrant and native populations but patterned as well by the exigencies of an extractive economy emerging in the newest territorial acquisition of the United States and by the over­ whelming predominance of men among the immigrants. Work in the

of''sv^-^r^That^ partnerships as well as

. Nonh indentured labor. Wage work

^^^^^QSfe"tn.m£rs-.wWas«i&yi€-b"4Hor"e~prevalen.L-aftpj th^ iiiitial boom, but ^

t^’^tely to non-Anglo Amerirap mpn Iviore than narratives of miniriglaboritse07Kowever, these are sto­

ries about the conflicts work in the diggings provoked. In fact, nowhere is the contested nature of Gold Rush social relations clearer than in the series of mining-related ethnic and racial "wars" that plagued the Southern Mines: the Chilean War, the "French Revolution, the Mariposa War, and a whole host of skirmishes less extravagantly labeled by either participants or historians. Another

i87 Mining Gold and Making War

key set of struggles revolved around white opposition to black labor

le"fr“ce *7 t *e vigorous, oftL to­ ut resistance that attempted imposition of Anglo dominance could

provoke in an area like the Southern Mines, wLre non-AnSosTe

Sh’' M numerical superiority, and later ? Ai^ericans,'^ ^d, later, Chinese found that U.S. whites were backed by an anti- itatrto state government that did not hes­ itate to levy onerous taxes on "foreigners," send out militias after troublesome Indians or Mexicans, or return fugitive black slaves to | heir white masters. Once these struggles were resolved, o^Ld hd armed resistance to Anglo control in the Southern Mines-^which

now beg^ to take shape as class rule too-would become in“

individual retribution that began ' of th^^tiMoa “s? “ California's Southern Mines-the tele ‘

Selftirr:'™ «I-death-do-us-part

dve™ «ess Mines over access to gold, one must understand something of the methods bv

ch mmers extracted the precious metal. Gold in California was foimd in three types of deposits, which miners caUed placers gravels

hen sights on the placers, surface deposits that were relatively easy to e^loti with Simple tools such as picks and shovels Spmetimes placer gold was located in the bed of a stream or river and

bfeds. What miners recovered, however, was not pure gold but gold ni^ed With dirt and rocks. In order to separate L metel frl fte debns, miners reUed on one of gold's key attributes-its weight Golgis

the vmT® gold-bearing dirt with water and p the gold to sink to the bottom while the water washed the

dlFtTro”'T ^ auriferous ft around and around until the water and dirt sloshed over the sides

T l^ttom. But most turned to devils h as rockers, long toms, or sluices to get at the gold. Rockets were

*e ^e"l“nc “ me pnnciple. Mmers washed gold-bearing dirt through these

^^e wooden devices, which were lined at the tottomliTdeal m oftelworled «P>°it the placers, gold seekers most atcWcI^^v n . “ope'^atively organized groups, not in big, hier-

y rganized companies with large numbers of wage laborers.

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As time passed, miners realized that the placers were like the tip of an iceberg—that far more gold lay deeper beneath the earth's surface. Some of those deposits were "deep gravels," or ancient placers that had long since been covered by debris. Other underground deposits were composed of gold that was embedded in solid rock ^vein or quartz gold, it was called. Extracting gold from these kinds of deposits required more technical know-how, greater outlays of capital, and often larger numbers of workers than did placer mining. Their exploitation eventually turned mining into a full-fledged industry in California and led to an elaboration of class relations similar to those that characterized other industrializing areas in the United States and around the world. Although miners had no way of knowing this in the earliest months and years of the Gold Rush, there were actually fewer deposits of these sorts—deep gravels and quartz gold in the Southern Mines than in the Northern Mines. Accordingly, economic development and class formation followed different patterns in much of the Southern Mines. But in the boom years of the Gold Rush, these distinctions between the Northern Mines and the Southern Mines were only beginning to emerge, and placer mining remained the chief concern of most gold seekers throughout the gold regions.^

Some disputes over labor in the diggings echoed those raging in the eastern United States. Important in a few conflicts was the language of "free labor," which, by the time of the Gold Rush, was fast becom­ ing the rallying cry of certain northern white men on the make, and which soon proved decisive in reshaping the political party system in the United States and in the sectional antagonisms that threatened to

. destroy the Union by the end of the 1850s. Not surprisingly, hee- labor ideology lurked around the edges of struggles involving African American miners, but it also cropped up in other disputes as the end, however, given the prevalence of a variety of "unfree labor systems in the mines, it is striking how modest the drive for free labor could be in the boom years of the Gold Rush.

The language of free labor fused an older Protestant belief in the worthiness of work with new attention to upward mobhity and eco­ nomic growth more appropriate to the evolving industrial capitalism of the Northeast. In this, hard labor for wages held a certain dignity, but only as a stage in a man's life before he began to work for himself. As one historian explains, "The aspirations of the free labor ideology were . . . thoroughly middle-class, for the successful laborer was one who achieved self-employment, and owned his own capital a busi­ ness, farm, or shop." Implicit, and often quite explicit, in this was a

Mining Gold and Making War1'8?

relentless critique of African American slavery in the South, which to mafrjy northerners thwarted economic development and negated pos- ■^ibilities for social mobility. For some, this critique was consistent

* i^itli a desire to end the enslavement of black people and offer them the perceived benefits of a dynamic, expansive, capitalist social order. For‘.others, it reflected a desire to end the degradation of nonslave­ holding, poor whites, who had no opportunity to rise in an eco­ nomic system that lacked a substantial middle class.^

Free labor, antislavery, and, sometimes, antiblack rhetoric permeated 'California's early state legislative debates, though such ideologies played themselves out differently in the mines.^ In the senate and ^s^embly, California's initial admission to the Union as a nonslave state gaye way to continued disagreements over whether or not even free African Americans should be allowed to immigrate. At the same time, California law before 1852 was silent on the question of what would .happen to slaveholders who entered the state with enslaved blacks, ,^d attention to the question was minimal, especially in the diggings.^ As-one young master wrote to his father with regard to a slave named Patrick, "I don't consider there is any risk in bringing Patrick ... as no ofie will put themselves to the trouble of investigating the matter."^ Xnd the Martha's Vineyard-bom Timothy Osborn noted that enslaved blocks near his Tuolumne County camp worked hard for their Mississippi master, "notwithstanding the laws of the land that make th^ free."^ Despite their antislavery reputations, white people from states like Massachusetts often did nothing to interfere with men such as this Mississippi planter. Charles Davis, himself an advocate of colo­ nization schemes for African Americans, was sure that he had chosen a path of moderation in his dealings with neighboring slaveholders in Mariposa County: "Everybody here knows that I am a friend to the slave, but for all this, his master is a friend to me. I can say and do just as I wish with the slaves around me, and their masters have no suspi­ cions of my injuring them, and every black man that knows me, mani­ fests the greatest respect toward me."^ Out in the diggings, the "laws of tl^e land" were largely irrelevant, and it was northern white men like Osborn and Davis who helped ensure that black slave labor would thrive in the Southern Mines.

Indeed, the Southern Mines were the first destination of many white slaveholders, traveling overland as they did along southern trails to California.^ Mariposa, the southernmost county in the region, seems to have been a special haven for slave-owning whites. The county's rugged terrain and small immigrant population may have made ignor­ ing the "laws of the land" all the more simple. The evidence is circum-

Roaring Camp 190

stantial, of course, since as a "free" state California gathered no statis­ tics regarding slaves and slaveholders. But the immigrant population of Mariposa County in 1850 (4,379 people in all) included 4.5 percent African Americans, while the larger populations of Calaveras and Tuolumne counties (16,884 and 8,351 people, respectively) included only .5 and .75 percent black people, respectively. And the 1850 manu­ script census for Mariposa County reveals a number of large groups from southern states that included both black, and white families—^par- tiesfno doubt, of slaves and their masters.^®

Despite this relatively hospitable climate for slave owners in a nominally "free" state, enslaved African Americans recognized that the ambiguities of both law and custom in California offered unusual opportunities for escape from bondage. The frequency of fugitive slave cases during the first few years of the Gold Rush makes this clear. And, indeed, the judge in one such case in 1851 found that the federal fugitive slave law, passed as a part of the Compromise of 1850, had no bearing on cases in which slaves fled their masters in California and did not cross state lines in their flight. In 1852, how­ ever, the friends of slavery in California succeeded in shepherding through the legislature a state fugitive slave law that allowed white slave owners to reclaim black slaves who had escaped within the state. This law was renewed in 1853 and 1854, and then finally allowed to lapse in 1855.^^

Flight from slavery was not the only means by which African mericans seized their freedom. Perhaps in part because of the tenu­

ous legal status of slaveholding in California, enslaved blacks not infrequently were able to buy their way out of slavery in the diggings. Thomas Gilman, for example, an African American man in his twen- ies, purchased his freedom for $1,000 in 1852 at Shaw's Flat, a placer mining area in Tuolumne County. Born in Tennessee, Gilman seems to have worked in the diggings until he accumulated the capital to free himself. He lived in Tuolumne County for the rest of his life, mining and pa5dng taxes on personal property and real estate assessed for as much as $725 during flush years, as little as $25 in hard times. Likewise, Peter Green purchased his freedom from Thomas Thorne, one of the largest slaveholders in Mariposa County, for $1,000 in 1855. Perhaps Green and Gilman, like the black men Leonard Noyes observed at San Antonio Bar in Calaveras County dur­ ing 1851, had had mining claims of their own that they were allowed to tend on Sundays; these "Sunday claims" may have been the resource many African American men tapped to obtain their "free­ dom papers" in California.

191 Mining Gold and Making War

Unlike Thomas Gilman, many black miners who bought or other­ wise appropriated their freedom were unable to live in peace in the diggings. Stephen Spencer Hill, who accompanied his Arkansas mas­ ter to California in 1849, claimed to have bought his way out of bondage in April of 1853.^^ The former master. Wood Tucker, went back home, and in October 1853 Hill filed claim to 160 acres of land near Gold Spring in Tuolumne County. He cleared 40 of those acres, planted wheat and barley, and, in his spare time, built a cabin and kept mining for gold. Six months later, however, a friend of Hill's for­ mer master named Owen Rozier arrived at Hill's ranch, asserting that Hill had never been freed and that the land Hill owned was thus actually the property of Tucker, who was now back in Arkansas. On tlie advice of a proslavery attorney, Rozier wrote to Tucker asking to be.appointed Tucker's agent in California, so as to reclaim Hill as well as-the cabin, the fields, and the diggings. When Hill received word that his former master had authorized Rozier to seize him under California's fugitive slave law. Hill fled. He was quickly arrested. ^Meanwhile, a handful of white neighbors rallied on Hill's behalf. As the British-born John Jolly recorded in his diary four days after the ^rest, "Hames, Chips & myself collecting subscriptions for conduct­ ing Steves case. Engaged Mr. Wolcot & Barber as his lawyers."^'* Other heighbors harvested Hill's crops and cleared the ranch of everything from which Rozier and Tucker could profit, and hounded Rozier so mercilessly that Rozier finally pistol-whipped one of them, which laiided the would-be slave-catcher temporarily in jail alongside Hill. But in the end, the lawyers engaged for Hill could not prove his free­ dom, and so Rozier made plans to transport the former slave back to Arkansas. Rozier made it as far as Stockton. There Stephen Spencer Hill made good his final escape, along with, according to the local newspaper, "the gold watch of Mr. R, some thirteen dollars in cash and a draft on Miles Greenwood & Co., of New Orleans, for $500."^^ Rozier's loose change may not have made up for the land Hill had lost and the work that had gone into the improvements, but there must have been, nonetheless, a sweetness to the taking.

It was not only recently freed slaves such as Hill who faced harass­ ment in the diggings. James Williams, an African American man who had escaped from his Maryland master as a boy of thirteen, made his way to California when he was twenty-six to dig gold and live in a place of relative safety from those who would enforce the federal fugitive slave law. In the Southern Mines, however, he found his trou­ bles did not cease. As he recorded in a narrative of his life that began with his flight from bondage, Williams worked for a white man in

Roaring Camp 192

the diggings for six months until the employer turned on him: "he either raised a false report, or caused one to be raised in order to get a certain class of men to pursue me, to make me leave the place, to elude paying me my money, and he accomplished his design."^^

Williams did not reveal the nature of this "false report," but other white miners' responses to black men in their midst provide some clues. In the fall of 1849, William Miller, the Anglo American man from Massachusetts who lived and worked with free African Americans on the Tuolumne River, got into a fight with southern white men over who would be allowed to work adjacent gold claims. Miller and his white partners had joined forces with a party of black miners ("Goulard Gentlemen," Miller respectfully called them in his diary) to dam the river and work its bed. As the company of black and white men walked downstream together to locate the best spot for damming, they came upon a group of white southern miners and asked whether the damming project would interfere with their dig­ ging. The southerners said it would not. But soon enough, as Miller put it, "a Swaggering Looking Fellow Came Along," and announced that "a White Man might come in [work in the vicinity] but a Black Man Could Not no how." From there things went from bad to worse, as the southern men came after Miller's party first "Armed to the Teeth with Rifles. Revolvers. Bowie Knives, and one Pick Ax," and then with a vow to go to the law. The latter threat proved decisive, as Miller recorded in his diary, "Our Committee thought It was a going to accumulate Considerable expense in the Co[mpany] Concluded to give up to them and went to work below them."^^

In all of this, racialized imderstandings of "free labor" haunted the everyday work lives of African American men in the mines. Ironically enough, this was pMcularly true for those who were indeed free labor­ ers; such miners could face opposition from both northern and south­ ern whites. A few of these men, like Thomas Gilman, were able to carve out niches of relative safety in the foothills, living out their lives beneath the Sierra Nevada. More often—even when they had white allies like the Gold Spring men who helped Stephen Spencer Hill or the associates of William Miller who stood by their "Goulard Gentlemen" frien(j^lS“‘15F^ Amer]cmr'facegnKamsimeM~m tne~diggmg§. Meanwhile, enslaved blacks benefited little from the attentions of white northerners like Charles Davis, who thought slavery "a great evil" but fancied himself equally the friend of both master and slave. Indeed, free-labor ideology rested on an important ambiguity in its critique of slavery; it never entirely clear whether it was the institution of slav- ery itself or the presence of black workers that ideologues thought

103 Mining Gold and Making War

degraded (whitel laborJ.^ In this, the "friends" of African Americans in ^e'mines could bear an eerie resemblance to their enemies.

If the Southern Mines were no haven for African Americans, neither was the area a refuge for Latin Americans. Chileans and Mexicans who worked in parties led by a patron faced their own set of Anglo hostilities ill the diggings, but those hostilities at times resembled black-white con­ flicts. Several historians point to Latin American peonage as a central cdhcem for Anglo Americans who wished Chileans and Mexicans out of the mines. Such scholars argue that Anglo treatment of Spanish­ speaking miners "hinged ... on the slavery question" as it was evolving in the United States, a debate that encouraged immigrants from north­ eastern states to see "parallels between Negroes and masters, on the one hand; and peons and patrons, on the other. Some evidence for this interpretation exists. For example, when Theodore Johnson entered a gorge near Weber's Creek, just to the north of the Southern Mines proper, he noted, "we met a large party of Peruvians and Chilians, with .their Indian peones or slaves, besides a considerable number of Mexicans from Sonora." In this, Johnson indicated how closely connected North 'American slavery and Latin American peonage could be in Anglo men's minds.^^ And in the summer of 1849, San Francisco's Alta California reported that a mass meeting of Anglos along the Tuolumne River had issued a proclamation complaining about "the sudden and unexpected appearance among us of influential men from distant provinces of

'Mexico, Peru, Chile, the Sandwich Islands & c., with large bands of hired men, who are nominally slaves." This proclamation called for the "Immediate expulsion from the diggings ... of all classes of slaves or hired serfs coming from distant countries. Instances such as these demonstrate that, as another historian puts it, "in the gold camps, indi­ vidual Anglo-Americans feared that Sonoran peons or Southern capital­ ists with gangs of slaves would exploit the gold fields in such an efficient way that free labor would be driven out."^^

Yet in situations where one might most expect to hear the voice of free labor rising in protest, one listens in vain.^^ In the spring of 1849— before the bulk of Anglo Americans and Europeans immigrated—^the Californio Antonio Franco Coronel returned to the diggings after win­ tering at a Sonoma rancho.^ Coronel seems to have had four servants with him—^Benito Perez and his wife, and two "mute Indians," as Coronel called them, one of whom was named Augustin. Augustin was probably an gentzaro, a detribalized New Mexican Indian captured and eventually traded to Californios for horses.^^ When Coronel returned to the mines with Augustin and the others, he settled in for a time at

Roaring Camp 194

An artist's rendering of an early Gold Rush scene, with a Californio patron and Indian miners working alongside Anglo Americans. Both women depicted appear to be Spanish Mexican. From The Shirley Letters from the California Mines in 1851-52 (San Francisco: Thomas C. Russell, 1922).

Reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

the "dry diggings" along Weber's Creek, where Theodore Johnson had encountered Chileans, Peruvians, and Mexicans. Coronel found a simi­ lar mix of argonauts, along with Californios like himself and some Anglo Americans and Germans. As Coronel recalled, "All some more, some less—were profiting from the fruits of their labor." Yet one Sunday, Coronel arose to find armed Anglos on patrol and notices posted on trees ordering all who were not U.S. citizens to leave the area within twenty-four hours. In response, according to Coronel, a number of people "of various nationalities" gathered in a defensive position atop a hill. But twenty-four hours passed, and then three or four more days, and not much more transpired than verbal taunts, warning shots, and^ome dmnken revelry. "Finally," Coronel remembered, "we returned to . . . our work, although daily some of the weak were despoiled of their claims by the stronger." A few days later, however, a French-speaking man and a Spanish-speaking man were summarily hanged by inebriated Anglos for allegedly stealing four pounds of gold. For Coronel, this was the last straw: "This act dismayed me. . . . Two days later I picked up camp and went to the northern mines."^^

Dictating his reminiscences of the Gold Rush nearly thirty years later for the Bancroft collection of Californiana, Coronel tried to make sense of what had happened to him and his workers in the dig­

195 Mining Gold and Making War

gings. Nowhere did it occur to him that the disputes in which he became embroiled were disputes about his use of peon labor, though Coronel went on to become a high-ranking official in Los Angeles city and California state governments and was thus well versed in Anglo American political culture. Instead, Coronel thought that the main reason for Anglo antipathy to Spanish-speaking miners was that "the majority of them were Sonorans who were men used to gpld mining and consequently more quickly attained better results— as hid the Californians by having come first and acquired the same art. Indeed, historians have noted the frequency with which Anglo miners first learned placer mining techniques by watching Mexican ,or Chilean miners in action, and Southern Mines sources underline this conclusion.^^ When he arrived in the diggings, for example, Timothy Osborn saw Spanish-speaking mission Indians washing out gold in wooden bateas: "It was the first mining we had ever seen and \Ve watched them carefully." Osborn questioned them in Spanish about how much gold they were finding, and the miners replied, as Osborn wrote in his diary, "'Poquito medio once esta dia' (little—half ah ounce today)." That sounded good enough to Osborn and his two 'pousins; they staked a claim nearby.^®

With Mexicans, Chileans, Californios, and mission-educated Indians as frequent gold-mining teachers and guides to gold deposits, Anglo Americans rarely took quick offense at the labor practices that pro­ duced the first glint of yellow metal they saw in California, whether those were the practices of independent gamhusinos or teams of pafrones and peones. In June of 1850, for example, Timothy Osborn noted, "The Spaniards (more especially Sonorians) are hospitable to the Americans in their own country, and it is due to them that every opportunity to reciprocate their kindness should be seized upon." In fact, it took Osborn a full six months in the diggings to learn to use the racial epithet "greasers" when writing about Mexican miners in his diary. These later references were a far cry from journal entries written when he first arrived in the Southern Mines.^^ As Osborn's early obser­ vations suggest, little more than curiosity often characterized initial meetings between English- and Spanish-speaking peoples. The Reverend Daniel Woods, for instance, came upon a large Chilean camp in January 1850 south of Sonora. Woods noted that the Chileans had "come from their own gold mines to try their fortune here." He took particular interest in a family at work in the diggings—the father and older children panned for gold, while the mother washed clothes and kept an eye on an infant swinging in a basket from branches overhead. Meanwhile, a five-year-old girl "with a tiny pick and spade" worked at

Roaring Camp 196

a hole already two feet deep, washing the dirt down at the stream and placing a "scale or two of gold into a dipper a little larger than a thim­ ble. This was not the stuff of ethnic war in the mines.

interplay between global economic change and individual actions in creating the event that is remembered as the Gold Rush. They also demonstrate the decisive role of the state on behalf of white Americans in the diggings, though that role itself could be contested among competing groups of Anglos. In all of this, the language of free labor was often muted by the overwhelming desire of many Gold Rush participants to gather gold as quickly as possible and then return to their homelands. But that language, along with the rhetoric of the European revolutions of 1848, sometimes surfaced—for exam­ ple, in Anglo American men's expectation that the state would surely support them (as true independent producers) and in the French deployment of symbols of revolutionary ferment.^^

The first of these three conflicts has often been called thejChilean__ Wai—Seeumentation for what happened in the Calaveras diggings mdudes articles from San Francisco's Alta California; an unpublished account by an Anglo participant, John Hovey; another by an Argentinean-born Chilean observer, Ramon Jil Navarro, published as a series of articles in Concepcion's El Correo del Sur; and a reminiscence by another Anglo participant, James J. Ayres, written in the 1890s but published in the 1920s. The accounts diverge in both particulars and in narrative intent.^^ Taken together, however, the various accounts suggest the following. In late 1849, parties of both Chileans and Anglos decided to winter south of the Calaveras River in a ravine that had come to be known as Chile, or Chilean, Gulch. At some point, Anglo miners called a mass meeting, elected a judge or alcalde for the mining district, a man named Collier, and ordered the Chileans out of the diggings. Few Chileans left. Around the same time, some Chileans drove some Anglos off a mining claim in the vicinity. After the Chileans were ordered out of the district, they sent a delegation to Stockton to plead their case to a regional judge there, a man named Reynolds. Reynolds sympathized with them and issued a warrant for the arrest of Judge Collier and the Anglos who had tried to expel the Chileans. Fortified by the writ of arrest, but lacking Anglo officials willing to enforce it, the Chileans returned to the gulch and planned a surprise attack on the Anglos in order to make the arrest. Sometime

197 Mining Gold and Making War

between eight and ten o'clock on the night of December 27, 1849, somewhere between twenty (a Chilean estimate) and two hundred (an Anglo estimate) Chileans fell upon the Anglos, who numbered between a handful (according to the Anglos) and a horde (according to the Chileans). At least two Anglos and perhaps one Chilean died in the ensuing struggle. The Chileans finally subdued the Anglos, tying some to trees while capturing others, and then began marching them in the middle of the night to the regularly commissioned local alcalde, a man named Scollan, who apparently offered the Chileans no assis­ tance. Then the whole party started toward Stockton, several of the Chileans dropping out of the procession along the way. En route, -however, an Anglo rescue party overtook the captors and their cap­ tives, and now the rescuers marched the Chileans back toward the Cajaveras, while the former Anglo captives continued on toward Stockton to deal with the authorities there. Back in the Calaveras dig­ gings, Anglo miners organized a makeshift trial for the Chileans. The jury sentenced three men to death, perhaps two to have their ears cut off, and several to fifty lashes or more.

The Alta California seems to have lost track of events in the dig­ gings by this time and failed to report on the final outcome. At first, the Alta noted that two hundred Chileans had attacked about twenty Ainericans, killing several and then marching the prisoners toward Stockton, "not even allowing the wounds of the unfortunate men to be dressed." The paper reported that "the Chilenos said they were acting under orders from the authorities," and warned that "this out­ rage will be the signal for a general outbreak between the Americans and foreigners in the mines. Two days later, however, a letter from a Stockton correspondent provided more details, some of which con­ tradicted the earlier story. The correspondent explained that it was Anglos who had decided to winter near the Calaveras first, though they had chosen a spot where "Chileans or other foreigners" had worked the summer before. Soon after the Anglos settled down for the-* rainy season, Chileans moved in nearby. This led to the mass njeeting of Anglos, which produced the order for Chileans to leave the area. The correspondent acknowledged that the Chileans had secured a writ of arrest for the Anglos from the Stockton judge, but added that "none of the Chilians spoke English, nor did they show any authority for the arrest of the Americans." In the process of the arrest, two Anglos and one Chilean were killed. The Chileans marched Anglo prisoners to the tent of the local alcalde. Judge Scollan, who "refused to have anything to do with them," and then started off toward Stockton. Stopping at a store along the road the

Roaring Camp 198

next morning, the Chileans had breakfast but offered the Anglos only "a little cold coffee." Meanwhile, "some of the Chilians ... had either given out or vamosed." By now, according to the correspondent, the Chileans began to fear an Anglo rescue attempt, and so they came to "an understanding with the Americans, and agreed to loosen their arms . . . provided they would intercede for them in case of an attempt at rescue by other Americans." Deliverance came soon enough. The Anglo rescuers bound the Chilean captors and marched them back toward the Calaveras, while the freed Anglo captives went on to Stockton "and gave themselves up to the authorities." The cor­ respondent had heard that the eleven Chilean prisoners "unable from exhaustion to proceed to the Calaveras, were hung upon the road," though he emphasized, "1 give this as a rumor.

Five days after this report, a final letter from the Stockton correspon­ dent appeared in the Alta, detailing the efforts of an Anglo delegation from the Calaveras that had come to Stockton, as the correspondent put it, "for the purpose of laying before our citizens a correct account" of the conflict in the diggings. The delegation included four white men, all "most respectable and intelligent gentlemen," who appeared before a meeting "of the citizens of Stockton." These "gentlemen" suc­ ceeded in convincing the "citizens" that the Chileans, "by false swear­ ing," had obtained a writ of arrest from the Stockton judge for the Anglos, including Judge Collier, who had ordered Chileans out of the mines. "If this writ had been placed in the hands of a proper officer," the correspondent explained, it would have been obeyed. Instead, "it was given to a parcel of the lowest order of Chileans—^none of whom could speak a word of English—^who ... stole upon their unsuspecting victims in the dark . . . murdering all who offered the least resistance." Those at the meeting passed resolutions applauding the conduct of the Anglos and offering to "unite with the miners to render any assistance they may desire in bringing the guilty to a just punishment." The cor­ respondent closed his letter by reporting that "there is no truth to the rumor that the [Chileans] were executed on the road," and warned that those Chileans left near the Calaveras were reinforcing their position and might also be "endeavoring to induce the Indians in the neighbor­ hood to join them."^^

For readers of the Alta California, then, the Chilean War was a conflict that arose when "the lowest order of Chileans," legitimately banned from Anglo diggings, sought the aid of corrupt Anglo officials, to whom the/correspondent referred as "certain persons who would now wish to shirk from all responsibility." In the end, for English-speaking readers, the event became a kind of warning against the possibility of "a general

199 Mining Gold and Making War

outbreak between the Americans and foreigners in the mines" or, alter­ natively, of a deadly alliance between Chileans and Indians in the dig­ gings. Conspicuously absent in all of the Alta California articles was any mention of competing sets of labor relations or of conflict between the ideological underpinnings, for example, of Chilean patron/peon practices versus small-scale Anglo mining partnerships.

For John Hovey, qne of the Anglo miners who participated icuthese- events, recognition of distinctive Chilean labor relations in the dig­ gings was something of an afterthought. Hovey recorded what he pbsferved in his diary, and also inserted a separately titled narrative, '^Historical Account of the troubles between the Chilian & American^ Kfihers in the Calaveras Mining District." According to Hovey, "the troubles" began when Anglo prospectors strayed into a mining area claiined by Chileans and were ordered to “vamos." The Anglos, "for they were staunch men," responded by organizing a mining district in which only "bona-fide citizens of the United States working for them­ selves" could take up claims. Significantly, the district laws included provisions for a "Military Captain" as well as a president, secretary, and judge. The president himself was no pacifist, and Hovey remem­ bered that the white miners' leader made a speech at the founding meeting in which he railed that "the foreigners, and especially the djamhejd copper hides, every s[o]n of a b[itc]h of 'em, should be driven from our diggings." When the Anglos of the newly created mining district approached the Chilean camp to enforce the new laws, they learned that many of the men there were "peons or slaves." But nowhere did Hovey suggest that Anglos wanted to exclude Chileans

, because of unfree-labor practices. The point was to drive out foreigners, ; dark-skinned men, illegitimate sons of immoral women. The remain- f der of Hovey's version of the events at the Calaveras roughly follows the chronology of other accounts, ending with the trial of Chileans, the execution of three patrones, and the Whipping of the pednes. The bnly Anglo act that seemed to give Hovey pause was the execution of one of the three Chilean leaders. This man had come to California

. With his son, who had taken ill. "Think of that little boys feelings," Hovey exclaimed, "left alone in a foreign land sick without a friend ^nd only eleven or twelve years of age."^®

An absence of concern about questions of free labor characteriz"^ the account of Ramon Jil Navarro as well. Navarro's is by far the most elaborate and dramatic of the narratives, sparing nothing in its por-

j trait of the aggrieved Chilean miners as men of high principle, ;; uncommon bravery, and peerless hospitality. For example, Navarro pointedly distinguished Chileans in California from Mexicans, who.

Roaring Camp 200

The Anglo miner John Hovey's rendering of the makeshift jail and court­ house where Chilean participants in the "Chilean War" met their fate. From the John Hovey Journal.

Reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

though perhaps the most skilled miners in the diggings, nonetheless "allowed themselves to be treated like cowards by the Americans." As for his countrymen, Navarro boasted, "There is not a single example of a Chilean letting himself be forced off his claim without a strug­ gle.Navarro's story begins as several groups of Chileans settle in for the winter of 1849-50, each building a cabin and hauling in sup­ plies for the rainy months ahead. On December 10, however, Anglos in the area—having decided to "act as an authority independent of Calaveras County, the state of California, or even the United States

201 Mining Gold and Making War

itself"—issued an order to the Chileans to abandon their camp. As Navarro understood it, Anglos justified this act by arguing that it was wrong that "Chileans, as foreigners, not paying any fees, should exploit the mines at the expense of themselves who were citizens of the United States and who had come by land with so much toil and privation and who were rightful owners of mines bought from Mexico with Yankee blood." The Chilean men who headed the com­ panies, however, refused to leave, citing the severity of the winter, thfe law of the land, and "the right of possession, which was even more sacred in California." Yet two days later, several Anglos walked into the Chilean camp, saying, "You, Chileno, largo de aqui" (get out of here). The leader of the group working in the placers, Jose del Carmen Teran, simply replied, "You, Yankees, largo de aquV’^^

A few days after this incident, according to Navarro, hostilities moved beyond such mutual posturing, as Anglos infiltrated the Chilean camp, separating the men working in the diggings from their patrones in the cabin area. Some Anglos hid among the trees nearby as the district's alcalde. Judge Collier, and some unarmed Anglos approached the cabins in a seemingly friendly manner. The Chileans welcomed the Anglos, serving them "coffee and a light lunch."

’Finally, on cue, the armed Anglos rushed in from the woods and sur­ rounded the Chileans at gunpoint and then moved out to seize the men at work in the diggings. This accomplished, the Anglos robbed the Chileans, marched them to the Anglo camp, and forced the stronger captives to help stow the stolen goods in Anglo cabins. Navarro considered this the work of "bandits" and compared the Anglos unfavorably with highwaymen from Guadalajara or Apache raiders in northern Mexico, who, though they were thieves, never mistreated their victims with bodily insult or injury.'^^

In Navarro's account, then, these are the provocations that forced tlje Chileans to seek help from officials in Stockton. There they received the sympathies of the judge, the sheriff, and the town's lead­ ing merchants. So they returned to Judge Scollan, the appointed alcalde in Calaveras County, with the following order, which Navarro, himself the official translator for the Stockton court, inter­ preted for the Chileans:

By these presents, Messrs. Concha and Maturano are authorized to arrest and bring to Stockton either freely or by force all of the individuals residing in Calaveras who have defied the legal authority of this subprefecturate and who have recognized Mr. Coller as judge. They are authorized likewise to arrest and bring

Roaring Camp 202

to Stockton all individuals who took part in the robbery, vio­ lence, and expulsion carried out against the aliens living in Chile Gulch. . . . The lawful judge of Calaveras, Mr. Scollen, will authorize the execution of this order by his presence.

Judge Scollan dutifully accompanied two of the patrones to the Anglo camp and served the warrant, but when the Anglos refused to com­ ply, Scollan claimed he could do no more.^^

It was at this point that the Chileans took matters into their own hands, feeling the need, as Navarro put it, "to avenge their outraged honor." Three of the Chilean patrones—Temn and two others, named Ruiz and Maturano—led their parties into battle. There were only twenty men in all, the patron named Concha having departed with his workers for Stockton. The tiny band of Chileans approached the Anglo camp, bursting through cabin doors and shouting, ‘‘Subprefecto orden, vamos for Stockton." The Anglos went for their weapons and immediately felled one of the Chileans. In retaliation, Maturano and Ruiz killed an Anglo each. The struggle continued until the Anglos were finally subdued, and then, finding that the captured Anglos out­ numbered the Chileans two to one, Teran reluctantly ordered that the "the most vicious of the Americans" be tied up. The Chileans fur­ ther revealed "their generosity of character and their good hearts" by refraining from taking anything from the Anglo camp, not even the goods that had been stolen from Chileans days before.*^^

The Chileans then proceeded to Judge ScoUan's residence, to demonstrate their respect for legitimate government. There, they treated the wounds of those Anglos who had been injured, exhibiting tenderness, Navarro contended, to the point of tears. Then the captors and their captives continued toward Stockton, stopping for breakfast at a roadside store where "all sat down together at the same table without any ceremony and in perfect harmony." According to Navarro, "a kind of intimacy had grown up" among the men by daybreak. Still, at each stop along the way, a few Chileans dropped out of the march, too "sick or too worn out to continue walking." Finally, their numbers reduced, the Chileans encountered a band of a hundred armed Anglos at a road­ side inn, and, unable to resist, the captors surrendered. The Anglos bound the remaining Chileans so tightly that the ropes drew blood. But what "distressed the Chileans most," Navarro wrote, "was the vile ingratitude with which their good treatment of their prisoners was requited." Some of the Ailglos then started the Chileans back toward the Calaveras, while others "went on to Stockton to seize the subpre­ fect" (who had already left for San Francisco).

203 Mining Gold and Making War

Navarro's account continues in this vein, stressing the countless deeds of inhumanity the Anglos inflicted upon the Chileans, espe­ cially the refusal to feed the captives; once back in the diggings, the Chileans were herded into a cold room and "treated exactly the way captains of slaving ships treated the unfortunate Negroes who fell into their hands." Soon enough, however, on December 31, the makeshift trial began. It did not last long. By ten o'clock that night, the sentences came down: Teran and two others were to be thrown off ,of Mokelumne Hill; three men were to be whipped, have their heads shaved, and their ears cut off; and several others were to be whipped and have their heads shaved. The last two groups of con­ victs asked to be shot rather than suffer such dishonoring punish­ ments, but the Anglos refused their request.^^ Before New Year's niorhing arrived, however, Anglos from the Mokelumne mines inter­ vened and demanded leniency for the Chileans. They succeeded only in protecting one man, Maturano, and in insisting that the death sentence for Teran and the two others be carried out in a more humane fashion. So it was that on January 1, 1850, three Chilean men, died by firing squad; three others were whipped and shaved, and lost their ears to an Anglo's knife; and the rest were tied to branches and "whipped so that blood spurted from their lungs." Not even the "sobbing pleas" of the son of one of the dying men could "inspire pity" among the Anglos, "such men as they were."^^

Throughout, Navarro took pains to underline the manly stoicism of his Chilean protagonists, and particularly of the patrones among them, who chose violence only when provoked but then were quick to defend their own honor to the death. At the same time, theirs was a style of manhood that mixed courage with compassion, as evi­ denced by the tender care and comradeliness (and especially the breakfast) they offered their Anglo captives, despite the Anglos' rapa­ cious acts. The Anglos, by contrast, were cheap hoodlums who knew nothing of either honor or manhood, not to mention hospitality. As if to underscore the bankruptcy of Anglo gender in the diggings, l^avarro placed at the scene of the final trial a woman, wife of one of the jurors. This Anglo woman, Navarro wrote, failed to act "in keep­ ing with the mission of her sex" by consoling the prisoners and pleading on their behalf. Instead, she "was an endless torment to the Chileans." She stood in the doorway at the trial, alternately drinking and swinging a noose at the prisoners, demonstrating "the horrible facial expressions they would have in their last agonies." And then, when death called, she "watched the spectacle in as cold blooded a manner as the worst of the Yankees.How better to represent the

Roaring Camp 204

disorder of the diggings, where racial and ethnic violence cost men their honor, their ears, and their lives, than as a disorder of gender?

The final account of the Chilean War appears in the reminiscences of James J. Ayres, Gold and Sunshine, which he wrote fifty years after the events. The book, which was not published for another twenty- five years, opens as Ayres and his partners settle in for the winter of 1849-50 near the Calaveras River. Two miles away was a Chilean set­ tlement, watched over by a Dr. Concha and several "lieutenants." The military allusion was no accident. The rest of the camp was made up of peones Concha and others had brought from Chile, who, according to Ayres, "stood in relation to the headmen as dependents, in fact as slaves." Neither was the reference to slavery incidental.^® Conflict arose when "small parties of Americans" would discover new diggings, but then be "driven off by a superior body of these Chileans." So the Anglos called a mass meeting and drew up mining laws. As Ayres put it, "In other mining districts where Americans from the South had brought their slaves with them, a law was adopted which prohibited masters from taking up claims for their slaves." In the Calaveras diggings, this principle was applied to situa­ tions where Chilean patrones took up claims for their peones. Soon after the meeting, some Anglos were driven "under peculiarly aggra­ vating circumstances" from a gulch they were working (one hears echoes of Teran's mocking, "You, Yankees, largo de aqm"). The dis­ trict's alcalde. Judge Collier, called another meeting, which "came together in a temper of great exasperation," adopted a resolution to order the Chileans out of the mines, and then "marched in a body to Chilean Camp, and served the notice upon the headman present.

According to Ayres, the Anglos had almost forgotten the "Chilean imbroglio," when one evening their tent flaps flew back and they found a dozen guns aimed at them. Ayres was among those bound to a tree by the attacking Chileans. But because Ayres spoke some Spanish, the Chileans took him to another camp in case they needed an interpreter. This put Ayres in a cabin where two Anglos had been shot, and introduced him to the person he assumed had led the raid, a man Ayres thought the Chileans called Tirante. "He was not mis­ named," Ayres added. (Teran was at the center of Navarro's narrative too, but as hero rather than tyrant.)®® Ayres numbered the Chilean captors at five dozen and the Anglo captives at thirteen. The party proceeded to the tent of Judge Scollan, who Ayres acknowledged was the "regularly appointed alcalde." Ayres learned later that the Chileans had tried to persuade the alcalde "to give a tone of legality to their murderous proceedings by certifying to our arrest by the

^05 Mining Gold and Making War

authority of a warrant that had been issued by Judge Reynolds, of Stockton." The alcalde declined to intervene, so the Chileans pushed oh with their prisoners toward Stockton. In the morning, when they stbpped at a trading tent, Ayres noted that the Anglos were "allowed tb get some coffee and food." There Ayres learned that some Anglos Wj^re planning a rescue, and he also noticed that the Chileans had "diminished in numbers" along the way: "Some of the peons had

,dropped out from sheer exhaustion; others had furtively deserted. As the remaining Chileans recognized their increasingly perilous

‘Situation, they began to argue among themselves about what to do. According to Ayres, "Tirante proposed that the prisoners be dis­ patched," and that the Chileans disperse. But "a large, fine-looking Chilean called Maturano . . . opposed the proposition not only as cruel and inhuman, but as one that would surely bring upon them the' vengeance of the whole American people." Maturano won this debate, and Ayres vowed to repay him for "the manly and humane stand he took in this terrible crisis of our fate."®^ By evening, all were so weary that they stopped for the night and lay down around a campfire. Eventually the Chileans fell asleep, and the Anglos were able to loosen their ropes and quietly gather their captors' weapons. On signal, then, the Anglos turned on the Chileans and tied them up. "The peons," Ayres noted, "gave us no trouble when they saw that their patrones were in our power." At daybreak, the Anglos marched their former captors toward Stockton, until they ran into a party of rescuers at a roadside inn along the way. After a grand reception and a good meal, the rescue team headed back toward the Calaveras with the prisoners, while Ayres was appointed "to go to Stockton and lay the facts before the people and the authorities"—^but not before he paid his debt to Maturano. Ayres took Maturano aside and told him to escape by running for his life through the wild oats that grew near the irln. As Maturano prepared to leave, Ayres recalled, "he kissed my haiid and thanked me."®® Then Ayres went on to Stockton, finding "the community intensely excited" and particularly outraged at Judge Reynolds, who had issued the warrant for the Anglos' arrest and who now had escaped to San Francisco. That evening, Ayres attended a mass meeting, where a nephew of Judge Collier "delivered a powerful, eloquent and impassioned address" that exonerated the Anglos of all wrongdoing. His good name cleared, Ayres headed back to the Calaveras, where he learned that miners from Mokelumne Hill had conducted a trial and pronounced the following sentences: "Tirante and two others ... were sentenced to death; some four or five ... were sentenced each to receive fifty to one hundred lashes on the bare

Roaring Camp 206

back; and two ... were condemned to have their ears cut Such was the story of James Ayres—a story that, not surprisingly,

frequently contradicts that of Ramon Jil Navarro. Yet even with a nar­ rative structured to shed the best possible light on his own and other Anglos' actions, half a century later Ayres felt compelled to write an apologia for the story, a brief chapter entitled "Obvious Observations upon the Bloody Episode." What was obvious to Ayres by 1896 was that "mutilation can at no time nor under any circumstances be justi­ fied." The death sentences, even the whippings, did not trouble Ayres so much as the act of cutting off Chilean ears, which he confessed had not troubled him at all in 1850. In what must have seemed a fit­ ting argument to make in the 1890s, Ayres wrote, "This only goes to prove that our civilization is, after all, but a veneering, and our inher­ ent nature is that of the savage, only requiring the proper circum­ stances, conditions, and surroundings to draw it out" (surroundings many called the frontier).Besides, Ayres had placed himself in Stockton at the time of the trial and had made other miners responsi­ ble for the brutal sentences.^^ His conscience assuaged, Ayres went on to lay responsibility for the affair at the feet of the Stockton judge, who ignored local mining district laws. And, Ayres added, "If I am told that we had no right to forbid the Chileans to locate claims for their peons, the answer is obvious, that we had the same right... as the other districts had to forbid the slave owners among our own people to stake out claims for their black bondsmen." He concluded by explaining that his purpose was to set the story straight not only in the United States but in Chile as well. A few years earlier, he noted, a mob in Valparaiso had "maltreated and killed sailors belonging to a United States cruiser" (this was the cruiser Baltimore). Chilean news­ papers had identified this uprising as retribution for the 1849 "Chilean Massacre" in California. "This venomous spirit," Ayres claimed, made its way even to the "higher orders of Chile, and at one time it looked as if we would . . . have to bring the peppery little republic to its senses by our national strong arm." No doubt, such comments failed to endear Ayres to any Chilean reader who hap­ pened upon Gold and Sunshine after it finally was published in 1922.^^

A great deal is kaleidoscoped in Ayres's brief justification of the Chilean War. First, there is the retrospective insertion of concern over Chilean peonage, which Ayres likened to slavery. Accounts generated during the Gold Rush—the Alta California coverage, John Hovey's diary, and Ramon Navarro's articles in El Correo del Sur—downplayed conflicts over labor relations and the ideas that informed them. Ayres and men like him may indeed have been concerned about questions of free labor

207 Mining Gold and Making War

in 1849. But such concerns were unlikely to produce a clear consensus among Anglos in the Southern Mines, where southern whites, some With black slaves in tow, were overrepresented. It seems likely, then, that aversion to unfree-labor practices was peripheral rather than central to the Chilean War of 1849-50. By 1896, however, when middle-class white northerners and southerners were mending all sorts of ideological fences, it would not have been unseemly for Ayres to map the "slavery question" onto other kinds of disputes that arose in the diggings.^®

Second, there is the self-assured Anglo Americanism reflected in Ayres's didactic use of the Gold Rush past to placate "peppery" Chileans who dared challenge U.S. imperial power—Chileans who had a historical memory all their own. Indeed, decades before the 1890 attack on U.S. sailors from the cruiser Baltimore, a Chilean author had claimed John Rollin Ridge's Joaquin Murrieta as Chile's own Gold Rush hero, christening him El Bandido Chilefio. To an audience schooled in such Gold Rush tales of resistance. Gold and Sunshine shed little light on the subject. As the easy Chilean appropriation of Murrieta suggests, outside of the United States, battles over the meanings of the Gold Rush have been resolved less frequently in white Americans' favor. As recently as 1966, for example, the Nobel Prize-winning Chilean poet Pablo Neruda transformed the Murrieta story into an anti-U.S. opera titled Fulgor y muerte de Joaquin Murieta (The Splendor and Death of Joaquin Murieta). The opera was translated into a number of languages and performed widely in Latin America, Eastern and Western Europe, and the USSR (and on some U.S. college campuses in 1968).^^ In a song that introduced the opera, Neruda, like Ramon Navarro before him, reclaimed the Gold Rush for Chilean audiences:

* Today they kill blacks like this before it was Mexicans, thus they also killed Chileans,

j Nicaraguans, Peruvians, ‘ those unrestrained gringos

with their inhuman instincts

Who disputed their ground and who challenged them face to face? It was a Chilean bandit! It was our Joaquin Murieta!^

Such tales of resistance—stories retold and retooled by each genera­ tion, each collectivity—were rooted in the everyday struggles of Gold

Roaring Camp 208

Rush participants. Those historical struggles, while they have been recounted iri wildly disparate ways according to the varied interests of tellers, had in common the pursuit of dominance in the diggings by some Anglo American men and the tacit approval of many others. The will to rule reflected in such conflicts as the Chilean War had as much to do with processes unfolding in cities and villages like Boston, Philadelphia, and Boscawen, New Hampshire, as with any­ thing happening in camps and towns like Mariposa, San Andreas, and Mokelumne Hill. It reflected the transformation underway in the eastern states that entailed industrialization and the commercializa­ tion of agriculture, shifts that had a monumental impact on the lives of young men uncertain about how to negotiate the changing eco­ nomic landscape. Going to California was a deeply individualistic, if also familial, response to the industrial and commercial revolution of the midnineteenth century. As such it was a kind of middle-class project, although, to be sure, many of the men who engaged in the project were at most aspirants to that class status. And many would fail miserably in their desperate attempt to avoid what free-labor advocates saw as the degradation of lifelong wage work. One Ohio man put it this way: Being a shoemaker, and ambitious to rise some­ what over the bench, it is no wonder that the discovery of gold in California excited my fancy and hopes." Such men would go to great lengths to protect the object of their dreams. They would be chal­ lenged, of course, by other Gold Rush participants caught up in what was ultimately a global economic transformation. What would prove decisive in the diggings, however, was the power of the state to back up the Anglo will to rule.^^

Tjtg_m(3st_.CQmmon_means white American men devised to protect California s gold from the^spirations of other Gold Rush participants :^^thecreatiQ|ioflidningdrstncTs\^ETa^^baffingTiT^Tt^

.diggings. Thi^ is the route John Hovey and James Ayres took ^Chilean Gulch in late 1849. A couple of months earlier, "the People of Lower Mocalime Bar" (along the lower Mokelumne River) passed a similar set of resolutions, arguing that when U.S. citizens arrived in California, they found "a large proportion of its mineral resources in the hands of a people who have no right whatever to the soil on which they are trespassing—No interest in the perpetuity or prosperity of our government, and strangers alike to its laws, its language, and its institu­ tions." The Anglo men thus appointed an alcalde to notify the "foreign population that they must immediately stop mining and "prepare to leave the country with all convenient dispatch.

209 Mining Gold and Making War

Sometimes exclusionary practices were more ad hoc. For example, while mining at Mormon Gulch in Tuolumne County during the winter of 1850, the Reverend Daniel Woods noted that his neighbors quite unceremoniously had "driven off a large number of French miners from what is called Trench Bar.'"63 Another such expulsion involved a more diverse set of miners. William Shaw, who had emi­ grated from England to Australia in 1848 and then moved on to California in 1849, traveled to the diggings with two other white men and two men of color. The latter included a Chinese man, who had.been a crew member on the ship Shaw took from Australia, and a yoUng Malaysian, who Shaw said had been adopted by one of the white men as a child and over whom the white man exercised "pater­ nal controul." Shaw referred to these two as "followers" whom he and his associates had brought along "thinking they might be use­ ful"; the men of color, in other words, were employed by the white men. Once up in the foothills, Shaw's party found themselves accused as trespassers by Anglo Americans, who offered a variety of reasons for trying to eject Shaw's party from the diggings. As Shaw piit it, "The presence of our black confederates they made a source of

V complaint: evidently imagining them to be in a state of slavery or "vassalage to us." Shaw assured them that he "exercised no compul- ision over the blacks." But the white Americans also argued that I "coloured men were not privileged to work in a country intended only Tor American citizens." And then some among them "were Incoiisistent enough to ask the Celestial and the Malay to work for tlien; for pay."^^

Shaw went on to explain that over time "this feeling against the coloured races rose to a pitch of exasperation." Some of the antipathy

;; arose, he thought, because "capitalists" were hiring Chinese, Hawaiian, or hative laborers in what he called a "system of monopoly." "The obli-

rgations and agreements entered into" between such employers and '. workers, Shaw reported, were frequently "cancelled and annulled by the fiat of the vox populi." At the same time, independent bands of Mexican, Chilean, and, increasingly, Chinese miners were at work in the diggings, and Anglo Ainericans, "relying on their numerical strength, commenced acts of hostility and aggression on any 'placer' inhabited by coloured people, if it were worth appropriating or excited their cupidity." The results of such appropriations were not hard to pre­ dict. As Shaw put it, "retaliations were made, and where might was right, retributions upon unoffending individuals often took place, ^hich were nigh producing a war of race against race."^^

This near "war of race against race" created some unexpected

Roaring Camp 210

alliances, particularly after April 1850, when the California state legis­ lature imposed a licensing tax of twenty dollars per month on all non-U.S. citizens at work in the diggings.^^ Officially, the law was called "An Act for the better regulation of the Mines and the govern­ ment of foreign miners," but it was known to most as the foreign miners' tax (or as one disgruntled French immigrant called it, "the miserable law of 20 piastres").In and around the town of Sonora, response to the tax was especially swift and ultimately decisive. Friedrich Gerstacker, the German travel writer who published his observations of the Gold Rush soon after his sojourn in California, called what happened in Tuolumne County the "French Revolution," though the uprising against the foreign miners' tax included not only French but Mexican and Chilean miners and some,Germans as well.^® Anglo American merchants in Sonora (indeed, throughout the Southern Mines and the supply town of Stockton) rallied in opposi­ tion too. Other merchants, such as the Canadian-born William Perkins, joined them, since all faced tremendous business losses as a direct result of the tax.

^-<SIthough the foreign miners' tax was approved April 13, 1850, and ' its text printed in California newspapers within the following two

weeks, it was not until May that organized resistance began. When the tax collector, Lorenzo A. Besangon, arrived in Tuolumne County to begin his appointed duties, Mexican, Chilean, and French miners gath­ ered outside of Sonora, responding to notices posted throughout the town and the nearby American Camp (soon to become the town of Columbia).To date, no Mexican, Chilean, or French accounts of these cross-ethnic meetings have been uncovered, though Anglo news­ paper stories abound and Gerstacker's fanciful tale of "Die franzdsische Revolution" provides a non-Anglo countemarrative. (Gerstacker's account seems particularly fanciful because it recounts verbatim con­ versations to which he was unlikely to have been party.) The Stockton Times-reported that some had seen Chilean, Mexican, and French flags hoisted in defiance where miners gathered at the ironically named American Camp. Gerstacker recounted a different meeting at Murphys New Diggings, where German miners were also in attendance, Alsatians prominent among them, and Basques among the French.^®

11 were dismayed by the new tax. As one Sonora correspondent to the Stockton Times (who signed himself "Leo" but was actually the merchant William Perkins) explained, the miners insisted "that it was impossible that such an amount could be paid; ... a great many dig­ gers hardly getting more gold than sufficed for a mere livelihood. Out of these assemblies came • delegations sent to authorities in

.211 Mining Gold and Making War

Sonora "to ascertain if any action of the Governor could arrest the consummation of the contemplated taxation." The delegates memo­ rialized the governor, complaining that the tax would lay waste to all of their hopes, not to mention all commerce in the Southern Mines. Leo translated a bit of the memorial for the Stockton Times to demon­ strate how reasonable the petitioners were:

Without doubting for a moment the power of the present gov­ ernment to make a difference between American citizens and those of other countries, we humbly draw your excellency's attention to the fact that it is altogether contrary to the institu-

' tions of the free Republic of the United States, to make such a -difference as amounts in reality to a prohibition of labor. Without assuming any tone other than that of the deepest

■respect for the government under which we live and are pro­ tected, we beg humbly to suggest to your excellency that a

^ larger state income could be raised, and that too, without caus- * ing the slightest dissatisfaction, by the imposition of four or five

dollars per month, instead of the large sum of twenty.

For some, however, reasonable petitions did not suffice to express their indignation. Nor did all Anglo Americans and their allies respond to Spanish- and French-speaking people's protests with as much sympathy as Leo, or William Perkins, who wasted not a day in pronouncing the tax "illegal, unjust, abortive and extremely prejudi­ cial to the best interests of the state.--------

! .Accounts of what occurred on Sunda/May 19, 185W are vague ahd sometimes contradictory, but they sug^esU:hat4her^legates sent into Sonora to reason with authorities were backed up by three to fiVe thousand French, Chileans, and Mexicans. Perkins placed these men outside the town of Sonora, while another correspondent indi­ cated that at least some of that number "proceeded tumultuously Into town, sweeping through the streets, boasting of their strength, and threatening in many instances to burn the town that night." Writing his reminiscences years later, Benjamin Butler Harris sug­ gested that the "turbulent convention" of "foreigners" itself took place in Sonora and was dominated by a French man, Casimir Labetoure—^who, as it happens, was Perkins's next-door neighbor, a fellow merchant, and a member of the Sonora town council. Harris recalled that Labetoure "made a 'liberty or death' speech in both French and Spanish in, which he encouraged the Mexicans with the ayerment that the foreigners on the Coast largely outnumbered the

Roaring Camp 212

Americans, that the Americans here could not fight like those of the Mexican War, being servile peons sent here by their masters to delve in the mines."^^ Nevertheless, none of the accounts reported any vio­ lence, save an incident, seemingly unrelated to the revolt, in which a Mexican man resisted arrest. Perkins claimed that another Mexican drew a knife to protest the arrest and that yet another bystander, pre­ sumably Anglo, interceded, wounding the armed Mexican man severely with a bowie knife (the Mexican later died). Harris, on the other hand, recalled that it was the deputy sheriff himself who had "cut off with a bowie knife the head of a Mexican who, with drawn pistol, had resisted arrest under a warrant."^^ Whatever happened, a Mexican seems to have died at the hands of an Anglo, which must have added to the tension seething in Sonora.

Meanwhile, Anglos and their allies sent messengers out to the sur­ rounding camps, drawing in hundreds of armed miners, who, accord­ ing to Perkins, "marched through the streets with guns and rifles on their shoulders." The Mexicans, French, and Chileans seem to have left Sonora, regrouping at American Camp, where they raised their flags and considered their options. Incensed, armed Anglos swept into the camp the following morning "to avenge the insult." One correspondent insisted that when the Americans arrived, "they found all things in order." But Harris recalled that the Anglos marched in just as "the foreigners, with streamers, banners, and flags, were parad­ ing the streets . . . preceded by a naked Indian daubed in war paint, all singing the Marseillaise and other Revolutionary Songs." Along with the report that Labetoure denounced Anglo miners as peons, Harris's description of this demonstration suggests that the language of free labor and the rhetoric of revolution could easily be tapped once tensions surfaced in the mines. Another observer, however, described no such dramatic encounter and maintained instead that the Anglo warriors "liquored up" once they reached the quiet camp and sat down en masse to a banquet served up at the principal hotel. All agreed that no battle ensued, though Harris was sure that the Anglos had intimidated the French- and Spanish-speaking miners into retreat, and the protesters' flags, now full of bullet holes, were replaced by the Stars and Stripes.^^

Gerstacker reported that, in the meantime, the French, Germans, and "Spaniards" at nearby Murphys New Diggings got word that two French men and a German had been arrested at Sonora while protest­ ing the tax, and that the sheriff there had "been killed with a knife by a Spaniard." In response, a crowd of French-, German-, and Spanish­ speaking miners gathered, "each talking in his own language" (occa-

Mining Gold and Making War213

siohally resorting to English to make themselves understood), and decided to march into Sonora in defense of their compatriots. Among them was a particularly eager soldier, a woman who worked the gam­ ing tables and habitually dressed in pants and a short jacket, "sport­ ing a felt cap clapped jauntily on the side of her head." On this day, s\ie tied a red ribbon around the hat, mounted her horse, and urged a few of the more reluctant (and inebriated) men to join her. Some of the men hung back, but a Madame Louis—herself already clad in "dark colored pantaloons, a red woolen shirt, a large felt sombrero over one ear"—leaped into her saddle, her less enthusiastic husband. Monsieur Louis, falling in behind. "Here were our two Amazons," Gerstacker exclaimed, "galloping, laughing, and singing as they went."^^ It took a German observer to recognize, or perhaps to pro- ciuce, the revolutionary panache of these French women's attire.

As it turned out, when the soldiers arrived in Sonora, they learned that the report about the imprisoned men and the murdered sheriff was false: "The whole affair was merely an extravagant story that had had as its consequences the embroiling of the Americans with the for­ eigners."^® An extravagant story indeed, but a story that had a particu­ lar resonance for certain Gold Rush participants. It was not hard for French-, Spanish-, and German-speaking miners to believe that Anglo Americans had thrown their compatriots in jail without just cause, or that one of their own might have become so enraged at discrimina­ tory treatment that he would have stabbed a sheriff. Even lies tell truths,. Likewise, it was not hard for readers of Gerstacker's tale to imagine that French women in the mines had donned pants, shirts, jackets, caps, and even Mexican sombreros, given the perceived blur­ ring of gender and ethnic boundaries that the Gold Rush entailed. Of course, part of this blurring recalled the European revolutions of 1848, but it took on new meanings during the Gold Rush. Hardly a contest in the diggings narrated by participants or observers lacked its cross­ gender, cross-racial component, whether it was a fiery French orator denouncing Anglos as peons to a Mexican audience or an "unhappy liusband" searching for his "gentle better-half" among a bunch of red- shirted miners. In the latter case, when camped for the night en route to Sonora, Monsieur Louis had to survey closely each face among his party "until at last he discovered Madame, stretched under a tree at the side of her friend." In true Gold Rush fashion, that is, "without regard for the rights of the first occupants," Monsieur Louis "chose as his place of repose the space between the two fair ladies."^^

William Perkins, as Leo, seems to have heard about Madame Louis and her comrades, as he noted that "a large body of Frenchmen under

Roaring Camp 214

arms" had arrived in Sonora, having received word that "the French inhabitants were in danger of their lives." When they realized the report was false, "they peaceably dispersed." In fact, a good number of French- and Spanish-speaking miners not only dispersed during the "French Revolution"; they left the Southern Mines altogether. One Anglo who had swept into American Camp with his compatriots, for example, noted the "scene of confusion and terror" that marked the men's march; "Mexicans, Chilenos, et id genus omne—men, women and children—were packing up and removing." In retrospect, this par­ ticipant wondered, "What could have been the object of our assembly, except as a demonstration of power and determination, I know not; but if intended as an engine of terror, it certainly had the desired effect." At the time of these events, however, most Anglos and their allies who worried about the effect of the tax had more practical con­ cerns. Leo had warned in his very first letter to the Stockton Times about the antitax uprising in Sonora: "This state of affairs, if allowed to last, will min the prosperity of the whole southern mines, and your own town of Stockton will be the first to suffer thereby." It took only a week for the Stockton Times editors to offer their wholehearted agree­ ment. On June 1, the newspapermen noted, "As we expected, the col­ lection of the new tax is producing a ruinous effect upon the traders in the southern mines. Business, in many places, is at a complete stand still; confidence is shaken; there exists a universal feeling of dis­ trust among the miners; man is set against man."®®

Accompanying this report was a memorial addressed to the govgr- nor of California and signea "oy nearly every merchanmStpck^,"

Sopping "the lata oTthousands ot miners," ae^^Sili^Laess, in thgjoimes,

WherTThe' had previously pre- :^ail€^rihri5erghantr‘-argaed===^tKr'lH^^ T^te5trcS^pStionerri)eforenEeiii—that thF tax ought to be set at a rate of five dollars a month instead of twenty. And the Stockton Times heartily endorsed the memorial, urging the governor to consider "the claims of the vast interests embarked in the district of San Joaquin, where the burden of the tax is most severely felt."®i Indeed, mer­ chants in the Southern Mines had taken the middle-class project of Gold Rush emigration one step farther, by plowing their profits into commerce in California rather than taking gold east to advance busi­ ness prospects back home. Anglo American miners might want the Southern Mines all to themselves, but Anglo American merchants wanted customers. And in the Southern Mines, customers were just

215 Mining Gold and Making War

as likely to be Mexican or French or Chilean as they were to be white people from the eastern states. By the summer of 1850, then, just two years after the discovery of gold in the Sierra Nevada foothills, the meanings of Anglo dominance in the diggings had begun to bifur­ cate. What began here as diverging interests between white miners, on the one hand, and white merchants, on the other, would evolve into full-fledged class conflict in the years to come.®^

The protests of Mexican, French, and Chilean miners and—proba­ bly more important—the petitions of merchants in the Southern Mines eventually had their intended effect. On August 10, 1850, the StQckton Times announced that the foreign miners' tax had been reduced from twenty dollars per month to twenty dollars for a four- month period. By March of the following year, the tax had been repealed altogether.®® Residents of the Southern Mines, however, knew it was far too late for the repeal to bring back old times in the

^ diggings. Two years later, Anglo men still remembered "the long train pf fugitives" leaving the mines: "Some were going North; some South; the great body was probably bound for home; some by way of th^ sea; others by Los Angelos and the Great Desert." As early as July 20, 1850, the Stockton Times had reported a mass exodus from the area tributary to the San Joaquin River: "the evil is done—the foreign '.population, we mean the Mexicans, Sonorians and Chilians are on the march home. . . . The San Joaquin district will loose from twenty to thirty thousand of her working population in the space of a few ihonths."®4 The newspapermen, allies more to Anglo merchants than tq Anglo miners, mourned especially the departure of Mexicans, protesting that "the land of their adoption is no longer a land for t^em." To those who doubted Mexican immigrants' desire to settle in (California, the newspaper challenged, "look at their wives and fami- lik; see them . . . becoming proprietors of lots for the erection of stores. Speak with them and Iparn their ultimate intentions." For the Stockton Times, a tax on "foreign miners" was a "direct tax on labor," arid as such it impeded efforts to create "a permanent laboring popu­ lation" in California. Members of what would become a middle class in the Southern Mines argued that it was customers and wage work­ ers—not competitors for U.S. gold—who were driven off by the for­ eign miners' tax.®®

Yet not all left, and those who stayed did not adjust easily to the tax and the relations of dominance it evoked. The Reverend Daniel Woods heard in July of 1850 that a dozen men had been murdered in and around Sonora in the space of a week. Woods imagined, "This ^tate of things is no doubt owing in part, to the heavy tax imposed

Roaring Camp 216

on foreigners, which deprives many of them employment. In conse­ quence, they [are] destitute of the means with which to purchase their daily supplies. They are accordingly driven to steal and i^tirder. Woods probably exaggerated the extent to which the responsibility for mayhem in Sonora could be laid solely at the feet of disgruntled "foreign" miners, but his assessment of the situation was in fact more generous than that of many Anglos. Woods, unlike others, also recog­ nized that the tax drove increasing numbers of the Mexicans who remained into wage labor.^^ Violence and theft in the Southern Mines did seem to surge in the summer of 1850 and continue unabated at least into the following year, no doubt in part as a consequence o both the economic destitution and the ethnic tensions created by the foreign miners' tax.^^ In response to the turmoil, Anglos m Sonora gathered late in July at what one unsympathetic Anglo wag called "The great Greaser Extermination meeting." Those in attendance voted for resolutions claiming that "the lives and property of the American citizens are now in danger, from the hands of lawless marauders of every clime, class and creed under thej:anopy of heaven." Because the men gathered felt sure that they had m their midst "the Peons of Mexico, the renegades of South America, and the convicts of the British Empire," they resolved that "all foreipers m Tualumne county, except persons engaging in permanent business and of respectable character, be required to leave the limits of said county, within fifteen days." Five hundred copies of these resolutions were distributed throughout the county.

So it was that, by the summer of 1850, some Anglos m the Southern Mines had tried to drive French miners from French Bar, Chileans from Chilean Gulch, and Sonorans from Sonora, the town founded by northern Mexicans in 1848. From here on, struggles between Spanish- and French-speaking Gold Rush participants, on the one hand, and Anglo Americans, on the other, would not erup ^ into events observers could hyperbolize into "wars" or revolutions. For one, too many Chilean, French, and Mexican miners left the dig­ gings for such skirmishes to continue unabated. In addition, two years of discriminatory and exclusionary practices—from the most local disputes over a single placer claim to the systematic, state-sanc­ tioned persecution of "foreign" miners-had a profound effect on the strategies of resistance and accommodation remaining Spanish and French speakers pursued. Chileans had learned that civil authorhies, however sympathetic to Chilean complaints about expulsion from the diggings, would not defy angry crowds of white Americans to offer Chileans protection. And French- and Spanish-speaking men

217 Mining Gold and Making War

alike had found that, without the backing of Anglo merchants, their challenges to extortionist legislation met with outraged reprisals from Anglo miners. In retrospect, even some white Americans recognized the horror that they, collectively, had visited upon Mexican, Chilean, and French Gold Rush participants. Benjamin Butler Harris, for exam­ ple, invoking the name of the nativist Know-Nothing Party of the later 1850s, claimed that the foreign miners' tax was "so outrageously extortionist in its terms as to make an angel weep or a Know-Nothing laugh." And the man who called the exclusionist gathering in Sonora "The great Greaser Extermination meeting" penned a poem by that title which satirized a rabidly anti-Mexican speech delivered there by a man named John Cave:

... that speech, it is sure to immortalize Cave, And I hope coming folks will take warning.

And choose (if they would their property save) Some American place to be bom inP

The warning Mexican, Chilean, and French Gold Rush participants took from the events of 1849 and 1850 led to new tactics of survival, evasion, and revenge. Many simply left. Others moved to or created camps and towns with non-Anglo majorities. Mokelumne Hill and nearby Jesus Maria, in Calaveras County, for example, retained an iilternational appearance. An American dentist named John Baker lived there in the mid-1850s and described the population of Jesus Maria in particular as consisting of "Chilians, Mexicans, Americans, Peruvians, Dutchmen, Italians and Indians." He added, with some trep­ idation, "they present to me a mixed mass, I can assure you. The prin­ cipal language is Spanish." Indeed, Baker had to learn Spanish in order t<^ work in the area. Several years later, a German traveler to Mokelumne Hill found the French influence still strong there, though he noted an increasing number of German residents as well. The prin- cijpal inn, the Hotel Leger, he described as "an establishment half way between a German beer hall and a French restaurant," perhaps not sur­ prising, since the innkeeper was Alsatian. Farther south, in Mariposa County, the town of Homitos became a place of refuge for a variety of non-Anglos, but particularly for Mexicans. A smug young Anglo woman visited there in 1857 and noted that she "wasn't much taken with it. Most of the inhabitants are Spaniards & Indians." Four years later, another traveler noted of Homitos that "to this day there seems tb be an onmipresent stmggle between the Mexican and American ele­ ment .... Even the very signs seem to fight it out, or compromise. The stage house is the 'Progresso Restaurant'; the bakery is a 'panderia'; the

Roaring Camp 218

hotels invite both in Spanish and English; the stores in Italian as well as American and Spanish; while Sam Sing or Too Chang outrival the lavado y plan[c]hado/"^® For some non-Anglos who stayed in the Southern Mines, living in camps and towns with non-Anglo majorities was a ticket to economic and cultural survival.

Others fought Anglo dominance tooth and nail. When they did, often as not, they in turn faced dire legal or extralegal consequences. If the Stockton Times coverage of killing and stealing in the Southern Mines after the imposition of the foreign miners' tax is any indica­ tion, it would seem that individual and anonymous retaliation against Anglo usurpers became more common over time than the earlier organized forms of resistance practiced in the Chilean War and the "French Revolution.Response to such retaliation was swift and furious, and no doubt fell upon many a Mexican or Chilean who had not participated in and perhaps did not even countenance acts of vio­ lent retribution. The sheriff of Tuolumne County, for example, kept a record of his expenditures for 1851—the year after the exodus of Mexicans and Chileans—^which indicates that of 115 suspects he arrested, over half had Spanish surnames.^^ Just as often, however, "suspects" faced not a sheriff and a court hearing but a vigilante mob, sometimes organized enough to call itself a vigilance committee. Misbehaving white Americans were by no means exempt from the workings of lynch law in the Southern Mines, but for every well-pub­ licized whipping or hanging of a suspected Anglo thief or murderer, probably several Mexicans met a similar fate. In the summer of 1851, for instance, when Sonora's vigilance committee was most active, the hanging of a white man named Hill received the most publicity. But Enos Christman detailed in his diary just one week of the commit­ tee's deeds: "the Sonora Vigilance Committee hung another horse thief. The following Sunday three Mexicans were tied to the whip­ ping post, and each received twenty-five lashes well laid on. Another Mexican was found with a stolen horse . . . and sentenced to receive 150 lashes, to have one-half of his head shaved, and to leave the country in 48 hours under penalty of being hanged if he ever returned. With such odds, it is little wonder that in some cases, strategies of individual and anonymous retribution evolved into instances of social banditry in the diggings, as they did with Joaquin Murrieta and his compatriots.^^

In the meantime, however, there was yet another population in the Southern Mines that interfered daily with the project of asserting Anglo American dominance in the diggings. Native people in the

Mining Gold and Making War

foothills—including both Sierra Miwoks and mixed bands of Miwoks, Yokuts, former mission Indians, and other peoples from the San Joaquin Valley—had adopted a variety of strategies in response to the unprecedented invasion of Miwok gathering and hunting grounds after 1848. The most important among these were placer mining and livestock raiding. Miwoks and their allies started mining long before the bulk of Anglo and European immigrants arrived in the Sierra foothills. In fact, on the day that Antonio Franco Coronel, Benito Pere'? and his wife, Augustin, and the other "mute Indian" got to the Stanislaus diggings in the fall of 1848, they had barely settled in wheri "seven Indians, each one with little sacks of gold," approached the campsite. One of these Indians, who were most likely Miwoks, took hold of CoroneTs saddle blanket—a worn cover that had cost only two pesos—and then pointed to a certain spot on his elongated

: sack Of gold, indicating how much he was willing to offer for the pur- chasei Coronel hesitated, blankets being scarce in the mines, but relented when one of his peones volunteered to make him a cover of woven grass. Coronel sold the blanket for more than seven ounces of golft (about $112), and then a second for more than nine ounces (about $144). Meanwhile, Benito Perez sold another Miwok a New Mexitan serape for two pounds, three ounces of gold (about $560).^^

Perez, himself an experienced miner, marveled at how much gold the Miwoks carried in their sacks. He urged his patron to send him and, Augustin after the Indians to learn the whereabouts of their plac­ ers, ctnd Coronel agreed. Perez and Augustin followed the seven min­ ers back to their rancheria, and camped a ways off so as not to be seen. The next morning, the two peones trailed the Miwoks to their diggings and surprised them while they worked. According to Coronel, although the Indians "seemed hostile," Perez "insisted in digging in a place next to theirs." In no time at all, Perez had gath­ ered three ounces of gold (about $48).^^ When Perez and Augustin returned and told their patron the news, Coronel sent them back, along with the other "mute Indian," to "take possession" of the most productive ground. Coronel came close behind, "followed by some of the Spanish people who had been there in camp." Shortly, Californio patrones, Indian peones, and Sonoran gambusinos filled the ravine Coronel called Canada del Barro (no doubt because of the barro, or clay, that made washing the gold so difficult). Coronel did not men­ tion what became of the seven Miwoks who had led them to these extraordinarily rich claims; he himself mined there only for a couple of months before leaving the diggings for the winter.^^ Mexicans, Californios, and mission Indians may often have introduced Anglo

Roaring Camp 220

prospectors to profitable diggings, but long before, Spanish-speaking men and women themselves had followed Miwoks into the mines.

Some historians have stressed the extent to which California Indians were incorporated into the placer mining economy as wage or contract laborers, following the pattern of Spanish Mexican use of native workers in the service of settlement. This practice, such histori­ ans argue, declined with the ascendancy of Anglo Americans in the diggings, who, as a group, pursued a policy toward Indians of extermi­ nation rather than incorporation and exploitation. And indeed, there were early examples in the Southern Mines of widespread white employment of native workers. John Murphy, for whom Murphys Camp in Calaveras County was named, struck it rich in 1848 and 1849 by contracting for Indian labor in the diggings in exchange for supplying the workers with clothing, blankets, and food. Murphy seems also to have cemented trade and labor relations by marrying a native woman. These laborers may well have been Miwoks, who were native to the area. But Murphy himself had come to the Southern Mines from Charles Weber's camp farther north, where Yokuts Indians seem to have worked for Weber's Stockton Mining Company. So it is possible that some of Murphy's laborers were Yokuts as well.^® After establishing one work site, John Murphy and his brother Daniel moved on to nearby Angels Creek, where they took up a second set of claims, which became known as Murphys New Diggings (the spot from which Gerstacker's French "Amazons" would depart for ^onora a year or so later). The New Englander Leonard Noyes arrived at this camp in the fall of 1851, after the Murphy brothers had left, and heard "Fabulous Stories ... of the amounts of Gold" taken there by Daniel Murphy, "who had all the Indians working for him." Noyes recalled that Murphy had "had a trading post there [where] he sold Indians coarse white blouses or over shirts for their weight in Gold."

But by far the most well-known early white employer of native labor in the Southern Mines was James D. Savage (the name prompted a French Gold Rush participant to insist that Savage had been kidnapped as a child and raised by Indians).!®^ savage was actu­ ally an overland emigrant from Illinois who worked for a time at Sutter's Fort before the Gold Rush began. But by the time the massive influx of immigrants started, in 1849, Savage was already established as an Indian trader to the south of Sutter's Fort in the area that was becoming the Southern Mines. Eventually, he set up trading posts on the Fresno, Mariposa, and Merced rivers; learned a number of Indian dialects; and married several native (probably Miwok and Yokuts) women. Everywhere Savage set Indians to work in the diggings, not

1 Mining Gold and Making War

Ipnly around his Mariposa County trading posts but also to the north |Lt what would become Jamestown and Big Oak Flat in Tuolumne feounty. White observers consistently described Savage as the pi,ckhowledged "chief" of the native communities with whom he was l^ssocxated, but given the difficulties whites had in understanding |lndian habits of social organization, it seems likely that the relation- pship between Savage and the Miwok and Yokuts workers was more I cfoiriplicated. It is clear that Indians routinely exchanged with Savage 1‘the gold they gathered for clothes, blankets, and provisions, just as I the native peoples to the north did with John and Daniel Murphy.^oi I The reasons some Miwok and Yokuts people worked for Savage and f the Murphy brothers are not hard to imagine. Increasingly, native

peoples found themselves hungry and cold as a consequence of inva- i^sipn and the subsequent decline of animal populations in the I foothills. Likewise, they found themselves the target of harassment I and violence from immigrant miners. The Reverend Daniel Woods f visited one of Savage's camps in the late fall of 1849 and warned that ; although the Indians there were "openly friendly," they in fact har­ bored a "growing distrust of the emigrant miners," who subjected Indians to "the most cruel and barbarous impositions." Woods pre­ dicted that "the time will come when they will seek revenge." He was right. In the meantime, although immigrants responded with outrage at the first signs of Indian resistance, most, like Woods, were well aware of the situation they had created for native peoples in the dig­ gings. Lafayette Houghton Bunnell, who participated in the hostili­ ties that eventually erupted, remembered, "We had sufficient general intelligence ... to know that we were looked upon as trespassers on [Indians'] territory, but were unwilling to abandon our search for gpid." And the Stockton Times could not have been clearer about the causes of Indian-immigrant tensions in the Southern Mines: "The complaint on the part of the Indians is that the white men have driven the game from their accustomed haunts; that the rivers which aforetime so abundantly supplied them with fish, cease to afford them food; and that the Americans kill their young men." In circum­ stances like these, working under the protection of a white man such as Savage and gaining access to immigrant trade goods made sense.

Still, most Sierra Miwoks did not choose this strategy for coping with invasion. Indeed, both Savage and the Murphys probably employed not only Miwoks but Yokuts, whose hunting and gathering grounds lay to the south and west of Miwok territory. The Yokuts were native people who, like the Plains Miwoks, had been forced into Spanish Mexican missions earlier in the century and who generally had more

Roaring Camp 222

experience with non-Indian labor practices than did those Sierra Miwoks who, up to the time of the Gold Rush, had remained largely beyond the reach of Spanish Mexicans and later European and Anglo settlers such as John Sutter and John Marsh.^®^ Hence, it seems likely that proportionately fewer Miwoks worked initially for white men than did Yokuts in the south and Nisenans in the Northern Mines.

Sierra Miwoks did dig for gold, however. Throughout August, September, and October of 1850, for example, Timothy Osborn worked and lived alongside Indian miners near the Merced River, noting in his diary mostly friendly exchanges with his neighbors. The Miwok women and men came and went as they pleased, carrying not only bows, arrows, and animal carcasses, but bcitccis and crowbars as well, indicating that they had begun to supplement customary means of subsistence with mining. Likewise, Friedrich Gerstacker, passing through Murphys New Diggings in late 1850, encountered a band of Miwoks and watched them dig gold there, noting that Indians in the Southern Mines were far less likely to work for whites than those farther north. These Calaveras County Miwoks labored in family groups, the men breaking up the hard ground with pickaxes and the women and children carrying the gold-bearing dirt off and washing it at the river. Few such early descriptions of Miwok min­ ing practices exist, but it seems likely, given Gerstacker's account and a scattering of later reports, that women were central in the Miwoks' turn to gold digging. Sam Ward, brother of Julia Ward Howe, lived among Miwok and Yokuts miners at George Belt's ferry and store on the Merced River in 1851 and 1852}^^ There he, like Gerstacker, saw Indians mining in families, "the father scooping into his batea the invisible mud and sand of the riverbed, and the mother bearing it to shore to perform those skillful gyratory manipulations by which the water is made to carry away . . . the earthy matter until . . . there remain at the bottom of the pan the yellow spangles surrendered by the incongruous mass."^°^

Among other Miwok bands, women seem to have assumed respon­ sibility for virtually all aspects of mining. This was the case in early 1851 when Ephraim Delano dug gold at Dusty Bar on the Stanislaus River. There, he wrote to his wife back in Maine, he saw "plenty of the Indian woman at the mines." In fact, he said, "The Woman does the principal part of the Labor I have seen some of the squaws digging gold all day with a Child on there Back slung in a Basket." As late as the summer of 1854, Jean-Nicolas Perlot saw similar sights when he followed Miwok miners deep into the Sierras to what he hoped would be rich diggings along the south fork of the Merced River. Once Perlot

223 Mining Gold and Making War

and his companions located the Indian placers, they began working nearby—according to Perlot, in perfect amity. Indeed, Perlot seems to have forgotten who first discovered these diggings, noting in his remi­ niscences, "The Indians worked constantly around us. All the compa­ nies' let them go freely where it seemed good to them, even in our ditches, to gather paydirt in their pans, carry it on their heads, and go wash it at the river."io7 perlot was quick to point out who the miners w^/e. in this Miwok community: "The women especially did this work; the occupation of the men consisted almost entirely in watching the womens work." In this situation, then, gold digging seems to have been assimilated into women's gathering activities, leaving Miwok men their customary, more episodic work of hunting, fishing, and horse raiding. Perlot probably mistook this symbiotic sexual division of labor for Miwok women's economic independence when he wrote, "I have never seen an Indian woman cede to her husband the gold she gathered, which made me suppose that each one worked for herself." Ih tact, around the same time, Miwok womerl also were selling Perlot and his companions fresh salmon—the products of Miwok men's vy^ork—indicating the mutual dependence encouraged in native divi­ sions of labor,

Whether Miwok women mined on their own or worked alongside their menfolk, their labor was key to the survival of native peoples in the southern Mines. When J. D. Borthwick arrived in the vicinity of

\ Mpkelumne Hill in 1852 after a stint in the Northern Mines, he was ; iiifmediately struck by the relative prosperity of the Miwoks, com­ pared with the Nisenans he had seen farther north. Borthwick was

I sarcastic about the causes of Miwoks' well-being, suggesting that they rmust have been "a slightly superior race" because they "had more |inoney, and consequently must have had more energy to dig for it." |Wl)at Borthwick probably did not understand was how different the Irecent histories of Nisenans and Miwoks had been. Nisenans had lost |a great deal of their autonorhy well before the onset of the Gold push: They were hard hit by malaria in the 1830s; they formed the libackbone of John Sutter's Indian labor force in the 1840s; and they, pnlike Miwoks, had not engaged in extensive livestock raiding and grading to offset pre-Gold Rush incursions. What Borthwick saw ^hen he coihpared Nisenans and Miwoks, then, were native peoples pffefently affected by conquest. 1^9 I The Miwok practice of livestock raiding—developed decades before |to cope first with horse-rich Spanish Mexicans coming from the west land, later, horse-poor Anglo American fur trappers coming from the least—proved particularly adaptable to Gold Rush circumstances.

Roaring Camp 224

Immigrant miners falsely attributed all manner of depredations to Indians in the diggings, and they probably exaggerated Miwok live­ stock raiding as well. But when it came to horse and mule stealing, there was no denying both Miwok propensity and Miwok prowess. Miwok men increasingly came to supplement hunting with livestock raiding, particularly as deer populations declined, so it was not far­ fetched for immigrants to look about for signs of Indians when they woke up in the morning to a missing mule. The Reverend Daniel Woods put it most simply when he described thefts by Miwoks at Sherlock's Diggings in Mariposa County during November of 1849: "Mules are stolen, and driven away to be eaten." A few days earlier at nearby Agua Fria, George Evans recorded in his diary that local Indians had proved "very troublesome to the miners, having stolen

The Anglo miner John Hovey's rendering of his camp at Red Bluff Bar, with Jenny and Jerico in the foreground. Such mules were favorite targets for native livestock raiders. From the John Hovey Journal.

Reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

225 Mining Gold and Making War

almost all the mules brought here." But Evans also wrote that these same Indians were meeting with miners a few miles away to "enter a treaty" with them: "|The Indians] seek to camp in some of these ravines during the winter months and wish to first secure a peace with the palefaces now holding possession of their old winter quar­ ters." Peace seems not to have been secured, however, because two days later Evans noted that eighteen mules and several horses were missing when the immigrant men arose for breakfast. The miners gathered to plan revenge, vowing "to follow, kill, and plunder this thieving horde of savages.''^^^

Immigrant men were sorely troubled by the loss of their pack ani- rtials, but they were also irritated and sometimes frightened by the brazen defiance Miwoks displayed in their interactions with the min­ ers. Alfred Doten wrote about a February 1850 incident in Tuolumne County in which forty miners chased a party of Miwoks assumed to have stolen some mules, only to find the Indians safely ensconced on a hill "in too great numbers to drive them from their position." The Miwoks stood on the hilltop mocking their pursuers, using "the most insulting gestures and language, slapping their arses and daring the Yankees to come up there." Enraged, one of the miners picked off one of the Miwoks with a rifle bullet. Later, the miners retrieved the Indian's bow and arrow as well as his scalp, but they never recovered the mules.Similarly, William Miller and his companion, Mr. Savory, were unnerved one night in March 1850, while en route ^outh from the Tuolumne to the Merced River. They had pitched their tent near an Indian encampment. Later in the evening, an older Miwok man was carried in with a bullet hole in his neck. The women at the camp began to yell and moan and "Kept It up all night," according to Miller. Concerned, Savory helped dress the old man's wound. But neither of the white men could sleep that night, as Indians kept passing near their tent, "Damning the Americans in Spanish." The Miwoks may have known little English, and the Anglos little of whichever Miwok dialect these Indians spoke, but both groups understood enough Spanish for the Miwoks to make clear their general disdain for Anglo invaders. Savory's wound dress­ ing notwithstanding.

Sometimes fear of the consequences of such disdain, along with a fervid belief in widespread Indian "depredations," could unite not only Anglo Americans but French and Mexican miners as well. Such was the case during the winter of 1850-51 around the headwaters of the Calaveras and Mokelumne rivers, an area the Stockton Times noted was "in a state of great excitement in consequence of the irrup-

Roaring Camp 226

tions of large bodies of the hostile Indians." The newspaper acknowl­ edged that the Miwoks were "irritated by their former sufferings," but complained that "they now murder and rob all that comes within their reach." No longer content to take one or two horses or mules at a time, early in January, "immense swarms of Indians poured down and drove off every animal they could find," or so a white miner told the Stockton Times. In response, some number of French, Anglos, and others—two different newspaper articles estimated 100 and 500, respectively—set out after the presumed livestock thieves.

The French men, all accounts agree, were members of the fanied Garde Mobile, volunteer troops who had helped suppress street riot­ ing in Paris during the revolution of 1848 but who since, as one his­ torian puts it, "had become somewhat obnoxious." To rid themselves of potential troublemakers, French government officials shipped 140 of the Gardes Mobiles off to California in November 1850. These sol­ diers ended up in Calaveras County, sporting arms, flags, and other accoutrements of war, much to the dismay of Anglo American min­ ers, who no doubt remembered the past summer's "French Revolution" in Tuolumne County. Tensions ran high, and more than one high-spirited, if not particularly lethal, skirrnish erupted. In one threatened conflict, a group of Miwok warriors actually weighed in on behalf of the Anglos, though no war ensued. Another struggle, prompted the Stockton Times to run a tongue-in-cheek article titled "The Garde Mobile versus the Anglo-Saxon," which closed with assurance that "the Anglo-Saxon was victorious.

But Anglo-French tensions fell by the wayside when neighboring miners banded together to chase supposed Indian livestock thieves. According to two newspaper reports, the miners chased the raiders to the north fork of the Stanislaus River, but found them ensconced "in a bold and strong position," on a table-shaped mountain far above the river bed. It must have been a capacious table, because the Stockton Times contended that 500 Indians and "upwards of 700 mules, horses, and cattle" were camped there. Nonetheless, these Miwoks, like those that Doten's neighbors found "slapping their arses and daring the Yankees" from a hilltop, continually "defied the white man" to retrieve the animals. A second article concluded with the kind of suggestion that always put fear in the hearts of Anglo min­ ers—that is, the possibility that a single struggle was actually evi­ dence of a broader, interracial coalition against the majority of white men in the mines. In this case, a participant in the hostilities told the Times that he thought the belligerents were actually "a mixture of Northern and Pale Indians, a few 'Niggers' and white men."^^^

227 Mining Gold and Making War

After following these events for a couple of weeks, the Stockton Tirnes suddenly fell silent, failing to report on how the conflict ended. There could have been a number of reasons for this silence, but one particular explanation suggests itself in an account of the struggle Leonard Noyes recorded in his reminiscences. Noyes was camped near the south fork of the Calaveras River, in the heart of the livestock-stealing area, during the winter of 1850-51. He recalled

horses regularly were found missing that winter, and the Indians were charged with being the thieves." Noyes joined the makeshift troops that organized to go after the Indians, a group he remembered as including "50 Americans 25 Mexicans and 75 of the Guard Mobile, French refugees." The soldiers advanced to the Miwok camp near the Stanislaus River. There they planned for the Anglos and Mexicans to circle around behind the camp, which was up in the hills, and then run the Indians toward the waiting French tpen.116 But when Noyes's contingent got to the Miwok camp, the ftidians were gone. Furthermore, there were "no signs of their ever haying Cattle there or Horses as no tracks appeared," though there were "plenty of bins made of bushes very neetly constructed, all filled with Acorns." Some of the Anglos and Mexicans proposed burning the acorn granaries, but others prevented this action because, as Noyes put it, "most of us concluded that we had been lied to in regard to the Indians having stolen the Cattle." Noyes closed his account of this nonengagement by describing how his party fired a few volleys to make their French allies believe that the Anglos and Mexicans had done battle with the Miwoks, and how one man instructed the rest to tell the French men they had encoun­ tered fifteen hundred Indians rather than about fifteen (and those "[too] far off to shoot"). "Always after," Noyes recalled, when he would run into one of the Gardes Mobiles, he "got a hearty shake of the hand" for his bravery. If Noyes was correct that the combined Anglo, Mexican, and French troops never saw more than fifteen Indians and never found any sign of stolen livestock, perhaps the Stockton Times editors concluded-that under these circumstances, no news was the best possible news to print.

There must have been dozens of such not-so-close encounters in the Southern Mmes during the early years of the Gold Rush, and thus it is not surprising that one set of incidents finally led to genuinely warlike conditions in the diggings. The Mariposa War began in December of 1850 when native people in the employ of James Savage, while he was away, attacked his trading post on the Fresno River, killing three white men, wounding another, and ransacking

Roaring Camp 228

the store. According to one account, the Indians took this action most immediately because the men left in charge refused to slaughter a cow for their use. Upon his return, Savage located the attackers and tried to negotiate with them. The Indians tried to negotiate too, ask­ ing Savage to join them in war against immigrant miners, or a least to return to his trading post and remain neutral in the hostilities. Savage refused, and in fact signed on as commander of the volunteer force organized to chastise the Indians. This force, known as the Mariposa Battalion, consisted of just over two hundred soldiers, with white frontiersmen from Missouri and Texas overrepresented among them but including as well a strong contingent of white men from New York State, a handful of Europeans, and at least one African American from Philadelphia and one Hispano from New Mexico.

One of the New Yorkers, Robert Eccleston, is the only soldier in the Mariposa Battalion known to have kept a journal during the military campaign, which lasted officially from February to July of 1851.“^ The outbreak of hostilities between Indians and immigrants included not just the contingent that attacked Savage's trading post in December but a broad, if loose, coalition of Miwok, Yokuts, and mixed bands in Mariposa County. Tensions spilled over into Tuolumne and Calaveras counties as well—though the Stockton Times may have exaggerated when it reported in late January, "It now appears that with few excep­ tions the whole of the Indian tribes from the Cosumnes to King's river are in a state of insurrection." A majority of the struggles occurred in Mariposa County, not coincidentally the site of the most widespread white use of native labor in the Southern Mines. Though actual battles took place, Eccleston's diary reveals the Mariposa campaign, for the soldiers, as a tedious pursuit of individual Indian bands through the relentlessly rugged terrain of the Southern Mines' southernmost reaches. The warriors of one band might give themselves up to the troops, calling their womenfolk, children, and elders out of the moun­ tains and taking them down to the plains where the government wanted native people to settle. Meanwhile, another band would keep themselves well in advance of the soldiers, traversing the ravines and canyons of Mariposa County with ease while Eccleston and his com­ rades lumbered along behind.

Even Savage himself, no stranger to the local geography, had trou­ ble keeping up with Indians. Before the Mariposa Battalion had been mustered in, he chased after three hundred former employees who had attacked and then bolted the Fresno River post. Eccleston noted that Savage "was but an hour behind the Indians in his start & not with standing they were heavly packed could not overtake them . . ,

Mining Gold and Making War 229

^ The whole of the Mariposa War was hke this. Once, in Match, when some of the troops thought they Ses “nl ^oC group ofuUoZ Paiutes, and Yokuts), they arrived at the rancheria only to find it deserted, save a few dogs and a hundred-year-oid womaZ When the

Frtstrated, the troops burned over five thousand bushels of acorns Sk "LTed \ products of native women's work. Indeed, burning acorn granaries, and sometimes whole tandiOT^, was one of the most common acts of the soldiers, who had such difficulty catching up to the Indians themseives.i^i

Nahve women Qike native men) played contradictory roles in the conflict from the aged Yosemlte woman who baldly defied a detach! iSidl to Battalion to a young woman who served as

campaign against the Chowchllla Yokuts stefeh^lirT delighted Eccleston, with her "black & "thrf!!!, gracefully upon her shoulders," a scarf thrown negligently over the left shoulder," her bodice of white

advantage. Of course, native men also served as guides to the sol diets, though none of them caught Eccleston's "sometime M^k bTifd" as wLn the NuTu Miwok band, once members had surrendered and agreed to move do™ to the plains, offered to help the Mariposa Mo “ I! fccleston recorded in his diary, "The chief here ofL to send with ts 50 wamors to fight against the Yoosemita's providing we give them he women as prisoners." Perhaps Yosemlte women were fenowed or eir work habits. Indeed, when the Mariposa Battalion finally did

toake contact with the Yosemlte band, thr^gh the leLrnanfed

enaya, Tenaya balked at the idea of settling in the San Joaquin Valley and receiving government annuities: "We do not want anvtihlng from

women are able to do our work," he boasted. some m^T “d men played in the Mariposa War, Harris dignity even in defeat. Benjamin Butler Hanis, for example, recalled that when several bands gave themselves up to the troops, a very old woman among them waf asked totr nt! people were being sent to live on toe P ns, am toe mother of all these mountains." Surrenders such as

anotoer fifteen m Apnl, while others still eluded their pursuers On

d return these and future agreements to the U.S. Senate for ratifi-

Roaring Camp 230

cation. While the treaties showed little or no understanding of or respect for native cultures or modes of subsistence, neither were they stingy in what whites perceived as material benefits. As Eccleston recorded in his diary the treaties proposed that the Indians settle in the San Joaquin Valley "allowing them 10 years provision & clothing for 20 yrs, a pair of pants, shirt & blanket every four mo[nth]s to each Indian. They also give them 1 Farmer, a Carpenter, a Schoolmaster & Preacher, and a Blacksmith." Eccleston noted as well James Savage's assessment of such treaties. Savage predicted that not all of the native people would come down out of the mountains, but only "young men & fast travelling women." These would accept government "pres­ ents" and build temporary shelters, but then "as soon as they get a good chance, steal a large band of horses & kill a few white men & run back to the mountains."^^^

It did not happen just this way, but Savage was correct to predict that, for the most part, Miwoks would not become reservation dwellers. For one, the treaties negotiated by the federal commission­ ers were never ratified by the U.S. Senate (in part because of resist­ ance to the treaties from the California state government), though the vote against ratification would not come about until the follow- ing year. In the meantime, federal Indian agents and commissioners considered the treaties already in effect, and so spent freely on food and equipment, and granted licenses to traders to operate within the ill-fated reservations. James Savage was one of these licensed traders, and for a little more than a year he settled back into an uneasy peace with those Indians who had gathered, for the time being, down in the valley on the Fresno Reservation—most of them probably Yokuts.125 But in the summer of 1852, Savage became embroiled in a dispute with a competing trader, Walter Harvey, over native treaty rights; in this case. Savage seems to have taken the Yokuts side in the controversy. Harvey was furious with Savage not so much over their opposing views but over remarks Savage had made questioning his status as a gentleman. In a fight, Harvey shot Savage and killed him. Thus ended the career of the largest employer of native labor in the Southern Mines. As for Harvey, within a year he would join Harry Love's state-sponsored rangers in pursuing the latest lion in the path of Anglo xiominance in the diggings—Joaquin Murrieta.

The Mariposa War had a less profound impact on Sierra Miwoks and their allies than one might expect. In Calaveras County, for example, Miwoks continued to combine mining with customary sub­ sistence strategies, using gold to buy what hunting and gathering could no longer supply and what contact with immigrant society

231 Mining Gold and Making War

made indispensable—especially clothing. When Indians did turn to reservation resources, one historian suggests, they often did so "as part of their seasonal round," though this mixed economy became more difficult to sustain as the decade went by.^^?

Events at Belt's ferry and store on the Merced River illustrate another path Miwoks followed after the war. George Belt had received one of the coveted licenses to trade with native people, and later a contract to supply two groups of Indians with cattle and flour as stipulated by the soon to be unratified treaties of 1851. The native settlements located in and near the Merced Reservation included sev­ eral bands of Miwoks and one of Yokuts. Sam Ward arrived there late in the summer of that year, anxious to cast his lot with the newest entrepreneurs in the diggings—^those investing in quartz mining Although Ward came from an old and affluent banking family in New York City, he had not been able to maintain family fortunes. On the advice of "an old Chilean miner who had once [overseen] similar works in his native country," Ward and other Anglos eagerly bought shares in a quartz company. One of Ward's fellow shareholders, Henry Drought, also became a partner of Belt's ferry and store. Since Drbught preferred to manage his business affairs from San Francisco, he enlisted Ward to watch over operations at the Merced River or, as Ward put it, to "see the hands played out which had been dealt to 'my friend in the double game of Indian trading at the river and of quartz crushing" at Quartzburg, a few miles east of the ferry and store,

Thus Ward settled in at Belt's, where the Miwok and Yokuts bands had already established their rancheria and were hard at work placer mining. Indeed, when Ward first arrived, they had been so successful in the diggings that they had cleaned out the store's shelves of all trade goods. So the proprietors were obliged to sell the Indians a small herd of cattle at reduced rates in order to prevent them from taking their business to a rival trading post. Once Ward assumed his duties, he assessed the situation and concluded, "Unlike most pro­ ducers . . . our market lay under our eyes; the demand depended Upon the success of our consumers in their gold washings." Hence Ward decided to turn his attentions to "the habits and customs of the Indian tribe," of which he now considered himself "the vicarious paterfamilias." A chance visit by James Savage, who was en route to San Francisco and who spoke at length to the Indians at Belt's in their native dialect, convinced Ward that he, too, must learn the Miwoks' language: 'My plans were soon formed to approach, if not to rival, the white Savage in this particular influence over the red."i29

The Miwok miners tried to help Ward with his language lessons.

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just as they patiently watched him try to learn how to pan for gold sometime later, but there is little evidence that he was a particularly apt pupil. What Ward did learn, however, was how adaptable these native women and men were to changing economic circumstances. Ward taught some of the youngsters to grow melons, while their par­ ents balanced gold digging with gathering, hunting, and fishing. In fact, when a dam built farther down the river prevented salmon from swimming up as far as the rancheria at Belt's, Ward intervened on the Indians' behalf and persuaded the immigrant men downstream to remove the obstruction. All over the Southern Mines, Indians like these negotiated their needs with interlopers like Ward. Native peo­ ple turned immigrant commercial ventures to their immediate advantage when they could, and adjusted to the loss of autonomy gold-centered social and economic relations spelled when they could not. All in all, many Indians in California saw to it that the Gold Rush did not destroy native communities or ways of life, though the dislocations of the former and the transformations of the latter were often monumental in scale.

Miwoks were especially successful in this regard. The Belgian miner Jean-Nicolas Perlot learned this in the years following the Mariposa War, as he pushed up farther into the Sierra Nevada in search of gold. Indeed, while men such as Ward stayed in the foothills investing in quartz mines and trying to profit from licensed Indian trading and federal Indian contracts, Perlot worked to prolong the Gold Rush—a phenomenon centered on the quick exploitation of surface deposits—^by ranging far and wide in pursuit of undisturbed placers. In his perpetual prospecting in Mariposa and Tuolumne counties between 1852 and 1854, Perlot found Indians there engaged in a wide variety of activities. During the hard winter of 1852-53, for example, Miwoks from the Tuolumne River area seized Perlot's only pack animal ("alas! our donkey, our poor donkey," Perlot recalled), and killed it for food, leaving only the head and hooves behind. And that spring, Perlot ran into three Miwok men who were hunting— safer work, when Indians could find it. After exchanging friendly greetings, Perlot realized that he had met one of the men many months before along the Fresno River, when the man had helped Perlot balance a heavy load of supplies on a mule.^^^ And in the fall, when camped along the Merced River, Perlot watched Miwok women gathering a cornucopia of seeds and berries in the neighborhood. One morning in October, however, Perlot awoke to the sound of native women and men "singing, and running with all the speed which with they were capable in the direction of the Merced." This

233 Mining Gold and Making War

coming and going went on for two days, and Perlot began to worry that the Indians might be preparing for battle. But then two Mexican men passed by who understood something of the local Miwok dialect. They informed Perlot that the words of the song he kept hearing meant simply, "The acorn has fallen." What Perlot was wit­ nessing was the start of the annual celebration that marked the beginning of the acorn harvest. He was a bit chagrined: "Those whom we saw passing by ..., so noisy and joyful, were therefore not animated by . . . bellicose intentions," Perlot recalled, "they were going to celebrate the acorn festival.

It was in the following year, however, 1854, that Perlot saw Miwok women regularly passing by his camp en route to Coulterville, in Mariposa County, or Garrote (later Groveland), in Tuolumne County. On. their way to town, the women traveled unencumbered, but on their return they walked with heavy baskets of flour carried on their heads. Perlot concluded that these women must be coming from rich Indian placers located up in the mountains. So he decided to inquire about these diggings with Indians he knew—a man Perlot called Flesno (because this was the fellow who helped Perlot with his

mule on the Fresno, which Perlot thought Miwoks pronounced Flesno ) and one named Juan, with whom Perlot could communi­

cate in Spanish. Juan and "Flesno" eventually led Perlot to these plac­ ers, where Perlot entered a world seldom encountered by white Gold ^ush participants. It was here that he saw Miwok women at work in the mines, those who he thought ceded none of the gold they gath­ ered to their husbands. It was here that he talked with the leader of a Miwok band—Jose, father of Juan and Scipiano—who had memo­ rized his people s treaty rights by heart. And it was here that he met with Jose's son, Scipiano, who spoke his desires to Perlot with the ,hope that this relatively sympathetic white man might have some influence with those who lived below: "Look for Volo (gold) where you want, let the Ochd (Indian woman) seek her seeds where they are and Oulai Nang-d Blanco (and the Indian will be the friend of the White)."i33

Of course, immigrants did not invade Miwok gathering and hunt- iitS grounds to find friends, but to get gold, and the mutual respect that came to characterize Perlot's interactions with Miwoks—often a grudging respect on Perlot's part—was the exception rather than the rule in the Southern Mines. Perhaps it was Perlot's ascribed status as a foreigner in California that helped shape his own historical mem­

ory of Indian-immigrant relations there.i34 por men like Perlot knew what it was either to steer clear of white Americans bent on economic

Roaring Camp 234

dominance or to negotiate an interdependent existence o" ‘he mar­ gins of Anglo settlement—margins that were centers for those Miwok, Mexican, Chilean, and French people who "wars" of 1850 and 1851. Still, European men—Belgians like Perlot along with the majority of French-speaking immigrants who came from France—stood a far better chance of msmuatmg thernsemes into the dominant culture and class of the Southern Mines, where law and custom barred Latin Americans, native peoples, and also African Americans from even the prospect of free participation m civic and economic life there. This Would also be tme for Chinese immigrants, who began to pour into the Southern Mmes “ 1852, oncg-tiiSe“initiaL-etbnlc_and economic tensions had been resmWargely m white AmerlcliSTavDrr-—— ✓Mfa the Chilean War, the Mariposa War, anti'tiie Frencn

iRe^ution," middle-class Anglo men—for more and moreTtoe was a Jecognizable middle class in the mines—asserted control Y®"’ ety of ways. They bought up water rights and sold use of the watto to men who persisted in the decUnlng placers; they mvested m qudrtz mining; and, perhaps most significantly, they sent for then wives add other female relatives from the East. Together, these white womed and men would seek to realize their vision of "good and congenial society" in the Southern Mines. And they, particularly the men among them, would also remember the boom years of the Gold Rush in a manner that would obscure much of what these pages reca -j that is, a Gold Rush in which some of the riches of the South^ Mines may have sailed off to M^co in the hands of Rosa Feljzdie Murrieta, widow of the late Joaquin.

Partin