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Sex, Gender, Culture, and a Great Event: The California Gold Rush Author(syf Albert L. Hurtado Source: Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 68, No. 1 (Feb., 1999yf S S 9 Published by: University of California Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3641867 .

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. University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to PacificHistorical Review. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 204.17.179.87 on Sat, 17 May 2014 14:35:16 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Sex, Gender, Culture, and a Great Event: The California Gold Rush ALBERT L. HURTADO The author is a member of the history department at the University of Oklahoma. A version of this paper was his presidential address to the Pacific Coast Branch, American Historical Association, at its ninety-first annual meeting in August 1998 in San Diego, California. I was working on the galleys for my book, Intimate Fron- tiers: Sex, Gender, and Culture in Early California, when I happened to hear several historians on National Public Radio. They were explaining why a new historical organization, The History So- ciety, was needed. Among other things, they argued that the proliferation of gender studies in history threatened to trivial- ize the discipline. We should be thinking about big things, and we should be seeking the "truth."I I suspect that there are many historians who believe that sex and gender are trivial subjects. Sex and gender are merely manifestations of biology that are common to all humans. What have they to do with the big things in history? How does knowledge of sex and gender help us discover some of the truth about the past? This essay addresses those questions. Surely the California gold rush qualifies as one of the "Big Things" in history. The discovery of gold in 1848 set off a human migration that was truly global in scope. Hundreds of thousands of people from every continent set off for California. As a national event, the 1. Marc Trachtenberg, one of the historians who spoke about these issues on public radio, explained his views more fully in "The Past Under Siege: A Historian Ponders the State of his Profession-and What to Do About It," Wall Street Journal, July 17, 1998, reprinted on the H-Net discussion list, H-SHEAR, Sept. 16, 1998. Pacific Historical Review ?1999 by the Pacific Coast Branch American Historical Association 1 This content downloaded from 204.17.179.87 on Sat, 17 May 2014 14:35:16 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 2 Pacific Historical Review gold rush provided a muscular punctuation to the Mexican- American War as Anglo Americans swept westward and around the Horn to the gold fields. They were the human "facts on the ground" who validated the provisions of the Mexican cession and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.2 Regionally, the gold rush set a pattern of mineral rushes, industrial mining, and environmental despoliation that marked the West from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day.3 The gold rush earthquake set off political, social, and demographic tremors that continue to shake the American West and the wider world as well.4 So how do sex and gender fit into the Big Event? First, a few basic definitions are in order. I agree with many other scholars who theorize that gender is a social construction. In other words, each society construes gender-that is, what it means to be a "man" or a "woman"-and defines what kind of behavior is acceptable and desirable. Gender signifies far more than sexual difference; it is a status that determines power re- lationships in society. Likewise, sexuality is a social construction that varies among cultures. Thus, gender and sexuality are fluid circumstances of human life, and their manifestations-such as heterosexual monogamy-are not "natural" biological condi- tions but constructions that manipulate the range of biological and social possibilities and that change over time.5 2. Richard Griswold del Castillo, The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo: A Legacy of Conflict (Norman, Okla., 1990yf 3. Rodman W. Paul, California Gold: The Beginning of Mining in the Far West (Cambridge, Mass., 1947yf Paul, Mining Frontiers of the Far West, 1848-1890 (New York, 1963yf Paul's work set the standard for gold rush scholarship, but there have been dozens of excellent studies before and after his work was published. The most recent is Malcolm J. Rohrbough, Days of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the American Nation (Berkeley, 1997yf 4. Two excellent papers that explore the far-reaching impacts of the gold rush are Gray Brechin, "Nature and the Mining Exchange," and Allan James, "Mining California: Impacts on Land and Life," both presented at "Green and Gold: California Environments-Memories and Visions," University of California, Santa Cruz, July 30-Aug. 2, 1998. 5. On the construction of gender, see Joan Wallach Scott, "Gender: A Use- ful Category of Analysis," in Joan Wallach Scott, ed., Gender and the Politics of His- tory (NewYork, 1988yf 28-50; Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York, 1985yf 19; Susan Lee Johnson, "'A Mem- ory Sweet to Soldiers': The Significance of Gender" (with commentary by Albert L. Hurtado and Deena J. Gonzalezyf in Clyde A. Milner II, ed., A New Significance: This content downloaded from 204.17.179.87 on Sat, 17 May 2014 14:35:16 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Gender and the Gold Rush 3 California-at any time, and especially during the gold rush-is a particularly complicated place to look at gender and sexuality. It has always been a multicultural frontier and is likely to remain so. Multiculturalism implies that several cultures with assorted notions of sexuality and gender met and mingled. Mixing, however, did not lead to amalgamation, at least not on a large scale. The trend toward separation and domination in the face of diversity is one of the themes of this essay. The gold rush is about swift demographic change. In 1848, before the discovery of gold, perhaps 165,000 people lived in California. The vast majority of them-approximately 150,000-were Indians, most of whom lived autonomously in what came to be known as the mother lode and other isolated regions away from Mexican settlements. Approximately 7,500 Californios and 6,500 other people of American and European extraction accounted for the rest of the population.6 Then John Marshall discovered gold, word leaked out, and the rush to California was on. It is impossible to give more than rough estimates for the number of hopeful people who poured into California from 1848 to the early 1850s. No one made an offi- cial count until the 1850 federal census, and that enumeration was seriously flawed. The state of California made another stab at census-taking in 1852, but that effort was also incomplete. Federal officials finally made a reasonably accurate count for the 1860 census after the gold rush was over. Flawed as they are, these documents consistently describe a population with far Re-envisioning the History of the American West (New York, 1996yf 255-288. On the history of sexuality, see Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Intro- duction, trans. Robert Hurley (3 vols., New York, 1978yf Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Ex- perience: Victoria to Freud, vol. 1: Education of the Senses (4 vols., New York, 1984yf John D'Emilio and Estelle Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in Amer- ica (New York, 1988yf Jeffrey Weeks, Sexuality (NewYork, 1986yf On race and gen- der in the American West, see Antonia Castafieda, "Women of Color and the Rewriting of Western History: The Discourse, Politics, and Decolonization of His- tory," Pacific Historical Review, 61 (1992yf 501-534; Peggy Pascoe, "Race, Gender and Intercultural Relation: The Case of Interracial Marriage," in Elizabeth Jame- son and Susan Armitage, eds., Writing the Range: Race, Class, and Culture in the Women's West (Norman, Okla., 1997yf 69-80. 6. For Indian population, see Sherburne F. Cook, The Population of the Cali- fornia Indians, 1769-1970 (Berkeley, 1976yf 44. For other segments of the popu- lation, see Hubert Howe Bancroft, History of California (7 vols., San Francisco, 1886yf 5: 643. This content downloaded from 204.17.179.87 on Sat, 17 May 2014 14:35:16 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 4 Pacific Historical Review more men than women (see Figure 1yf In 1850 there were 12.2 men for each woman in California. The ratio declined to 7.2 men per woman in 1852 and 2.4 men per woman in 1860.7 The ratio of men to women was even higher in the mining districts than for the state as a whole, and it held true for every racial and ethnic category in the censuses-including Indians.8 While the 1860 ratio was significantly lower than it had been in previ- ous census years, details for age cohorts show that the older the population, the higher the ratio of men to women (see Figure 2yf These statistics indicate that women came later to Califor- nia and in smaller numbers than men. Men rushed to Califor- nia; women ambled. Changes in the sex ratio to 1860 were due to the immigration of families, births in California, and a mod- estly growing immigration of single females. In 1860 men who were over thirty had only a slim chance of marrying a woman from their own age cohort. Patterns of age and gender imbal- ance that dated from the gold rush era remained embedded in the censuses until the twentieth century.9 Historians and contemporary observers have naturalized the maleness of the gold rush population-even celebrated the masculine social world that emerged as a result. In 1855 Frank Soule, John Gihon, and James Nisbet published their firsthand Table 1 Sex Ratios, California White Population Year Males per Female 1850 12.2 1852 7.2 1860 2.4 Derived from "Table No. 3-Population Cities, Towns, &c.," Joseph G. C. Kennedy, comp., Population of the United States in 1860 (Washington, D.C., 1864yf 30. 7. Derived from "Table No. 3-Population Cities, Towns, &c.," Joseph G. C. Kennedy, comp., Population of the United States in 1860 (Washington, D.C., 1864yf 30. 8. Albert L. Hurtado, Indian Survival on the California Frontier (New Haven, Conn., 1988yf 196. 9. "Supplement for California," Thirteenth Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1910, Abstract of the Census (Washington, D.C., 1913yf 598-609. This content downloaded from 204.17.179.87 on Sat, 17 May 2014 14:35:16 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Gender and the Gold Rush 5 Table 2 Sex Ratios for White Age Cohorts in 1860 Age Males per Female 15-19 1.2 20-29 3.1 30-39 4.3 Derived from "Table No. 3-Population Cities, Towns, &c.," Kennedy, comp., Population of the United States in 1860, 30. observations of the brief, tumultuous history of California's first city in Annals of San Francisco. They summarized the dy- namics of gold and society: [Gold] Dust was plentier than pleasure, pleasure more enticing than virtue. Fortune was the horse, youth in the saddle, dissipation the track, and desire the spur. Let none wonder that the time was the best ever made.'0 These three men, at least, greeted the wide-open, vice- ridden advent of the Barbary Coast with unalloyed enthusiasm. And who should be surprised at a population of young men who responded positively to the voluptuous opportunities that gold dust provided?"l In "the States" drinking, gambling, and open prostitution were condemned, even if they were not completely expunged from society. Large cities-especially ports-had vice districts, and the incipient temperance movement had just begun its long effort to reform Americans' drinking habits.'2 Still, San Francisco and the gold rush towns seemed designed to satisfy precisely those appetites that reformers damned as un- Christian and immoral. 10. Frank Soule, John H. Gihon, and James Nisbet, Annals of San Francisco (NewYork, 1854yf 666. 11. For accounts of the San Francisco high life during the gold rush and af- ter, see Herbert Asbury, The Barbary Coast: An Informal History of the San Francisco Underworld (New York, 1933yf Curt Gentry, The Madams of San Francisco: An Irrev- erent History of the City by the Golden Gate (Garden City, N.Y., 1964yf Benson Tong, Unsubmissive Women: Chinese Prostitutes in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco (Norman, Okla., 1994yf 93-125. 12. W. J. Rorabaugh, The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition (New York, 1979yf This content downloaded from 204.17.179.87 on Sat, 17 May 2014 14:35:16 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 6 Pacific Historical Review To be sure, the large male population demanded femi- nized service industries-laundresses, cooks, housekeepers, seamstresses, and prostitutes. The abundance of gold enabled men to pay handsomely for such services. This incarnation of Adam Smith's principle of supply and demand has inspired some historians to argue that gold rush demography raised the value of women's labor and enabled them to gain riches in the gold fields just as male miners and entrepreneurs made their fortunes. Certainly some women made a good living, bought property, and achieved a degree of independence that ex- ceeded the nineteenth-century norm. Some women spoke elo- quently about their achievements in California businesses.13 Women's independence came at a cost to men who paid dearly for all kinds of women's labor. Men also set a high value on women as brides-wives who customarily provided unwaged labor for domestic duties including child rearing, cooking, cleaning, and sexual service. I do not mean to imply that men married merely to obtain a source of cheap labor and free sex, but rather to emphasize that women's household work had real economic value to their spouses and to society. Unpaid wives who cooked, sewed, and cleaned contributed to the general economy as well as to the hygiene and contentment of their men. In an industrial economy, even one as primitive as Cali- fornia's, someone would have to provide these services if men were to contribute their labor fully and exclusively to the in- dustry at hand. Even child rearing has an economic value be- cause it replaces the labor force. This was a lesson in household economy and subsistence reproduction, as it is called, that Cal- ifornia men quickly learned.14 Gold rush letters and diaries are full of evidence that men were incompetent at the basic domestic skills, but the value of women's work in the California economy was driven by more 13. Rohrbough, Days of Gold, 172-184; Joann Levy, They Saw the Elephant: Women in the California Gold Rush (Hamden, Conn., 1990yf 91-107; Paula Mitchell Marks, Precious Dust: The True Saga of the Western Gold Rushes (New York, 1995yf 337-366. 14. Immanuel Wallerstein, "Household Structures and Labor-Force Forma- tion in the Capitalist World-Economy," in Joan Smith, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Hans-Dieter Evers, eds., Households and the World-Economy (Beverly Hills, Calif., 1984yf 18-19; Hans-Dieter Evers, Wolfgang Clauss, and Diana Wong, "Subsistence Reproduction: A Framework for Analysis," in ibid., 23-26. This content downloaded from 204.17.179.87 on Sat, 17 May 2014 14:35:16 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Gender and the Gold Rush 7 than their superior ability to darn socks, wash long johns, nurse babies, and change diapers. Henry Sheldon, a Methodist mis- sionary who did not make much money from his preaching, soon gained an appreciation of woman's worth after sending for his Ohio sweetheart to marry. His wife, Priscilla, became something of a cultural cottage industry in Shasta. In 1854 Brother Sheldon reported that his wife put on a splendid Sun- day school exhibition and collected $66. She also started a se- lect school, for which she got $120 per month. The reverend thought her tuition was too cheap, but he did not want to start trouble by charging more in the little town. They were also boarding a little boy and three girls at $30 per month each (ex- clusive of washingyf a business that a bachelor surely would not have undertaken. In her spare time, limited as it was, Priscilla gave piano lessons to two pupils and guitar lessons to two oth- ers. Evidently she borrowed a piano for the lessons (perhaps in a local saloonyf The reverend intended to get a piano for Priscilla so she could take more students. Priscilla took in more than $300 in June from these pursuits, while her preaching husband found offerings in his collection plate that varied from $12 to $15 per week.15 Brother Sheldon may have made addi- tional money laboring in the mines or in some other way, but he never commented on such things. Surely Priscilla's value as a teacher was enhanced in California because of the scarcity of women in the mining districts. Perhaps because of Priscilla's gender, Shastans were willing to pay far more for cultural edifi- cation than for religious uplift. It would be too much to say that Brother Sheldon got his living by selling sex, but gender seems to have been a marketable commodity. The rarity of females in the mines led men to do extraor- dinarily foolish things when women appeared. William M. Stew- art, a California miner who later became U.S. senator from Nevada, left a particularly colorful description of such an en- counter. One morning in 1850 near Nevada City Stewart no- ticed a wagon with a woman's dress on a nearby clothesline. "When I saw the feminine raiment I raised the usual alarm, 'Oh Joe!"' Stewart recalled, "and this called the attention of 15. Henry B. Sheldon to his father, July 5, 1854, Henry B. Sheldon Collec- tion, California Room, California State Library, Sacramento. This content downloaded from 204.17.179.87 on Sat, 17 May 2014 14:35:16 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 8 Pacific Historical Review the miners on Buckeye Hill, where I was, to the clothesline which had attracted my notice. They gathered around on the hill, nearly surrounding the covered wagon and its contents."16 Soon there were two or three thousand young men surround- ing the wagon and clothesline. A young husband came out to ascertain what had attracted the mob, but his terrified wife re- mained in the wagon. Stewart, who showed leadership poten- tial even then, took up a collection to entice the frightened woman from the wagon. Soon miners were pulling nuggets from their pokes, and Stewart held out a tidy pile for the woman if she would show herself. (Stewart does not say whether or not she was clothed for this exercise.yf Finally she came out, and Stewart held the prize just beyond her reach while the woman chased after it like a carrot on a stick, "so the boys could have a good view of her," he said. "I suppose half an hour was occupied with her running back and forth while the boys looked on in admiration, when I finally gave her the bag with all the good wishes of the camp. She grabbed it and ran into the tent like a rabbit."17 The rarity of white women was matched by the scarcity of white children. Many observers commented on the sentimen- tality of miners when they saw a child who reminded them of home, hearth, and domesticity. But there were ribald jokes, too. In the same year that William Stewart discovered a woman near Nevada City, John Paul Dart heard about "a man on the other side of the hill [who] had found a specimen on the Stanislaus that weighed 18 pounds." Thinking that it was a chunk of gold, he went to the place and asked the owner to show it to him. "'Certainly,' says he and went in the tent and brought out a boy baby about two months old. 'That is it,' says, he, but he didn't have the laugh all on his side. I told him I thought if he would continue to dig in the same old claim, he would probably find another. Somebody else asked him if he had reached the edge [of his claim] yet. The mother was a regular Californian," Dart said, "and enjoyed the joke."'8 16. William M. Stewart, Reminiscences of Senator William M. Stewart of Nevada, ed. George Rothwell Brown (New York, 1908yf 64. 17. Ibid. 18. John Paul Dart to brother, Dec. 26, 1850, John Paul Dart Collection, Cal- ifornia Room, California State Library, Sacramento. This content downloaded from 204.17.179.87 on Sat, 17 May 2014 14:35:16 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Gender and the Gold Rush 9 Dart also remarked on a newspaper report concerning "the arrival of two ships, from France, with over 300 women aboard. Gads, what a rich cargo." He reckoned that the women would be "worth their weight in gold." "The imports of Cali- fornia are richer than the exports," he added.19 Dart's observa- tion about the "worth" of the French women implies that he thought of them as commodities-prostitutes-an assumption that may have been rooted purely in his ethnocentric beliefs about the supposed immorality of French women. Still, the gold rush attracted prostitutes from around the world. Miners funneled much of their hard-earned gold dust through San Francisco, which quickly became a center of wealth that at- tracted prostitutes.20 Henry B. Sheldon, the Methodist mis- sionary with a keen eye for wrong-doers, reported to his family that in San Francisco prostitutes numbered "nearly one thou- sand and there are no villages of any size in the country where they are not to be found-They are the aristocracy." Courtesans rode in "the most splendid carriages, and on the most showy studs."21 As these examples show, the scarcity of women tended to raise their economic value, whether as prostitutes, cooks, seam- stresses, or laundresses.22 Likewise, historians and contempo- rary observers contend, the scarcity of women raised their social value in California. At the very least, scarcity made men appreciate women more. Everywhere Californians remarked on the extreme deference that men paid to women. However, women had to "conduct themselves with the strictest propriety or be cast from the pale of good society," Sheldon reported, be- cause of the presence of so many prostitutes.23 Men certainly deferred to some women during the gold rush, but what if we introduce race and class into the equation? In the early years of the gold rush-say, until 1851 or 1852- there were many Indian women in the state, although their 19. Ibid. 20. For general accounts of prostitution, see Asbury, The Barbary Coast;, Gen- try, The Madams of San Francisco; Tong, Unsubmissive Women, 93-125. 21. H. B. Sheldon to Dear Friends, June 25, 1852, Sheldon Collection; em- phasis in original. 22. Rohrbough, Days of Gold, 172-184. 23. Sheldon to Dear Friends, June 25, 1852, Sheldon Collection. This content downloaded from 204.17.179.87 on Sat, 17 May 2014 14:35:16 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 10 Pacific Historical Review numbers were declining rapidly. No one will be surprised to hear that white men extended few courtesies to Indian women. Blinded by racial prejudices and decades of frontier warfare, Anglo Californians seldom had a kind word for native women. Even Dame Shirley, that paragon of gold rush observers, could muster little sympathy for Indian women. "They are very filthy in their appearance," she wrote. "If one of them should venture out into the rain, grass would grow on her neck and arms."24 On another occasion she compared them with "Macbethian witches" for their "haggardness of expression and ugliness of feature."25 Most white men were at least as critical of Indian beauty as Dame Shirley, although a few of them took Indian wives.26 Such alliances of convenience were seldom solemnized by church rit- ual or state license. These were the sort of custom marriages that were prominent among mountain men and fur traders in the nineteenth century.27 John A. Sutter, founder of New Hel- vetia where Sacramento now stands, is a prime example of this pattern. Sutter, who left his lawful spouse and children in Switzerland, pioneered in the Sacramento Valley in the 1840s. As lord of New Helvetia, Sutter kept Hawaiian and Indian mis- tresses. Some observers claimed that Sutter fathered several children by these women. Sutter's ways began to change when his oldest son unexpectedly arrived in California in 1848. The following year Sutter's son-evidently with his father's assent- financed passage for the rest of the family to California. The Sutter family reunion, however reluctant the patriarch may have been, put an end to his philandering with women of color. Other white men also abandoned their Indian consorts as soon as white spouses became available and when the devel- 24. Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clapp, The Shirley Letters from the California Mines, 1851-1852, ed. Carl I. Wheat (New York, 1949yf 148-149. 25. Ibid., 14. 26. Hurtado, Indian Survival, 173-175. 27. Albert L. Hurtado, "When Strangers Met: Sex and Gender on Three Frontiers," in Jameson and Armitage, eds., Writing the Range, 130-133; William Swagerty, "Marriage and Settlement Patterns of the Rocky Mountain Trappers and Traders," Western Historical Quarterly, 11 (1980yf 159-180; Jennifer S. H. Brown, Strangers in Blood: Fur Trade Companies in Indian Country (Vancouver, B.C., 1980yf 73-74, 111-130, 199-230; Sylvia Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur Trade So- ciety, 1670-1870 (Norman, Okla., 1980yf 28-52, 231-242. This content downloaded from 204.17.179.87 on Sat, 17 May 2014 14:35:16 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Gender and the Gold Rush 11 opment of frontier society made Indian marriages an embar- rassing reminder of past conditions.28 Men who persisted in liv- ing with native women earned the racist sobriquet "squaw men," and their children were known as "half-breeds"-slurs that condemned racial mixing.29 It is impossible to know the number of custom marriages in California, nor is it possible to quantify the incidence of rape. In the latter case, however, we know that the newspapers and agents of the Office of Indian Affairs and U.S. Army offi- cers routinely complained about assaults on Indian women.30 Some observers went so far as to say that rapes were one of the principal causes of warfare in California-a strong accusation in a frontier country where conflict with Indians was more or less constant.31 Clearly, some men cared little for the niceties of gender relations when it came to women of color. What were the root causes of sexual violence? Most students of rape argue that assaults on women are attempts to assert power over the victims. Rapists often believe that their prey is especially blame- worthy.32 In gold rush California, so lately conquered in the Mexican-American War, women of color were obvious targets for racist assailants, rapists and murderers alike. One gold rush hunter reported that he bagged "two grizzlys, one Antelope, and a digger squaw este noche," an ambiguous statement that may have had sexual as well as violent meaning.33 Victorian notions about frail womanhood did not prevent some men from systematically murdering Indian women. One of the worst, but by no means the only, of these gendered mass killings occurred at Humboldt Bay in 1860. Bret Harte, a young newspaper reporter who subsequently became famous as the au- thor of sentimental short stories about the gold rush, reported that several bands of white men mercilessly slaughtered about 28. Hurtado, Indian Survival 62-65; Iris H. W. Engstrand, 'John Sutter: A Bi- ographical Examination," in Kenneth N. Owens, ed., John Sutter and a Wider West (Lincoln, Nebr., 1994yf 81-82. 29. Hurtado, Indian Survival, 175-178. 30. San Francisco Bulletin, Sept. 13, 1856, quoted in Robert F. Heizer, ed., The Destruction of the California Indians (Santa Barbara, Calif., 1974yf 278. 31. Sacramento Union, Oct. 1, 1858, quoted in ibid., 279-280. 32. I extend this argument in Hurtado, Indian Survival, 182-187. 33. "Roop House Register, 1854-1857," manuscript, California Room, Cali- fornia State Library, Sacramento. This content downloaded from 204.17.179.87 on Sat, 17 May 2014 14:35:16 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 12 Pacific Historical Review 150 Indians who lived peaceably around Humboldt Bay. One contingent attacked a sleeping Indian community on a small is- land in front of Eureka, killing three men and fifty-seven women and children.34 Tribesmen brought some of their mur- dered kin to Union where Harte saw them. "Old women, wrin- kled and decrepit, lay weltering in blood, their brains dashed out and dabbled with their long gray hair," he wrote in the Northern Californian. He saw "infants scarcely a span long, with their faces cloven with hatchets and their bodies ghastly with wounds." As these vulnerable people "huddled together for pro- tection like sheep, they were struck down with hatchets."35 Nor were Indians the only women of color who were sub- ject to violence. The lynching of the Mexican woman Juanita (also known as Josefayf is a well-known gold rush incident, for she was the only woman to die at the hands of a lynch mob. On the Fourth of July 1851 she was living in Downieville with a Mex- ican gambler. While celebrating the national holiday, Joe Can- non, a popular young Englishman, evidently knocked in the Mexican couple's door. The next morning he went to the shack to apologize. Juanita, who understood little English, perhaps thought Cannon was going to attack her lover; according to some accounts, she reacted to Cannon calling her a prostitute. In any case, she killed Cannon with a Bowie knife. A mob gath- ered, assembled a kangaroo court, and condemned Juanita to hang. All accounts agree that she ascended the makeshift scaf- fold without assistance, adjusted the noose so that it did not tan- gle her hair, and went to her death with uncommon courage. On the gallows she said that she would do the same thing again if her honor was similarly affronted. Then the mob hanged her.36 Some believed that the hanging of Juanita was justified, 34. William F. Strobridge, Regulars in the Redwoods: The U.S. Army in Northern California, 1852-1861 (Spokane, Wash., 1994yf 204-205. 35. Harte quoted in Richard O'Connor, Bret Harte: A Biography (Boston, 1966yf 45. 36. For some firsthand accounts see D. P. Barstow, "Statement of Recollec- tions of 1849-51," Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; George Barton, "A Double Tragedy in the Mines: Hanging of Mexican Woman, Juanita, at Downieville, Sierra County, in 1851," The Grizzly Bear (Nov. 1923yf 4; Milt Go- tardi, ed., "The Hanging of Juanita," Sierra County Historical Society Bulletin, 2 (Dec. 20, 1970yf 13-31. This content downloaded from 204.17.179.87 on Sat, 17 May 2014 14:35:16 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Gender and the Gold Rush 13 but most Californians condemned it. Newspaper editors were appalled that Downieville men had hanged a woman, regard- less of the provocation.37 Likewise, some eyewitnesses con- demned the lynching of a woman on principles of gender as well as due process.38 The nineteenth-century philosopher- historian, Josiah Royce, was horrified that the mob had killed a woman, and modern historians--with justification-have ar- gued that Juanita would not have been hanged if she had been an Anglo American woman.39 Such incidents take us a long way from the sentimental forty-niner who doffed his hat and bowed to every woman he was lucky enough to meet. Singular as it was, it was not mere chance that made the Mexican Juanita the only woman to be lynched in California. When white pillagers burned Indian communities, raped Indian women, and then murdered them with axes, their corpses were not inadvertent collateral damage. Race trumped gender in California. Class trumped gender, too, even among whites. The haunt- ing story of Amelia Kuschinsky shows how dangerous sex and gender could be for a poor working girl. I use the term "girl" for two reasons. First, her contemporaries called her a girl, and she probably applied the term to herself. Second, "girl" is em- blematic of the power relationship that doomed her. In the late 1850s, at age fourteen or perhaps even younger, Amelia was a servant in the home of a Shasta merchant named August Stiller, his wife, and three children. The Stillers were from Prus- sia and Wurtemburg, and Amelia was probably from Europe as well. Someone, probably Stiller, got Amelia pregnant when she was fifteen. After trying to abort her pregnancy using folk reme- dies, the Stillers called in a local physician, another German who was sympathetic to the Stillers' desire to keep the matter private. The doctor, or perhaps someone else, evidently used in- 37. "A Woman Hung at Downieville," San Francisco Daily Alta, July 9, 1851, p. 2; "The Hanging at Downieville," ibid., July 14, 1851, p. 2; "The Downieville Tragedy," ibid., Jan. 29, 1852, p. 2. 38. Barton, "A Double Tragedy," 4; Barstow, "Statement of Recollections." 39. Josiah Royce, California, from the Conquest in 1846 to the Second Vigilance Committee in San Francisco (Boston, 1886yf 368-374; Illustrated History of Plumas, Lassen, and Sierra Counties (San Francisco, 1882yf 445-447; Leonard Pitt, The De- cline of the Californios: A Social History of the Spanish-Speaking Californians, 1846-1890 (Berkeley, 1966yf 73-74; Levy, They Saw the Elephant, 85-88. This content downloaded from 204.17.179.87 on Sat, 17 May 2014 14:35:16 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 14 Pacific Historical Review struments to abort the fetus, but something went wrong. He perforated her uterus, an infection took root, and peritonitis killed her after a terrible, painful illness. After an autopsy a fu- rious mob threatened to lynch the physician and Stiller, but the sheriff arrested them and held them for trial. Abortion was il- legal in California, and some thought the two should be tried for murder. Evidence at trial proved inconclusive, and the men went free.40 Amelia's short life and death tell us that even white women-especially poor white women-were subject to sexual abuse during the gold rush. Her youth, servant status, and pos- sibly her foreign birth made her vulnerable to molestation. Ar- guably, the demographic conditions that were supposed to benefit women also put them at risk. Imagine being one woman among a hundred sexually alert young men. Imagine living in a community where most other women were prosti- tutes, circumstances that several women commented on.41 Would you feel somehow empowered in this situation? How would you regard the men who patronized the whores? Would you want to reinforce the boundaries in a stratified society that placed you above some women? Demography gave an advan- tage to women of the right race (whites, especially Anglo- phonesyf and class-the middling sort and above. Poor women took their chances. Women of color were among the ranks of the despised who were subject to the whims of individuals and the mob.

Still, it must be admitted that white women who wished to marry found California a very fertile field for investment. Con- versely, the majority of men could not marry in California. They either remained single, returned east, or sent for brides. In short, there was a crisis in the marriage market. The crisis was evident in the lives of the Bullard family. Benjamin and Eleanor Bullard emigrated from Michigan to California with their three sons and five daughters in 1853. The family settled in Sacra- 40. Inquest on Amelia Kuschinsky, March 15, 1860, Shasta County, Records of the Clerk, Coroner's Inquests, Shasta College Museum, Redding, Calif.; "A Case of Abortion and Death," Shasta Courier, March 17, 1860, p. 2; "The Abortion Case," Shasta Courier, March 24, 1860, p. 2. 41. See, for example, Mrs. D. B. Bates, Incidents on Land and Water, or Four Years on the Pacific Coast (Boston, 1860yf 317-318. This content downloaded from 204.17.179.87 on Sat, 17 May 2014 14:35:16 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Gender and the Gold Rush 15 mento where they operated boarding houses. The oldest son, William, worked in the mines in Timbuctoo, Yuba County, while the daughters remained with their parents. "Girls are bound to get married in this country," brother William said, and were in "no danger of living to be old mades [sic] here."42 Mary, one of his sisters, explained that "California is a fast country and a girl gets to be a young lady at twelve." Another sister, Caroline, who was evidently in her early teens, soon had to beat the boys off with a stick. "Caroline has got to be a regular heart smasher," Mary revealed. "If you could only see the beaux that she has, and their hearts are ready to break on her account. Oh you would pity them."43 Caroline married a prosperous man when she was sixteen, and her other sisters also married well and quickly, except for Mary who died of tuberculosis. Poor brother William, a successful miner, waited for years to find a mate, but it was not for want of effort. He corre- sponded with a young cousin in Michigan and thought he had a chance to lure her to California, but she disappointed him. Still, perhaps she could help. In his town of Timbuctoo there was "one Girle... & I should judge thare was about two hun- dred young men from the age of 20 to 30 years." The rest of the mining towns had similar conditions. "Now... you see that the chances are slim for me to get a wife in California (for Squaw time is about over...yf so I think I shall have to go back to Michigan to get a Wife." If she knew of a young woman who wanted a husband, 'just tell her that I am the chap."44 In the case of Indian women, William would not allow his desire for a wife to override his racial preferences, but he had other preju- dices, too. When he announced that there would be a Fourth of July ball a few miles from his mine, he declared that "as I don't like the kind I shant go. (The kind are Irishyf he added.45 William was not so picky as long as the woman met his racial, ethnic, and probably religious preferences. "If one of your Sis- ters would like to hitch teams with your California Cousin just 42. William Bullard to Julia Bullard, March 5, 1862, Bullard Collection, Cal- ifornia Room, California State Library, Sacramento. 43. Mary Bullard to Dear Aunt, June 3, 1857, ibid. 44. William Bullard to Dear Cousin [Julia], April 1, 1859, ibid. 45. William Bullard to Julia Bullard, June 29, 1862, ibid. This content downloaded from 204.17.179.87 on Sat, 17 May 2014 14:35:16 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 16 Pacific Historical Review tell her to say so," he pleaded.46 None of them did, but the "honest miner," as he called himself, finally hit pay dirt in 1868, fifteen years after he had arrived in California. He married Mary Farrell, a native of Ireland.47 To marry in California, William had to relax at least one of his prejudices. Not only was it difficult for men to marry in California, it was comparatively hard for men to keep their wives. "The devil gets in the women here, or perhaps it comes out of them. I sus- pect the latter," John Dart wrote. "Eight women in ten that comes leaves their husbands."48 "It is rather a dangerous thing to marry a woman here for fear that some hombre will prose- cute you or her for bigamy," Dart claimed.49 He exaggerated but identified another effect of the crisis in the gold rush mar- riage market. Women could leave their old husbands for new ones who were richer or who otherwise suited them better. If the devil motivated women to leave their husbands, Cal- ifornia's divorce law permitted them to do so with relative ease. Women and men could sue for divorce on grounds of natural impotency, adultery, extreme cruelty, willful desertion, neglect, fraud, and conviction of a felony. The state legislature and courts progressively liberalized divorce law throughout the nineteenth century. Aggrieved wives and husbands alike took advantage of this law, but more women than men sued for di- vorce. Californians divorced at a much greater rate than other Americans, a difference that increased during the nineteenth century. By 1880 the ratio of married to divorced couples in California (239 to 1yf was about half that of the United States as a whole (481 to 1yf Not all Californians were satisfied with the California di- vorce law. When the legislature considered the 1851 divorce bill, editors of the Alta (a San Francisco newspaperyf categori- cally denounced it and all divorce laws: They are all reprehensible, all opposed to good morals, all at variance 46. William Bullard to Cousin Julia, Oct. 12, 1862, ibid. 47. Collection Description, ibid. 48. John Paul Dart to brother, Dec. 7, 1853, Dart Collection. 49. Ibid. 50. Robert L. Griswold, Family and Divorce in California, 1850-1890: Victorian Illusions and Everyday Realities (Albany, N.Y., 1982yf 18-20, 28, 30-31. This content downloaded from 204.17.179.87 on Sat, 17 May 2014 14:35:16 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Gender and the Gold Rush 17 with the principle of marriage, all tending to encourage immorality, dissatisfaction and alienation of feeling, all incompatible with the great source whence the civilized world draws its ideas of the sanctity of an oath and the sacredness of the marriage contract, all an insult to the Bible and the principles of Christianity.51 Unhappy California spouses could always discard their mates and obtain more suitable replacements, and, the editors fumed, women fished "for partners with as much unconcern as ever Isaac Walton flung a fly upon the surface of a brook."52 "Cali- fornia is becoming notorious for the rapid, steam-engine man- ner in which the family tie is severed," said the Alta, "and it has almost come to be considered that there is an alienating qual- ity in our very air."53 Alienating qualities were not located in the air but in the demographic imbalances of California's population. There were too many men competing for too few women. This basic fact was plain in the operation of the marriage market where women had many opportunities to marry and men had few. The same forces that impelled the marriage market drove the divorce mill. Relatively lax divorce proceedings in the Golden State certainly presented new opportunities and options to women, but dissolutions of marriage are best understood in economic rather than feminist terms. Whatever the legal and moral arguments for divorce may have been, divorce added women to the marriage market-if only briefly-where men could select them. The general effect of liberalized divorce was to redistribute scarce resources-women-in the competitive and inflated gold rush economy. Of course, the marriage mar- ket did not operate according to strict laws of supply and de- mand, nor did buyers and sellers follow only their own best material interests. Emotional, social, religious, and other factors were also at work. Still, it is noteworthy that, without prompting from women, a government of men enacted a law that made it easier for women to dissolve their marriages. This statute ben- efited some of California's horde of single men as well as the dissatisfied wives whom it briefly liberated. 51. "Concerning Divorce," San Francisco Daily Alta, Jan. 26, 1851, p. 2. 52. Ibid. 53. [Untitled], ibid., June 12, 1854, p. 2. This content downloaded from 204.17.179.87 on Sat, 17 May 2014 14:35:16 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 18 Pacific Historical Review Divorce was not intended to free women or to provide them with new opportunities outside of marriage. The conju- gal couple, their offspring, and the nuclear family were con- sidered the ideal social condition for Californians, just as they were for other Anglo Americans. Courtship, marriage, and even divorce (insofar as it led to remarriageyf reinforced famil- iar social, racial, and gender patterns that prevailed in the states. Was the gold rush era "the best ever made," as The Annals of San Francisco put it? Perhaps it was for some young men who were emancipated for the first time from the restraints of home and family. But most men seemed to value the common do- mestic arrangements they had once known, mourned their ab- sence, and hoped for their replication in the Golden State. Some white women who were willing to play the marriage mar- ket may well have thought of the gold rush as the best of times. But for others the blessings were mixed according to their race, class, and gender. So, what did sex and gender have to do with the Big Event? Ideas about gender influenced the basic makeup of California society. Anglo Americans had no doubts about the superiority of their way of life compared to Mexican, Indian, and other Californians, and their ideas about gender were no exception. For Anglo Americans, the centripetal forces of homogeneity, cul- tural conformity, and continuity mastered the weaker centrifu- gal forces of diversity and cultural change. The gold rush dis- tributed the benefits and liabilities of sex unequally according to gender, race, and class. Only the most attractive men-how- ever attraction may be defined-operated advantageously in the marriage market. Some white women transcended their class by marrying men who had profited in the gold fields; some did not. In most cases nonwhite women were considered suitable only for sexual gratification as prostitutes or temporary helpmeets until more fitting potential spouses arrived. Worse, some white men easily put aside Victorian ideas about the "gen- tler sex" so that they could rape and murder Indian women. All women who used their bodies to attract men, whether as pros- titutes or prospective spouses, ran significant risks-pregnancy, botched abortions, venereal diseases, and death. In the end, ideas about sex and gender influenced hundreds of thousands This content downloaded from 204.17.179.87 on Sat, 17 May 2014 14:35:16 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Gender and the Gold Rush 19 of individual decisions about marriage, family, and community relations. In turn, those decisions shaped the future population of California. Gender and sexuality were not trivial particulari- ties that revealed only the incidental "natural" events of indi- viduals' lives; they were fundamental threads woven into the fabric of culture and historical experience-the rudiments of life and death. This content downloaded from 204.17.179.87 on Sat, 17 May 2014 14:35:16 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions