The Prospector by C.D. Nichols circa 1903. Source: Library of Congress

All That Glitters?

Legacies of the California Gold Rush

01.19.18

Gold was discovered in California 170 years ago this month. It set off a mad rush from across the United States — and around the world. Ed, Joanne, and Nathan delve into what happened in California after gold was found and some of the lasting impacts of the Gold Rush.

California gold rush; gold; resource extraction

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Shipshape and Frisco Fashion

Maritime archaeologist Jim Delgado tells the story of Gold Rush San Francisco’s rapid boom – and the very unusual solution inhabitants found for their new city’s chronic housing shortage.

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Shake It! by Jahzzar

Railroad’s Whiskey Co by Jahzzar

California gold rush; San Francisco

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NATHAN: Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of Virginia, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.

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

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

JOANNE: I’m Joanne Freeman.

NATHAN: And I’m Nathan Connolly.

JOANNE: If you’re new to the podcast, we’re all historians and each week we explore the history of one topic that’s been in the news.

NATHAN: And we’re going to start off today in Coloma, California a little town up in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. 170 years ago this month, a man named James Marshall was working outside a sawmill. He saw something about the size of a pat of butter glinting under the water flowing from the mill. He called to a man named James Brown, who was working on the mill.

MALE SPEAKER: Mr. Marshall called me to him. I went and found him examining the bedrock. He said, “this is a curious rock, I’m afraid that it will give us some trouble.” Said I to him, “What makes you think so?” He said he had seen the blossom of gold.

JAMES DELGADO: That sun-struck speck of gold would spark the biggest mass migration of humanity by sea since the Crusades.

ED: That’s maritime archaeologist James Delgado, and that mass migration he’s talking about, that’s, of course, the California Gold Rush. Over the course of the gold rush, more than 300,000 people arrived from all over the world. They were trying to strike it rich, either in the goldfields or in the new boom-towns springing up across California. And no place saw miners or change arrive faster than San Francisco. By 1860, it would be a city of 60,000 people. But when gold was first discovered, it wasn’t quite so bustling.

JAMES DELGADO: San Francisco in January of 1848 was a small village perched on the end of a muddy cove, and a population of about 400 people. It was a sleepy little outpost at the edge of the world. Between January 1, 1849 and the end of the year, 764 ships just left American ports alone, and there were probably some 500 more that sailed from everywhere else around the world, including Hong Kong, Valparaiso, Chile, France, Great Britain, Denmark, Australia, you name it. Everybody came by sea. And so, as the ships started to come in, at first in the dozens and then up to 90, to 100 ships in any given week, it just simply overwhelmed San Francisco. One observer literally felt it was a forest of ships masts.

JOANNE: That forest of mass grew thicker each week. Because, while dozens of new ships were coming into the harbor, almost none were leaving. Most sailors jumped ship as soon as they arrived, eager to find gold themselves and captains couldn’t find anyone willing to take their places. So the ships stacked up in the Bay making it harder by the day to unload people and goods. On the shore, men crowded into makeshift tents wherever they could basically find a scrap of land. In other words, it was a mess.

JAMES DELGADO: San Francisco suddenly became this central hub, this [INAUDIBLE], this place in which all the shipping of the world was descending. You needed facilities to house, feed, water these people and to sell them what you thought or what they thought they’d need. So, how do you do that when lumber is $1 a foot, when a nail cost $0.25, when a brick’s $1? And we’re talking on a scale of times 10 in today’s money, if not more.

JOANNE: Some entrepreneurial ship owners saw an opportunity. They couldn’t leave, but all of a sudden there might be a profit in staying put. All they had to do was beach their ships in the mudflats on the edge of the village.

JAMES DELGADO: 275 of them were converted into floating buildings. They turned them into warehouses, they turned them into a bonded storage facilities for the government. They turned them into offices, they turned them into hotels, even private residences. There was a restaurant in one and the town jail was in a tiny little ship named Eufemia that was more right in the heart of the waterfront.

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

JAMES DELGADO: A Venice, as one guy called it, built of pine rather than marble. The only city in the world that he had visited other than Venice itself where Main Street was only visible at low tide and the entire central part of the city noticeably swayed as the tide and the wind moved the water.

JOANNE: As the years passed, San Francisco stabilized in more ways than one. A city government formed, tents and ships were replaced by timber homes and warehouses, and city fathers were desperate for more land to build on. So sand and rocks and trash were pushed out to fill the muddy Cove with solid land.

JAMES DELGADO: 75 of those ships ended up buried beneath the rapidly increasing and encroaching waterfront. The city front extends until finally, by order of the state, they pass a law stopping the filling because otherwise, they argued, San Francisco Bay would have been completely filled and Oakland would have been a suburb of the city. In that way, this “Venice of Pine” ultimately becomes solid ground by 1855.

JOANNE: Those boats are still buried under San Francisco’s downtown today. Delgado has excavated a few of them himself. He says it’s easy to look at the story of the ships as mere curiosity, but they reveal something deeper about what Americans were looking to claim when they came to San Francisco. And it wasn’t just gold.

JAMES DELGADO: The story of San Francisco is a metaphor for the gold rush, but it is not an accident. When gold was discovered, it tapped into longstanding American desires to take San Francisco Bay as this great port in the Pacific. To use it as a springboard for expanding into the Asian market, and, as well, to fulfill the dreams of manifest destiny and move the country from sea to shining sea. And it leaves us with a lasting legacy that, to this day, is somewhat mythologized.

The Argonauts

Ed sits down with historian H.W. Brands to talk about what lured hundreds of thousands of people to California in the first place: all that gold. What happened once a miner found it?

MUSIC:

Forgiven Not Forgotten by Ketsa

California gold rush; gold

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

NATHAN: We’ll learn about the consequences of vigilante justice in a mining boom-town, explore the day-to-day lives of miners, and look at the devastating impact of the gold rush for California’s native peoples.

ED: But first, let’s step back and explore why men from all over the world were drawn to California in the first place, the gold.

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

ED: This is historian HW Brands. He says that while many Argonauts didn’t strike it rich, there really was an enormous amount of gold in California.

HW BRANDS: You go from the discovery of gold in California in 1848 through, say the next 25 years, essentially, the world gold supply doubled in that 25 years. So if you took all the gold that had ever been dug out of the ground from the earliest pre-history until 1848, as much again was dug out in the next 25 years.

ED: But there was another enticement for fortune seekers. When gold was found, the region was in a kind of legal limbo.

HW BRANDS: California was being transferred from Mexican ownership to American ownership. California at this point had no territorial government, had no state government. It basically had no government at all. And the attitude of the federal government, the attitude of American culture at the time, was that there are these resources that are in the public domain, but we would rather they be in private hands as quickly as possible. So the government was selling off land on a regular basis as far as it related to precious metals like gold. The prevailing ethos was, it’s there for the taking, quite literally. People could become wealthy if you got there first.

ED: So what do you mean by that?

HW BRANDS: Well, it is called the gold rush precisely because people had to rush to get there. They knew that the people who got there first would have the best claims, would have the best opportunity to lay their hands on gold. If you got there more slowly, then all the good spaces would be taken, you’d be pushed to the margins.

Now the reason for this is that over tens of millions of years, gold had gradually been washing out of the Sierra batholith, this big chunk of granite that underlies the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Gold being heavier than gravel and sand, the gold would sink to the bottom of streams and collect in the bottoms behind rocks, beneath gravel, and all this stuff. So all you had to do at first was just separate out the heavy gold from the comparatively light sand and gravel. And you’d do that by scooping up a shovelful or a handful of this stuff, swirling some water around, the water would wash away the light stuff and leave the heavy gold.

And that would take you probably, well the first time you did probably take five minutes, when you got good at it, it’d take you a minute or 30 seconds, and you’d repeat, and repeat, and repeat, and repeat, and you’d do this from morning until night. And at least at first, it was open season. You get there, you get the gold, you put in your pocket, you can walk away.

ED: So were the first people who got there, did they become the richest people in California? Were they able to leverage that early access to the trough into position and wealth?

HW BRANDS: There were two models of business success in California in response to the discovery of gold. The first was, get your hands on as much gold and as many claims of gold property as you can, and it behooves you to keep it secret as long as you could until you got as much of the gold cornered as possible. The other model was, don’t worry so much about mining the gold, instead mine the miners. And there was another guy named Sam Brannen who had a general store in the vicinity of the goldfields, and that’s exactly what he did. And he was the one, in fact, who publicized the discovery of gold in California. So he heard that there was gold up in the mountains and he managed to get his hands on enough to fill up a small jar. And he went to San Francisco, which was a very sleepy village at the time, but there were a lot of ships that would stop in to re-provision. And he started running around the streets of the village yelling, gold, gold on the American River.

And his thinking was, everybody who comes to California goes off to the mines is going to have to buy shovels, are going to have to buy bread, they’re going to have to buy boots and all this stuff, and that’s the way I will make my money.

ED: So let’s say that I’m an Argonaut going out to the gold fields of California, how much money would a miner have spent? How much was required to sustain yourself while you were trying to strike it rich?

HW BRANDS: If you were mining gold, panning gold and you made $10 a day, that was a good day. But, you would probably have to pay at least half of that to support yourself. Because flour was expensive, and boots were expensive, and everything was expensive. So when you put numbers on it, a 10-pound bag of flour cost $1.25. That’s not going to sound very daunting because a 10-pound bag of flour today costs $5. Except that $1.25 was the weekly salary of a manual laborer in New York. So Sam Brannen, the merchant who sold stuff to the miners, he very shortly was the wealthiest man in California. So in answer to the question, did the people who came to California, did they get rich? Some of them did. And become wealthy was a comparative concept. Most of them were thinking, I’m going to go to California for a season and earn enough money to buy the farm that I wanted. Or I’ll earn enough money to be able to get married. Or I’ll earn enough money to start the business. They didn’t want to become insanely wealthy, they just wanted to get a jump on life.

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

HW BRANDS: So, by the end of the 1850s, it was no longer the case that a single individual without capital could get a start in the gold industry. Because by then, it had become industrialized, it had become corporatized. The gold was first discovered in active streams. Eventually, those good stream-beds were pretty well picked over, and so you could make much money doing that. And so the good holdings, in many cases, now were underground mines. These were put together by corporations, by banks, by speculators with lots of money. And so if you are going to become a miner, you almost always were a paid employee of an industrial corporation and you were working underground. You wouldn’t see the daylight, it wasn’t anything like what the first miners went through. You might as well be working in a steel factory back in Pittsburgh, except you were in California, and you’re deep underground.

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

HW BRANDS: Yeah it certainly was. And one of the striking things about California is the way it accelerates American history. So the Industrial Revolution in the east unfolded over 50 years. In California, it unfolded over about six or eight years.

ED: So, obviously, the California Gold Rush had an enormous impact on the United States. What were its other consequences?

HW BRANDS: I think California changes American attitudes toward what constitutes success and what are the prerequisites of success. Before California, I think in terms of the Benjamin Franklin Puritan model of success. And that is you have to exhibit the right kind of attitudes, traits of character. And your success, or more precisely, if you fail, there’s probably something wrong with you. You better look inside and see how you can get right with your soul, with your creator.

People go to California and they discover that model doesn’t apply at all. Because two minors who are standing waist-deep in a rushing stream, freezing, the sun’s beating down on them, and one guy reaches down and picks up a rock. And the guy who is 20 feet away and the next claim of reaches down and picks up a gold nugget. And the guy who picked up the rock doesn’t beat his breast and hang his head and say, what did I do wrong? He said, I’ve got to go find a different claim.

And so the California model was that you try and you fail, and you try again, and you fail, and you try again, and you fail, but eventually you keep trying long enough, you’ll succeed. And this became the model for the modern Silicon Valley phenomenon and the venture-capital industry is based on this model. Where you invest in 10 different ideas and nine of them turn out to be busts, but the 10th one pans out and you’ll make a fortune.

ED: HW Brands is historian at the University of Texas-Austin. His book on this subject is the “Age of Gold, the California Gold Rush and the New American Dream.” We also heard from James Delgado, author of “Gold Rush Port, the Maritime Archeology of San Francisco’s Waterfront.”

Golden Ticket

Ed, Nathan, and Joanne discuss the many types of change that the Gold Rush brought to California and the country– even when they defied all logic.

MUSIC:
Flicker & Burn by Podington Bear

California; California gold rush

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Joanne, Nathan, I’ve certainly learned a lot conducting those two interviews. And I’m just wondering what strikes you about the place of the Gold Rush in the broader span of American history?

NATHAN: Ed, I can’t help but think about how compressed the history of the United States is and how it gets replicated in the history of California between the 1850s and really the turn of the 20th century. I mean you have this mass migration of Europeans who are going out west, you have massive declines in indigenous populations, and the impact of the gold rush on culture, on economics, on the land of California. Again, are all happening in ways that feel very similar to the United States kind of writ long.

ED: That’s really interesting, Nathan, and I was struck in these interviews about how all these things that we think of as being a sequence are kind of piled on top of each other in California.

NATHAN: It’s true, I mean you have, just as one example, obviously the economic impact of the gold rush is going to be profound. Not just in terms of number of tons of gold that then are removed from the mountains of California, but the way that the local economies there are dramatically changed. You’ll see a dozen eggs costing you the equivalent of like $90 by today’s prices or like $3,000 for a pair of shoes in today’s money. And it’s not just stuff around the house or food items, you think about the ways in which women are coming out and they’re either working as comfort workers or domestics. And you think about even extermination of Native Americans gets monetized in this period. Where people are paying $25 for a scalp, or $5 for the part of an indigenous woman or child. It can get really macabre but the point is, everything seems to be for sale in a way that is far more dramatic than what was happening even 10 years earlier.

JOANNE: And it touches on a larger thread, not just in American history but certainly in American history. Just thinking about the Gold Rush made me think about a different kind of a rush at the end of the 18th and at the beginning of the 19th century. And that was a sort of land rush when there was this wild craze of people who wanted to buy up land. At that time, it was called land mania.

The states at the end of the revolution began selling off Western lands, and there was a craze of people rushing around trying to, essentially, find a way to make value, make money and have instant gain based on something that they hadn’t known that they could have before. Which is the same impulse as the gold rush and in that sense, what really strikes me about the gold rush and this land mania craze, is the emotion driving it. I mean you used ‘drastic,’ I think and we’ve been saying ‘extreme.’ Even the words that we’re using to talk about it really drive at value.

The idea that there’s something out there that you can have that has great value, and you can transform yourself. All you have to do is find a way to get it. The emotion that drives that takes over from whatever the logic is of seeking it in the first place. And I think a rush or a mania ends up building on itself.

ED: Listening to you folks talk, I hear echoes of the current day as well. It seems that California was not only sort of a bellwether or an accelerated American history back in the 19th century, but in some ways it still seems to be doing that today.

JOANNE: Well, certainly, I mean, if you think about the mix of big bucks and big emotion and all of the fervor and churning of energy that goes into something like Silicon Valley, even in the same location, it really makes you realize that although we’re talking about the gold rush as though it’s in the ancient past, that we’re talking about a mix of things that we’re still seeing in a different form.

NATHAN: And I would absolutely contend that California still has a lot of the attributes that one might associate with the Gold Rush period. I mean it’s one that has to do with racial and ethnic diversity, it certainly is a place that people consider to be wide open, to be a place of populism. And there’s certainly a sense, too, that California is still a land of great possibility. I mean the old adage, “go west young man” still holds true for a lot of people. You think about California as a place where movies are made and other kinds of gold I guess in those hills now today.

JOANNE: Well great possibility, and then gets us right back to great scarcity. I mean, if you think about the West Coast generally, but in particular northern California, and how hard it is now and how expensive it is now to try and actually live there, much like the 1840s and 50s. I mean, you might say that real estate is the California Gold of the 21st century.

NATHAN: I would not argue with that.

JOANNE: We heard about how the California Gold Rush was a global phenomenon, drawing Argonauts from Asia, Europe, South America, Australia and the US. So it should be no surprise that the mining camps could be pretty diverse.

Roaring Camp

Historian Susan Lee Johnson tells Ed about the complicated leisure world of the Gold Rush, where racial and gender roles were turned upside down.

MUSIC:

Original Rags and Reels by George Stehl

Going Forward Looking Back by Podington Bear

California gold rush; gender; sexuality

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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SUSAN LEE JOHNSON: Large numbers of Chilean, Mexican, European, particularly French miners, later Chinese miners, and of course, also, it was home to indigenous people in this area, primarily Miwok Indians.

ED: This is historian Susan Lee Johnson. While the miners came from all over the world, most had one thing in common, they were all men.

SUSAN LEE JOHNSON: Out in the mines, the population was 97% male.

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

SUSAN LEE JOHNSON: Who was going to do the domestic work? In virtually all of the immigrant populations, Anglo-American, Chinese, French, Chilean, Mexican, this was work that was generally done by women. So men had to take up this work themselves and they came up with really innovative ways to do this. Created cook-weeks where group of men who lived in a tent or cabin together, one man would do that work for a week and then turn it over to another man.

But also, men sometimes hired other men to do this work for them. So as Chinese started to move into the mines, they filled a niche and became laundry workers. And laundry was not work that men did in South China, this was a California phenomenon. Men also started to associate certain kinds of skills with different groups. So Frenchmen were known as being particularly good cooks, so Anglo-American men tended to sort of feminize Frenchmen in the way that they talked about them and their domestic skills.

So it was in gender terms it was sort of a world turned upside-down. And also, because when one is living in a world turned upside-down, one talks about it, one writes about it. So it’s something that’s very easy to research because men in their letters home to their loved ones, in their diaries, comment on this because it is so different than what they’re used to.

ED: But that’s a long time, really, for there not to be many women around. What was the consequence of that for camp life?

SUSAN LEE JOHNSON: Well, they would have had to create their own leisure world. By getting up dances, maybe just with a fiddle and sometimes men would create a female dancing partner by just designating a man who had a patch on his pants as the female partner for a dance. And there is considerable evidence of intimacy between men. That at a time when homosexuality as a category of human experience didn’t really exist. I don’t mean to suggest that the California Gold Rush was some sort of queer paradise, it was not, certainly same sex intimacy was considered a sin or a vice, but not a particular kind of sin or vice. The same, not so different as sex outside of marriage. So there was a lot of sin and a lot of vice and this was just another option.

ED: So you talked before about how people would describe this and write letters home. I’m assuming they didn’t talk about this as much. Did they talk about it in different kind of language?

SUSAN LEE JOHNSON: Well they talked about it, but generally when they were writing home, especially when men were writing to their female relatives, it was never the man writing the letter who was engaged in this behavior. It was always other men who were doing these things. Once in a while, a man writing to a brother or a male friend would intimate that things were pretty wild in California. But, generally, when men wrote about these things, they were talking about other men engaging in them.

Now sometimes men did write about these things in their diaries. It’s kind of needle-in-a-haystack work to try to find these passages in diaries. But they are there. And, certainly, it’s evident in, for example, divorce records. Because, sometimes, women would join their husbands and their husbands would head to California. Wives would come a year, two, three, four years later, find that their husbands had been engaged in visiting brothels or even in one case, a woman accused her husband of sleeping with men. And they weren’t very happy about this. So sometimes in divorce records, one sees evidence of what has gone on in the absence of wives before they arrive in California.

ED: So you describe this really kind of a free-wheeling society that begins there soon after gold is discovered. How long does that maintain that form?

SUSAN LEE JOHNSON: I mean when I think about the Gold Rush, I think of a Gold Rush decade from about 1848 to 1858. But the really free-wheeling period lasts about half that long. So maybe about five years. So it’s very short-lived. What’s interesting, though, is that this pattern repeats itself all over the west for another 50 years, all the way up to Alaska and actually in parts of Canada for a good half-century.

ED: Susan Lee Johnson is a historian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She’s the author of “Roaring Camp, the Social World of the California Gold Rush.”

There for the Taking

Most of those who came to California during the early days of the Gold Rush were men. Scholar Maythee Rojas has the story of one of the few women in Downieville, California, who was caught up in a violent conflict and faced vigilante violence herself.

MUSIC:

A Different Dimension by Ketsa

Toy Weapons (I) by Jahzzar
Poor Wayfaring Stranger by Podington Bear
Detroit 12 by Podington Bear

Bed by Jahzzar

California gold rush; Fourth of July; Mexican Americans; lynching

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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JOANNE: Men certainly dominated Gold Rush California, and that had a lot of consequences for the women who did live there. Consider this famous incident that took place in a town called Downieville, about an hour from Sacramento. On July 4, 1851 the people of Downieville gathered to celebrate Independence Day.

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

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

MAYTHEE ROJAS: There’s a lot of drinking, there is a lot of parades and just a lot of fun that people are having. When I say people, I mean mostly men, because that’s what makes up the majority of the population, and in terms of who’s actually doing the celebrating, it’s mostly white men.

NATHAN: Including Frederick Cannon, an Australian miner. After a night of drinking, he and some other miners ended up outside the house of a Mexican couple. Their names were Jose and Josepha. Cannon knew Josepha, who worked in a saloon.

MAYTHEE ROJAS: Some people describe her as having a particularly wild eye. That it sparkles and it was a, I don’t know, a glean to it. I feel like it’s kind of hinting at, again, sort of her devilish nature. She’s described as small, and by that I mean petite. But really the most common word used is ‘beautiful.’

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

MAYTHEE ROJAS: As he’s stumbling by, and I say stumbling because that is the way it’s recorded by various eyewitnesses of that time, he decides to go knock on the door and eventually knocks the door down off its leather hinges and enters.

NATHAN: No one knows what happened inside Josepha’s home that evening. Cannon went in alone as his friends waited outside. Eventually he emerged and he and his companions went on their way.

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

MAYTHEE ROJAS: Because this is also the same street that a doctor lives on that offers hangover medication to miners who have drank too much. And so, as he passes by her door, her husband who’s now home rushes out very upset and starts demanding that Frederick pay for the door.

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

MAYTHEE ROJAS: And then what’s really interesting is then the conversation turns to Spanish. So at some point, the people who are witnessing it don’t actually know what’s being said. But, because Frederick seems to have enough of a handle of the language to be able to argue with them, but it does grow incredibly heated.

ED: A small crowd gathered. One person later said that Josepha seem more agitated than her husband. But the argument took a fateful turn when Cannon

MAYTHEE ROJAS: Apparently calls her a whore or something of the like and she then demands that he repeat those words to her inside of her own home. And he follows and she has a knife and stabs him with it inside the home. Stabs him in the heart, and he stumbles out and it’s a deep enough wound that he dies almost immediately.

ED: One eyewitness would write that Cannon fell with one last groan at the feet of the beautiful woman who threw her knife, dripping with blood, on the ground.

MAYTHEE ROJAS: And, of course, this creates great chaos. Everyone’s thrown into a moment of panic. There was a great sense of injustice. How could this miner have been killed by a Mexican woman? There’s just so much indignation about It

JOANNE: Downieville, like many Gold Rush towns, didn’t have a formal legal system at this time. Nevertheless, the townspeople threw together a hasty jury trial.

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

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

MAYTHEE ROJAS: And, within a few hours time, Jose is run out of the town completely, he’s exiled, and Josepha is sentenced to death.

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

MAYTHEE ROJAS: Perhaps this is just dramatic, but it’s interesting that it shows up in multiple accounts. They say that she said, “if I had to do it again, I would.”

The editors at the San Francisco papers don’t believe it. They just can’t wrap their minds around the fact that a community would kill a woman. I mean it’s such a scarcity to have women present and the story just seems rather outrageous.

ED: It was outrageous even for the people of Downieville. Days, months, and even years after the fact, eyewitnesses were still publishing accounts of the lynching. Rojas has analyzed many of these narratives, most of which were written by white men. She says that some of the details are different in each one, but the basic outline remains the same.

MAYTHEE ROJAS: So the story goes back to this idea that it’s a really tragic thing and people are ashamed of it. The men, specifically, are ashamed of it, but then they feel really torn because they feel that this woman should never have done what she did. Like this was monstrous, that women don’t do things like that. She shouldn’t have gotten so angry, and she had this hot-blooded temper and it just always got her in trouble and it just finally reached its boiling point.

ED: Rojas contends that the recollections of the young woman’s death give us more than a strange nugget of Gold Rush Lore. She says that Josepha’s death is revealing of a key moment in California’s history.

NATHAN: Only a few years before Josepha’s hanging, California had been a Mexican territory. But Mexico lost California and most of the southwest following the Mexican-American War.

MAYTHEE ROJAS: There’s a great deal of animosity between the US and Mexican residents. Particularly on the US side, you see individuals writing very, very ugly things about Mexicans and about Mexico as a country, and really feeling incredibly entitled about this land that they now possess by being Americans and that no one else had rights to it.

NATHAN: And that extended to who should enjoy the benefits of the Gold Rush. Mexicans, naturally, were among the first to reach California’s goldfields. In 1850, the state legislature of California passed a miner’s tax that levied a $20 per month fee on foreigners. This was an incredibly steep fine that shut many Mexicans out of the mining industry.

JOANNE: But for a woman like Josepha, the conflict was more personal. Remember, the night before she stabbed him, Frederick Cannon broke into her home while she was alone.

MAYTHEE ROJAS: Given the desire that women in general generated being such a scarce commodity in that area, and given the nature of how he approached her in her home, and given the history that we’ve seen since then in terms of how Mexican women, how women of color in general have been treated by white men, especially around the area of power, many have believed that some sort of sexual issue took place that was non-consensual and likely violent. And that was in part what made her so upset. I mean, if you think about it, to be called a whore on top of maybe having been sexually assaulted, that’s a lot for someone.

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

MAYTHEE ROJAS: I think that’s what’s really important to recognize about it. Is that it’s not isolated. It’s not just a hot-tempered woman or a mistaken situation over what actually took place. Or even just a lonely, drunk miner. That property and women’s bodies were definitely seen as ‘for the taking’ by white men.

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

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

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

'The Interest of the White Man Demands Their Extinction’

Ed talks with historian Benjamin Madley about the devastating impact of the Gold Rush on California’s native tribes – and how both government officials and everyday citizens justified enslaving and killing native peoples.

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Derived by Ketsa

American Indians; California gold rush; Indian Removal; genocide

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NATHAN: Now we’ve spent quite a lot of time on this show today talking about the people who came to California during the Gold Rush. But what about the people who lived there for centuries? Before becoming a US territory, California had been colonized by Spain, Russia, and Mexico. Colonization had been devastating to native peoples.

Those living along the coast were often forced to convert to Catholicism, into labor in the Spanish missions, or on private ranches. Overworked and underfed, many died of infectious diseases.

ED: By the 1840s, perhaps 150,000 native people remained in California. The majority lived in the rich Central Valley, or in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, the very places where miners would soon be heading to find their fortunes. I recently spoke with historian Benjamin Madley, he says that as Americans arrived, they brought a new, targeted violence against the California tribes. That violence was inflicted by the state and federal governments as well as by everyday people. They all justified enslaving and killing native peoples as the unavoidable consequence of American expansion.

BENJAMIN MADLEY: Once gold is discovered, the killing accelerates quite rapidly. Particularly as an influx of prospectors and forty-niners moved south from Oregon. And these Oregonians saw them as a dangerous problem to get rid of, an obstacle between them and the gold. But, the turning point is really in late 1849, early 1850. There were these two white slaveholders living on the shores of Clearlake named Stone and Kelsey and they routinely raped California Indian women, tortured them to death, reportedly shot them to death for entertainment.

And so the Pomo and Wappo people, who were living under their rule, rose up and killed the two of them. And so, in response, vigilantes first murdered and massacred large numbers of California Indian ranch workers and farm workers in the Sonoma and Napa Valley. And then the United States Army launched two separate genocidal killing campaigns.

ED: And why was that the turning point?

BENJAMIN MADLEY: That was the turning point because the initial vigilantes who killed large numbers of California Indian people in Napa and Sonoma counties became the subject of the very first case of the new California State Supreme Court. And all eight men were released on bail. So this communicated a strong message to the people of California about how the state legal system was going to respond to the mass murder of Indians. And that was by granting Indian killers a pass.

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

BENJAMIN MADLEY: California governors authorized 24, that’s two dozen, separate state militia expeditions against California Indians between 1850 and 1861. And these expeditions killed at least 1,340 California Indian people. At the same time, the state raised three separate bills that raised over $1.5 million. A huge amount of money at this time in history for Indian hunting militia operations.

And so these state militia expeditions then inspired, I think, over 6,400 murders of California Indian people by vigilantes. And when I first began the research, I thought that the killers must have been some kind of rogue element. But state endorsement for this genocide was only very thinly-veiled. In 1851, California’s first governor Peter Bernet declared and I quote, that “a war of extermination will continue to be waged until the Indian race becomes extinct.”

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

BENJAMIN MADLEY: Yes, and between 1846 and 1873, California’s indigenous population plunged from perhaps 150,000 people to just 30,000. So we know that diseases, dislocation, and starvation caused many of these tens of thousands of deaths, but then near-annihilation of California’s Indian population was not, as it is often described, the unavoidable result of two civilizations coming into contact for the first time.

This was actually a case of genocide. Sanctioned, paid for, and facilitated by state and federal officials. For example, in 1852, California’s US Senator John Weller, who later became the state’s governor in 1858, he told his colleagues in the United States Senate that California Indians and I quote “will be exterminated before the onward march of the white man.” And he insisted that the interest of the white men demands their extinction. So this was not a crime that was hidden. This was something that you could read about almost every week in every little newspaper up and down the state of California.

ED: So do the indigenous people fight back?

BENJAMIN MADLEY: They do but it’s difficult for them to do so and I’ll tell you why. So attackers frequently surrounded California Indian villages and opened fire at dawn or under moonlight when Indian people were asleep. Once most of the men had died trying to protect their village, the attackers closed in for the final exterminatory executions which they carried out with sabers or bayonets or hatchets or simply with rocks or sometimes their bare hands.

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

BENJAMIN MADLEY: They were often killed but they had a value, so they tried generally not to kill them but to sell them into slavery.

ED: So it’s hard not to notice the irony of California entering the United States as a free state at the same time that it is deeply implicated in a different kind of slavery.

BENJAMIN MADLEY: Well one thing to understand about California is that while it entered the Union as a free state, it had a very strong and vocal pro and free-labor movement. So not only were there hundreds, and perhaps even thousands, of African-American chattel slaves brought into California by Southerners, by 1860 the state has passed a law that allows for the indenture of any Indian. And that could be a child, a woman, a prisoner of war, anybody. They’ve also put into effect a system of prisoner-leasing. So, for example, people could be arrested for public drunkenness if they were an Indian under California law. White people would then hire them as leased prisoners by paying the judge for a week of their labor. And then at the end of that week, they would give them hard alcohol and then they would immediately be rearrested for public drunkenness and then leased out again, often to that very same person who had incriminated them by giving the alcohol in the first place.

ED: Wow. So as everyone knows, back in the east, people are arguing passionately about African-American slavery. Do people draw analogies from one way or the other to that trade and that subjugation?

BENJAMIN MADLEY: Absolutely. One of the really interesting things that happens in California is that sometimes Free Soilers, the very people who are arguing for the abolition of slave labor, they seek to justify the massacre of California Indians as the erasure of California’s preexisting unfree labor economy under Mexican rule.

ED: So let me get this straight. So they’re actually engaging in this genocidal behavior because they want to erase slavery.

BENJAMIN MADLEY: That was sometimes the case.

ED: Do you think the gold rush appreciably changed this history? Did it accelerate it? Did it give a rationale for all this killing? Or is this something that would have happened anyway?

BENJAMIN MADLEY: The Gold Rush was absolutely central to the genocide of California Indian people. It attracted the largest mass migration of the 19th century in the United States to California. Before the Gold Rush, there were perhaps 13 or 14,000 non-Indian people in California. By 1860, that number exceeded 360,000 individuals. So there was a huge influx of manpower to carry out the actual killing. By the same token, the gold in California’s natural environment provided a huge amount of money with which to carry out the killing. California politicians knew, from the beginning, that the federal government would reimburse them for the money they had expended on killing California Indian people because California’s mining operations were providing so much money. A massive injection of capital to the national economy and to the federal treasury.

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

BENJAMIN MADLEY: You did not miss anything. What has changed very recently was that the governor of California, Jerry Brown, acknowledged that what happened in California was in his words, “an actual genocide.”

ED: Does that have practical consequences?

BENJAMIN MADLEY: One of the big questions is, will state officials tender public apologies along the lines of the ones issued by presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush in the 1980s for the forcible relocation and imprisonment of some 120,000 Japanese-Americans during the Second World War. Should state officials offer compensation along the lines of the more than $1.6 billion that Congress has now paid these Japanese-Americans and their heirs.

Another question for the state and federal government bureaucracy is whether or not they’re going to change the names that commemorate and valorized some of the perpetrators of this genocide. And these investigations are going to be painful. We can’t bring back the dead. But they’re going to help all of us, both native and non-native, to make more accurate sense of our past and ourselves.

JOANNE: Benjamin Madley is a professor of history at UCLA and the author of “An American Genocide, the United States and the California Indian Catastrophe 1846 to 1873.”

NATHAN: That’s going to do it for us today. But you can keep the conversation going online. Let us know what you thought of the episode or ask us your burning history questions. You’ll find us at BackStoryradio.org. Or send an email to BackStory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter at BackStory Radio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

ED: This episode of BackStory was produced by Nina Earnest, Emily Gadek and Ramona Martinez. Jamal Millner is our technical director. Diana Williams is our digital editor and Joey Thompson is our researcher. Additional help came from Angelique Bishosh, Sequoia Carrillo, Emma Gregg, Courtney Spanya, and Erin Teeling

Our theme song was written by Nick Thorburn. Other music in this episode came from Ketza, Paddington Bear, and Jazaar. Special thanks this week to Kelly Jones and Joey Thompson, who lent us his voice as well as his research. And, as always, thanks to the Johns Hopkins Studios in Baltimore.

JOANNE: BackStory is produced at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the provost’s office at the University of Virginia, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.

FEMALE SPEAKER: Brian Balogh is Professor of history at the University of Virginia and the Dorothy Compton professor at the Miller Center of Public Affairs. Ed Ayers is Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus at the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University. BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.