Roaring Camp

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.”