There for the Taking

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.