Life in the mining camps, or diggings as they were called, was influenced by numerous factors. The most important of these were the technologies used to extract gold, the absence of duly constituted authority to resolve disputes over claims, the scarcity of women, and the presumption of many white Americans that they were entitled to the lion’s share of California’s and the West’s resources, especially in view of the United States’ victory in the Mexican War.
Most of the gold extraction technologies, from the simplest to the more involved, used water to separate the metal from clumps of ore, gravel, and dirt. Panning was the earliest and most elementary method of rendering precious particles and nuggets. Miners simply sloshed river sediment in a water-filled, hand-held pan, gathering the heavier gold particles that gravitated to the bottom. Among teams of miners, sluices or wooden cradles were popular. Also called “Long Toms,” a sluice was an elongated, shallow wooden structure of varying lengths, open at one end. Water would be channeled via inclined
Conveyances, called flumes, into the sluice as gravel and bits of ore were fed into the device. Cleats or raised surfaces in the sluice would catch the gold particles, preventing them from being washed away in the man-made current. Miners also built and used rockers, or sluices that rolled from side to side during the water flow, in order to separate gold from river sediment. These relatively inexpensive techniques were in widespread use during the first three or four years of the rush, when surface gold was plentiful. During that time, 1848-52, some $200 million in gold was obtained in California. On average, according to one estimate, gold-seekers using these methods gathered $20-worth of the metal a day in 1848 and $2-worth in 1853. Multiply these figures by 20 to gauge their equivalent value today.
In the mid-1850s, as the surface deposits of gold became scarcer, other extraction technologies came into use. Hydraulic mining utilized canvass-constructed high-pressure water hoses, sometimes called water cannons, carrying sufficient force to blast away entire hillsides to get at ore deposits. The resulting debris was then channeled into sluices for the rendering of gold. Because of the required capital investment in equipment, only mining companies could afford this method. In 1870 some 22 percent of the gold extracted in California was garnered by this technique. Hydraulic mining was environmentally destructive, and one can see the devastation today in such places as Malakoff Diggins State Park, where a portion of the damaged landscape has been preserved. The water cannons toppled trees, denuded hillsides, and silted waterways feeding the Sacramento River. When heavy rains descended in winter 1861-2, the bed of the river running through Sacramento had risen to such a level from this silting that the city was flooded. Scientist William Brewer, who visited the surrounding area, wrote in his journal in January 1862: “The Central Valley of the state is under water.”
Similarly, companies employing work crews engaged in hard-rock mining, especially in the so-called Mother Lode area, which extended for roughly 120 miles along today’s Highway 49 from Eldorado County southeast to Mariposa County. This zone, 4 miles wide at some points, was thought to possess the richest veins of gold in California. Using winches, pulleys, and drills, crews entered mine shafts and bored into the surrounding walls, unearthing quartz and other gold-bearing substances. The ore was then crushed in “stamp mills” and gold was extracted from the amalgamation by the application of mercury, much of which was mined at New Almaden. In addition to its use in the gold country, California mercury was shipped throughout the West and overseas. By the late 1860s one-half of the gold mined in the state was from quartz. The mercury-laced tailings polluted some of California’s waterways, endangering fish and other aquatic life.
With tens of thousands of miners of diverse ethnic and national origins, laboring often in close proximity to one another, problems of law and order were bound to arise given the absence of lawmen and courts. Add large quantities of liquor, firearms, greed, and xenophobia to the mix and combustible situations were guaranteed. The mere names of some of the mining towns are suggestive of trouble: Hell’s Delight, Gouge Eye, Devil’s Retreat, and Murderers’ Bar. In the early 1850s murder and theft pervaded nearly all mining camps and lynch law, that is, the imposition of the death penalty without due process, was common. For example, in Dry Diggings (later renamed Hangtown and finally Placerville)
Figure 4.4 Hydraulic mining at Malakoff Diggins, now a California State Park. Courtesy of the California History Room, California State Library, Sacramento, California.
In January 1849 a Chilean and two Frenchmen stood accused of robbery and attempted murder. The accused were tried by an armed and drunken crowd. When Edward G. Buffum protested on behalf of the defendants, the mob threatened to hang him, until he backed off. All three of the accused men, none of whom spoke or understood English, were then lynched. This was not a rare occurrence.
Women, on the other hand, were rare. According to the 1850 census females comprised less than one-tenth of California’s population. In the state’s mining counties they constituted only 3 percent of the inhabitants. So whatever restraining force they might have provided in the diggings was largely absent. Among the few living in the gold fields, some mined, others washed clothes and cooked for males, and a contingent engaged in prostitution.
Like the men, women in the diggings struggled with success and failure. Lucy Stoddard Wakefield wrote from Placerville to friends on September 18, 1851: “I love California and probably now shall make my home and final resting place here,” adding, “I have been toiling hard for the last two and a half years and am still doing an almost incredible amount of work.” To avoid sexual harassment, some female Argonauts dressed in male garb. A popular Frenchwoman, who had left Paris for California’s mines, reported that she “cut off her hair,
Donned men’s clothes, took the name of Marie Pantalon, and went prospecting in the gold country.”
Writer Louise Clappe, better known by her pen name of Dame Shirley, narrated the stories of some female gold-seekers, one of whom lost her husband to cholera on the overland trail and had to provide for her nine children by washing and cooking for male miners. “She used to wash shirts, and iron them on a chair - in the open air, of course; and you can fancy with what success. But the gentlemen were too generous to be critical, and as they paid her three or four times as much as she asked, she accumulated quite a handsome sum in a few days. . . .”
Most of the prostitutes in the gold fields were women of color: Mexican, Chinese, Chilean, and Indian. They lived and plied their trade mostly in the southern mines, that is, those located south of the Mokelumne River, separating Amador and Calaveras counties. The northern mines, situated above that line, were largely the province of single white males. They occasionally traveled southward to engage the services of female sex workers. There, for example, they would have found Chilean Rosario Amestica, who had sailed to California with a group of male miners from her country. Still, the scarcity of white females in the northern mines at times led to attacks on non-white women, often regarded as little more than prostitutes. The consequences of the imbalance in the ratio of white men to white women for the sexual behavior of Anglo miners is a subject deserving of more study.
Probably the most determinative factor of life in the diggings was the Anglo presumption of entitlement to all of California’s and the West’s riches - precious metals, land, forests, fisheries, everything. In accordance with the spirit of Manifest Destiny in the 1840s, dominant in Washington, D. C., and especially among settlers of the West, God gave the North American continent to the United States. Some Protestant ministers preached that God had hidden California’s gold from the Catholic Spaniards and Mexicans, revealing Eldorado’s wealth only when the sway of the Vatican over the province diminished.
California’s white miners may have been the most presumptuous of all. They flooded into Nevada during the Comstock Lode era from 1859 to 1881. Nearly $300 million, mostly in silver but some in gold, was extracted from the area, where some of the world’s most advanced technology was used to move workers and equipment thousands of feet into hard-rock hillsides. Mining companies capitalized by San Francisco banks and stockholders further illustrate the economic reach of California in western extractive enterprises. George Hearst and James Flood were among the many San Francisco millionaires profiting from the Comstock mines. For them life in the diggings was something they read about rather than experienced.
World History
