Literature written to depict the California gold rush, such as works by Mark Twain, Bret Harte, and Joaquin Miller, does not portray all aspects of the gold rush

Literature about the California gold rush, including works by Mark Twain, Bret Harte, and Joaquin Miller, does not always portray all aspects of the gold rush. For example, some of these works did not mention the prevalence of women in the gold rush. Actually, according to one source, about ten percent of those traveling overland to the West in 1849 were female (Levy, xvii). Contrary to popular belief, these women were not just part of the prostitution trade; many of them were part of families traveling out to the gold rush to seek fortune and start new lives. These women often lived with their families in the mines and mining camps, and worked there alongside the men. However, works by these authors described the mines and camps as populated only by men. In particular, “The Luck of Roaring Camp” by Harte contained the general, but inaccurate, attitude that women were only a nuisance in the camp and could not help to contribute to society. “Miggles” by Harte was one of his few stories that contained a strong female character, but she was presented as being outside the norm for women in California of that time. However, according to various journals, letters, and newspaper articles from the gold rush era, there were actually many strong women who were actively involved in the gold rush. Many of them lived in mining camps, worked in the mines, set up businesses, provided emotional support for others in the camps, and provided financial and emotional support for their husbands or families. Therefore, contrary to the idea conveyed by literature written about the California gold rush, women were very active in the gold rush and in many ways contributed to their families and societies.

Literature can provide myths of a lack of presence of women in the gold rush. Select literature by Twain, Harte, and Miller mentioned a rarity of women in the West during the time of the gold rush. In Roughing It, Twain recalled that women were a “rare and blessed spectacle” (Clemens, 310). He humorously recounted a story in which a group of miners who had not seen a woman in a long time convinced a traveler to show them his wife, although she was sick. When the man finally brought her out from their wagon, the miners “crowded around and gazed at her, and touched her dress, and listened to her voice” (Clemens, 311). They were even so overcome by this rare sight that they collected among them twenty-five hundred dollars in gold and gave it to the man! (Clemens, 311). Twain uses this anecdote to illustrate the fact that he believed from his few personal experiences in the silver mines that there were almost no women in the West during the gold rush. Likewise, Harte said in his sketch of the gold rush “The Argonauts of ‘49”, “I should like to give some pictures of [the forty-niners’] domestic life . . .” (Harte, 274). However, he asserted that it was difficult to discuss the typical domestic life of a husband and wife because, as he added, “ . . . but the women were few and the family hearthstones and domestic altars still fewer” (Harte, 274). In Life Amongst the Modocs as the narrator (Miller) and his new friend, the Prince were about to enter the Yreka mining camp, the Prince described to the narrator what he should expect of it. Speaking about the population of the camp, the Prince said, “Three thousand people there! not a woman, not a child!” (Miller, 71). Furthermore, Miller said in his description of the mining camps in general, “Men are there, down in these dreadful cañons . . . toiling for gold” (Miller, 3). He implied that only men worked in the mines, and there were no women at all in the mining camps. However, there were quite a few women in many of the mining camps of the gold rush, who went to live and work there with their husbands or whole families.

A lot of the women in the camps provided for or sold to the miners services such as cooking, washing, and mending clothes, but the literature mentioned above portrayed a society in which men were left to do much of this work themselves. In Roughing It, Twain described life in the mines and camps without the presence of women with a tone of pity for the men. He said, “[The miners] cooked their own bacon and beans, sewed on their own buttons . . . washed their own shirts” (Clemens, 310). Perhaps Twain drew this picture from his own limited observances during the few years that he was in the mines. In a journal entry written Jan. 23, 1865, he wrote, “Beans and dishwater for breakfast at the Frenchman’s; dishwater and beans for dinner; and both articles warmed over for supper” (Dunne, 1). At this local boarding house in which the food was prepared by a man and served to men, apparently there was not much choice or quality of food. However, in many of the camps there were women who used their domestic skills learned back in the East to supply and prepare food that was of much higher variety and quality. Harte described life in the camps without women in a similar manner. He said, “For many months the frying-pan formed their only available cooking-utensil. . . . He fried his bread, his beans, his bacon, and occasionally stewed his coffee . . .” (Harte, 271). According to this description the men were alone in the camp, left to perform domestic deeds that they were not accustomed to. Harte also described the meanness in quality of these men’s clothes. He said, “The Argonaut’s dress was peculiar. He was ready if not skillful with his needle . . . The flour-sack was his main dependence. . . . the husk clothed the outer [man]” (Harte, 271). However, there were women in the camps to cook for the men as well as to provide other services such as washing and mending clothes. For example, it did not appear that men actually had to revert to such things as flour sacks for their clothes. On the contrary, Harte said, “In rare cases, the woman who was a crown to her husband took in washing” (Harte, 274). However, as shown by various journals and other documents from the gold rush period there were plenty of women in the camps who made and sold home-cooked food to the men, and did the washing while their husbands were away in the mines.

Women were very active in the camps and in many cases their mere presence was needed by various men who also lived in the camps. However, in Harte’s story, “The Luck of Roaring Camp”, the men of the camp expressed sentiments that they did not want women in the camp. The only woman who lived in their camp was Cherokee Sal, who was a promiscuous Native American woman, who eventually died in childbirth. When the issue of whether or not they should allow other women into the camp to help raise Sal’s orphaned baby came up, it was immediately rejected. “The introduction of a female nurse in the camp . . . met with objection. . . . and the speaker urged that ‘they didn’t want any more of the other kind’ [women]” (Harte, 11). Clearly the view toward women in this particular mining camp was a negative view and one that stated women were not necessary.

However, in reality, men’s attitudes toward women in the camps were actually much more positive and respectful. Many of the men who traveled to California in search of gold left their wives, mothers, sisters, and other women at home whom they were close to, and many of them sorely missed the presence of females in general once they were in California. “More than half of these forty-niners [in a study looked at by the author] were married or engaged to be married. . . . All had strong ties to families, communities, and institutions in the East” (Roberts, 7). Because these men were used to being around women and being involved socially in the East, they became very lonely once they were in the camps, especially those who were married.

While probably no more than 30 percent of forty-niners were married, a far higher number would experience the rush through a prism of gender. If they did not have wives, they had mothers, sisters, daughters, and other female connections ‘back home.’ And it was to them, and for them, that they would most frequently write their letters . . . (Roberts, 71).

There were many letters exchanged during the early years of the gold rush between husbands in the mines and their wives back east. The majority of these letters showed that the husbands, who often were unsuccessful in finding gold, were in need of emotional support. Hiram Pierce, who was unsuccessful in the mines, wrote to his wife Sara of his “regret that I have ben able to make no remitance” (Roberts, 192). She replied, “If I could get you back, I should be willing to live on very small fare.” However, many of these men who went out to California and left loved ones behind had too much pride to go back empty-handed and so continued to stay in California and miss their families or significant others. They often had to go so long without hearing from their loved ones that they were brought to tears. Henry Billington Packer wrote in his journal that when he received a letter from his fiancée, “the tears ‘came deep and full, like the flowing of a gentle stream . . .’” (Roberts, 162). Asaph Sawyer wrote, “many is the time when home and all that is dear to me . . . comes into my mind, the tears will fill my eyes . . .” (Roberts, 162). The emptiness in the men left by the absence of their loved ones could only be filled by the presence of other women in the camps.

The presence of any women, even strangers, in the camps was therefore often appreciated and women could use this fact to their advantage. Contrary to the sentiment expressed in “The Luck of Roaring Camp”, women were very useful in the camps. Although women were present in the camps, they were still somewhat a minority in this society, and therefore, somewhat of a novelty. Because of the relative rarity of women in the camps, “a prospector was willing to pay exorbitant prices to experience the satisfaction of a woman’s cooking” (Smittle, 1). Luzena Wilson, the wife of a miner, was confronted by a man in her camp as she was cooking biscuits for her family. He offered her five dollars for her biscuit, and when she hesitated in shock, he doubled his offer. “He wanted bread made by a woman, he said, and put a shiny ten-dollar goldpiece in her hand” (Levy, 91-92).

Men in the camps often appreciated a woman’s cooking and washing, and many women were able to turn these services into a steady income for their families. In fact, it was often necessary for a woman to supplement her husband’s earnings in the mines by doing things such as cooking and washing, since he was usually unsuccessful in the mines. “In the mining towns, women earned as much or more than miners by baking pies, sewing, cleaning, ironing, washing, running hotels . . .” (Perkins, 2). In addition, one woman in the California gold rush, Margaret Frink observed that “if ‘a woman could cook at all’ she could make a living” (Levy, 92).

Although a lot of literature did not portray women with active roles in the gold rush, Harte’s story “Miggles” showed Miggles as a strong, independent woman, but he presented her as a minority in this respect. In his short story, she was juxtaposed by two women of “propriety” (Harte, 29), who were presented as the average woman, to show how out-of-the-ordinary Miggles was in Harte’s opinion. These women were the “French lady” and the lady from Virginia City who wore a “confusion of ribbons, veils, furs, and shawls” (Harte, 29). On the contrary, our first impression of Miggles was that of a woman in a “trailing, wet skirt” who had a “flash of white teeth, a sparkle of dark eyes, and an utter absence of ceremony or diffidence” (Harte, 32). Harte therefore regarded her in a negative light. Miggles was also an ex-prostitute, had a pet grizzly bear, and lived with and cared for a man who was neither her husband nor a relative, but was completely dependent on her. To further emphasize the difference between her and the other women, Harte described on several occasions the reactions of these respectable women towards Miggles. After the men questioned Miggles about Jim, and they found out that this man whom she lived with was neither related to her nor her husband, “there was an awkward pause [and] the lady passengers moved closer to each other . . .” (Harte, 34). Also, during the dinner, Miggles played with her pet bear, and Harte recounted,

The incident of the bear did not add anything in Miggles’s favor to the opinions of those of her own sex who were present. In fact, the repast over, a chillness radiated from the two lady passengers that no pine-boughs brought in by Yuba Bill and cast as a sacrifice upon the hearth could wholly overcome (Harte, 35).

Besides the difference between her and the “average woman” in personality, she also was much more independent and bold. She came out to this part of the country and bought the house on her own and took complete care of herself. However, these kinds of bold women were in fact much more prevalent than Harte would have the reader believe, whether they ran boarding-houses as a source of income or came out to California alone in search of their own dreams of striking it rich in the mines.

Many women who came out to California had prosperous boarding house businesses. In “The Argonauts of ‘49”, Harte said that it was the “model spouse” who “kept a boarding-house and served her husband’s guests” (Harte, 274). However, it was much more than just the “model spouse” or the rare independent woman, like Miggles, who ran boarding houses. Many women kept boarding houses in California. “In 1850 nine out of every thousand persons gainfully employed in California ran boardinghouses or hotels” (Levy, 95), and a lot of these people who kept boarding houses were women. For instance, in Nevada County in 1850, four of the thirteen women there hosted boarders, and in Nevada City twelve of the twenty-three women hosted boarders or ran hotels (Levy, 101). And in most cases, she did not set up the boarding house so much to serve her husband’s guests as to have a profitable business. Her earnings from this business helped supplement her husband’s earnings or supplied the sole income for her family. Luzena Wilson’s story is a perfect example of how a family could succeed financially through one woman’s business. Luzena, remembering the ten dollars she received for her biscuit, decided to run her own kitchen (Levy, 92). Although this did not bring in much profit in the long run because supply-costs were too high, Luzena and her husband took a chance and sold their oxen so that they could buy a local hotel in Sacramento (Levy, 99). Luzena ran the kitchen in this hotel. They soon sold this business to invest in commodities, but lost much of their money. However, Luzena took the initiative and began once more to sell meals to miners, this time in Nevada City. Soon after this, she set up her own soon-to-be-successful hotel and took her husband into partnership (Levy, 102). This hotel had at one point “seventy-five to two hundred boarders at twenty-five dollars a week” (Levy, 103). She was able to hire a cook and waiters to help her, and she no longer had to work in the kitchen, but managed the hotel. After a fire in Nevada City destroyed her hotel, though, her fortune was gone. However, because of Luzena’s strong and determined spirit, she started over with her stove and kettle. This business grew into yet another successful hotel, and soon so many people frequented the area that a new town was born.

Some women chose rather than setting up businesses to help their husbands in the mines, whether it was to help their families earn money or for the pure joy of gold digging. Women were seen and reported working alongside their husbands in the mines, shoveling, panning, or working the rocker. This idea contradicts the stereotype supported by literature that few women went out to the gold rush, and if they did, they only stayed in the camps to help with cooking and cleaning. But women did not always restrict themselves to domestic-style work in California. Every able-bodied person was needed to help with all kinds of work, including mining. As Luzena Wilson said, “We did things that our high-toned servants would now look at aghast, and say it was impossible for a woman to do. But the one who did not work in ’49 went to the wall. It was a hand-to-hand fight with starvation in the first” (Levy, 98-99). Even “high-toned” women, such as Louise Clappe (better known by her pen name, Dame Shirley), who were not used to doing “dirty work” helped out in the mines. Clappe did actually have an initial curiosity in mining when she followed her husband Dr. Fayette Clappe from San Francisco into the mountains. She wrote to her sister Molly, who was back in the East, “ Did I not martyrize myself into a human mule . . . actuated by a virtuous desire to see with my own two eyes the process of underground mining . . .” (Clappe, 130). However, this curiosity did not prevail as she would, while working in the mines, “ruin a pair of silk velvet slippers, lame my ankles for a week, and draw a ‘browner horror’ over my already sun-burnt face” (Clappe, 130). In an earlier letter she wrote to her sister after only finding three dollars and twenty-five cents in gold dust, “I can truly say, with the blacksmith’s apprentice at the close of his first day’s work at the anvil, that ‘I am sorry I learned the trade;’ for I wet my feet, tore my dress, spoilt a pair of new gloves . . . and lost a valuable breastpin . . .” (Clappe, 83). She did not enjoy working in the mines as much as she thought she would. But she did come from a fairly high-classed society as reflected in her improper dress, and her incidental refusal to dress like a miner because she felt it was too masculine (Clappe, 88). This shows that not all women who worked in the mines were of low social class like Miggles; some in fact were as high-class as the women who visited Miggles.

Unlike Louise Clappe, some of the women who worked in the mines actually had the same enthusiasm for mining gold as many of the men did. For instance, Lucena Parsons wrote in her journal “of her great desire to see the gold diggings” (Levy, 110). She recorded in her journal that she went out to the “diggings” everyday from late May to early June (Levy, 110). She was often successful, but even when she did not find much gold, her spirits still remained high. She wrote of one occasion, “This morning the gold fever raged so high that I went again to dig with the rest but got very little gold. . . . Came home tired to night. Still in good spirits” (Levy, 110).

Also, like Miggles, there were a few women who came out to California by themselves without men; they came alone to search for gold. For example, Señora Martinez from Mexico not only worked in the mines, but brought workers to California to dig for her (Levy, 109). Another Mexican woman was reported to have worked in the “dry diggings forty-six days, and brought back two thousand one hundred and twenty-five dollars” (Levy, 109). Also, in 1850 two women were reported to have “scraped the beds of California’s creeks, accumulating upwards of $10,000 worth of gold” (Egli, xiv).

Despite the limited portrayal of women in certain gold rush era literature by Harte, Twain, and Miller, women were very active in the gold rush. They helped work in the mines, provide food and emotional care to others in the camps, and provide financial and emotional support for their husbands and families. Although it was not very common for women to work and hold much status in 1850, survival in California depended on everyone’s contributions, and women had to pull the same weight as men. Because there were less societal constraints on gender differences, they were much freer than the women in the East, and perhaps set precedence for future generations of women. Despite the fact that they may not be remembered in literature, through their hard work and perseverance the women of the gold rush contributed a great deal to their families and societies in general. They left journals and letters that have given us a better idea of who the forty-niner was and what he/she felt, and in some cases these women contributed a great deal more, as in the case that Luzena Wilson’s hotel lead to the formation of a new town.

Works Cited

1. Clappe, Louise Amelia Knapp Smith. The Shirley Letters from the California Mines 1851-1852. Eds. Robert Glass Cleland and Oscar Lewis. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949.

2. Clemens, Samuel L. Roughing It. New York: Penguin/Signet Classic, 1980.

3. Dunne, Mike. “Boring Diet Gave Miners Appetite for Dining Out.” The Sacramento Bee 18 Jan. 1998. 14 Mar. 2001. <http://www.sacbee.com/goldrush/part2/

02food.html>.

4. Egli, Ida Rae, ed. No Rooms of Their Own Women Writers of Early California. Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books, 1992.

5. Harte, Bret. Selected Stories and Sketches. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

6. Levy, JoAnn. They Saw the Elephant: Women in the California Gold Rush. Hambden, CT: Archon Books, 1990.

7. Miller, Joaquin. Life Amongst the Modocs: Unwritten History. Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books/Urion Press, 1996.

8. Perkins, Kathryn Doré. “ ‘Real women’ who defied stereotype.” The Sacramento Bee 18 Jan. 1998. 17 Mar. 2001. <http://www.sacbee.com/goldrush/part3/ 03women.html>.

9. Roberts, Brian. American Alchemy: The California Gold Rush and Middle-Class Culture. Chapel Hill, NC and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

10. Smittle, Anne. “Prostitution in the Gold Rush Era of Early California.” 29 Apr. 1999. Online posting. 10 Apr. 2001. <http://home.earthlink.net/~wsmittle/prostitute.htm>.

Works Consulted

1. “Discovery.” 1997. Online posting. 17 Mar. 2001. <http://www.pbs.org/goldrush/

goldcountry.html>.

2. “The Foremothers Tell of Olden Times.” The Chronicle (San Francisco) 9 Sept. 1900. 17 Mar. 2001. <http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist5/foremoms.html>.

3. “Gold Country.” 1997. Online posting. 17 Mar. 2001. <http://www.pbs.org/goldrush/

goldcountry.html>.

4. Johnson, Susan Lee. Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000.

5. Levy, JoAnn and Henry Mace. “The Women.” 1997-2000. Online posting. 5 Mar. 2001. <http://www.goldrush.com/~joann/women.htm>.

6. “Life of the Miner.” Oakland Museum of California 1998. Online posting. 4 Apr. 2001. <http://www.museumca.org/goldrush/fever12.html>.

7. Marcello, Patricia Cronin. “No Place for a Woman?” Online posting. 17 Mar. 2001. <http://www.malakoff.com/tcnpfaw.htm>.

The Under-acknowledged Importance of Women in the California Gold Rush

Julie Goodwin

Engl 480-11