SOURCE: “The Literature of the Mining Camps,” in Updating the Literary West, Texas Christian University Press, 1997, pp. 99-116.

[In the following excerpt, Berkove and Kowalewski survey the work of writers John Rollin Ridge, Alonzo Delano, Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe, and George Horatio Derby, maintaining that these individuals were the first to introduce the California gold rush to the American public and that they paved the way for later literary talents including Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, and Bret Harte.]

For the world as well as America, the thrilling news that gold and silver were to be had for the taking in the West fired the imagination. The West's already mythic aura brightened anew. The demand for writing about the West grew more insistent, and the literature of the mining camps was an on-the-ground response to this market. Men and women with impressive and varied verbal talents were among those who immigrated to the West, and in the relatively few years of the heyday of prospecting and the beginning of industrial mining they created a regional literature of surprising range and power.

Subsequent generations of writers have used the Old West as a fictile era, to be shaped retrospectively by the issues of later days. Some great authors have used its settings and situations to create memorable works of art, and the continuous outpouring of new literature about the Old West has absorbed the attention of contemporary readers at the expense of the semi-forgotten original writers of the mining camps. The wheel is turning, however, and there are now signs of a revival of interest in their work. One of the reasons for this revival is historical; mining camp literature is authentic because its authors had firsthand knowledge of what they wrote about. Whoever is seriously interested in the time and place they depicted must read them. But another reason is aesthetic; they were good writers and much of what they wrote still reads well and has intrinsic appeal. The foundation they established for western literature remains an enduring and attractive part of the structure.

MINING CAMP AUTHORS: CALIFORNIA

In May of 1848, Sam Brannan, who helped finance the general store at Sutter's Fort in Sacramento, noticed that some of the workers there were beginning to pay for their purchases in gold. He went out to the Coloma sawmill to verify the fact that James Marshall had indeed discovered gold in a diversion ditch at the mill some four months earlier. He immediately journeyed to San Francisco, where, as legend has it, he wandered the streets waving a quinine bottle full of glittering dust, shouting: “Gold! Gold, from the American River.”

The effect was electric. A human avalanche of prospectors, speculators, doctors, lawyers, sailors, shopkeepers, gamblers, actors, former slaves, artists, and writers poured into California to try their hand at placer mining in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada (and later in the northern coastal mountains and the southern Cascades). California was the first region of the United States to undertake precious-metal mining on a large scale, and between 1848 and 1852 some $200 million in gold was taken from the placer mines. But it was not simply a new extractive industry that made the Gold Rush a historical phenomenon. It was the carnivalesque atmosphere of swagger and possibility, expectation and boomtown optimism that sent fortune-seekers from China, England, Sweden, France, Germany, Australia, Hawaii, South America, and the eastern United States scurrying to “see the Elephant” in California.

The boom-and-bust mentality of the Gold Rush helped energize an art and literature that tended to stress the novel and the picturesque. Franklin Walker has pointed out that the emphasis was on lawlessness rather than law; gambling rather than the slow accrual of a fortune; the prostitute with a heart of gold rather than the pioneer mother; the abandoned orphan rather than the extended family with solicitous relatives in China, Mexico, or New Jersey (Walker 1). The trials of the patiently grubbing, homesick “honest miner” did not captivate writers' imaginations. As Joseph Henry Jackson puts it, “a hero hip deep in an icy mountain torrent is a chilly hero at best; there is … little greatness in subsisting on moldy pork and soggy biscuit in order to get rich. A dyspeptic shaking with ague is not the stuff of which legends are built” (Ridge xix-xx).

The jostle of competitive publishing venues open to writers on the California frontier also undoubtedly contributed to the sensationalistic or melodramatic cast of much gold-rush writing. As early as 1850, some fifty printers worked in San Francisco, and the city boasted that by the mid-fifties it published more newspapers than London (many in languages other than English). Writers could see print quickly in reputable journals like the Pioneer, the Golden Era and, after 1868, the Overland Monthly, as well as in ephemeral local publications with names like Hombre, Satan's Bassoon, or the Wine, Women, and Song Journal.

In fiction, the one notable work inspired by the mining camps was John Rollin Ridge's sensationalist romance, The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit (1854). The first novel published by an American Indian (Ridge was half Cherokee), Joaquín Murieta is primarily remembered for establishing Murieta's image as a folk hero, a Mexican miner driven to become an outlaw because he is unjustly persecuted by gold-hungry Anglos motivated by “the prejudice of color, [and] the antipathy of races, which are always stronger and bitterer with the ignorant and the unlettered” (Ridge 9-10).

Ridge evoked the uneasy, often violent interracial relations of miners on a polyglot frontier. The tensions were not only between whites and non-whites but among minority groups as well. The California Indians are treated as subhuman by Murieta's gang and Chinese miners are repeatedly brutalized by the Mexican desperadoes: 150 Chinese at one point are left scattered “along the highways like so many sheep with their throats cut by the wolves” (Ridge 97). The daring and bloodthirsty exploits of Murieta and his gang take place in a romantic landscape of secluded arroyos and dusty canyons. As we can see in his description of Calaveras County, for instance, Ridge portrayed the gold mines as rough but bustling communities where nature, as a panoramic sweep, matched the larger-than-life human spectacle of the camps:

Its mountains were veined with gold—the beds of its clear and far-rushing streams concealed the yellow grains in abundance—and the large quartz-leads, like the golden tree of the Hesperides, spread their fruitful branches abroad through the hills. … The busy wheels of the sawmills with their glittering teeth rived the mighty pines, which stood like green and spiral towers, one above another, from base to summit of the majestic peaks. Long tunnels, dimly lighted with swinging lamps or flickering candles, searched far into the bowels of the earth for her hidden secrets.

(82-83)

The classical allusion to the Hesperides adds a flicker of mythological glamour that helps transform a workaday setting into a landscape of adventure full of soaring forests and subterranean secrets.

Gold-rush drama embodied the love of melodrama and action displayed in Joaquín Murieta. One of the first eyewitness dramas about the Gold Rush was David G. “Doc” Robinson's Seeing the Elephant in the early 1850s. The manuscript of this and other plays by Robinson have been lost, but contemporary accounts of the play indicate that it dealt with gullible miners who head west with overblown hopes of striking it rich, only to encounter bad weather, hunger, and bandits.

Amongst the popular melodramas and farces of the day like Bombastes Furioso (many of them given unisex performances in the predominantly male camps) were Warren Baer's musical satire, The Duke of Sacramento (1856), Alonzo Delano's sentimental melodrama, A Live Woman in the Mines; or, Pike County Ahead (1857), Charles E. B. Howe's romantic melodrama, Joaquin Murieta de Castillo, the Celebrated California Bandit (1858), and Joseph Nunes' Fast Folks; or the Early Days of California (1858). These were followed by later reminiscent plays about the mines like Bret Harte's Two Men of Sandy Bar (1876), Bartley Campbell's My Partner (1879), and Joaquin Miller's The Danites in the Sierras (1877) and '49: The Gold-Seeker of the Sierras (1884).

Often more historical curiosities than fully realized dramatic works, many of these plays nevertheless have a kind of rough-and-ready impudence that can still beguile. Delano's A Live Woman in the Mines, for instance, features characters with names like Sluice Box and High Betty Martin—who wears men's clothes and carries a gun: “a specimen of a back-woods western Amazonian,” Delano notes, “who is indomitably persevering and brave under difficulties, but withal with woman's feelings when difficulty is over” (66). The play is insensitive in its portrayal of California Indians, but it still manages to include fresh portraits of the miners yearning for feminine company or news from home. The characters speak a wild and woolly western vernacular that is indebted to the Southwest humorists, as when an express rider recounts his latest journey:

Run the gauntlet between a pack of cayotes [sic], three grizzlies, and a whole tribe of Digger Indians—killed two horses and jumped a ledge a hundred feet—hung myself by the heels in the bushes—turned forty somersets down a canyon—slept three nights on a snow bank—froze three legs stiff, had 'em amputated and climbed the hill next morning on crutches, and have brought lots of letters for the boys. … Please take the bags, and give me a glass of brandy and water without any water in it.

(Loney 90)

Not only does Delano's farce focus upon the excitement caused by the arrival of a woman in the mines, it also comically presents the miners' starvation. When the food runs out, the men dine on rats and boots. They also tie the last piece of pork on a string; each man swallows the pork, then pulls it out and passes it on.

Whatever attention is due gold-rush poetry, fiction, and drama, the true imaginative wealth of the era resides in its nonfiction. No other aspect of the American frontier witnessed such an outpouring of letters, journals, diaries, and personal narratives, much of it still uncatalogued, let alone read and interpreted. There are more written documents about the California Gold Rush than about any other nineteenth-century historical event except the Civil War. Yet despite the human drama and the historical importance of the period, the literature of the California mining camps remains largely neglected. It has been read primarily by historians who have emphasized its documentary value rather than its imaginative and aesthetic complexity.

This neglect of contemporary accounts stemmed in part from the fact that writers in the late 1860s and 1870s, particularly Bret Harte, quickly transformed the Gold Rush into mythic history. As Kevin Starr puts it, “Harte depicted the Gold Rush as quaint comedy and sentimental melodrama, already possessing the charm of antiquity. As pseudo-history, as an uproarious and Dickensian saga, Harte's Gold Rush gave Californians a stabilizing sense of time past” (49). Harte's image of the stouthearted, red-shirted 49er went through further permutations, becoming, when drained of his melancholy and unruliness, the entrepreneuring pioneer of the California boosters. However useful such reimaginations of the mining camps may have been for later popular historians and chambers of commerce, they tended to obscure the actual accomplishments of mining camp literature.

The literary neglect of gold-rush writing, while undeserved, is not entirely surprising. Letters and diary entries often consisted of simple, unrefined, sometimes ungrammatical prose that addressed practical matters such as the price of meals or hardware, mining techniques, and claim disputes. Yet in the best works, this very emphasis on the demands of everyday life—on the mud, heat, and fleas in the camps—contributes to the rough-hewn piquancy of these memoirs.

The best mining camp narratives blend satire and affection in unanticipated ways. This is certainly the case in what Wallace Stegner rightly calls the “finest of all Gold Rush books” (Harte viii): The Shirley Letters, a group of twenty-three letters written by Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe (1819-1906) to her stay-at-home sister in Massachusetts. Published serially in 1854 and 1855 in the Pioneer under the nom de plume “Dame Shirley,” Clappe's letters from two crude camps high in the upper canyons of the Feather River displayed both a belletristic verve and a clear-eyed but warmly tolerant view of the rowdy masculinity of the mines. “How would you like to winter in such an abode?” Clappe asked her sister in an early letter:

in a place where there are no newspapers, no churches, lectures, concerts or theaters; no fresh books, no shopping, calling nor gossiping little tea-drinkings; no parties, no balls, no picnics, no tableaux, no charades, no latest fashions, no daily mail, (we have an express once a month,) no promenades, no rides nor drives; no vegetables but potatoes and onions, no milk, no eggs, no nothing.

Yet just when Clappe makes this social milieu sound irredeemably crude and dispiriting, she adds a characteristic twist: “I expect to be very happy here. This strange, odd life fascinates me” (54).

In her last letter, Clappe states that she has moved from being a “feeble and half-dying invalid” to a “perfectly healthy” woman who will miss the mines: “I like this wild and barbarous life; I leave it with regret” (198). A parallel process is at work in Alfred T. Jackson's The Diary of a Forty-Niner (1906), a little-known but remarkable journal. Very little is known about Jackson; in fact his authorship of the book cannot be authoritatively confirmed. Originally from Connecticut, Jackson spent just over two years, from 1850 to 1852, on Rock Creek near Nevada City. His diary details his life with his friend and mentor, “Pard,” and his romance with his French sweetheart, Marie. In disarmingly simple but responsive prose, Jackson chronicles his own transformation of character. He moves from being a timid, morally censorious greenhorn, homesick—“way off here out of the world” (3)—for the safety of the New England countryside, to being a more adventuresome and broad-minded Californian, at home in the stimulating environment of the foothill mines. Though headed out of the mines at the end of the book, Jackson is unwilling to return to Connecticut to “vegetate” on a farm. He has discovered the pleasures of good friendship and reading Byron's poetry out loud. At their farewell dinner in a Nevada City hotel with “a couple of baskets” of champagne, Marie expresses the crowd's general sentiments when she exclaims, “Oh! zey are ze good boys, and in our hearts we will nevair, no nevair, forget zem” (183).

A number of other gold-rush narratives are worthy of note. Many are by Americans: Bayard Taylor's Eldorado, or Adventures in the Path of Empire (1850); Walter Colton's Three Years in California (1850); Edward Gould Buffum's Six Months in the Gold Mines (1850); Leonard Kip's California Sketches With Recollections of the Gold Mines (1850); Alonzo Delano's Life on the Plains and Among the Diggings (1854), which was later supplemented by a collection of thirty-six letters to newspapers in Alonzo Delano's California Correspondence (1952); Eliza Farnham's California In-Doors and Out (1856); Mrs. D. B. Bates' Incidents on Land and Water, or Four Years on the Pacific Coast (1858); J. Ross Browne's Crusoe's Island … with Sketches of Adventures in California and Washoe (1864); Franklin A. Buck's A Yankee Trader in the Gold Rush: The Letters of Franklin A. Buck (1930); Sarah Royce's later reminiscences in A Frontier Lady: Recollections of the Gold Rush and Early California (1932); J. Goldsborough Bruff's journals and drawings in Gold Rush (1949); and Mary Jane Megquier's letters from 1849 to 1856, collected in Apron Full of Gold (1949). Others are by Europeans: the English sportsman Frank Marryat's Mountains and Molehills or Recollections of a Burnt Journal (1855); the Scottish artist and writer J. D. Borthwick's Three Years in California (1857); and the Belgian landscape gardener Jean-Nicolas Perlot's account of his experiences in the southern mines, collected in Gold Seeker (1985).

Realistic prose accounts of the Gold Rush were often less well-known in California than the work of frontier humorists like Alonzo Delano (1802?–1874) and George Horatio Derby (1823–1861). Delano published Life on the Plains and other works under his legal name in the East, but he presented himself as the long-nosed character Old Block in San Francisco. He wrote popular whimsical sketches, or “whittlings from his penknife,” of western types like the miner and the gambler for San Francisco's Pacific News. These articles were collected in two books: Pen Knife Sketches, or Chips from the Old Block in 1853 and Old Block's Sketch Book, or Tales of California Life in 1856. Delano was a productive author who never considered writing his exclusive occupation. He moved to Grass Valley later in his life, opened a bank, invested in quartz mines, and was an enthusiastic Grass Valley promoter.

George Horatio Derby was a caricaturist and U.S. Army topographical engineer assigned to California in the early 1850s after service in the Mexican War. He wrote under the pseudonyms John Phoenix and John P. Squibob and became famous as a wag and practical joker. His letters, squibs, and burlesques appeared in various California papers. His most notorious escapade occurred in 1853 when he was left in charge of editing the San Diego Herald while its editor, a friend of Derby's, was away. Derby changed the political alliance of the paper from Democratic to Whig and turned the weekly into a comic journal complete with mock advertisements and mock editorials. The audacity of the stunt gained statewide attention; it was the comic culmination of Derby's previous satires on phrenologists, land speculators, pompous politicians, and pretentious literary reviewers. His occasional prose was collected in two volumes, the popular Phoenixiana; or Sketches and Burlesques (1855), which went through some twenty-six printings, and the posthumous Squibob Papers (1865).

Derby, Delano, Ridge, and Clappe, were the first writers to help lodge the California Gold Rush in the American imagination. They form a lively and still unappreciated pool of literary talent that anticipated the work of those writers—including Twain, Harte, Joaquin Miller, Ambrose Bierce, Ina Coolbrith, and Prentice Mulford—who reached maturity in the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s and whose work in California would end up overshadowing their own. …

Primary Bibliography

Clappe, Louise A. K. S. The Shirley Letters. 1854-55; rpt., Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, 1985.

Delano, Alonzo. Life on the Plains and Among the Diggings. 1854; rpt., Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, Inc., 1966.

Harte, Bret. The Outcasts of Poker Flats and Other Stories. Wallace Stegner, intro. New York: New American Library, 1961.

Jackson, Alfred T. Diary of a Forty-Niner. Chauncey L. Canfield, ed. 1906; rpt., New York: Turtle Point Press, 1992.

Loney, Glenn, ed. California Gold-Rush Plays. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1983. (Includes Alonzo Delano, A Live Woman in the Mines, or Pike County Ahead [1857]; Bret Harte, Two Men of Sandy Bar [1876]; and Charles E. B. Howe, Joaquin Murieta de Castillo, The Celebrated California Bandit [1858].)

Ridge, John Rollin. The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit. Joseph Henry Jackson, intro. 1854; rpt., Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986.

Secondary Bibliography

Starr, Kevin. Americans and the California Dream, 1850-1915. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.

Walker, Franklin. San Francisco's Literary Frontier. 1939; rpt., New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1943.