SOURCE: “Epilogue: Telling Tales,” in Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush, W. W. Norton & Company, 2000, pp. 315-44.

[In the following essay, Johnson focuses on the Southern Mines of California, suggesting that because of such factors as the ethnic diversity of the region and its “unruly history” (which did not coincide with typical American tales of success), the Southern Mines have been virtually forgotten by twentieth-century society.]

In the 1990s, a travel writer for the New York Times encouraged readers to visit the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. Her article, “Exploring the Mother Lode,” begins with a spare but serviceable two-sentence history of the California Gold Rush:

In 1848, a carpenter named James Marshall noticed flecks of gold shining in the tailrace of the sawmill he was building for John Sutter on the American River in California. Though the discovery did neither Marshall nor Sutter any good, it spurred tens of thousands of fortune hunters to struggle by land and sea, hoping to find its riverbeds strewn with the stuff of dreams.

The author goes on to assure her readers that now anyone can visit this land of dreams, “with less discomfort,” by taking a three-day tour along California's Highway 49, which traverses the gold region. She recommends that tourists restrict themselves to the northern half of the highway, since it “offers a greater concentration of mining sites, museums and Victorian architecture.” The southern half, she explains, “is the least densely populated part of the gold country,” with the exception of the state park at the reconstructed town of Columbia and the modern county seats at Mariposa and Sonora. With the Southern Mines dispatched in two sentences (save a brief mention of towns in Amador County, which has always straddled the divide between north and south), the author goes on to detail the historical, technological, and architectural sites that dot the northern Mother Lode.¹

Why are the Northern Mines so memorable, the Southern Mines so forgettable? It is my contention that the Southern Mines have been neglected because the area fits dominant cultural memory of the Gold Rush—as it has evolved in the United States—less well. First, the south was by far the more demographically diverse region, in that Native Americans, Latin Americans, African Americans, East Asians, and Europeans frequently outnumbered Anglo Americans there. Second, it was the area that was less successful in following what came to be the expected trajectory of industrialization in western mining. The unruly history of the Southern Mines has proven more difficult to enlist in American narratives of success, stories of progress and opportunity that are linked to financial gain and identified with people racialized as white and gendered as male. An adequate account of the century-and-a-half-long process by which dominant cultural memories have evolved and have been contested by countermemories could easily fill another book about the California Gold Rush. But an account of the origins of those discursive struggles must start here—else one key purpose of the layering of historical particularities in the preceding chapters [of Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush] will go unrealized.

At the same time that social relations in the Southern Mines were changing in the 1850s, dominant meanings of the California Gold Rush were beginning to take shape. Although these were contemporaneous developments, the meaning-making process that occurred on a national level in the United States almost guaranteed that social change in the Southern Mines would not capture eastern imaginations, and hence would not figure in a reimagined, now continental American nation.² Close readings of four texts published during and just after this period show how lived social relations in the Southern Mines, popular representations of the Gold Rush, and the project of nation building were interrelated. The first two texts—both obscure and each superficially similar to the other—illustrate the start of this interrelationship. These are pamphlets produced in the 1850s that purport to document crime and its consequences in the Southern Mines. The second two texts—well-known stories written in the 1860s by California's premier teller of tales, Bret Harte—are more tangentially related to the historical past of the Southern Mines. But the direction of those tangents indicates much about the process by which the United States claimed the Gold Rush as cultural property over and against the claims of other nations, and by which some Americans asserted ownership over and against the proprietary rights of other Americans.

Crime pamphlets had been popular in the United States since the early nineteenth century; their appearance on the literary horizon coincided with the emergence of cheap, often sensationalist newspapers called penny papers, which appealed in both price and content to working men in eastern cities.³ Immigrants to California from the East would have been familiar with the popular genre, while eastern readers would have welcomed new tales from the far western frontier. And indeed, the first of these stories was printed not in California but by a New Orleans publisher who had offices in Charleston, Baltimore, and Philadelphia as well; no doubt it circulated first in such eastern and southern locales. The pamphlet told the story of Two Eras in the Life of the Felon Grovenor I. Layton. Who Was Lynched by the Vigilance Committee, at Sonora, Tuolumne County, California, June 17th, 1852. The second of these stories, however, was published in the Southern Mines, by the printer in Jackson who produced the local newspaper. It, too, told a story of crime and retribution: Murder of M. V. B. Griswold by Five Chinese Assassins; Fou Sin—the Principal … Convicted, and Sentenced to Be Hung at Jackson, April 16, 1858. No doubt this pamphlet circulated primarily in California.⁴

Different as social relations in the Southern Mines were from those in the East, the first of these two pamphlets suggests how mightily some could struggle to incorporate those relations into stories intelligible to an eastern readership. Two Eras in the Life of the Felon Grovenor I. Layton tells a familiar tale of a respectable young man who travels from the Hudson River Valley home of his loving parents to New York City, the Anglo American capital of vice and immorality. Though Grovenor goes there to study medicine, he soon falls under the influence of a “dissolute and unprincipled young man” who introduces him to the city's brothels, billiard saloons, and gambling houses. Then, suddenly, Grovenor's parents succumb to small pox. What is more, he learns that his father has died insolvent, leaving Grovenor a beggar and forcing him into a career of crime. First, he forges a check. Next, he kills a man. By this time, it is the fall of 1848, and news of the gold discovery in California reaches New York. Gripped by gold fever, Grovenor forges another check in order to purchase his passage to “the El Dorado of the Pacific, the Ophir of America.” In the spring of 1849, he boards a steamer bound for Panama, accompanied by his lovely but fallen paramour, Irene (Irene, too, has met her downfall in New York, having left behind a loving family in the Mohawk Valley, only to find herself seduced and abandoned in the city, where she meets Grovenor).⁵

Together, Grovenor and Irene arrive in San Francisco. There they manage a gaming house until they are run out of town by a vigilance committee for robbing and murdering a customer. So they move on to Benecia, northeast of San Francisco, and again open a gambling saloon. Here, too, they cheat and kill and must leave town. Next, Grovenor and Irene head for Sacramento, and Grovenor, under an assumed name, opens an exchange office and banking house. At first, he runs a legitimate business, but then he falls in with a gang of counterfeiters and begins to dispose of counterfeit notes to “unsuspecting miners.” Eventually, however, some do suspect Grovenor, and they set up a sting to catch him in the act of exchanging hard-earned gold dust for worthless notes on eastern banks. Again, Grovenor escapes before he can be caught, and he and Irene move on to Stockton, where he works with counterfeiters under a new assumed name. Here he leaves Irene and goes on to continue his nefarious business alone.⁶

He heads for the Southern Mines, stopping at Jamestown, near Sonora. There he hears talk of some Chileans who are finding “an immensity of gold at Mormon Gulch.” Grovenor starts immediately for their camp, where he finds two men and a woman sharing a cabin and “digging with might and main.” They tell Grovenor that they have taken ten thousand dollars out of their claim in three short months. So he ingratiates himself with the Chileans, until they agree that he may join them in their labors and keep one-fourth of the gold dug thereafter. Grovenor works with them for a week, meanwhile plotting robbery. One day, he returns early to the cabin, complaining of sickness. Within an hour, the men send the woman back to the cabin to check on Grovenor. She catches him in the act of stealing their gold, and runs to the door to alert her mining partners. But Grovenor stops her and stabs her to the heart, and then rushes out to meet the men who are running from the claim. He slashes each of them to death. Then he drags the bodies into the cabin and, after gathering up the gold, sets the domicile ablaze.⁷

Now Grovenor goes to Sonora, “the greater part of whose inhabitants are Chilians and Sonorians,” and puts himself up at “the best house of entertainment.” He explains that his haggard appearance and his bloodied clothing are the result of an Indian attack. Then a party of Chileans, having passed through Mormon Gulch, comes to town. They have seen the burned cabin and found human bones amid the charred timbers. They come to Sonora laden with evidence of the murders. Many suspect Grovenor, and the local vigilance committee questions him. But he cannot be linked positively to the crime until a man from Jamestown steps forward and identifies Grovenor as the person whom he had told several weeks before about Chileans who were striking it rich at Mormon Gulch. So the vigilance committee impanels a jury and swears the Jamestown man in as a witness. Then another stranger comes forward and says that he saw the suspect digging gold alongside three Chileans at Mormon Gulch. On this evidence, Grovenor is convicted of murder and sentenced to hang. Only now does Grovenor feel remorse, and he delivers these dying words before the rope is adjusted about his neck:

There was a time, I remember me, when I was innocent, and knew no guile; but a change came over the spirit of my dream, and I turned disdainfully from the beaten paths in which my fathers walked, and followed in pursuit of a phantom which tempted me on with its luring smile and siren song. … If this were the only crime I have stained my soul with, I might hope to be forgiven; but I have perpetrated so many crimes that I cannot hope to be forgiven, either in this, or the world to come.

In case the reader has failed to grasp the meaning of this tale, the writer concludes that “the sad end of the felon, Grovenor I. Layton,” should be “a warning to all, and deter many from taking the first false step.”⁸

In this narrative, California in general and the Southern Mines in particular are western outposts of the moral world represented by New York City—extreme outposts where a young man's propensities toward evil go from bad to worse, where the rush for gold and the race to sin put him on a fast track to judgment. Curiously enough, Grovenor Layton may well have been a figment of that moral world's imagination. He appears nowhere in the historical record that one would expect to find him—in local newspaper reports, for example, or in the letters and diaries of people who lived in and around Sonora in the summer of 1852, when Grovenor was supposed to have been lynched. In fact, Sonora's vigilance committee was most active a full year earlier, in the summer of 1851, when reports of vigilante trials and executions in Sonora filled newspaper columns as far away as San Francisco.⁹ This suggests that the story of Grovenor Layton was not simply shaped by eastern discourses of urban danger and the perils of unseemly gain, as was many a crime pamphlet tale. His absence in the historical record suggests that the story was wholly fabricated within such discourses.¹⁰

Yet even if eastern imaginations created Grovenor Layton's tale, the actual particularities of social relations in the Southern Mines are among the signposts that give the narrative direction. After trouble follows him from San Francisco to Stockton, Grovenor heads to the vicinity of Sonora, the heart of the Southern Mines and the virtual headquarters of gold-seeking Chileans and northern Mexicans—or “Chilians and Sonorians,” as the pamphlet would have it. He learns about a party of Chilean miners, whom he finds and joins, only to rob and murder them in a week's time. He escapes the crime scene to Sonora, where he lodges at a “house of entertainment.” Looking much the worse for wear, he blames his appearance on marauding Indians. But the miners Grovenor kills are part of a larger Chilean community, and so the crime is quickly discovered. A vigilance committee steps in and, with testimony that can place him at Mormon Gulch with the Chileans, Grovenor is convicted. Signposts drawn from life in the Southern Mines, then, help plot Grovenor's downfall: Sonora's multi-ethnic population and its public amusements, immigrant travel and the perceived threat from native peoples, the arbitration of justice by vigilance committees.

The signposts, however, just as often as they point in historically meaningful directions, are turned upside down and backward. Put simply, vigilance committees were more concerned with punishing wrongs done to Anglo Americans than wrongs done by them, especially wrongs done by them to non-Anglo Americans. Often enough, wrongs against Anglos were perpetrated by other Anglos, so many a white man dangled from a hangman's noose. When one did, his name filled not only newspapers but letters and diaries as well. In the summer of 1851, for example, the Sonora vigilance committee went after an Anglo named Hill and eventually lynched him. Hill's name peppers the historical record for those months. During the same summer, however, a white man named Snow was murdered, allegedly by Mexicans. One must look long and hard to find any reference to the names of the Mexican men who were hanged by the vigilance committee for Snow's murder. Most typical is the kind of reference the merchant William Perkins made in his diary once the summer's hangings were over: “The summary execution of Hill and a few Mexicans has had a more wonderful effect than could have been anticipated.”¹¹ All of this is to say that while Grovenor Layton may have been the sort of white man vigilance committees loved to hate—particularly for his bilking of innocent white miners—historically, the crime of cheating and killing Chilean gold seekers would have been an unlikely last straw to lead to a lynching.¹²

This takes us back to the eastern imaginations that produced and consumed Two Eras in the Life of the Felon Grovenor I. Layton. In 1852, the region known as Southern Mines did not write its own stories—at least not stories that were consumed by mass audiences outside of California. Details of life in the Southern Mines did circulate via newspapers, emigrant letters, guidebooks, and returning gold seekers—enough so that easterners could imagine Grovenor mining with Chileans at Mormon Gulch, lying about an Indian attack, boarding at a Sonora house of entertainment, hanging by the neck from a vigilante rope. But details and stories are not the same thing. In 1852, stories about the Southern Mines were rarely indigenous tales. Generated elsewhere, such narratives took crucial details of life in the diggings and familiarized them as aspects of an essentially eastern, Anglo American story: the tale of a country boy gone to ruin in the city, which, in turn, was a tale of the moral peril men faced in an increasingly market-based economy. Viewed in this way, the teller of Grovenor's tale was not so far off in depicting the diggings as an outpost of the urban East. The growth of cities in the nineteenth century depended on the exploitation of resources in the hinterlands.¹³ And just as gold moved from west to east, from country to city, in 1852, so too did information about the social relations that gold-seeking engendered. The stories easterners told about such social relations may not have made much sense to residents of the Southern Mines, but they would have helped domesticate the Gold Rush for eastern readers by assuring them that the dangers of the city and the dangers of the diggings bore a family resemblance.

By 1858, enough such stories had been told about the Gold Rush that the event had been domesticated in both senses of the word: Anglo Americans had come to understand the Gold Rush in the context of nineteenth-century domestic ideology, and they also had claimed the event as a domestic episode—an episode in national history. That is to say that the diggings became as familiar a trope for the fevered coupling of material gain and moral hazard as the city had become—a place where a man might “make himself,” but where he also might lose himself and his moral bearings to the excesses of a changing economy. Launched from a middle-class family, as Grovenor Layton was, a young man was expected to have internalized not only the domestic values necessary to work hard, make money, and provide for a family but those that would prevent him from wanting to make too much money too fast without work, since opportunities for unseemly gain abounded.¹⁴ In the end, then, the real danger was located within individual white men. Certain settings, such as cities and mines, simply encouraged a man to abandon self-restraint or, as Grovenor put it, to turn “disdainfully from the beaten path in which my fathers walked.” Just as it was incorporated into everyday economic and social thought of the dominant, so too was the Gold Rush assimilated into narratives of nation building, so that gold seeking came to represent perils and possibilities not merely for individuals but for the American nation itself. The California state legislature aided this process by imposing a foreign miners' tax in 1850 and again in 1852, which not only circumscribed the work of many gold seekers but also helped define gold seeking as a right of citizenship. And the lucky timing of the gold discovery—simultaneous with the 1848 signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, whereby the United States took California from Mexico—made many Americans feel that the Gold Rush was a providential gift to a favored nation. A decade later, in 1858, the event had been housebroken into just such an animal.

By then, the Southern Mines region was telling its own tales. Whether anyone outside of California was listening is another question. The second pamphlet under consideration here was printed in the town of Jackson by the publisher of the local newspaper. And it is not only this western place of publication that distinguishes the 1858 pamphlet. Where Two Eras in the Life of the Felon Grovenor I. Layton reads as a single, continuous story, Murder of M. V. B. Griswold by Five Chinese Assassins is fragmented. Where one voice tells Grovenor Layton's tale, several narrate the murder of Martin Van Buren Griswold. And where the Chileans in the former are mute, nameless characters, the Chinese men in the latter have names—Fou Sin and Chou Yee, for example—and they speak on their own behalf. Make no mistake: Murder of M. V. B. Griswold by Five Chinese Assassins is a pamphlet produced by white newspapermen for white readers. Nonetheless, generated as it was in the Southern Mines, the actual particularities of social relations there provide more than just signposts for a familiar story. Indeed, these particularities threaten to spawn counternarratives quite at odds with the overarching tale the pamphlet tries to tell.

The pamphlet begins with a tribute to the murdered man, Martin Van Buren Griswold, who is the antithesis of Grovenor Layton. Although both were raised by loving parents in New York State, Martin never takes the “first false step” down the road of self-destruction. His origins are “highly respectable”; he is not only a namesake but a relative of the former president Martin Van Buren. A man “of very much more than ordinary vigor,” Martin, unlike Grovenor, when faced with moral or material danger, responds with cool strength of character. He also exhibits appropriate racial self-confidence; according to the pamphlet writer, only “the utter contempt in which he held the whole [Chinese] race” can explain Martin's murder. His lack of regard for Chinese men, that is, “made him the more readily a victim to Asiatic cunning and treachery.” As Martin's employer put it, in a fair fight Martin could have “whipped … fifty or an hundred such men as the Chinamen.”¹⁵

When Martin leaves home at the age of twenty-one, he does not go to the city but rather embarks on a tour of the southern and western states, in order to prepare himself for “the vicissitudes of life.” He settles for a time in Milwaukee, but then joins the overland migration for California, predicting—prior to the gold discovery—that “in less than two years the development of wealth on the Pacific slope of the Sierra Nevada … will loom up to an extent that will astonish the world.” His party, however, detours to Oregon, where he first hears of the gold excitement. He sails for San Francisco. From there he heads for the Northern Mines, where he works “industriously and with good judgment” and takes out “a large sum of money.” He returns to the Atlantic states, traveling through Mexico, where an altercation with “Greasers” allows Martin to demonstrate “a specimen of American prowess.” Back in New York, he feels for the last time “the kindliest influence that entwines itself about the heart of a man—the influence of home.” Thus fortified, Martin sets out on an arduous journey from Milwaukee to St. Paul to “the most remote stations of the Hudson Bay Company.” Eventually, he returns to California, where he spends years crisscrossing the state before settling near Jackson in Amador County. Although Martin's “capacity, experience, [and] knowledge of the world” have fitted him to run his own business, he chooses instead to enter the employ of Horace Kilham as “general business manager and confidential clerk.” It is while working for Kilham that Martin Van Buren Griswold is murdered.¹⁶

Unlike Two Eras in the Life of the Felon Grovenor I. Layton, which presents a seamless narrative, Murder of M. V. B. Griswold by Five Chinese Assassins ends this biographical sketch abruptly and moves on to a new section, “The Murder—The Trials, &c.” It is as if the life of Grovernor Layton leads inevitably to its ignoble end, while M. V. B. Griswold's life in no way points to the manner of his death, so that the murder must be considered separately. This section is designed to convince the reader that “five Chinamen were present and participated, either directly or indirectly,” in killing Griswold. From the start, however, the presence of five Chinese men in this pamphlet complicates the tale. In providing their names, the writer acknowledges that “it is difficult to spell Chinese names in English so as to retain the proper sound,” foreshadowing the difficulties these men will bring to Anglo American storytelling. The writer settles on these transliterations from the Cantonese: Fou Sin and Chou Yee, for the two Amador County cooks who are friends; and Coon You, Coon See, and Ah Hung, for the three others who also seem to be acquainted. Fou Sin, Chou Yee, and Coon You, we learn, are convicted of murder and sentenced to be hanged. Ah Hung is never charged. Coon See is acquitted of murder, but convicted of the lesser charge of grand larceny. Coon See then commits suicide in his jail cell.¹⁷

According to this section of the pamphlet, the crime itself unfolds thus: Both M. V. B. Griswold and Fou Sin work for Horace Kilham, “an extensive ditch proprietor”—that is, a water company manager—and a banker of sorts who exchanges gold dust for specie. Griswold is Kilham's clerk and Fou Sin his cook. While Kilham is away in Sacramento, five Chinese men apparently commit the “ingeniously conceived and dexterously executed” killing. Their primary aim is to rob Kilham's safe, which holds eight or nine thousand dollars. In order to steal the money, they must do away with Kilham's clerk. So Griswold is felled by a blow to the head, and the safe is emptied. Griswold's body is stashed underneath a bed in Fou Sin's room, and a board that almost reaches the floor is nailed to the bed rail so as to conceal the corpse. This section, however, is not written in narrative fashion but rather as a kind of catalogue of evidence that emerged from the inquest into Griswold's death and the trials of Fou Sin and his compatriots: the empty safe, Fou Sin's absence on Kilham's return, the body under the bed, a bloody shirt, sightings by white men of Chinese men in flight, gold and jewelry in Fou Sin and Chou Yee's possession. As the writer puts it, all of this “made up one of the strongest cases of circumstantial evidence of which there is any record.”¹⁸

Just as the reader starts to piece this evidence together into a story, yet another section of the pamphlet begins, one with which the writer wrestles mightily so that it does not contradict what has come before. Here, statements appear that Fou Sin, Chou Yee, and Coon You made to newspapermen after conviction and before execution. A portrait of each man, drawn from an ambrotype, precedes his statement. The portrait and statement of Fou Sin go farthest in undermining the pamphlet's overarching narrative, though the consistency of all three men's accounts is also key. Fou Sin's portrait depicts a strong man with sturdy features who gazes directly at the camera, with no hint of guilt or remorse. He does not wear a customary queue; rather, his full head of hair hangs neatly to the nape of the neck. The writer of the pamphlet prefaces Fou Sin's statement by noting that Fou Sin was the “master spirit” of the crime, “vastly the superior of all the others.” And indeed, Fou Sin's “capacity, experience, [and] knowledge of the world” exceed those of M. V. B. Griswold himself. He is fluent in English, and so he speaks to the newspapermen without an interpreter. He chronicles his life from his origins as the son of a farmer and stonecutter in South China, to his many years working aboard British, French, American, and Russian ships, to his arrival in San Francisco in 1857 and his subsequent journey to Jackson, in the Southern Mines. According to Fou Sin, it was an old friend from his home district near Canton, a man named Chou Yee, who told him to look for work in Jackson and who lent him the thirty dollars it cost to travel there from San Francisco.¹⁹

Now begins Fou Sin's account of the crime at Horace Kilham's house. Once in Jackson, Fou Sin finds work cooking for the ditch proprietor Kilham. Chou Yee visits Fou Sin often, in part to see if Fou Sin can repay the thirty dollars advanced for the fare from San Francisco. During one such visit, three other Chinese—strangers to Fou Sin and Chou Yee—come to the house. They confirm with Fou Sin that his “master” is “very rich,” and threaten to “rob the money out of the house.” Fou Sin tells them not to do this while he is cooking there. But the next thing he knows, they are beating and choking Griswold, taking the key to the safe from the dying man's pocket, and emptying the safe of its contents. Now all five Chinese men—Fou Sin and Chou Yee as well as the strangers—must flee to avoid arrest. Fou Sin's statement continues with an account of their escape, the three strangers departing in one party and Fou Sin and Chou Yee in another. Both Fou Sin and Chou Yee disguise themselves by shaving their heads, and Fou Sin buys Chinese apparel to replace his Euro-American clothes. Their flight takes them from Jackson to Sacramento to the Northern Mines. In Marysville, however, an acquaintance of Fou Sin's betrays them, and they are arrested.²⁰

Appended to this statement are answers Fou Sin gave to questions posed by examiners as well as a translation of a letter written to his father and brother. Fou Sin explains, for example, why one of his shirts was bloodied: it was hanging over the edge of the bed when Griswold's body was pushed underneath. He also explains why a deadly slungshot was found in his room: he made it in case he got into a fight at a Chinese brothel (a slungshot is a striking weapon that resembles a blackjack). In addition, he passes on what he has learned in jail about the two strangers, Coon See and Coon You, who were also arrested. According to Fou Sin, Coon See has said that he was “in jail for a long time in China for killing a man.” Likewise, Coon You has said that he was “a robber and pirate” and a “great scoundrel” there. These denunciations notwithstanding, both Coon See and Coon You, as well as Chou Yee, add brief notes to the letter Fou Sin writes to his family explaining his fate. The pamphlet writer cannot help admiring the literary merit of this composite epistle. As translated by Charles Carvalho, Chinese interpreter for the city of San Francisco, Chou Yee writes, “My body hath gone before me, borne on clouds. My youth was coupled with twenty springs; I was unconscious of it, but thus it was.” And Coon You, “The spirit will mount, borne by red incense, full of fragrance; the fulfillment, like a gem, is soon wrought.” More and more, the “five Chinese assassins” threaten to break out of their characterization as cunning and treacherous devils and to appear instead as men with complicated affections and animosities, men alive to (what readers would consider) refined sensibilities.²¹

To forestall this eventuality, the pamphlet employs several tactics. First, Fou Sin's portrait and statement are followed by those of Chou Yee and Coon You, which are less flattering. Chou Yee's portrait, for example, depicts a disheveled man: he looks away from the camera; his face is careworn; his hair hangs in uneven tangles. Coon You's likeness, meanwhile, must have looked feminized to eyes schooled in Anglo American conventions of gender. He is pictured with his hair drawn loosely into a queue, which is brought forward over one shoulder for emphasis. He gazes just above the camera's lens, lending an innocent air to his appearance. Both Chou Yee's and Coon You's statements are translated from the Chinese, underlining their foreignness, and the pamphlet writer does not preface either with admiring observations. Chou Yee says little about his background—only that he came to California from the Sandwich Islands and went to the Southern Mines, where he worked as a cook. Coon You's statement is similarly brief—though he mentions he is married—and is damningly contradicted in several particulars by an account he gave just after his conviction. In addition to setting these largely negative representations off against the more ambiguous representation of Fou Sin, the pamphlet writer also frequently interrupts the statements of all three men to point out apparent lies and inconsistencies. For example, where Fou Sin claims that Griswold was killed with a stick or club, and that his own slungshot was not used, the writer interjects, “The wounds on … Griswold's head … could scarcely have been made with a club. He must have been struck with the slungshot … or something of the kind.” Finally, the pamphlet closes by reproducing the verdict of a coroner's jury in the jailhouse death of Coon See, who is found to have hanged himself by a rope made out of strips torn from his own shirt. Earlier, the writer has speculated that Coon See “appealed his case to the court of his own conscience, which convicted him … and receiving his sentence, [he] became his own executioner.” This closing, then, tries to bring the reader back around to the positive guilt of the “five Chinese assassins.”²²

When the Southern Mines region began to write its own stories, the California Gold Rush became very complicated. Just as it was difficult to spell out Chinese names by means of the English alphabet, so too was it difficult to contain Chinese testimonials in an Anglo American narrative. Indeed, read in historical context, the statements of Fou Sin, Chou Yee, and Coon You point to a different unfolding of events surrounding M. V. B. Griswold's murder from what the pamphlet writer would have readers imagine. None of the convicted men suggest that Fou Sin and Chou Yee knew Coon You, Coon See, and Ah Hung. As for the four who were charged, Fou Sin and Chou Yee, on the one hand, and Coon You and Coon See, on the other, likely came from different native places in South China and felt little affinity for each other. California-bound Chinese came overwhelmingly from just eight districts in the Pearl River Delta area of south-central Guangdong Province: the “Three Districts,” or Sam-yap; the “Four Districts,” or Sze-yap; and the single district of Xiangshan. From what they told their interrogators, Fou Sin and Chou Yee probably came from Sam-yap, the area closest to the city of Canton. Coon You and Coon See probably came from Xiangshan.²³ Among Chinese immigrants, district origins drew important social boundaries. Hence it is not surprising that where Anglo American observers saw five Chinese men acting in concert, the Chinese men themselves saw something else altogether. For their part, Fou Sin and Chou Yee consistently blame the robbery and murder on the three strangers who came to Horace Kilham's headquarters that fateful morning—Coon You, Coon See, and Ah Hung. Coon See apparently gave no account of the crime before he was found hanged in his jail cell. Coon You, however, in one statement claims that Fou Sin and Chou Yee murdered Griswold—before he and Coon See arrived at Kilham's—and in another includes Coon See among the perpetrators. What this suggests is that two or three of these men might have joined forces to rob the safe where Kilham kept the proceeds of his ditch-digging and gold-dust-changing business. All five of them, however, are unlikely to have done so together.

As logical as all this seems when considered in historical context, such a reading of Murder of M. V. B. Griswold by Five Chinese Assassins was improbable in 1858. Those most apt to read in this manner—Chinese immigrants—for the most part were not literate in English. As audience, the publisher had in mind English-speaking Americans, as he put it, “the entire people, not only in California, but also in the Atlantic States.” That the publisher intended to create among this people both local and national markets for the pamphlet is underlined by two strategies. First, he rushed the pamphlet to press after Fou Sin, Chou Yee, and Coon You were convicted, and put it on sale the day they were executed, when local attention to the crime and its punishment was at an all-time high. Second, when the pamphlet went on sale, postage was included in the purchase price; for fifty cents, anyone could both buy the pamphlet and send it to friends or relatives in the East.²⁴

How might local and national audiences have read this pamphlet? White people in Amador County would have been shocked, outraged, and frightened by the crime. They might well have known Griswold. They might have recognized Chou Yee, who had worked as a cook in area restaurants and residences for several months. And they certainly knew of Griswold's and Fou Sin's employer, Horace Kilham. Kilham had lived near Jackson since the early 1850s, and his house, which also served as an office, was a local gathering place. Kilham was well known as a prosperous “ditch proprietor,” and he also ran an exchange business for miners laden with gold dust. In addition, he cultivated an oft-visited orchard and garden that included over 800 peach trees, 75 apple trees, and 200 grapevines—the only spot of its kind in the county. However shocking the crime, then, local readers must have felt compelled to grapple with its meaning. Indeed, on the day that Fou Sin, Chou Yee, and Coon You were hanged, officials estimated that four to five thousand people jammed the streets of Jackson.²⁵ Those unnerved by the crime would have applauded the pamphlet's efforts to impose order and logic on events, just as they seemed to appreciate the finality of retribution that the hangings represented.

Such responses, however, did not always extend beyond the immediate area. Much of the content of the pamphlet appeared first in the columns of Jackson's Amador Weekly Ledger (it was the Ledger's publisher who printed the pamphlet). Other California newspapers reprinted or commented on some of the items the Ledger published. When the Jackson paper ran the portraits and statements of Fou Sin, Chou Yee, and Coon You, for example, the Sacramento State Journal noted, “The Amador Ledger comes to us this week with the portraits of the three Chinamen who were strangled for the murder of Martin Van Buren Griswold,” but then declined to reprint the Ledger article. The Ledger editors were furious at the implication of this brief note, and shot back in their next issue, “If the lawful execution of three yellow-skinned Chinamen, who committed the most diabolical murder and robbery ever recorded in the annals of California crime, is to be termed ‘strangling’ … then the Journal is welcome to use the expression.” But the Sacramento writer should admit, the editors insisted, that his note “conveys the idea that the Chinamen were hung by a mob.”²⁶ This was precisely the idea that the newspaper-and-pamphlet publisher wanted not to convey. After all, it was 1858, not 1848, and California criminals were punished within a state judicial system, not at the hands of local vigilantes. Were they not?

If the content of Murder of M. V. B. Griswold by Five Chinese Assassins, as it first appeared in the Ledger, could stir up this kind of rancor within a forty-mile radius of Jackson, one wonders how the pamphlet was received when local people sent copies to eastern friends and relatives. Indeed, all one can do is wonder, since no evidence of eastern reaction appears to have survived. If distribution of the pamphlet depended on individuals sending single copies through the mail, it seems unlikely that an extensive national audience ever developed. And the pamphlet does not seem to have been reprinted by an eastern publisher. In addition to these logistical problems, there would have been discursive problems as well in attracting a national readership. Put simply, the pamphlet told a complicated story that eastern readers were ill prepared to hear. Martin Van Buren Griswold himself would have been a familiar character—a cherished son of eastern parents who chases western opportunities, lighting out for the territories while holding in his heart “the influence of home.” He is industrious and forward-looking (indeed, he predicts the Gold Rush) and does not hesitate to demonstrate “American prowess” to “Greasers.” He becomes a clerk, a respectable entrée to an emerging middle class.

But M. V. B. Griswold is brutally murdered. And he is murdered not by customary western adversaries—say, Indians or Mexicans. He is murdered, it seems, by a world-traveled Chinese cook whose final act is to send a letter home to his family. What is more, this cook has a name—Fou Sin—and a story to tell, as do his countrymen, who are supposed to be co-conspirators. These co-conspirators, however, tell conflicting and confusing stories. And the one who is acquitted of murder charges, and who thus will not face execution, hangs himself—or at least that is what the coroner concludes. For eastern readers, then, the pamphlet would have ended with unsettling images: on the one hand, there is the only man not convicted of murder hanging by his neck in a jail cell; on the other, there are the three convicted men awaiting death. If readers had any doubt whatsoever about the guilt of the remaining three, then this last image could have been disturbing indeed. Most such readers would have been raised in a culture steeped in Christian iconography. And, short of the cross itself, there was no more powerful Christian image than that of three men facing public execution together—reminiscent as that was of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ alongside two common criminals. It was not an image that reflected well on public officials.

To Anglo American readers outside the region where the white clerk and Chinese cook lived, worked, and died, Murder of M. V. B. Griswold by Five Chinese Assassins would have told the wrong stories. Two Eras in the Life of the Felon Grovenor I. Layton had helped domesticate the Gold Rush for eastern readers by assuring them that true moral danger was located within the hearts of individual white men, where it could be mastered, not in the external trappings of western mines or eastern cities. At the same time, by portraying Grovenor Layton as both murderous villain and lynched victim—both subject and object—of his own story, and by eliding the murdered Chileans as nameless ciphers, the pamphlet participated in the taming of the Gold Rush as an essentially Anglo American event. Murder of M. V. B. Griswold by Five Chinese Assassins, by contrast, said that the danger white men faced in California was not within themselves, where self-restraint could keep it in check, but without, in the very social order the Gold Rush had fostered. No amount of hard work and home influence could defend against it. And that danger had a foreign face. It was not a familiar foreign face, either—not that of continental neighbors such as Mexicans or Indians. Worst of all, that foreign face was neither monolithic nor predictable—nor even consistently dangerous. It might be Fou Sin, son of a farmer and stonecutter, who was intelligent, worldly, and worried about his white employer only insofar as it concerned his own employment. It might be Coon You, a young husband whose innocent appearance contrasted with his incriminating statements. It might be Chou Yee, who looked diabolical enough, but who penned haunting phrases such as “My body hath gone before me, borne on clouds.” When the Southern Mines region told its own tales, then, they were tales like these—global, complex, fragmented, multivocal. This was true even when the individuals telling the tales, such as the publisher of the Amador Weekly Ledger, came from social positions of dominance and privilege. No wonder national audiences turned a deaf ear to such stories so very long ago.

Tales told in the decade or so after the California Gold Rush sounded more like the story of Grovenor Layton and the nameless Chileans than like the story of M. V. B. Griswold, Fou Sin, Chou Yee, and the rest. But the fiction of the 1860s and early 1870s also introduced a new comic twist. This fiction elaborated on—even celebrated—the moral ambiguity of Gold Rush social relations in a manner unlike the crime pamphlets of the 1850s. Had Grovenor Layton's story been told by a Bret Harte or a Mark Twain, for instance, Grovenor would have been not only a fatally flawed but an infernally funny man, and the vigilantes who lynched him would have been pilloried as vainglorious prigs. No teller of such tales was more influential than Bret Harte, a native of New York State who emigrated to California when he was seventeen. Harte worked at a variety of jobs until he established himself as a writer and editor in the 1860s, with the help of no less a Gold Rush luminary than Jessie Benton Frémont.²⁷ As one historian puts it, it was Harte who “fixed the Gold Rush into formula for the nation.”²⁸ Harte's oeuvre fills almost twenty volumes in all, but his reputation as storyteller of the Gold Rush rests on a handful of tales, the most famous of which include “Tennessee's Partner” and “The Luck of Roaring Camp.” One can hardly overstate the impact these stories had in codifying collective memory of the Gold Rush for generations of Americans, for whom the event became one of colorful, unwashed, unshaven men who confront a moral vacuum in the mining camps, and who respond by struggling to build a new moral order appropriate to Gold Rush conditions. As late as 1969, when Joshua Logan and Alan Jay Lerner brought an unfortunate film version of Lerner and Frederick Loewe's Broadway musical Paint Your Wagon to the screen, moviegoers saw in Clint Eastwood's and Lee Marvin's characters men after Harte's own heart, albeit updated to 1960s sensibilities. Marvin's grizzled ne'er-do-well and Eastwood's innocent farm boy turned forty-niner could have stepped off the pages of any Harte story. To grasp the relationship between the Southern Mines and popular memory of the Gold Rush, then, one must attend to Harte's fiction.

First, consider “Tennessee's Partner,” which was published in Harte's own periodical, the Overland Monthly, in 1869. This tale of two white miners, one named Tennessee and the other called simply Tennessee's Partner, opens in 1853, as Tennessee's Partner decides to leave the diggings for San Francisco in search of a wife.²⁹ He finds one closer to home, in Stockton, and brings her back to the cabin he shares with Tennessee in the mines. But Tennessee soon woos the woman away from his partner, and the lovers run off together. Then, however, the woman rids herself of Tennessee as well. So Tennessee returns to the old cabin, where his partner greets him “with affection.” All is well between the two friends, but the rest of the men in the camp turn against Tennessee, not only because he has stolen a wife but because he is, in general, a gambler and a thief. After one especially flagrant crime, Tennessee is finally arrested and tried in a makeshift miners' court.

During the course of the trial, Tennessee's Partner appears, carrying a carpetbag filled with seventeen hundred dollars in gold, which he offers as payment for Tennessee's crime. He also offers a wry rebuke to a question posed about Tennessee's character:

I come yar as Tennessee's pardner—knowing him nigh on four year, off and on, wet and dry, in luck and out o' luck. His ways ain't aller my ways, but … there ain't any liveliness as he's been up to, as I don't know. And you sez to me, sez you—confidential-like, and between man and man—sez you, “Do you know anything in his behalf?” and I sez to you, sez I—confidential-like, as between man and man—“What should a man know of his pardner?”

Neither the gold nor the rebuke influences the court, and Tennessee is convicted and hanged. All his partner can do is gather up the body in a donkey cart, where he has laid a rough-hewn casket filled with fragrant pine needles. The cart itself is decorated with willow slips and buckeye blossoms, and in it Tennessee's Partner wheels the body away. After burying his friend, however, Tennessee's Partner falls desperately ill. Delirious on his deathbed, he feels himself walking up the hill near their cabin and looking for Tennessee, who he fears may be staggering home drunk. At the top of the hill, the two men spot each other, and Tennessee's Partner sees that Tennessee is “all by himself, sober, and his face a-shining.” The story ends: “And so they met.”

Harte's story did indeed capture something of the homosocial ties—and tensions—of the California Gold Rush. The ties he breaks off suddenly in 1853, showing them to be overwhelmed by the tensions of man against man in the mines. Such ties can be sustained only in death, when Tennessee and his partner meet on the high hill of the afterlife. In the Southern Mines, of course, such ties were rendered anomalous primarily by the influx of white women from the eastern United States. And tensions there, while they arose often enough among white men, typically involved struggles for economic and cultural dominance defined in racial terms and dignified by the language of citizenship. Indeed, although Harte meant to represent the moral complexity of the mines, his stories represent a narrowing of the field of moral conflict, in which relations of power among various human communities, as opposed to those among individuals, rarely surface.

But something else was lost in Harte's vision. Acquaintances of Harte claimed that he had modeled the relationship between Tennessee and his partner on a story he had heard about two Tuolumne County miners, Jason Chamberlain and John Chaffee.³⁰ Jason and John, too, believed that they had served as prototypes for the famous tale. In letters he wrote as he grew older, Jason often called himself “Tennessee” and John “Old Pard.”³¹ If there is even a shred of truth to the claimed connection between the actual and the fictional partners (and there is no reason to believe there is not), then the afterlife reunion of the devoted friends in “Tennessee's Partner” is doubly ironic. For the decline of the Southern Mines brought no such tragedy in the lives of Jason and John. The Massachusetts artisans, in fact, lived together near the town of Groveland for over fifty years. Neither ever married, and the voluminous archive they left behind holds no trace of intimate female companions. John dug gold for the rest of his life, with little success. Jason turned to gardening and, in time, to keeping a way station for travelers headed up to Yosemite Valley, which, by 1890, was a national park.

Jason had a guest book for the travelers who passed through on their way to the park, and some of the entries in that book suggest that his partnership with John was an intimate one indeed. One party quipped, “The artistic inclination of these gentlemen is quite apparent tho which one is the ‘ladies man’ we could not discover, each modestly declining the honor.” Another man wrote simply, “These are men after my own Heart.” A few days later, a visitor remarked on Groveland's natural beauty, but noted that the most curious bond created “by the convulsions of nature” was that between “the wedded batchelors.” And yet another traveler, himself an old forty-niner, was even more explicit in his guest book entry:

On Our Trip to the Yosemite Providence directed us to the Cheerful Cabin of Messrs Chamberlain and Chaffee Two Characteristic “49ers” whose attachment to each other has the true “Damon and Pythias” ring, that touches sentiments so welcome May their “Golden Wedding” to be celebrated in 1899 be a crowning event to their long history of Hospitality³²

Jason and John did make it to their “Golden Wedding.” In his diary for 1899, itself a gift from Overland Monthly editors, Jason wrote on the inside front cover, “This is the Jubilee Number or 50 Years Together.”³³

The partners would live with one another for four more years, until sickness forced John to travel down to the Bay Area for medical care in 1903. A guest book entry from this period indicates the toll John's illness took on Jason: “His meditative, absent look, and day dreams indicate that his mind, thought, anxiety are in Chaffee while he lingers in the East Bay Sanitorium at Oakland. A love could not miss his sweetheart more.”³⁴ John never returned to Groveland. He died on July 31, 1903. Jason puttered around their homestead for a couple of months after John's death, picking apples, walking to town for his mail, and looking after his own failing health (he was eighty-one, and suffered from painful prostate troubles). The journal Jason kept for over half a century ends abruptly on October 16, 1903, with the terse entry “went for mail picked apples.” Shortly thereafter, Jason Chamberlain put the barrel of a shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.³⁵

This story of illness and grief is not easily accommodated by collective memory of the Gold Rush, though Bret Harte's tale prefigured the partners' deaths and offered a culturally intelligible narrative in which to fit their passing. But like most dominant cultural memories of California's rush for riches, this one narrows the field of vision considerably, cutting short as it does the intimate—and, no doubt in some cases, erotic—ties between men that the Gold Rush fostered. Indeed, no historical silence is so deafening as that which surrounds the intimacies among men who spent a night, or a lifetime, together in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. Groveland was not Greenwich Village, to be sure. But neither was it a land of lonely hearts.

In the end, of course, the process of codifying collective memory of the California Gold Rush produced not one but many historical silences. Consider another of Bret Harte's famous stories, “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” published in 1868.³⁶ Harte sets the scene in this manner:

There was commotion in Roaring Camp. It could not have been a fight, for in 1850, that was not novel enough to have called together the entire settlement. The ditches and claims were not only deserted, but “Tuttle's grocery” had contributed its gamblers, who, it will be remembered, calmly continued their game the day that French Pete and Kanaka Joe shot each other to death over the bar in the front room.

The commotion is created by a woman—a “very sinful woman” named Cherokee Sal—who is giving birth. She is not having an easy time of it, and the miners and gamblers occupy themselves by betting on the outcome: Will Sal live? Will the baby? If the baby lives, will it be a boy or a girl? What will be the color of the infant's skin? It does not take much imagination to guess at Sal's fate: such women rarely survive in nineteenth-century fiction. She dies in short order, but the baby, a boy, lives: “Mighty small specimen,” exclaims one miner; “Has n't mor'n got the color,” observes another.

The birth at Roaring Camp works a series of social miracles: first, the men file past the infant, who is wrapped in red flannel and lying in a candle box, bringing him the gifts of latter-day wise guys: a revolver, a slingshot, a golden spur, a diamond pin, and, then, a diamond ring (the giver remarking that he “saw that pin and went two diamonds better”). As time passes, the baby thrives on donkey's milk and attentive father figures, and the camp thrives too—so much so that the men christen the boy “The Luck” for the prosperity he brings. Wholesale regeneration follows. Men start to bathe and wash their clothes, and they begin to refrain from profanity. The Luck's cabin is whitewashed without and wallpapered within. Some even suggest inviting “one or two decent families” to live in Roaring Camp, so that The Luck can “profit from female companionship.”

But this is where the new social order doubles back upon itself: to bring in married, white women (“decent” being an unsubtle code for white and married) is not to create something new but rather to install a familiar moral regime, in which white women assert moral influence and white men exercise self-control. Bret Harte knew this story. It was a story that middle-class Americans told about themselves through much of the nineteenth century. It was not a story that interested Harte. What interested him was a story for which there was no imaginable resolution—one in which white gold seekers create an alternative social order, every bit as moral as that presided over by white women in settled regions. When there is no imaginable resolution, however, death and destruction often ensue. Harte could not conceive of a world in which an unmarried Cherokee mother could live in harmony with non-native men—or else he thought his readers would not abide such a world. So Sal dies quickly, leaving behind her mixed-blood offspring. Destruction follows. It is winter, and the rivers that start in the Sierra Nevada are swelling their banks from snow in the mountains and rain in the foothills. A wall of water rushes into Roaring Camp, sweeping tents, trees, and tools in its wake, dumping them in the valley below. Among the debris is the whitewashed cabin, and with it goes “the pride, the hope, the joy, The Luck, of Roaring Camp.” The dead infant is found in the arms of a man who tried and failed to save The Luck and who himself is dying too. “Tell the boys I've got The Luck with me now” are his last words, and, as Harte puts it, “The strong man, clinging to the frail babe … drifted away into the shadowy river that flows forever to the unknown sea.”

This, then, is another piece of the Gold Rush of collective memory: an amoral community of men confronts a baby's birth and begins to build a world worthy of that child. It is an impossible social world, however, and it ends in sentimentalized destruction. But note too who lived in this world: not just characters named Sandy and Stumpy and Kentuck but ones named French Pete and Kanaka Joe and Cherokee Sal. Granted, these characters are all dead or dying; Pete and Joe have knocked each other off by the third sentence. Nonetheless, they represent a kind of shadow story that lurks around the edges of Harte's tale, and that almost takes center stage in the baby who brings not just luck but regeneration to Roaring Camp. Recall the miners' curiosity about the baby's “complexion,” and the comment that the infant “has n't mor'n got the color”? This phrase derives from miners' habit of looking for “color”—that is, gold—in the dirt they washed out. Its use here tells us that, in the miners' eyes, the baby is light-skinned but not “white.” The shadow story, then, is one about a multiracial, multi-ethnic social world, in which French men and Pacific Islanders live alongside Anglos from the eastern United States and Cherokee women from Indian Territory. Within a few pages, all that remains of this shadow world is a mixed-race child who becomes, momentarily, not the shame but The Luck of Roaring Camp.

And then The Luck dies, and so does Roaring Camp. Unlike “Tennessee's Partner,” “The Luck of Roaring Camp” cannot be linked to any particular persons, places, or events in the Southern Mines. That does not mean, however, that the tale cannot be used to illuminate the troubled connection between history and memory, between the lived past of the Southern Mines, on the one hand, and popular representations of the California Gold Rush, on the other. Indeed, most of Harte's tales are not geographically specific; they represent a composite Gold Rush world. Roaring Camp, for example, is probably an imaginary mining community.³⁷ Yet Harte's stories, in their centering of Anglo American men as characters, draw more from the history of the Northern Mines than from that of the Southern Mines. Few readers have made or cared about this distinction, which may at first glance seem trivially historicist. Nonetheless, if one turns from sites of memory such as Harte's stories to the historical record of social relations in the Southern Mines, one can easily tell tales that suggest how dominant cultural memory has refracted history, casting a halo on the most basic inequities, the most blatant practices of power. In “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” for example, a mixed-blood baby's death brings the possibility of an alternative social world—even a moral universe—to an end. In the Southern Mines, actual infants perished, some of them the offspring of intimate interethnic and interracial ties. But such deaths suggest different stories with different morals: stories of power as well as sentiment, stories of women as well as men, stories that start not only north but also south of the equator, stories of complex human beings rather than rough-hewn heroes with hearts of gold.

One last story, then—this one drawn from an inquest into the death of an unidentified infant, whose body was found in a mining shaft on Murphys Flat in Calaveras County in 1858. The entire record of this human drama—in which a woman and man had sex and conceived, the woman carried the fetus to term and gave birth, and then someone, perhaps the woman herself, smothered the baby and threw the body down a mining shaft—consists of just three pieces of paper. The first is in the handwriting of a coroner. “Information having come to me … that the Body of [a] dead Infant had been found,” he writes, “I proceeded to the place where the Body lay.” The next is written by a doctor. He states that the fetus was carried to term and then smothered after birth. He notes that the deceased is female, and says that she looks like “a white child and from white parents,” although she “may be from a white father and [a] Chilano woman.” Finally, a jury summoned by the coroner renders its verdict: the deceased is female; she was born living; and she was smothered “by some person or persons unknown.”³⁸ No strong men clinging to frail babes here; this child was not The Luck of Murphys Flat.

Who was she? We cannot know for sure. But we can cast a wide net using the larger record of social relations in the Southern Mines to come up with a scenario that makes good historical sense. We know, for example, that the area jurors called Murphys Flat was a rich placer mining site as early as 1848. Miners used water from Angels Creek to wash gold-bearing dirt, looking for “color” in every pan, rocker, and sluice box. By 1858, when the body was found, the creek had proven insufficient, and a water company had built flumes and dug ditches to provide water to miners from the Stanislaus River.³⁹ By then, Murphys was one of the most famous spots in the Southern Mines. The unfortunate infant was born in the vicinity of this town. According to the doctor who examined her, she appeared to be the offspring of two white parents or of a white father and a Chilean mother. Like The Luck of Roaring Camp, the baby from Murphys Flat was light-skinned, but the doctor thought she might not be “white.” His guess that it was the mother who may have been Chilean was no doubt based on social rather than somatic observations. First, Chileans had lived in and around Murphys since the Gold Rush began, and not all had left, even after the Chilean War and the imposition of the 1850 foreign miners' tax. Second, the early history of the Southern Mines, when Anglo men socialized freely with non-Anglo women, had established a pattern of interethnic encounters that continued past the boom years. So it was not difficult for the doctor to imagine that an Anglo man and a Chilean woman had kept company.

What sort of situation could lead a woman to carry a fetus to term, only to smother the baby after birth? We do not know, of course, that the mother killed the infant. But with death following so quickly after birth, the mother seems a likely suspect. There is no record by which we can assess individual motivation, but there is copious evidence of the parameters within which a person would have made choices in 1858. A pregnant woman, probably unmarried, living at this moment faced overwhelming constraints. First, she lived in an economic world that provided few opportunities for a woman to support even herself, to say nothing of a child. Second, she lived in a social and cultural world in which married, middle-class women from the eastern United States were increasingly setting the standards for acceptable behavior. These two constraints were intertwined. The arrival of married, middle-class women also brought an assault on some of the work—dealing cards, pouring drinks, selling sex—most readily available to unmarried women, further narrowing economic opportunities. Third—if the woman was, in fact, Chilean—she lived in a place where the number of Chileans was shrinking, not growing, and where there was now a decade of bad blood between her people and Anglo Americans. Finally, whatever this woman was facing, it seems likely that she was facing it on her own, that the man who fathered the baby had, as Anglo miners liked to put it, “vamosed.” Under such circumstances, nurturing an infant and then raising a daughter might well have seemed an impossible task.

There is little else in the historical record to help us link these details together into a story. But there is one other piece of information we can glean from the Calaveras County inquest report: the baby from Murphys Flat was thrown in a mining shaft. Again, we have no direct evidence of the meaning a mother might have attached to such an act. But tossing a baby's body down a mining shaft seems a grim commentary on a historical moment that has come to be as celebrated as the California Gold Rush. We cannot know for sure the nature of this commentary any more than we can know for sure who committed this act. But it seems safe to suggest that the act did not constitute a compliment—to the father of the child, to men who were miners, to the Gold Rush itself. The depth of meaning embedded in a woman's gruesome decision to throw her infant daughter's dead body down a shaft toward the Mother Lode, la veta madre, is equal to anything we can plumb in a Bret Harte story.

But if I show that a document as thin as an inquest, when examined through the thick lens of historical context, can yield a past as richly textured as that portrayed in any great American short story, then I may seem to be straying from a commitment I made many pages ago—a commitment to write within the tension between history and memory rather than trying to resolve it. This was what I did when I told the tale of Joaquín Murrieta and Rosa Felíz de Murrieta, who are figures of memory just as surely as they are figures of history. Now I may seem to be saying that history tells better stories than memory because historians use documents and tell the truth while writers of fiction lie about our collective past. In fact, however, I offer my history as food for memory, and make only modest truth claims about the past I have constructed herein. In these final pages, I purposely have explored historical documents that are frustratingly fragmented, in order to turn back to my initial arguments—arguments that are not mine alone—about the similarity between the work of history and the work of memory. History and memory alike begin with fragments, with filaments, and then weave those filaments together into a fabric of the past intelligible to human eyes in the present. That fabric may not always be pretty, but if it is to be preserved, it must be useful. Because as human beings, we insist on wrapping ourselves in the mantle of the past; we warm our feet at old fires. If academic history and collective memory alike arise out of an impulse to know ourselves in the present by knowing our past, then there is little good to be gained by setting one way of knowing over or against the other.⁴⁰

Nonetheless, I do believe that historians have a key contribution to make to our collective project, a distinctive dish to bring to the table. Historical perspectives on the workings of memory are crucial. Take, for example, Bret Harte's fiction, which for a century and a half has constituted square one for popular memory of the California Gold Rush in the United States. As such, it demands our attention, for it demonstrates who certain Americans have imagined themselves to be—particularly Americans who are white and male or who at least aspire to such social categories of dominance. It also yields clues about how the American nation itself has been conceived. In “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” Sandy and Stumpy and Kentuck need no modifiers attached to their monikers; we assume they are white and American and male, quintessential Gold Rush participants. (Cherokee) Sal and (French) Pete and (Kanaka) Joe are, quite literally, other stories, other narratives, other nations. Harte's fiction, then, does not tell us much of anything about the people whom quintessential Gold Rush participants—quintessential Americans—have imagined themselves not to be.⁴¹ After all, one can rummage around in stories such as “The Luck of Roaring Camp” only just so long searching for the shadow story of people who were not white and American and male. The tales of Sal and Joe and Pete remain embedded in solid rock, no matter how one tries to crush it and get at the gold. This is because it was not Harte's intention to make of Gold Rush gender and race relations much more than a quirky, colorful background to high-spirited portraits of Anglo American men.⁴² Historians, however, can help turn backgrounds into foregrounds, portraits of individuals into pictures of crowds—now contending, now cooperating, now careening into artistic and political spaces heretofore unimagined.

But we must also ask for help, not only from one another but from all creators of collective memory—who are often better tellers of tales than are academic historians. We must turn in particular to those who are producing countermemories, stories and images and built environments doing battle with dominant narratives that reinscribe social inequities. My own understanding of California's Southern Mines, for example, has been informed not only by the work of countless other scholars but by sites of countermemory that I have visited or attended or otherwise encountered.⁴³ One of these was a gathering held in 1991 in what was once Nisenan country but is now Marshall Gold Discovery State Historic Park—the spot where white and native workers for John Sutter found gold in 1848. The gathering was called “Return to Gold Mountain: A Chinese American Pioneer Festival,” and its purpose was both to rededicate two Chinese buildings in the park and to educate Californians about the earliest Chinese immigrants to the state. This was the first-ever commemoration of Chinese participation in the Gold Rush held in what is now called the gold country, and it took more ethnic Chinese up into the foothills than had been there for over a hundred years.⁴⁴ Another of these sites of countermemory is the Del Rey Mural, a panel painted by the Chicano muralist Antonio Bernal in 1968 on the wall of the United Farm Workers' Teatro Campesino Cultural Center. The six-by-fifteen-foot painting features eight leaders, historical and contemporary, held in esteem by participants in the Chicano movement of the 1960s. The two central figures in the mural are Cesar Chávez, leader of the United Farm Workers, and Joaquín Murrieta, scourge of the Southern Mines.⁴⁵ Yet another site of countermemory is Chaw'se, or Indian Grinding Rock State Historic Park, near Jackson in Amador County. This remarkable site, which is built around an outcrop of rock where native women once ground acorns, was constructed in part by Sierra foothill Indians in the late 1960s. It features both an indoor museum and an outdoor park with a reconstructed Miwok village from times past. The site includes a ceremonial roundhouse and gathering places for contemporary native people; each fall, for example, witnesses a “Big Time” celebration that marks the customary time of the acorn harvest.⁴⁶ These sites of countermemory offer up a Gold Rush that cannot just be grafted onto dominant collective memory, for they both people and plot the past anew. They offer a past in which all are repositioned; at the same time, they embody a hope for a more just and equitable future.

As we begin the second century and a half since the California Gold Rush began, we would do well to recognize that we live in an era of concentrated human diversity and congealed human inequity not wholly unlike that faced by gold seekers a hundred and fifty years ago, especially in the region that was known as the Southern Mines. There is so much that we have not yet learned from the Gold Rush. If we can remember it differently, perhaps we can use that memory to different ends.

Notes

1. Carol Von Pressentin Wright, “Exploring the Mother Lode,” New York Times, Sunday, May 16, 1993, Travel section.

2. This argument, of course, relies on Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983); and also on thoughts provoked by essays collected in Cultures of United States Imperialism, ed. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1993).

3. See, e.g., David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), 171-77. See also Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America (London: Verso, 1987).

4. Two Eras in the Life of the Felon Grovenor I. Layton. Who Was Lynched by the Vigilance Committee, at Sonora, Tuolumne County, California, June 17th, 1852. For Robbery, Murder, and Arson, He Having Robbed Three Chilians, Two Men and One Woman, of Ten Thousand Dollars in Gold Dust, at Mormon Gulch, Murdered and Burned Them, Together with Their Cabin, May 28th, 1852 (New Orleans, Charleston, Baltimore, and Philadelphia: A. R. Orton, 1852); Murder of M. V. B. Griswold by Five Chinese Assassins; Fou Sin—the Principal. Together with the Life of Griswold, and the Statements of Fou Sin, Chou Yee and Coon You, Convicted and Sentenced to Be Hung at Jackson, April 16, 1858. Illustrated with Correct Likenesses of the Murderers (Jackson, Calif.: T. A. Springer, 1858). T. A. Springer also published the Amador Weekly Ledger.

5. Two Eras in the Life of the Felon Grovenor I. Layton, 1-32.

6. Ibid., 32-36.

7. Ibid., 36-38.

8. Ibid., 38-39.

9. I won't cite all of the places where I haven't found Grovenor Layton in the historical record, but they are numerous. My thanks to Mary Coomes for double-checking the San Joaquin Republican for me, and to Martin Ridge and Peter Blodgett for helping me think of even more places not to find Grovenor. For newspaper reports of Sonora vigilance committee activity in the summer of 1851, see the San Joaquin Republican and the Alta California (San Francisco), June and July 1851, passim, and esp. San Joaquin Republican, July 16, 1851. See also William Perkins, Three Years in California: William Perkins' Journal of Life at Sonora, 1849-1852, ed. Dale L. Morgan and James R. Scobie (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1964), 224-42; and Enos Christman, One Man's Gold: The Letters and Journal of a Forty-Niner, ed. Florence Morrow Christman (New York: Whittlesey House, McGraw-Hill, 1930), 189-98. I would like to argue as well that on the very day Grovenor was supposed to have been hanged (June 17, 1852), sources show that the town of Sonora was still smoldering from a destructive fire that had broken out just after midnight—making it not a good day for a lynching. But, in fact, sources differ as to whether the fire broke out just after midnight on June 17 or June 18. See, e.g., Alta California, June 20, 1852; Journal entry, June 18, 1852, John Wallis Journal, Holt-Atherton Center for Western Studies, Univ. of the Pacific, Stockton, Calif.; Perkins, 219; J. Heckendorn and W. A. Wilson, Miners and Business Men's Directory, for the Year Commencing January 1st, 1856. Embracing a General Directory of the Citizens of Tuolumne … Together with the Mining Laws of Each District, a Description of the Different Camps, and Other Interesting Statistical Matter (Columbia, Calif.: Clipper Office, 1856), 37; and [Herbert O. Lang], A History of Tuolumne County. Compiled from the Most Authentic Records. (San Francisco: B. F. Alley, 1882), 86. So it goes.

10. Analytically, the distinction may be a small one, but historically, it means the difference between lives and deaths imagined, on the one hand, and lives and deaths experienced, on the other. As for the subject of gain in the nineteenth century, I rely on Ann Vincent Fabian, Card Sharps, Dream Books, and Bucket Shops: Gambling in Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1990).

11. For multiple references to the crimes of Hill and the murder of Snow, see the sources cited in n. 9 above. For the quotation, see Perkins, 237. For more on the historical context for this vigilance activity, see chap. 4, “Mining Gold and Making War.”

12. The only more unlikely last straw would have been the cheating and killing of Mexican or Indian gold seekers. Given the recent U.S.-Mexican War and centuries of Indian-white conflict, even eastern readers probably would have balked at a story that ended with a white man lynched for such crimes. Unlike Mexicans and Indians, Chileans were largely unknown to eastern audiences, and so were more likely to fill the curious narrative niche they fill in this pamphlet.

13. For this argument, see William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991).

14. See Fabian; and Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981). For a wonderful example of the worries gold seeking provoked, see E. L. Cleaveland, Hasting to Be Rich. A Sermon Occasioned by the Present Excitement Respecting the Gold of California, Preached in the Cities of New Haven and Bridgeport, Jan. and Feb. 1849 (New Haven, Conn.: J. H. Benham, 1849). My thanks to Ann Fabian for introducing me to this sermon.

15. Murder of M. V. B. Griswold by Five Chinese Assassins, 5-6.

16. Ibid., 6-11.

17. Ibid., 12.

18. Ibid., 13-14.

19. Ibid., 15-31, esp. 15-17. For more on Fou Sin's life story, see chap. 1, “On the Eve of Emigration.”

20. Ibid., 18–22.

21. Ibid., 22-27.

22. Ibid., 12, 14-31.

23. The pamphlet does not record information about the district origins of Fou Sin, Chou Yee, Coon You, and Coon See as carefully as one would wish. The writer thought that Fou Sin said he was born in “Canton county,” and elsewhere notes that both Fou Sin and Chou Yee “were originally from the Canton district” (ibid., 14, 16). Similarly, the writer thought that Coon You said that he “belonged to the Cheung people,” which I have taken to mean that he was from Xiangshan (Heungshan or Chungshan). Elsewhere the writer notes that both “Coon You and Coon See belonged to the Yin Foo party or company of Chinamen” (ibid., 14, 30). I have been unable to find reference in Chinese American historiography to any district organization, secret society, or surname association that approximates the designation “Yin Foo.” The closest is the district organization (huiguan or huikuan) formed by immigrants from Xiangshan in 1852, variously transliterated as Yeung-wo, Yanghe, and Yang-ho. Nonetheless, the pamphlet consistently suggests that Fou Sin and Chou Yee shared a native place, as did Coon You and Coon See. For the district origins of Chinese emigrants and on social organization in Chinese America, I rely on Eve Armentrout-Ma, “Urban Chinese at the Sinitic Frontier: Social Organizations in United States' Chinatowns, 1849-1898,” Modern Asian Studies 17, no. 1 (1983): 107-35, esp. 109-19; June Mei, “Socioeconomic Origins of Emigration: Guangdong to California, 1850 to 1882,” in Labor Immigration under Capitalism: Asian Workers in the United States before World War II, ed. Lucie Cheng and Edna Bonacich (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1984), 219-45, esp. 224-27; Sucheng Chan, This Bittersweet Soil: The Chinese in California Agriculture, 1860-1910 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1986), 16-26, and Asian Americans: An Interpretive History (Boston: Twayne, 1991), 63-67; Ronald I. Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (Boston: Little, Brown, 1989), 118-19; and Gunther Barth, Bitter Strength: A History of the Chinese in the United States, 1850-1870 (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1964), esp. 87-90.

24. For the quotation, see the “Advertisement” printed on the pamphlet's first page of text: Murder of M. V. B. Griswold by Five Chinese Assassins, 3 (unnumbered). For the date the pamphlet went on sale and the postage-paid purchase price, see Amador Weekly Ledger (Jackson), April 10, 17, 1858.

25. For Kilham's orchard and garden and for the crowd at the hangings, see Amador Weekly Ledger, May 2, Aug. 22, Sept. 12, 1857, April 17, 1858.

26. Ibid., April 24, 1858 (the State Journal note is quoted here).

27. See Pamela Herr and Mary Lee Spence, eds., The Letters of Jessie Benton Frémont (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1993), esp. 185, 234, 235, n. 3, 334-35.

28. Kevin Starr, Americans and the California Dream, 1850-1915 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986), 49-50.

29. Harte's story is often reprinted. For the original, see Overland Monthly, 1st ser., 3 (1869). A useful collection of Harte's Gold Rush stories is Bret Harte's Gold Rush, ed. Reuben H. Margolin (Berkeley, Calif.: Heyday Books, 1997).

30. Chamberlain and Chaffee are introduced in chap. 1, “On the Eve of Emigration.” Their lives are documented in the John Amos Chaffee and Jason Palmer Chamberlain Papers, Bancroft Library, Univ. of California, Berkeley; and Jason P. Chamberlain Correspondence, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif. On the connection between “Tennessee's Partner” and Chamberlain and Chaffee, see Fred Stocking, “The Passing of ‘Tennessee’ and his Partner,” Overland Monthly, 2d ser., 42 (1903): 539-43; Fletcher Stokes, “Fred Stocking and His Service to California Literature,” Overland Monthly, 2d ser., 59 (1912): 105-14; and James G. White, “The Death of Tennessee's Pardner: The True Story of the Death of Jason P. Chamberlain,” Tuolumne County Historical Society Quarterly 4, no. 3 (Jan.-March 1965): 122-24. My thanks to the Tuolumne County historian Carlo M. De Ferrari for conversations about Chaffee and Chamberlain. Mr. De Ferrari grew up near the men's homestead, and no doubt knows more about them than any other living person.

31. See, e.g., Jason Chamberlain to [Bicknell], Nov. 23, 1897, Chaffee and Chamberlain Papers. In this particular letter, Chamberlain also explains the origins of his and Chaffee's association with the story: “Bret Harte was connected with the Overland Monthly and we had a friend and old Partner that was secretary of the company Bret Harte told our friend he was going to write a story and call it Tennessee's Partner Our Friend said he knew a character that would just fill the bill for Tennessee's Partner and when Chaffee went to the City a year ago he was introduced as Tennessee's Partner and was a big surprise to the Partner as he had never heard any thing about the matter before.”

32. See Guest Book (1895-1903), Chaffee and Chamberlain Papers. The guest book entries quoted are dated June 9, 11, and 20, 1895. Similar entries continue through 1903, when both men died. In his discussion of the making of a gay male world in New York City's Greenwich Village in this period, George Chauncey notes that “in some contexts calling men ‘artistic’ became code for calling them homosexual.” Although this was quite a different historical context—rural and western—most of the travelers who stopped at Chamberlain and Chaffee's on their way to Yosemite and who wrote in the guest book were from urban areas where such semiotic codes were being developed. Of course, almost no one would have used the term “homosexual” to describe the relationship between Chamberlain and Chaffee at the turn of the century. But I think it not unlikely that future research, by tracing the visitors who wrote in Chamberlain and Chaffee's guest book, will be able to link the partners to regional variants of the emerging gay worlds Chauncey documents. See Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994), passim and esp. 229. Even more relevant, Jonathan Ned Katz is engaging in a crucial study of intimate relationships between men in the nineteenth century, in which he is uncovering both the varieties of male same-sex bonds and the range of language used to describe those bonds. For example, college-educated men frequently used references to “Damon and Pythias”—and other famous male couples, historical and mythological, of ancient Greece and Rome—to signify intimate male relationships, as travelers did when they visited Chamberlain and Chaffee. Similarly, visitors referred to the two men as “David and Jonathan,” a biblical reference commonly used to denote male intimacies in the nineteenth century. In addition to the guest book entries cited above, see, e.g., those dated June 23 and July 9, 1903. See Katz, “Coming to Terms: Conceptualizing Men's Erotic and Affectional Relations with Men in the United States, 1820-1892,” in A Queer World: The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Martin Duberman (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1997), 216-35, esp. 221.

33. Jason Chamberlain Diary no. 38 (1899), Chaffee and Chamberlain Papers.

34. Entry dated June 27, 1903, Guest Book, Chaffee and Chamberlain Papers.

35. Diary entries, Aug. 2, Oct. 16, 1903, Jason Chamberlain Diary no. 42, Chaffee and Chamberlain Papers; and White.

36. This story is also often reprinted. For the original, see Overland Monthly, 1st ser., 1 (1868). For another reading of this story, see Blake Allmendinger, Ten Most Wanted: The New Western Literature (New York: Routledge, 1998), 65-78.

37. See Erwin G. Gudde, California Gold Camps, ed. Elisabeth K. Gudde (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1975), 293.

38. Inquest [Unknown Infant] (1858), Inquest Records, Calaveras County, Calaveras County Museum and Archives, San Andreas, Calif.

39. Gudde, 232-33. For a good account of social relations in the Murphys area, see Leonard Withington Noyes Reminiscences, Essex Institute, Salem, Mass., transcription at Calaveras County Museum and Archives, San Andreas, Calif.

40. For related arguments, see Richard White, Remembering Ahanagran: Storytelling in a Family's Past (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998).

41. Here my argument is influenced by Camille Guerin-Gonzales, Mexican Workers and American Dreams: Immigration, Repatriation, and California Farm Labor, 1900-1939 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1994), esp. 2-8, and by years of conversation with the author that are stretching into a lifetime.

42. Some of Harte's stories that focus on Chinese characters, even as they helped codify stereotypes, also advanced critiques of white anti-Chinese activity (critiques that frequently were not recognized and certainly were not shared by many readers). See Takaki, 104-8; Jonathan D. Spence, The Chan's Great Continent: China in Western Minds (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 126-29, 134-39.

43. The work in progress of David Glassberg, Department of History, Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst, will help immeasurably in understanding sites of memory in the “gold country”; e.g., “Remapping the Gold Country” (paper presented at the Western History Association Annual Conference, Sacramento, Calif., Oct. 16, 1998).

44. I attended this commemorative celebration in Oct. 1991. Organizers produced a pamphlet entitled Return to Gold Mountain: The Life of the Early Chinese in California (Sacramento: Chinese American Council of Sacramento, 1991). The festival was conceived by Peter C. Y. Leung, Asian American Studies, Univ. of California, Davis, who also served as co-chair of the planning committee. Wesley Yee chaired the planning committee.

45. I have not visited the Del Rey Mural, but it is reproduced, described, and analyzed in Signs from the Heart: California Chicano Murals, ed. Eva Sperling Cockcroft and Holly Barnet-Sánchez (Venice, Calif.: Social and Public Art Resource Center, 1990; Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1993), 22, 26-27.

46. I have visited this park, which is located off Highway 88 near Jackson, many times. The State of California produces a useful brochure about the park entitled “Chaw'se, Indian Grinding Rock State Historic Park,” California Department of Parks and Recreation, Sacramento, 1994. The periodical News from Native California (published by Heyday Books in Berkeley, Calif.) prints quarterly events calendars in which such gatherings as the Big Time festivities are listed.