Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush [Paperback]

Susan Lee Johnson (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0393320995 | ISBN-13: 978-0393320992 | Publication Date: January 2001

Winner of the 2001 Bancroft Prize.

Historical insight is the alchemy that transforms the familiar story of the Gold Rush into something sparkling and new. The world of the Gold Rush that comes down to us through fiction and film—of unshaven men named Stumpy and Kentuck raising hell and panning for gold—is one of half-truths. In this brilliant work of social history, Susan Johnson enters the well-worked diggings of Gold Rush history and strikes a rich lode. She finds a dynamic social world in which the conventions of identity—ethnic, national, and sexual—were reshaped in surprising ways. She gives us the all-male households of the diggings, the mines where the men worked, and the fandango houses where they played. With a keen eye for character and story, Johnson restores the particular social world that issued in the Gold Rush myths we still cherish. Maps, illustrations.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The California Gold Rush is commonly identified with the peculiarly American movement of Manifest Destiny, but as Johnson reveals in this informative study of the period, the Gold Rush was in fact one of the most cosmopolitan and multicultural events of the 19th century. Mexicans, French, Chinese, African-Americans, Chileans and Miwok Indians all panned for gold alongside their WASP counterparts in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas. The collision of these cultures sometimes led to humorous misunderstandings (as when Chinese miners mirthfully watched a white colleague struggle to use chopsticks), but just as frequently it produced ugly crimes, like when Mexican prospector Joaquin Murrieta was assaulted and evicted from his mining claim by jealous whites. Complicating relations in the mines was the almost complete absence of women; Johnson shows how men of all races found themselves reassessing gender roles in ways that had everything to do with ethnicity and cultural hegemony. For example, Anglo miners tended to feminize Chinese and French men, who made their fortunes in laundry and cooking as often as in mining gold. Johnson skillfully investigates the ramifications of these social pressures, though at times she surrenders to the ivory tower habit of interpreting the interpretations, analyzing the discourse about events instead of the events themselves. Hers is an intensely academic brand of social history: readers will find phrases like "homosocial," "gendered meanings" and "constructions of race" liberally sprinkled throughout the text. Underneath the jargon, however, is a valuable study of the complex, often troubled societies that contributed to one of America's great national mythologies. 15 photos, 1 map. (Jan.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

The California gold rush and the social and cultural forces it unleashed have become part of our historical and literary tradition. Johnson, professor of history at the University of Colorado, provides an excellent survey of the mini-universe that quickly developed as a result of the massive influx of wealth seekers into the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, around the town of Stockton. While her story lacks the romanticism of a Twain or a Harte, it offers a hardheaded look at the ethnic and class diversity that frequently led to violent conflict. Yet this is not a one-sided account of the strong devouring the weak. Johnson shows that conflict frequently coexisted with tolerance and harmony, and the eventual outcome was a degree of peace and stability in a new and vibrant society. This is a well-written account that effectively mixes personal stories with broader historical trends. Jay Freeman --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 464 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (January 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393320995
• ISBN-13: 978-0393320992
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.5 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #99,776 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good book, if you're looking for history, February 21, 2005

By 

S. Carroll (Bloomington, IN) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush (Paperback)

If you're looking for a rip-roaring yarn of hoary old prospectors jumping claims and battling over gold nuggets, this is not it. Johnson's book is a thoughtful work of social history that reexamines the collective memory many people have of the gold rush (all-American gold-diggin' brawl) in the context of the letters, diary entries, legal cases and ballads that people who were actually *in* the gold rush used to document their lives.

The picture that emerges is one of a complex society that grew up around the promise of instant wealth. For one thing, Americans were not (in Johnson's account) always the largest group of miners in the Southern mines: French guardsmen expelled by their country, Chilean aristocrats, Mexican families, Canadian traders, Chinese sailors, and the Indian tribes that lived in the area before the gold rush began - everyone got in on the action. This cultural meeting place brought interactions both peaceful (lessons on how to use chopsticks) and violent (the practise of "frontier justice" usually targeted non-whites without caring whether the person hanged had anything to do with the original crime, if in fact an original crime took place.) Johnson's book sketches a believable portrait of the evolvoing politics of the region, and along the way explains everything from the origin of Chinese landromats to Antonio Bandaras's character in _The Mask of Zorro_ (suddenly a much more interesting movie since I read this book).

Johnson's writing from a gender-studies perspective, so she's particularly interested in the issues that sprung up in a (mostly) all-male mining society. If you're from a culture that considers women's work "unmanly," and have thus never been taught to cook or clean for yourself, how do you survive in a frontier environment? For some, the answer was you didn't (miners got sick a lot, and scurvy was one of the killers). For others you either learned to practise domestic chores yourself (which you could then sell or split with others), and/or you paid a lot of money for help. In other words, the gold rush not only attracted men after gold, but women who saw they could make money selling services (of all kinds) to the gold miners. Johnson's section on the French prostitutes, for example (who were going to get taxed and inspected for veneral disease if they stayed in France), explains how the real money-makers of the gold rush were often not the miners (who depended on luck to strike it rich) but the merchants who sold to them.

The thing I admired the most about this book was the author's voice. Johnson presents us with a bunch of stories, but instead of offering just one interpretation, she gives us many possible readings of stories and also reminds us whose voice is being left out. For example, in her section on miners diaries she reminds the reader that diary-writing was an important part of 19 C Protestantism, so most available diaries are written from a very religious, Protestant perspective. An older historical approach would have claimed that this meant most people in the camp were religious Protestants: Johnson, on the other hand, reminds us that the Catholics, non-religious Protestants and illiterates were there too, but they weren't writing diaries.

Overall, I thought Johnson's book was very impressive. It won't necessarily give you a complete picture of the gold rush (Johnson's only looking at the southern mines), but it will give you a more complete picture than you'd have if all you'd ever heard was the Hollywood version of history. Looking at some of the other reviews on this site, I gather that some people get mad at this book because it doesn't squish history into an adventure story, while others get mad because they see it as "liberal revisionism." I actually thought Johnson was really fair in her presentation of history: she spends a lot of time looking at the raiding and fights that were going on between *all* the racial groups in this area, and she makes it clear that the fact American miners came to dominate the mines had a lot to do with the fact the mines were in the USA, and the government tended to (but did not always) side with natives over foreigners. As for the revisionist angle, yes, Johnson's challenging a popular perception of what the gold rush was (an all-American bonanza) but she's doing so based on what seems to be a lot of historical evidence and the testimony of the miners themselves. In other words I'm gathering most of the people who hated this book were looking for something completely different than what I would look for in a history book. If you, like me, are looking for well-written interpretation of historical evidence that acknowledges when the author *doesn't* know something, this is a good history book.

23 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Paydirt!, November 3, 2000

By 

Douglas Sackman (vashon island, WA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush (Paperback)

There are many good histories of the California Gold Rush, including Malcolm Rohrbough's award-winning _Days of Gold_. But _Roaring Camp_ presents the Gold Rush in a completely new light; and to look at the gold under johnson's illumination is to come to grips with what conventional history (and memory) represses--the intense collisions of cultures and dreams.

24 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Gender, Race, and Sex in California's Gold Rush, April 7, 2000

By 

Nan Alamilla Boyd (Denver, Colorado) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush (Hardcover)

Johnson's exquisitely researched and beautifully written book starts with the premise that the Southern mines during the early years of the California Gold Rush (1948-1852) were "a grand field for human interaction and connectedness." They were a kind of experiment in human relations, and Johnson points the spot light on the dynamic and flexible quality of race, gender, and sexuality. She argues that the social world of the gold rush - the organization of domestic labor, the leisure pursuits, and gaming activities (both mining and gambling) - reflected a topsy-turvy world not at all comfortable with itself. Johnson tells a story whereby the gold rush, particularly the relationships that developed in the more diverse and less wealthy Southern mines, created a crisis of racial and gender representation that only sorted itself out with the collusion of Anglo miners and the authority of the state. Johnson notes that Anglo miners, "Conflated their daily lives with a project of national expansion and economic growth infused with notions of progress and 'manifest destiny.'" In this way, Johnson explains the messy and not uncontested work of colonization and racial dominance, and she does so with an eye to the function of gender and sexuality. How was gender inextricably connected to the project of racial dominance? How did sex and sexuality play into the social world miners created for themselves in the early years of the Gold Rush? Through careful research and thoughtful analysis, Johnson sheds light on how, in the gold mines, men were motivated by complex desires - desires that at once explain the role California's Gold Rush played in the American drama of western expansion and colonization. But Johnson also describes the desires that play in and around a heretofore untold history of sex and sexuality in the California gold mines. Johnson's work, as a result, adds significantly to the history of race, gender, and sexuality in the West.