Customer Reviews

Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I was disappointed in this book. Johnson's thesis is interesting and she provides a considerable amount of interesting information. However, her analysis is wanting, often reflecting the shortcomings of hasty post-modern analysis. Like many post-modernists, her analysis hinges on domination. Since Anglo-American culture ends up dominating the Californian Native American culture and the Mexican culture as well as others, individual acts by whites (she fails to distinguish between Anglo-Americans and other white Americans) are seen as acts of domination. While individual acts may fit into a larger scheme of domination, the motivation for individual acts may have nothing to do with domination. This would be comparable to me arguing that the only significance of your driving a car is the domination of nature that you and your culture do. I found the monocausation very tiring.

A cigar is never just a cigar. She often engages in over-analaysis. A white miner writing home about Native Americans collecting acorns for flour does not express curiousity on the part of the white miner nor a contrast between the use of oak trees in the east and California, but rather an act of domination.

Finally, i was also bothered by inconsistency in analyzing data. For example, comparable linguistic usage was interpreted differently depending on what she needed for her argument.

This is not to say that the book has no merits for there are several. Among the merits of this book one must include her writing. One could also sight many of the stories that she tells.

In the end, i found this book less about the gold rush than about contemporary America and what appears to be Johnson's personal struggle. I was hoping for either a good social history of the Gold Rush or a good history of the construction of gender and race during the Gold Rush. I found neither.

I had high hopes when I picked up Susan Lee Johnson's Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush. It sounded like it would be an interesting take on an era that is much a part of Old West legend and lore, and Johnson's research does provide some good insights into what motivated people from all over the world to venture to California's gold fields and what they did once they got there. But gleaning those insights from this book comes with a certain cost as, for all that she brings out with her research, Johnson's actual relating of events suffers from a tendency to beat the reader over the head with her interpretation of what she's found and a style that tends to fluctuate between excruciating grad-student-speak pedantic and mind-numbingly tedious. One would ordinarily think that it would be impossible to make reading about the Gold Rush a dull and laborious experience, yet Johnson has against all odds managed to achieve that dubious honor.

A good example of the problem can be seen in passages like this one:

"Distinguishing between two kinds of work -- domestic and personal service work, on the one hand, and work in the mines, on the other -- may seem to reify categories of labor. Surely placer mining sustained and enhanced human life as much as baking bread or caring for the sick did. In making such distinctions, one invokes the discursive division between home and the workplace that accompanied the growth of industrial capitalism in the nineteenth century, especially in the northeastern and urban United States. One also echoes more recent Marxist-feminist delineations of productive and reproductive labor, which have placed 'reproductive' chores (often women's work) on a par with those 'productive' chores (often men's work) assumed to constitute true economic activity. But impulses similar to those that split home life off from labor in the nineteenth century -- impulses scrutinized by twentieth-century feminists -- also led most Gold Rush participants to view mining as qualitatively different from and more important than their other daily tasks."

It's worth noting that "discursive" seems to be Johnson's favorite word as she keeps using it again and again throughout the text. This is part of what I mean by grad-student-speak, which fits as she apparently used a great deal her doctoral dissertation in producing this book.

All that said, there are things to be learned from this book. In particular, the sections that deal with the foreigners that came to the Gold Rush were enlightening as Johnson shows why they came from some countries more than others (Mexico, Chile, France and China in particular) and how conditions in their home countries in that particular period served as the motivations for them to seek their fortunes in the California gold fields. Another useful aspect of Roaring Camp is when Johnson compares alternate accounts of events from other sources, showing that Mexican and Chilean perspectives of what went on during the Gold Rush were often quite different from the Anglo ones we are familiar with.

The book is better when Johnson simply presents the social conditions that existed with a minimum of commentary and interpretation, in clear and straightforward passages like this one:

"Probably the most common type of household in the Southern Mines during the boom years of the Gold Rush was that of two to five men who constituted an economic unit: they worked together in placer claims held by household members, alternating tasks and placing the gold in a common fund from which they purchased food and other necessities. Profits, when there were any, were divided among the partners. But such households were not universal. Often the men of several cabins would band together, for example, to dam a river and work its bed. In this case, domestic concerns were the province of the cabinmates, while the larger group distributed the proceeds of labor in the diggings. Likewise, a household might include members who worked seperately and did not pool resources, but did share household taks and provisions. The variations on these themes were endless, and the unpredictability of placer claims meant that a miner might find himself in a variety of domestic situations over the course of a year or two in California. At times he might even end up, as Anglos put it, 'on his own hook,' mining and tenting alone. But most men spent a good deal of time living and working in cooperation with other gold seekers."

But Roaring Camp is at its best when Johnson draws directly on the original accounts left by the people who were there at the time:

"The arrival of a 'board-shapen specimen of a descendant of the puritans' was a harbinger of things to come. There were other harbingers as well. J.D. Borthwick saw a hint of the changes when he visited Sonora in 1852. He delighted in the Sunday scene, when men came into town from miles around, some dressed in rough miners' togs, but others 'got up in a most gorgeous manner.' Many work silk scarves of orange or scarlet hanging over one shoulder and tied loosely across the chest. Some attached feathers, flowers, or squirrel tails to their hats, while other braided their beards in a whimsical style. Mexican men sported brightly striped blankets, while French men, with neatly trimmed whiskers, flaunted caps of red and blue. The men caught Borthwick's eye first, but he admitted that the 'Mexican women with their white dresses and sparkling black eyes were by no means an unpleasing addition to the crowd.' But Borthwick ended his description on a dark note. He was alarmed at the occasional man in a black coat and stovepipe hat -- 'a bird of evil omen among a flock of such gay plumage.'"

Unfortunately for the reader, sections like the above tend to be the exception rather than the rule.

Another problem of the book though are the odd swings in focus that throw the narrative off-kilter. In addition to interrupting the smoothness of the read, they also tend to be frustrating as Johnson devotes long sections of text to singularly dry but highly detailed coverage of events that in themselves are not particularly interesting, notably the histories of two competing waterworks companies. It's rather like reading an account of the gunfight at the OK corral and having to slog through long sections dealing with the history of street conditions in late 19th century Deadwood.

In truth, the only reason I'm giving the book three stars instead of two is because of the level of research that went into it. Reading-wise, I'd rate it two stars at best. I can only recommend this book as a reference for people interested in the period and the phenomenon, with the cautions that one has to make the effort to seperate the author's research from the author's make-the-facts-fit-the-theories interpretations, and that you'll have to sift through a fair amount of sand to find the occasional gold nugget.

Very well researched book that is fascinating to read. It gives a whole new perspective to life in the gold mines of CA during the mid-1850s.

Look, the content of this book is awesome and provides a vital link to the history of the gold rush in California! But the book design is terrible, because the paragraph length on average, is about three times normal, and this error in design makes the text quite difficult to read.

If you really care about the history of California, you should read Roaring Camp, but it won't be easy, simply due to the overly long paragraph structure.

Truth is, this book shows just how much we take good book design and layout, for granted. I'll never do that again, after reading Roaring Camp.

How such a supposedly good publisher could allow this kind of flawed paragraph editing to be allowed, that's the real mystery here.

I was disappointed in this book. Johnson's thesis is interesting and she provides a considerable amount of interesting information. However, her analysis is wanting, often reflecting the shortcomings of hasty post-modern analysis. Like many post-modernists, her analysis hinges on domination. Since Anglo-American culture ends up dominating the Californian Native American culture and the Mexican culture as well as others, individual acts by whites (she fails to distinguish between Anglo-Americans and other white Americans) are seen as acts of domination. While individual acts may fit into a larger scheme of domination, the motivation for individual acts may have nothing to do with domination. This would be comparable to me arguing that the only significance of your driving a car is the domination of nature that you and your culture do. I found the monocausation very tiring.

A cigar is never just a cigar. She often engages in over-analaysis. A white miner writing home about Native Americans collecting acorns for flour does not express curiousity on the part of the white miner nor a contrast between the use of oak trees in the east and California, but rather an act of domination.

Finally, i was also bothered by inconsistency in analyzing data. For example, comparable linguistic usage was interpreted differently depending on what she needed for her argument.

This is not to say that the book has no merits for there are several. Among the merits of this book one must include her writing. One could also sight many of the stories that she tells.

In the end, i found this book less about the gold rush than about contemporary America and what appears to be Johnson's personal struggle. I was hoping for either a good social history of the Gold Rush or a good history of the construction of gender and race during the Gold Rush. I found neither.

This author has compiled an impressive work (well, after all it is her PhD dissertation)of lots of information. After a 20-page preface where she delineates her background and indebtedness to a long array of authorities and repositories, and a prologue that sets the stage, it gets going. There is a massive notes section at the end, and similarly thorough bibliography, and a good index. This is a fine scholarly study.

I am not all the way through, but I am finding precisely the type of background that I sought for my own study. I have chosen to write this notice primarily because I am outraged at the one-star reviews that are entered twice and demonstrate nothing but prejudice and failure to appreciate a work that isn't supportive of the idea that the white men were the heroes of all stories.

In my opinion, Susan Johnson's research and demonstration of scholarship makes it inevitable for her to prove and defend her hypothesis throughout her book, ultimately confirmed in a solid thesis statement. What I find most intriguing about this book is the utilization of sources available to bring an "unheard" story, the "othered" story, to print. In Johnson's preface, she discusses the ideas for possible worlds of social justice. By choosing to undertake writing this book, Johnson deconstructs the social space of the California Southern Mines and through her thoughtful, inclusive reconstruction she gives a place to "others" whose testimonies and experience previously went unheard in a "mainstream" historical world. However, it is the stories that Johnson brings to life in this piece that truly `paints a historical picture' of the California Gold Rush.