Going For the Gold

By RICHARD WHITE

Aug. 27, 2000 12 AM PT

Richard White is the author of " 'It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own:' A New History of the American West." He is a professor of American history at Stanford University

With the 150th anniversary of the California Gold Rush upon us, the temptation to view history as metaphor has become almost as alluring as the gold that James Marshall first saw lying in the tail race of John Sutter’s Mill on the American River that spring morning in 1848. There have been exhibitions at the Oakland Museum and at the Huntington Museum (for which I was one of the advisors), and there have been a number of new books published on those fateful years. But as abundant as the metaphors are--in both the exhibitions and the publications--they are less useful for what they tell us about the Gold Rush itself than for what they say about our material dreams today.

The Gold Rush metaphor has been applied to almost every California economic bonanza--the aerospace boom in the 1960s, Hollywood for the last century, and the Silicon Valley more recently--that has been dominated primarily by men who grew very rich very fast. California has become synonymous with such moments, occasions when wealth is available to those daring, strong, clever and sometimes brutal enough to grasp it. This perception, right or wrong, has helped give entrepreneurial risk-taking a patina of respect and honor, for Californians and Americans alike.

Between 1848 and 1852, more than 100,000 people flocked to California in pursuit of wealth in its simplest and most elemental form--gold. Their success and the gold’s abundance helped create the metaphor, but it was inherently flawed. Obtaining gold was a different kind of work than the work involved in more recent California bonanzas. You locate and mine gold. You invent and make software and movies. Gold was, in the early years, available to anyone with a pick and pan. The unskilled workers who flocked to the gold mines would be janitors in today’s Silicon Valley.

It is all the more regrettable, then, that Gold Rush metaphors tend to equate people’s daily experience--their work, their search for wealth--with national progress and national destiny. It may be tempting to believe that selfish interests yield the national good, but such is seldom the case. The society that saw the Gold Rush was a society of extraordinary greed, extraordinary suffering and extraordinary good fortune. The Gold Rush was a remarkably complicated episode that involved a great deal of unpleasantness that metaphorical comparisons can only serve to obscure or distort. We are not what we are because of the Gold Rush, but the Gold Rush can still focus attention on what we have become.

The problem, of course, is that we disagree on what we have become and should become. The Gold Rush metaphor conjures up the kind of place my nephew, Alexander, imagined and desired when he was 4 years old: a house with no rules. As a libertarian boy’s club--a place with few women and little government--Gold Rush California still has a visceral appeal to those with social imaginations frozen at about age 4. Many of them currently live in the Silicon Valley. A house with no rules does not have the same appeal for people who think of themselves or their ancestors or the environment as the victims of those who roared through California in pursuit of wealth. All of this complicates the Gold Rush as a metaphor for our time, particularly when our time still resonates so closely with the best and worse qualities of the Gold Rush. It is not surprising therefore that California’s commemoration of the sesquicentennial has been subdued. We are not sure what memories it should evoke.

More than any other author, J.S. Holliday has tried to recognize the messiness of the Gold Rush while still seeing it as an occasion for celebration. Beautifully illustrated, clearly and engagingly written, his “Rush for Riches,” which served as the catalog for the Oakland Museum exhibit, is the product of years of reading and thinking about the event. The book is a stunning synthesis that struggles, usually but not always successfully, against the gravity of entrepreneurial metaphors. Holliday acknowledges the displacement, the injustice, the brutality and the damage the Gold Rush involved, but he pushes them aside to emphasize its energy and opportunity. Holliday’s Gold Rush is like a host who heartily greets all guests at the door, but only those dressed to suit its theme make it to the heart of the party. The theme of this party is California as a place where the impossible is possible.

This is a respectable premise but, partial. It focuses attention on Anglo American miners and entrepreneurs who loaded the deck in their own favor when it came to opportunity. Although Holliday covers Chileans, Australians, Mexicans, Californios, French, Hawaiian, Chinese and more (by 1870, after all, 39% of California’s non-Indian population was foreign-born), they serve largely as a backdrop to miners from the United States.

Holliday portrays Gold Rush California as a world honed to a single purpose: producing gold. Given Holliday’s empathy for the miners and his skill at bringing them to life, one is tempted to believe in his exuberant, isolated California, beyond effective control by any constituted authority. He writes like an old ‘49er remembering the brashness of the great adventure of his youth, when virtually everyone besides Indians and Californios was male and under 40. In July of 1849, 3,565 of those disembarking at San Francisco were men; 49, a fitting number, were women. This was a heyday for labor in a way Silicon Valley or Hollywood would never be, and it did not last. By 1852, gold mining was largely about the capital necessary to extract gold buried in ancient rivers, in the beds of still-flowing rivers, and ultimately in rock that needed to be mined, crushed and processed. Independent miners became wage laborers, sought other occupations, returned East, or drifted off in search of new strikes.

They had come to California, Holliday writes, “to grab and leave, and not to build and stay.” This was one dark side of their unrestrained search for wealth. “Rush to Riches” ends with the decline of California as a house with no rules. Holliday does this by focusing not on the limits put on the exploitation of human beings--for these came very slowly--but rather on the limits imposed on what could be done to nature itself. The last several chapters of the book recount the long struggle between Central Valley farmers and the hydraulic miners who were burying them under the mass of “slickens” that poured down from the mountains as miners washed tons of earth and gravel into the rivers in their search for gold.

“Rush for Riches” is an engaging, vivid and wonderfully crafted book, but Holliday occasionally pushes too far in creating this story of California as a place without restraint that eventually had to be restrained. He creates a chiaroscuro history that artificially emphasizes dark and light. Comparing California with the East, he writes that it was moving further toward a “ ‘new ethos,’ ” unconstrained by privilege or principle and measured only by the democracy of the dollar.” California’s entrepreneurial and democratic ethos provided “an escape from the nineteenth-century.” California, however, is better seen as epitomizing the 19th century United States. California happened to be settled by Americans just as they settled into capitalism. Americans put themselves and their new society graphically on display in California, and they were ambivalent about what they saw.

“So wealthy as to be self-reliant; so isolated as to be self-centered,” Holliday writes about California at one point, but as Holliday has emphasized in his earlier work, California migrants were members of families to whom they wished to return and with whom they remained in contact. Their own values and ambitions were very much shaped by the society from which they came. Miners changed their appearance, but they couldn’t so easily abandon the beliefs and tensions of the society that produced them. The emphasis on the connections and the tensions between older social values and newer market values marks much of the new Gold Rush scholarship.

Susan Johnson’s “Roaring Camp,” and Brian Roberts’ “American Alchemy” are both about wider connections. “Roaring Camp” is by far the better book--more nuanced, complicated, original and nicely written--but “American Alchemy” has an intelligent core. Roberts doesn’t see the Gold Rush as a metaphor for modern middle-class culture. He is convinced it is the beginning of the thing itself. For Roberts, the Gold Rush was less a male flight from middle-class convention than an elaboration and alternate form of that convention. It was a chance for middle-class men to rebel against being middle class, even as they honed the competitive economic skills they needed for middle-class status. In the Gold Rush, middle-class men could be unbathed, drunk and coarse, defying convention even as they perfected, at least in their own eyes, the self-reliance thought essential to manliness. It was a rebellion that allowed easy reabsorption of the rebels into a middle-class world redeemed by an equally conventional femininity. Like so many American rebellions, it took place within culturally narrow bounds. Roberts’ miners are guilty libertines, always explaining and justifying themselves.

Roberts pursues this thesis rather too doggedly by emphasizing the obvious: The letters and diaries that produce much of our knowledge of the Gold Rush were self-conscious literary productions designed to produce certain effects. Although this has been grist for the academic mill for a long time, it has not really penetrated Gold Rush art histories. “Art of the Gold Rush,” as Alex Nemerov has pointed out, does not pay equivalent attention to the historical visual language that paintings embody. The essays in “Art of the Gold Rush” largely treat the paintings as illustrations or study them for the painterly technique they reveal.

Roberts is pretty much one note, but Johnson hears other strains in the cacophony of the Gold Rush. Her focus is on the southern mines. Located on the drainage of the San Joaquin River, these mines contained a far higher percentage of foreign and nonwhite miners than the northern mines on the drainage of the Sacramento. Johnson recognizes the tensions of capitalist America, but she also sees the strangeness and lost possibilities of the Gold Rush. Instead of seeing the Gold Rush as a metaphor for the present--or as something as familiar as middle-class culture--she homes in on the metaphors that the miners themselves used to describe their experience and order their world. Their most powerful metaphors sprang from gender.

During the Gold Rush, men performed tasks customarily done by women, and in doing so some men became like women in the eyes of their fellows. By associating non-Anglo miners with specific feminine tasks--domestic chores for Chinese, cooking for the French-Anglo men--miners attributed feminine qualities to foreign males as part of their very racial or ethnic identity. To be foreign and feminized was to be marginalized in a way that simultaneously underscored American manliness.

All of this took on deeper meaning because standards of masculinity and femininity were changing as Americans became a market society. What it meant to be a proper man or woman was not so clear. Miners struggled to determine what constituted appropriate social behavior in a new homosocial world.

Homosocial--a world of largely male socializing--is not the same as homosexual, although there were signs of homoeroticism in the social world of the Gold Rush. The meaning of “homosocial” shows up in Charles Nahl’s famous Gold Rush painting, “Sunday Morning in the Mines,” which has found its way to the covers not only of “Art of the Gold Rush,” but also, rather oddly, of William Benemann’s “A Year of Mud and Gold,” a nicely selected collection of San Francisco letters and diaries. Nahl’s painting has carousing miners, fighting miners, reading miners (the Bible, apparently) and domestic miners, but there are only miners and only men. The Gold Rush crisis of gender roles had more to do with churchgoing, Sabbath keeping, drinking and gambling than sex. The temptations of California were projected onto “cultural others”--Mexican gamblers, French prostitutes. The miners could succumb to temptation, blame it on others, lament the absence of Anglo American women who stood for a proper social order--and regret their actual arrival as a loss of freedom.

Where Holliday wants to reiterate the reality of success, Johnson wants to know what has been lost in making the Gold Rush into an American metaphor of success, particularly when Anglo American success was often built on the “dispossession of other Gold Rush participants.” Her book is very much about the complexities of remembering and forgetting; how the miners remembered their experience and how we remember the miners. Although she uses memoirs--including the fascinating account of Jean-Nicolas Perlot, one of a number of recently published diaries or collections of Gold Rush writings--extraordinarily well, she moves beyond the journals and letters that are at the core of most Gold Rush histories. She opens with a real tour de force, a wonderful analysis of the complicated stories that have accumulated around the bandit Joaquin Murietta. The historical Murietta remains elusive, but the stories about him yield a treasure of information about gender relations, race relations, and social relations in 19th and 20th century California.

Metaphors are powerful because they grasp a single similarity, no matter how misleading, and render it all-encompassing. Hollywood and Silicon Valley at their silliest--and that is pretty silly--are all too ready to see the Gold Rush only as anticipations of themselves. Silicon Valley may be full of guys devoted to making large sums of money who work together, play together and eat together at large tables in expensive restaurants, but this does not make it “just like” the homosocial world of the Gold Rush. The past can be put to many uses, and as a metaphor for the present, the Gold Rush is only too ready to service this kind of solipsism. As metaphor, the Gold Rush reassures us that by pursuing our own interests, we are pursuing a common good. As history, the Gold Rush is less reassuring. It has possibilities lost as well as found, failures as well as successes and complication beyond imagining. It has people who do not think and act as we do. It too was like modern California--but, of course, different. In an age so adept at turning the past into metaphor, historians can have their high ambitions reduced to prosaic service as designated drivers for those bleary with metaphorical excess. Metaphor isn’t a bad thing, but it is best that not everyone yield to the past as simply a set of metaphors for the present.

ROARING CAMP

The Social World of the California Gold Rush

By Susan Lee Johnson

W.W. Norton: 352 pp., $29.95

AMERICAN ALCHEMY

The California Gold Rush and Middle-Class Culture

By Brian Roberts

University of North Carolina Press: 400 pp., $19.95 paper

ART OF THE GOLD RUSH

By Janice T. Driesbach, Harvey L. Jones, Katherine Church Holland

University of California Press / Oakland Museum of California/ Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento: 168., $50, $24.95 paper

RUSH FOR RICHES