Book Review

Canada and the United States

Susan Lee Johnson. Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush. New York: W. W. Norton. 2000. Pp. 464. $29.95.

The California Gold Rush survived its 1999 sesquicentennial with popular images of manly prospectors and limitless opportunity comfortingly bright. However, the Fortyniners are a losing football team, the Golden State can't keep its lights on, and, most dangerous of all to warmly glowing memory, historians have undertaken the task of reexamining this pivotal moment in national and international history. Susan Lee Johnson and Brian Roberts have written books that change the rules about how we see and use this event.	1
Although their books are quite different, the authors come to the subject of the Gold Rush with similar concerns. Using feminist and literary theory, Johnson and Roberts show us how and why the 1849 Gold Rush has been misremembered. They argue that even though the California Gold Rush made the United States a leader in a new global economy and molded national culture in crucial ways, we have allowed this event to gather romantic dust. The episode plays as a pleasant glitch in the often grim nineteenth-century story of market revolution, class formation, and industrial development. Amid the processes of becoming a nation of clerks and factory workers and of fighting a civil war, American men had a little vacation involving thrilling travel, outdoor work, national affirmation, and gold. Only a few lucky folks made much money, but everyone had a good time.	2
By focusing on domesticity, foreigners, women, leisure, and literary production, all things the Gold Rush is not supposed to be about, Johnson and Roberts show us how the standard story masks the complexity and importance of the event. Once we look at the Gold Rush as not just a pleasant interlude for American men but as a moment that resonated around the world affecting prices, family relationships, labor practices, and ideas about gender, it becomes important to reconsider. Both authors shift our vision by adjusting the focus to things formerly assigned to the periphery of the Gold Rush: the southern foothills of the Sierra Nevada and the domestic circles of east coast homes.	3
Johnson's book is primarily a social history of the "southern" mines, the least productive and least studied part of the Mother Lode but also the place where individual miners worked the longest. Because the stakes were smaller and the riches less glittering in this region, "foreign" miners, including Mexican-Americans and Indians as well as Chileans, French, and Chinese people, worked next to Anglo-Americans. In Johnson's pages we see a Gold Rush where people both reveled in the possibilities and suffered the brutalities of "a world standing on its head" (p. 100).	4
Johnson is at her best when she describes a moment of contingency where concepts of race, gender, and class seemed malleable. Before the mid-1850s, when Anglo-American dominance became certain, Indian women mined, Anglo men mended clothes and served meals, slaves ran away, and Mexican families prospered. The Anglo participants worried constantly about the moral dangers of such a situation but thoroughly enjoyed the freedoms, including gambling and sexual experimentation. However, such opportunity did not last. Johnson carefully traces the ethnic and class warfare that determined who would control the riches and the definition of "society." The world of fandangos and Chinese dinners dissolved into the monochrome vision of Bret Harte stories, where in Anglo miners and those who read about them took their superior positions for granted. However, using stories about crime and vigilante justice in which Mexicans and Chinese were forced to the edges of gold country, Johnson demonstrates the costs of the victory of American nationalism. Because the victors control much of popular memory, we have forgotten much of what happened and what was possible about the Gold Rush.	. . .