Representing Data VisuallyThis week, you are tasked to build visua.docx

Representing Data Visually
This week, you are tasked to build visual representations of the
data you have collected throughout your research. Visual
representations of data allow us to share information more
efficiently and, often, more effectively.
Using the data you gathered/created in your Analytical Report
in week five, create three to four graphic representations of that
data. This can be done using charts, graphs, tables, and so on.
Feel free to be creative.
Sex, Gender, Culture, and a Great Event: The California Gold
Rush
Author(s): Albert L. Hurtado
Source: Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 68, No. 1 (Feb., 1999),
pp. 1-19
Published by: University of California Press
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Sex, Gender, Culture, and a Great
Event: The California Gold Rush
ALBERT L. HURTADO
The author is a member of the history department at the
University of Oklahoma. A version of this paper was his
presidential address to the Pacific Coast Branch, American
Historical Association, at its ninety-first annual meeting in
August 1998 in San Diego, California.
I was working on the galleys for my book, Intimate Fron-
tiers: Sex, Gender, and Culture in Early California, when I
happened
to hear several historians on National Public Radio. They were
explaining why a new historical organization, The History So-
ciety, was needed. Among other things, they argued that the

proliferation of gender studies in history threatened to trivial-
ize the discipline. We should be thinking about big things, and
we should be seeking the "truth."I I suspect that there are many
historians who believe that sex and gender are trivial subjects.
Sex and gender are merely manifestations of biology that are
common to all humans. What have they to do with the big
things in history? How does knowledge of sex and gender help
us discover some of the truth about the past?
This essay addresses those questions. Surely the California
gold rush qualifies as one of the "Big Things" in history. The
discovery of gold in 1848 set off a human migration that was
truly global in scope. Hundreds of thousands of people from
every continent set off for California. As a national event, the
1. Marc Trachtenberg, one of the historians who spoke about
these issues on
public radio, explained his views more fully in "The Past Under
Siege: A Historian
Ponders the State of his Profession-and What to Do About It,"
Wall Street Journal,
July 17, 1998, reprinted on the H-Net discussion list, H-
SHEAR, Sept. 16, 1998.
Pacific Historical Review ?1999 by the Pacific Coast Branch
American Historical Association 1
2014 14:35:16 PM
2 Pacific Historical Review

gold rush provided a muscular punctuation to the Mexican-
American War as Anglo Americans swept westward and around
the Horn to the gold fields. They were the human "facts on the
ground" who validated the provisions of the Mexican cession
and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.2 Regionally, the gold
rush set a pattern of mineral rushes, industrial mining, and
environmental despoliation that marked the West from the
mid-nineteenth century to the present day.3 The gold rush
earthquake set off political, social, and demographic tremors
that continue to shake the American West and the wider world
as well.4
So how do sex and gender fit into the Big Event? First, a
few basic definitions are in order. I agree with many other
scholars who theorize that gender is a social construction. In
other words, each society construes gender-that is, what it
means to be a "man" or a "woman"-and defines what kind of
behavior is acceptable and desirable. Gender signifies far more
than sexual difference; it is a status that determines power re-
lationships in society. Likewise, sexuality is a social
construction
that varies among cultures. Thus, gender and sexuality are fluid
circumstances of human life, and their manifestations-such as
heterosexual monogamy-are not "natural" biological condi-
tions but constructions that manipulate the range of biological
and social possibilities and that change over time.5
2. Richard Griswold del Castillo, The Treaty of Guadalupe
Hidalgo: A Legacy of
Conflict (Norman, Okla., 1990).
3. Rodman W. Paul, California Gold: The Beginning of Mining
in the Far West
(Cambridge, Mass., 1947); Paul, Mining Frontiers of the Far
West, 1848-1890 (New
York, 1963). Paul's work set the standard for gold rush

scholarship, but there have
been dozens of excellent studies before and after his work was
published. The
most recent is Malcolm J. Rohrbough, Days of Gold: The
California Gold Rush and
the American Nation (Berkeley, 1997).
4. Two excellent papers that explore the far-reaching impacts of
the gold
rush are Gray Brechin, "Nature and the Mining Exchange," and
Allan James,
"Mining California: Impacts on Land and Life," both presented
at "Green and
Gold: California Environments-Memories and Visions,"
University of California,
Santa Cruz, July 30-Aug. 2, 1998.
5. On the construction of gender, see Joan Wallach Scott,
"Gender: A Use-
ful Category of Analysis," in Joan Wallach Scott, ed., Gender
and the Politics of His-
tory (NewYork, 1988), 28-50; Carroll Smith-Rosenberg,
Disorderly Conduct: Visions
of Gender in Victorian America (New York, 1985), 19; Susan
Lee Johnson, "'A Mem-
ory Sweet to Soldiers': The Significance of Gender" (with
commentary by Albert
L. Hurtado and Deena J. Gonzalez) in Clyde A. Milner II, ed., A
New Significance:
2014 14:35:16 PM

Gender and the Gold Rush 3
California-at any time, and especially during the gold
rush-is a particularly complicated place to look at gender and
sexuality. It has always been a multicultural frontier and is
likely
to remain so. Multiculturalism implies that several cultures with
assorted notions of sexuality and gender met and mingled.
Mixing, however, did not lead to amalgamation, at least not on
a large scale. The trend toward separation and domination in
the face of diversity is one of the themes of this essay.
The gold rush is about swift demographic change. In 1848,
before the discovery of gold, perhaps 165,000 people lived in
California. The vast majority of them-approximately
150,000-were Indians, most of whom lived autonomously in
what came to be known as the mother lode and other isolated
regions away from Mexican settlements. Approximately 7,500
Californios and 6,500 other people of American and European
extraction accounted for the rest of the population.6 Then
John Marshall discovered gold, word leaked out, and the rush
to California was on. It is impossible to give more than rough
estimates for the number of hopeful people who poured into
California from 1848 to the early 1850s. No one made an offi-
cial count until the 1850 federal census, and that enumeration
was seriously flawed. The state of California made another stab
at census-taking in 1852, but that effort was also incomplete.
Federal officials finally made a reasonably accurate count for
the 1860 census after the gold rush was over. Flawed as they
are,
these documents consistently describe a population with far
Re-envisioning the History of the American West (New York,
1996), 255-288. On the
history of sexuality, see Michel Foucault, The History of

Sexuality, vol. 1: An Intro-
duction, trans. Robert Hurley (3 vols., New York, 1978); Peter
Gay, The Bourgeois Ex-
perience: Victoria to Freud, vol. 1: Education of the Senses (4
vols., New York, 1984);
John D'Emilio and Estelle Freedman, Intimate Matters: A
History of Sexuality in Amer-
ica (New York, 1988); Jeffrey Weeks, Sexuality (NewYork,
1986). On race and gen-
der in the American West, see Antonia Castafieda, "Women of
Color and the
Rewriting of Western History: The Discourse, Politics, and
Decolonization of His-
tory," Pacific Historical Review, 61 (1992), 501-534; Peggy
Pascoe, "Race, Gender
and Intercultural Relation: The Case of Interracial Marriage," in
Elizabeth Jame-
son and Susan Armitage, eds., Writing the Range: Race, Class,
and Culture in the
Women's West (Norman, Okla., 1997), 69-80.
6. For Indian population, see Sherburne F. Cook, The
Population of the Cali-
fornia Indians, 1769-1970 (Berkeley, 1976), 44. For other
segments of the popu-
lation, see Hubert Howe Bancroft, History of California (7
vols., San Francisco,
1886), 5: 643.
2014 14:35:16 PM

more men than women (see Figure 1). In 1850 there were 12.2
men for each woman in California. The ratio declined to 7.2
men per woman in 1852 and 2.4 men per woman in 1860.7 The
ratio of men to women was even higher in the mining districts
than for the state as a whole, and it held true for every racial
and ethnic category in the censuses-including Indians.8 While
the 1860 ratio was significantly lower than it had been in previ-
ous census years, details for age cohorts show that the older the
population, the higher the ratio of men to women (see Figure
2). These statistics indicate that women came later to Califor-
nia and in smaller numbers than men. Men rushed to Califor-
nia; women ambled. Changes in the sex ratio to 1860 were due
to the immigration of families, births in California, and a mod-
estly growing immigration of single females. In 1860 men who
were over thirty had only a slim chance of marrying a woman
from their own age cohort. Patterns of age and gender imbal-
ance that dated from the gold rush era remained embedded in
the censuses until the twentieth century.9
Historians and contemporary observers have naturalized
the maleness of the gold rush population-even celebrated the
masculine social world that emerged as a result. In 1855 Frank
Soule, John Gihon, and James Nisbet published their firsthand
Table 1
Sex Ratios, California White Population
Year Males per Female
1850 12.2
1852 7.2
1860 2.4
Derived from "Table No. 3-Population Cities, Towns, &c.,"
Joseph G. C. Kennedy, comp., Population of the United States

in 1860
(Washington, D.C., 1864), 30.
7. Derived from "Table No. 3-Population Cities, Towns, &c.,"
Joseph G. C.
Kennedy, comp., Population of the United States in 1860
(Washington, D.C., 1864),
30.
8. Albert L. Hurtado, Indian Survival on the California Frontier
(New Haven,
Conn., 1988), 196.
9. "Supplement for California," Thirteenth Census of the United
States Taken in
the Year 1910, Abstract of the Census (Washington, D.C.,
1913), 598-609.
2014 14:35:16 PM
Table 2
Sex Ratios for White Age Cohorts in 1860
Age Males per Female
15-19 1.2
20-29 3.1
30-39 4.3

Derived from "Table No. 3-Population Cities, Towns, &c.,"
Kennedy, comp., Population of the United States in 1860, 30.
observations of the brief, tumultuous history of California's
first city in Annals of San Francisco. They summarized the dy-
namics of gold and society:
[Gold] Dust was plentier than pleasure, pleasure more enticing
than
virtue. Fortune was the horse, youth in the saddle, dissipation
the
track, and desire the spur. Let none wonder that the time was
the best
ever made.'0
These three men, at least, greeted the wide-open, vice-
ridden advent of the Barbary Coast with unalloyed enthusiasm.
And who should be surprised at a population of young men who
responded positively to the voluptuous opportunities that gold
dust provided?"l In "the States" drinking, gambling, and open
prostitution were condemned, even if they were not completely
expunged from society. Large cities-especially ports-had vice
districts, and the incipient temperance movement had just
begun its long effort to reform Americans' drinking habits.'2
Still, San Francisco and the gold rush towns seemed designed to
satisfy precisely those appetites that reformers damned as un-
Christian and immoral.
10. Frank Soule, John H. Gihon, and James Nisbet, Annals of
San Francisco
(NewYork, 1854), 666.
11. For accounts of the San Francisco high life during the gold
rush and af-
ter, see Herbert Asbury, The Barbary Coast: An Informal
History of the San Francisco

Underworld (New York, 1933); Curt Gentry, The Madams of
San Francisco: An Irrev-
erent History of the City by the Golden Gate (Garden City,
N.Y., 1964); Benson Tong,
Unsubmissive Women: Chinese Prostitutes in Nineteenth-
Century San Francisco (Norman,
Okla., 1994), 93-125.
12. W. J. Rorabaugh, The Alcoholic Republic: An American
Tradition (New York,
1979).
2014 14:35:16 PM
To be sure, the large male population demanded femi-
nized service industries-laundresses, cooks, housekeepers,
seamstresses, and prostitutes. The abundance of gold enabled
men to pay handsomely for such services. This incarnation of
Adam Smith's principle of supply and demand has inspired
some historians to argue that gold rush demography raised the
value of women's labor and enabled them to gain riches in the
gold fields just as male miners and entrepreneurs made their
fortunes. Certainly some women made a good living, bought
property, and achieved a degree of independence that ex-
ceeded the nineteenth-century norm. Some women spoke elo-
quently about their achievements in California businesses.13
Women's independence came at a cost to men who paid
dearly for all kinds of women's labor. Men also set a high value

on women as brides-wives who customarily provided unwaged
labor for domestic duties including child rearing, cooking,
cleaning, and sexual service. I do not mean to imply that men
married merely to obtain a source of cheap labor and free sex,
but rather to emphasize that women's household work had real
economic value to their spouses and to society. Unpaid wives
who cooked, sewed, and cleaned contributed to the general
economy as well as to the hygiene and contentment of their
men. In an industrial economy, even one as primitive as Cali-
fornia's, someone would have to provide these services if men
were to contribute their labor fully and exclusively to the in-
dustry at hand. Even child rearing has an economic value be-
cause it replaces the labor force. This was a lesson in household
economy and subsistence reproduction, as it is called, that Cal-
ifornia men quickly learned.14
Gold rush letters and diaries are full of evidence that men
were incompetent at the basic domestic skills, but the value of
women's work in the California economy was driven by more
13. Rohrbough, Days of Gold, 172-184; Joann Levy, They Saw
the Elephant:
Women in the California Gold Rush (Hamden, Conn., 1990), 91-
107; Paula Mitchell
Marks, Precious Dust: The True Saga of the Western Gold
Rushes (New York, 1995),
337-366.
14. Immanuel Wallerstein, "Household Structures and Labor-
Force Forma-
tion in the Capitalist World-Economy," in Joan Smith,
Immanuel Wallerstein, and
Hans-Dieter Evers, eds., Households and the World-Economy
(Beverly Hills, Calif.,
1984), 18-19; Hans-Dieter Evers, Wolfgang Clauss, and Diana
Wong, "Subsistence

Reproduction: A Framework for Analysis," in ibid., 23-26.
2014 14:35:16 PM
than their superior ability to darn socks, wash long johns, nurse
babies, and change diapers. Henry Sheldon, a Methodist mis-
sionary who did not make much money from his preaching,
soon gained an appreciation of woman's worth after sending
for his Ohio sweetheart to marry. His wife, Priscilla, became
something of a cultural cottage industry in Shasta. In 1854
Brother Sheldon reported that his wife put on a splendid Sun-
day school exhibition and collected $66. She also started a se-
lect school, for which she got $120 per month. The reverend
thought her tuition was too cheap, but he did not want to start
trouble by charging more in the little town. They were also
boarding a little boy and three girls at $30 per month each (ex-
clusive of washing), a business that a bachelor surely would not
have undertaken. In her spare time, limited as it was, Priscilla
gave piano lessons to two pupils and guitar lessons to two oth-
ers. Evidently she borrowed a piano for the lessons (perhaps in
a local saloon). The reverend intended to get a piano for
Priscilla so she could take more students. Priscilla took in more
than $300 in June from these pursuits, while her preaching
husband found offerings in his collection plate that varied from
$12 to $15 per week.15 Brother Sheldon may have made addi-
tional money laboring in the mines or in some other way, but
he never commented on such things. Surely Priscilla's value as
a teacher was enhanced in California because of the scarcity of
women in the mining districts. Perhaps because of Priscilla's

gender, Shastans were willing to pay far more for cultural edifi-
cation than for religious uplift. It would be too much to say that
Brother Sheldon got his living by selling sex, but gender seems
to have been a marketable commodity.
The rarity of females in the mines led men to do extraor-
dinarily foolish things when women appeared. William M.
Stew-
art, a California miner who later became U.S. senator from
Nevada, left a particularly colorful description of such an en-
counter. One morning in 1850 near Nevada City Stewart no-
ticed a wagon with a woman's dress on a nearby clothesline.
"When I saw the feminine raiment I raised the usual alarm,
'Oh Joe!"' Stewart recalled, "and this called the attention of
15. Henry B. Sheldon to his father, July 5, 1854, Henry B.
Sheldon Collec-
tion, California Room, California State Library, Sacramento.
2014 14:35:16 PM
the miners on Buckeye Hill, where I was, to the clothesline
which had attracted my notice. They gathered around on the
hill, nearly surrounding the covered wagon and its contents."16
Soon there were two or three thousand young men surround-
ing the wagon and clothesline. A young husband came out to
ascertain what had attracted the mob, but his terrified wife re-
mained in the wagon. Stewart, who showed leadership poten-
tial even then, took up a collection to entice the frightened

woman from the wagon. Soon miners were pulling nuggets
from their pokes, and Stewart held out a tidy pile for the
woman if she would show herself. (Stewart does not say
whether or not she was clothed for this exercise.) Finally she
came out, and Stewart held the prize just beyond her reach
while the woman chased after it like a carrot on a stick, "so the
boys could have a good view of her," he said. "I suppose half an
hour was occupied with her running back and forth while the
boys looked on in admiration, when I finally gave her the bag
with all the good wishes of the camp. She grabbed it and ran
into the tent like a rabbit."17
The rarity of white women was matched by the scarcity of
white children. Many observers commented on the sentimen-
tality of miners when they saw a child who reminded them of
home, hearth, and domesticity. But there were ribald jokes, too.
In the same year that William Stewart discovered a woman near
Nevada City, John Paul Dart heard about "a man on the other
side of the hill [who] had found a specimen on the Stanislaus
that weighed 18 pounds." Thinking that it was a chunk of gold,
he went to the place and asked the owner to show it to him.
"'Certainly,' says he and went in the tent and brought out a boy
baby about two months old. 'That is it,' says, he, but he didn't
have the laugh all on his side. I told him I thought if he would
continue to dig in the same old claim, he would probably find
another. Somebody else asked him if he had reached the edge
[of his claim] yet. The mother was a regular Californian," Dart
said, "and enjoyed the joke."'8
16. William M. Stewart, Reminiscences of Senator William M.
Stewart of Nevada,
ed. George Rothwell Brown (New York, 1908), 64.
17. Ibid.
18. John Paul Dart to brother, Dec. 26, 1850, John Paul Dart
Collection, Cal-

ifornia Room, California State Library, Sacramento.
2014 14:35:16 PM
Dart also remarked on a newspaper report concerning
"the arrival of two ships, from France, with over 300 women
aboard. Gads, what a rich cargo." He reckoned that the women
would be "worth their weight in gold." "The imports of Cali-
fornia are richer than the exports," he added.19 Dart's observa-
tion about the "worth" of the French women implies that he
thought of them as commodities-prostitutes-an assumption
that may have been rooted purely in his ethnocentric beliefs
about the supposed immorality of French women. Still, the
gold rush attracted prostitutes from around the world. Miners
funneled much of their hard-earned gold dust through San
Francisco, which quickly became a center of wealth that at-
tracted prostitutes.20 Henry B. Sheldon, the Methodist mis-
sionary with a keen eye for wrong-doers, reported to his family
that in San Francisco prostitutes numbered "nearly one thou-
sand and there are no villages of any size in the country where
they are not to be found-They are the aristocracy." Courtesans
rode in "the most splendid carriages, and on the most showy
studs."21
As these examples show, the scarcity of women tended to
raise their economic value, whether as prostitutes, cooks, seam-
stresses, or laundresses.22 Likewise, historians and contempo-
rary observers contend, the scarcity of women raised their

social value in California. At the very least, scarcity made men
appreciate women more. Everywhere Californians remarked on
the extreme deference that men paid to women. However,
women had to "conduct themselves with the strictest propriety
or be cast from the pale of good society," Sheldon reported, be-
cause of the presence of so many prostitutes.23
Men certainly deferred to some women during the gold
rush, but what if we introduce race and class into the equation?
In the early years of the gold rush-say, until 1851 or 1852-
there were many Indian women in the state, although their
19. Ibid.
20. For general accounts of prostitution, see Asbury, The
Barbary Coast;, Gen-
try, The Madams of San Francisco; Tong, Unsubmissive
Women, 93-125.
21. H. B. Sheldon to Dear Friends, June 25, 1852, Sheldon
Collection; em-
phasis in original.
22. Rohrbough, Days of Gold, 172-184.
23. Sheldon to Dear Friends, June 25, 1852, Sheldon Collection.
2014 14:35:16 PM
numbers were declining rapidly. No one will be surprised to
hear that white men extended few courtesies to Indian women.

Blinded by racial prejudices and decades of frontier warfare,
Anglo Californians seldom had a kind word for native women.
Even Dame Shirley, that paragon of gold rush observers, could
muster little sympathy for Indian women. "They are very filthy
in their appearance," she wrote. "If one of them should venture
out into the rain, grass would grow on her neck and arms."24
On another occasion she compared them with "Macbethian
witches" for their "haggardness of expression and ugliness of
feature."25
Most white men were at least as critical of Indian beauty as
Dame Shirley, although a few of them took Indian wives.26
Such
alliances of convenience were seldom solemnized by church rit-
ual or state license. These were the sort of custom marriages
that were prominent among mountain men and fur traders in
the nineteenth century.27 John A. Sutter, founder of New Hel-
vetia where Sacramento now stands, is a prime example of this
pattern. Sutter, who left his lawful spouse and children in
Switzerland, pioneered in the Sacramento Valley in the 1840s.
As lord of New Helvetia, Sutter kept Hawaiian and Indian mis-
tresses. Some observers claimed that Sutter fathered several
children by these women. Sutter's ways began to change when
his oldest son unexpectedly arrived in California in 1848. The
following year Sutter's son-evidently with his father's assent-
financed passage for the rest of the family to California. The
Sutter family reunion, however reluctant the patriarch may
have been, put an end to his philandering with women of
color. Other white men also abandoned their Indian consorts
as soon as white spouses became available and when the devel-
24. Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clapp, The Shirley Letters
from the California
Mines, 1851-1852, ed. Carl I. Wheat (New York, 1949), 148-
149.

25. Ibid., 14.
26. Hurtado, Indian Survival, 173-175.
27. Albert L. Hurtado, "When Strangers Met: Sex and Gender
on Three
Frontiers," in Jameson and Armitage, eds., Writing the Range,
130-133; William
Swagerty, "Marriage and Settlement Patterns of the Rocky
Mountain Trappers and
Traders," Western Historical Quarterly, 11 (1980), 159-180;
Jennifer S. H. Brown,
Strangers in Blood: Fur Trade Companies in Indian Country
(Vancouver, B.C., 1980),
73-74, 111-130, 199-230; Sylvia Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties:
Women in Fur Trade So-
ciety, 1670-1870 (Norman, Okla., 1980), 28-52, 231-242.
2014 14:35:16 PM
opment of frontier society made Indian marriages an embar-
rassing reminder of past conditions.28 Men who persisted in
liv-
ing with native women earned the racist sobriquet "squaw
men," and their children were known as "half-breeds"-slurs
that condemned racial mixing.29
It is impossible to know the number of custom marriages
in California, nor is it possible to quantify the incidence of
rape. In the latter case, however, we know that the newspapers

and agents of the Office of Indian Affairs and U.S. Army offi-
cers routinely complained about assaults on Indian women.30
Some observers went so far as to say that rapes were one of the
principal causes of warfare in California-a strong accusation
in a frontier country where conflict with Indians was more or
less constant.31 Clearly, some men cared little for the niceties
of
gender relations when it came to women of color. What were
the root causes of sexual violence? Most students of rape argue
that assaults on women are attempts to assert power over the
victims. Rapists often believe that their prey is especially
blame-
worthy.32 In gold rush California, so lately conquered in the
Mexican-American War, women of color were obvious targets
for racist assailants, rapists and murderers alike. One gold rush
hunter reported that he bagged "two grizzlys, one Antelope,
and a digger squaw este noche," an ambiguous statement that
may have had sexual as well as violent meaning.33
Victorian notions about frail womanhood did not prevent
some men from systematically murdering Indian women. One
of the worst, but by no means the only, of these gendered mass
killings occurred at Humboldt Bay in 1860. Bret Harte, a young
newspaper reporter who subsequently became famous as the au-
thor of sentimental short stories about the gold rush, reported
that several bands of white men mercilessly slaughtered about
28. Hurtado, Indian Survival 62-65; Iris H. W. Engstrand, 'John
Sutter: A Bi-
ographical Examination," in Kenneth N. Owens, ed., John Sutter
and a Wider West
(Lincoln, Nebr., 1994), 81-82.
29. Hurtado, Indian Survival, 175-178.
30. San Francisco Bulletin, Sept. 13, 1856, quoted in Robert F.
Heizer, ed., The

Destruction of the California Indians (Santa Barbara, Calif.,
1974), 278.
31. Sacramento Union, Oct. 1, 1858, quoted in ibid., 279-280.
32. I extend this argument in Hurtado, Indian Survival, 182-187.
33. "Roop House Register, 1854-1857," manuscript, California
Room, Cali-
fornia State Library, Sacramento.
2014 14:35:16 PM
150 Indians who lived peaceably around Humboldt Bay. One
contingent attacked a sleeping Indian community on a small is-
land in front of Eureka, killing three men and fifty-seven
women and children.34 Tribesmen brought some of their mur-
dered kin to Union where Harte saw them. "Old women, wrin-
kled and decrepit, lay weltering in blood, their brains dashed
out and dabbled with their long gray hair," he wrote in the
Northern Californian. He saw "infants scarcely a span long,
with
their faces cloven with hatchets and their bodies ghastly with
wounds." As these vulnerable people "huddled together for pro-
tection like sheep, they were struck down with hatchets."35
Nor were Indians the only women of color who were sub-
ject to violence. The lynching of the Mexican woman Juanita
(also known as Josefa) is a well-known gold rush incident, for
she was the only woman to die at the hands of a lynch mob. On

the Fourth of July 1851 she was living in Downieville with a
Mex-
ican gambler. While celebrating the national holiday, Joe Can-
non, a popular young Englishman, evidently knocked in the
Mexican couple's door. The next morning he went to the shack
to apologize. Juanita, who understood little English, perhaps
thought Cannon was going to attack her lover; according to
some accounts, she reacted to Cannon calling her a prostitute.
In any case, she killed Cannon with a Bowie knife. A mob gath-
ered, assembled a kangaroo court, and condemned Juanita to
hang. All accounts agree that she ascended the makeshift scaf-
fold without assistance, adjusted the noose so that it did not tan-
gle her hair, and went to her death with uncommon courage.
On the gallows she said that she would do the same thing again
if her honor was similarly affronted. Then the mob hanged
her.36
Some believed that the hanging of Juanita was justified,
34. William F. Strobridge, Regulars in the Redwoods: The U.S.
Army in Northern
California, 1852-1861 (Spokane, Wash., 1994), 204-205.
35. Harte quoted in Richard O'Connor, Bret Harte: A Biography
(Boston,
1966), 45.
36. For some firsthand accounts see D. P. Barstow, "Statement
of Recollec-
tions of 1849-51," Bancroft Library, University of California,
Berkeley; George
Barton, "A Double Tragedy in the Mines: Hanging of Mexican
Woman, Juanita,
at Downieville, Sierra County, in 1851," The Grizzly Bear
(Nov. 1923), 4; Milt Go-
tardi, ed., "The Hanging of Juanita," Sierra County Historical

Society Bulletin, 2 (Dec.
20, 1970), 13-31.
2014 14:35:16 PM
but most Californians condemned it. Newspaper editors were
appalled that Downieville men had hanged a woman, regard-
less of the provocation.37 Likewise, some eyewitnesses con-
demned the lynching of a woman on principles of gender as
well as due process.38 The nineteenth-century philosopher-
historian, Josiah Royce, was horrified that the mob had killed
a woman, and modern historians--with justification-have ar-
gued that Juanita would not have been hanged if she had been
an Anglo American woman.39
Such incidents take us a long way from the sentimental
forty-niner who doffed his hat and bowed to every woman he
was lucky enough to meet. Singular as it was, it was not mere
chance that made the Mexican Juanita the only woman to be
lynched in California. When white pillagers burned Indian
communities, raped Indian women, and then murdered them
with axes, their corpses were not inadvertent collateral damage.
Race trumped gender in California.
Class trumped gender, too, even among whites. The haunt-
ing story of Amelia Kuschinsky shows how dangerous sex and
gender could be for a poor working girl. I use the term "girl"
for two reasons. First, her contemporaries called her a girl, and
she probably applied the term to herself. Second, "girl" is em-

blematic of the power relationship that doomed her. In the late
1850s, at age fourteen or perhaps even younger, Amelia was a
servant in the home of a Shasta merchant named August
Stiller, his wife, and three children. The Stillers were from
Prus-
sia and Wurtemburg, and Amelia was probably from Europe as
well. Someone, probably Stiller, got Amelia pregnant when she
was fifteen. After trying to abort her pregnancy using folk
reme-
dies, the Stillers called in a local physician, another German
who was sympathetic to the Stillers' desire to keep the matter
private. The doctor, or perhaps someone else, evidently used in-
37. "A Woman Hung at Downieville," San Francisco Daily Alta,
July 9, 1851,
p. 2; "The Hanging at Downieville," ibid., July 14, 1851, p. 2;
"The Downieville
Tragedy," ibid., Jan. 29, 1852, p. 2.
38. Barton, "A Double Tragedy," 4; Barstow, "Statement of
Recollections."
39. Josiah Royce, California, from the Conquest in 1846 to the
Second Vigilance
Committee in San Francisco (Boston, 1886), 368-374;
Illustrated History of Plumas,
Lassen, and Sierra Counties (San Francisco, 1882), 445-447;
Leonard Pitt, The De-
cline of the Californios: A Social History of the Spanish-
Speaking Californians, 1846-1890
(Berkeley, 1966), 73-74; Levy, They Saw the Elephant, 85-88.
2014 14:35:16 PM

struments to abort the fetus, but something went wrong. He
perforated her uterus, an infection took root, and peritonitis
killed her after a terrible, painful illness. After an autopsy a fu-
rious mob threatened to lynch the physician and Stiller, but the
sheriff arrested them and held them for trial. Abortion was il-
legal in California, and some thought the two should be tried
for murder. Evidence at trial proved inconclusive, and the men
went free.40
Amelia's short life and death tell us that even white
women-especially poor white women-were subject to sexual
abuse during the gold rush. Her youth, servant status, and pos-
sibly her foreign birth made her vulnerable to molestation. Ar-
guably, the demographic conditions that were supposed to
benefit women also put them at risk. Imagine being one
woman among a hundred sexually alert young men. Imagine
living in a community where most other women were prosti-
tutes, circumstances that several women commented on.41
Would you feel somehow empowered in this situation? How
would you regard the men who patronized the whores? Would
you want to reinforce the boundaries in a stratified society that
placed you above some women? Demography gave an advan-
tage to women of the right race (whites, especially Anglo-
phones) and class-the middling sort and above. Poor women
took their chances. Women of color were among the ranks of
the despised who were subject to the whims of individuals and
the mob.
Still, it must be admitted that white women who wished to
marry found California a very fertile field for investment. Con-
versely, the majority of men could not marry in California.

They
either remained single, returned east, or sent for brides. In
short, there was a crisis in the marriage market. The crisis was
evident in the lives of the Bullard family. Benjamin and Eleanor
Bullard emigrated from Michigan to California with their three
sons and five daughters in 1853. The family settled in Sacra-
40. Inquest on Amelia Kuschinsky, March 15, 1860, Shasta
County, Records
of the Clerk, Coroner's Inquests, Shasta College Museum,
Redding, Calif.; "A Case
of Abortion and Death," Shasta Courier, March 17, 1860, p. 2;
"The Abortion Case,"
Shasta Courier, March 24, 1860, p. 2.
41. See, for example, Mrs. D. B. Bates, Incidents on Land and
Water, or Four
Years on the Pacific Coast (Boston, 1860), 317-318.
2014 14:35:16 PM
mento where they operated boarding houses. The oldest son,
William, worked in the mines in Timbuctoo, Yuba County,
while
the daughters remained with their parents. "Girls are bound to
get married in this country," brother William said, and were in
"no danger of living to be old mades [sic] here."42 Mary, one of
his sisters, explained that "California is a fast country and a girl
gets to be a young lady at twelve." Another sister, Caroline,

who
was evidently in her early teens, soon had to beat the boys off
with a stick. "Caroline has got to be a regular heart smasher,"
Mary revealed. "If you could only see the beaux that she has,
and their hearts are ready to break on her account. Oh you
would pity them."43 Caroline married a prosperous man when
she was sixteen, and her other sisters also married well and
quickly, except for Mary who died of tuberculosis.
Poor brother William, a successful miner, waited for years
to find a mate, but it was not for want of effort. He corre-
sponded with a young cousin in Michigan and thought he had
a chance to lure her to California, but she disappointed him.
Still, perhaps she could help. In his town of Timbuctoo there
was "one Girle... & I should judge thare was about two hun-
dred young men from the age of 20 to 30 years." The rest of
the mining towns had similar conditions. "Now... you see that
the chances are slim for me to get a wife in California (for
Squaw time is about over...) so I think I shall have to go back
to Michigan to get a Wife." If she knew of a young woman who
wanted a husband, 'just tell her that I am the chap."44 In the
case of Indian women, William would not allow his desire for a
wife to override his racial preferences, but he had other preju-
dices, too. When he announced that there would be a Fourth
of July ball a few miles from his mine, he declared that "as I
don't like the kind I shant go. (The kind are Irish)," he added.45
William was not so picky as long as the woman met his racial,
ethnic, and probably religious preferences. "If one of your Sis-
ters would like to hitch teams with your California Cousin just
42. William Bullard to Julia Bullard, March 5, 1862, Bullard
Collection, Cal-
ifornia Room, California State Library, Sacramento.
43. Mary Bullard to Dear Aunt, June 3, 1857, ibid.
44. William Bullard to Dear Cousin [Julia], April 1, 1859, ibid.

45. William Bullard to Julia Bullard, June 29, 1862, ibid.
2014 14:35:16 PM
tell her to say so," he pleaded.46 None of them did, but the
"honest miner," as he called himself, finally hit pay dirt in
1868,
fifteen years after he had arrived in California. He married
Mary Farrell, a native of Ireland.47 To marry in California,
William had to relax at least one of his prejudices.
Not only was it difficult for men to marry in California, it
was comparatively hard for men to keep their wives. "The devil
gets in the women here, or perhaps it comes out of them. I sus-
pect the latter," John Dart wrote. "Eight women in ten that
comes leaves their husbands."48 "It is rather a dangerous thing
to marry a woman here for fear that some hombre will prose-
cute you or her for bigamy," Dart claimed.49 He exaggerated
but identified another effect of the crisis in the gold rush mar-
riage market. Women could leave their old husbands for new
ones who were richer or who otherwise suited them better.
If the devil motivated women to leave their husbands, Cal-
ifornia's divorce law permitted them to do so with relative ease.
Women and men could sue for divorce on grounds of natural
impotency, adultery, extreme cruelty, willful desertion, neglect,
fraud, and conviction of a felony. The state legislature and
courts progressively liberalized divorce law throughout the
nineteenth century. Aggrieved wives and husbands alike took

advantage of this law, but more women than men sued for di-
vorce. Californians divorced at a much greater rate than other
Americans, a difference that increased during the nineteenth
century. By 1880 the ratio of married to divorced couples in
California (239 to 1) was about half that of the United States
as a whole (481 to 1).50
Not all Californians were satisfied with the California di-
vorce law. When the legislature considered the 1851 divorce
bill, editors of the Alta (a San Francisco newspaper) categori-
cally denounced it and all divorce laws:
They are all reprehensible, all opposed to good morals, all at
variance
46. William Bullard to Cousin Julia, Oct. 12, 1862, ibid.
47. Collection Description, ibid.
48. John Paul Dart to brother, Dec. 7, 1853, Dart Collection.
49. Ibid.
50. Robert L. Griswold, Family and Divorce in California,
1850-1890: Victorian
Illusions and Everyday Realities (Albany, N.Y., 1982), 18-20,
28, 30-31.
2014 14:35:16 PM
with the principle of marriage, all tending to encourage
immorality,

dissatisfaction and alienation of feeling, all incompatible with
the
great source whence the civilized world draws its ideas of the
sanctity
of an oath and the sacredness of the marriage contract, all an
insult
to the Bible and the principles of Christianity.51
Unhappy California spouses could always discard their mates
and obtain more suitable replacements, and, the editors fumed,
women fished "for partners with as much unconcern as ever
Isaac Walton flung a fly upon the surface of a brook."52 "Cali-
fornia is becoming notorious for the rapid, steam-engine man-
ner in which the family tie is severed," said the Alta, "and it has
almost come to be considered that there is an alienating qual-
ity in our very air."53
Alienating qualities were not located in the air but in the
demographic imbalances of California's population. There
were too many men competing for too few women. This basic
fact was plain in the operation of the marriage market where
women had many opportunities to marry and men had few.
The same forces that impelled the marriage market drove the
divorce mill. Relatively lax divorce proceedings in the Golden
State certainly presented new opportunities and options to
women, but dissolutions of marriage are best understood in
economic rather than feminist terms. Whatever the legal and
moral arguments for divorce may have been, divorce added
women to the marriage market-if only briefly-where men
could select them. The general effect of liberalized divorce was
to redistribute scarce resources-women-in the competitive
and inflated gold rush economy. Of course, the marriage mar-
ket did not operate according to strict laws of supply and de-
mand, nor did buyers and sellers follow only their own best
material interests. Emotional, social, religious, and other factors
were also at work. Still, it is noteworthy that, without

prompting
from women, a government of men enacted a law that made it
easier for women to dissolve their marriages. This statute ben-
efited some of California's horde of single men as well as the
dissatisfied wives whom it briefly liberated.
51. "Concerning Divorce," San Francisco Daily Alta, Jan. 26,
1851, p. 2.
52. Ibid.
53. [Untitled], ibid., June 12, 1854, p. 2.
2014 14:35:16 PM
Divorce was not intended to free women or to provide
them with new opportunities outside of marriage. The conju-
gal couple, their offspring, and the nuclear family were con-
sidered the ideal social condition for Californians, just as they
were for other Anglo Americans. Courtship, marriage, and
even divorce (insofar as it led to remarriage) reinforced famil-
iar social, racial, and gender patterns that prevailed in the
states. Was the gold rush era "the best ever made," as The
Annals
of San Francisco put it? Perhaps it was for some young men
who
were emancipated for the first time from the restraints of home
and family. But most men seemed to value the common do-
mestic arrangements they had once known, mourned their ab-
sence, and hoped for their replication in the Golden State.
Some white women who were willing to play the marriage mar-

ket may well have thought of the gold rush as the best of times.
But for others the blessings were mixed according to their race,
class, and gender.
So, what did sex and gender have to do with the Big Event?
Ideas about gender influenced the basic makeup of California
society. Anglo Americans had no doubts about the superiority
of their way of life compared to Mexican, Indian, and other
Californians, and their ideas about gender were no exception.
For Anglo Americans, the centripetal forces of homogeneity,
cul-
tural conformity, and continuity mastered the weaker centrifu-
gal forces of diversity and cultural change. The gold rush dis-
tributed the benefits and liabilities of sex unequally according
to gender, race, and class. Only the most attractive men-how-
ever attraction may be defined-operated advantageously in
the marriage market. Some white women transcended their
class by marrying men who had profited in the gold fields;
some did not. In most cases nonwhite women were considered
suitable only for sexual gratification as prostitutes or temporary
helpmeets until more fitting potential spouses arrived. Worse,
some white men easily put aside Victorian ideas about the "gen-
tler sex" so that they could rape and murder Indian women. All
women who used their bodies to attract men, whether as pros-
titutes or prospective spouses, ran significant risks-pregnancy,
botched abortions, venereal diseases, and death. In the end,
ideas about sex and gender influenced hundreds of thousands
2014 14:35:16 PM

of individual decisions about marriage, family, and community
relations. In turn, those decisions shaped the future population
of California. Gender and sexuality were not trivial particulari-
ties that revealed only the incidental "natural" events of indi-
viduals' lives; they were fundamental threads woven into the
fabric of culture and historical experience-the rudiments of
life and death.
2014 14:35:16 PM
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jspArticle
Contentsp. 1p. 2p. 3p. 4p. 5p. 6p. 7p. 8p. 9p. 10p. 11p. 12p.
13p. 14p. 15p. 16p. 17p. 18p. 19Issue Table of ContentsPacific
Historical Review, Vol. 68, No. 1 (Feb., 1999), pp. 1-143Front
MatterIn This Issue [pp. -]Sex, Gender, Culture, and a Great
Event: The California Gold Rush [pp. 1-19]Opposing
Negotiations: China and the Vietnam Peace Talks, 1965-1968
[pp. 21-49]Poisons in the Fields: The United Farm Workers,
Pesticides, and Environmental Politics [pp. 51-77]Research
NoteNot Just the Quiet People: The Nisei Underclass [pp. 78-
94]Reviews of BooksReview: untitled [pp. 95-96]Review:
untitled [pp. 97-98]Review: untitled [pp. 98-100]Review:

untitled [pp. 136-137]Review: untitled [pp. 137-139]Historical
News [pp. 140-143]Back Matter

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