H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by [EMAIL PROTECTED] (February, 2000)
J. S. Holliday. _Rush for Riches: Gold Fever and the Making of
California_. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: Oakland Museum of
California and University of California Press, 1999. xi + 354 pp.
Maps, illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $55.00 (40.00
sterling) cloth, ISBN 0-520-21401-3; $29.95 (19.95) paper, ISBN
0-520-21402-1.
Reviewed for H-California by R. A. Burchell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
Eccles Centre for American Studies, The British Library, London, UK
A Rich Contribution to Gold Rush Historiography
This must be the most handsome book in print today on its subject,
as befits a volume connected to an exhibition. The exhibition, held
at the Oakland Museum of California, to mark the 150th anniversary
of the discovery of gold in California and the subsequent gold rush,
was itself connected to four separate travelling exhibitions, a
fifth produced for the California Council for the Humanities, a
national gold rush symposium, many diverse public programmes, the
manufacture of statewide educational materials for the public
schools, two exhibition catalogues and the present volume. Such a
plethora of interconnected activities certainly required a volume of
the highest quality and in _Rush for riches_ they found it.
The volume opens with a survey of California life before the gold
discoveries. It reminds us that the first use of the name California
came in a Spanish novel about a mythical island, which may prompt
the response that there has been much myth connected to the region
ever since. Reflecting modern scholarship the author does not
reproduce Gertrude Atherton's view of pre-Gold Rush California as
splendid and idle, though he clearly feels there can be too great a
pursuit of pleasure. He notes the sombre fact that the indigenous
population melted away, as the nineteenth century phrase had it, but
not as its users were wont to infer, as the result of the warm
breath of Providence, but because newcomers brought diseases against
which there was no appeal, no way of circumventing. The newcomers
were few in number: in 1846 Oregon had more settlers than
California, partly because land titles were so clouded in late
Mexican times. The social, political, military and economic
situation at the end of Mexican rule can be gauged from the fact
that when the Mexican authorities surrendered Monterey to the
victorious Americans, they did not possess a flag to lower.
Chapter two deals with what the author calls a "Free for all". It
covers the year 1848 and the gradual spread of the realization that
the gold discoveries were real, extensive, generally accessible,
open to individual and small-partnership effort, and egalitarian, if
capricious. The author illustrates the story by mentioning
individuals, men like Sam Brannan and Charles Weber. This opens up a
problem that faces all general histories of the gold rush which use
such examples, for arguably neither man was a typical gold-seeker.
Unlike the many they saw commerce, real estate speculation,
transportation or agriculture as the routes to riches and unlike the
many they had capital to invest. They were not miners, though
admittedly they could not have succeeded had there been no
Argonauts. In one way the problem is connected to the sources. While
surviving caches of letters, well used in the present volume, do
give some idea how the ordinary, if usually very literate,
gold-miner behaved, surviving sources as a whole are better on those
who did extremely well from the rushes. Theirs were the stories
collected and retold as the pioneer generation passed away and a
flood of highly self-regarding biographical sketches were gathered
into commemorative volumes. These works were usually financed by
those who were included. Consequently,the rich were presented as
representative, but the books made no mention of the hundreds who
died and the thousands that returned east now aware that goldmining
was a form of gambling and that gamblers, particularly amateurs,
have always lost.
But what this chapter succeeds in doing is making clear how
important it was that the federal government abdicated its
responsibilities both to the Indians, onto whose lands the incomers
poured without invitation or sense of obligation, and to the common
weal, permitting private individuals to plunder the public domain in
a way which would it would never have done had other kinds of
property been involved.
The third chapter on worldwide contagion is slightly odd in its
accent on France and its silence on Great Britain and Ireland, not
to mention Australia's Sydney Ducks. _Punch_ could have provided the
author with some telling cartoons, the advertisement pages of the
London _Times_ further examples of crackpot technology to go along
with the illustration of the advertisement put out by Rufus Porter.
Porter, who founded _Scientific American_, promised to carry
goldseekers by air to California from New York, in something that
looked like a very primitive ancestor of the airships of the 1930s.
The author has presumably decided that we have had more than enough
of the overland journey from the eastern United States, since this
is not highlighted, though it is recalled. The chapter ends with the
Argonauts of '49 not always safely in their mining camps facing the
rains of the Californian winter.
The fourth chapter "Careless Freedoms", recounts the society of
1849, one that appeared in such a state of flux, almost anarchy,
certainly a great contrast to the steadier, more hierarchical, more
family-orientated east. It plots the beginnings of American San
Francisco and the origins of the postal service which failed
spectacularly to deliver the mail. It shows how, in the face of
Congressional deadlock, Californians created their own government
and how they gave more rights to women than was customary, partly to
attract not women of the night but "women of fortune". In the mines
it was becoming ever more necessary to band together to build
flumes, divert streams, dig ditches, construct dams, for it had
become clear that gold lay most accessibly on streambeds. But as the
year passed some of the implications of haphazard, uncontrolled,
almost heedless development, began to be seen. Fires destroyed San
Francisco time and again; floods washed away puny dams and ditches.
Mud and debris became more common.
Chapter five, "The getahead years," covers the 1850s. The themes
evident in the last chapter replay ever more loudly. The author
tells us in his introduction that he has been much influenced by
Robert L. Kelley's _Gold vs. Grain: The Mining Debris Controversy_,
originally published in 1959 and his debt becomes ever clearer. The
1850s increasingly showed a society ignorant of the law of the
commons, that the selfish, unceasing desire to maximise individual
gain without reference to general needs and obligations, was leading
ever more frequently to catastrophes, but while bigger remained
better for Californians, they were their own worst enemies.
Fortunately, as many readers may feel, it is often the case that
hubris leads to nemesis and this, the author implies, was
increasingly the case here.
The chapter also deals with the founding of Californian agriculture
and the preservation of law and order. Historians of the American
West, including California, fall roughly into three camps. There are
those who argue that the West was not particularly lawless, indeed
was remarkable in its respect for private property and the sanctity
of human life (within the white community). There are those who
stress inter-communal violence, not quite the same as lawlessness,
but something that produced the most shaming episodes of the late
nineteenth century West. And then there are the traditionalists who
like to see law and order as recreated on the frontier in the face
of great threats, by the operation of citizen democracy, of decent
individuals wresting control from often corrupt institutions. These
writers praise Committees of Vigilance as central to the American
tradition of resuming power to the people when the elected
authorities failed.
Early writing on lawlessness and law and order in California almost
entirely took this line. It was not until the 1960s that historians
began to question the complexion of both the Committees of Vigilance
and their victims, which the present author does not do. Indeed he
accepts the Committees on their own terms, producing in passing
perhaps the only suspect sentence in the book: "Statistics from the
district attorney for San Francisco affirm the gracious amenability
of sheriffs and judges to timely bribes: for 1,200 murders
committed in the city between 1850 and 1853, the official legal
system managed to sentence and convict only one defendant."(p. 174).
Surely Roger Lotchin, included in the bibliography, exposed the
misleading character of these statistics some decades ago.
The sixth chapter, "Astounding enterprises", takes the story to
Nevada, so much a Californian colony in the nineteenth century,
where silver discoveries augmented and extended gold. A careless
rhetorical question "Where else but in this unique society would
Irish and Chinese compete (sometimes fighting in the streets) for
jobs as they did in San Francisco in 1877?" should bring the answer
Queensland or New South Wales, but leaving that aside, the author
carefully shows the increasing inegalitarianism of society,
especially after the rewards of the Nevada mines fell into fewer and
fewer hands and the new Central Pacific Railroad ennobled its caste
of four.
Meanwhile technological advances were making hydraulic mining
increasingly effective in the sense of bringing down ever larger
hillsides and more widely influential in the sense of requiring more
and more timber and hence deforestation and more and more
acquiescence from farmers whose lands were disappearing below the
consequent mining debris brought down from the mountains by the
annual floods. Gradually, however, farmers came together to begin
the fight to curtail hydraulic mining. Like many since then they
sadly came to realise that political pressure would not work against
powerful vested interests but that recourse to the courts might. By
the middle 1870s they were ready for the legal fray but in short
order discovered the great weakness in the new strategy: the
sloth-like pace of the law, with its appeal procedures; its often
perverse decisions based on narrow legal considerations
Nonetheless, as the last chapter shows, in the end grain beat gold
and as so often within capitalism it was a body of capitalists
pursuing their own economic self-interest that produced what was a
more socially conscious policy. This last chapter is in one sense
the most important in the book in defining why it is so different
from most histories of the Gold Rush which seldom venture past the
early 1850s. It is but one of the reasons why the work deserves to
become one of the definitive surveys of its subject.
At the same time, however, it also reminds us how much we still do
not know about the Gold Rush. Questions remain: what percentage of
the Argonauts prospered and to what degree? How was capital raised
for the mining ventures; who provided it? The work has references
to foreign sources of capital, particularly British, but no one
knows what percentage came to California from abroad. Furthermore
the work does not always tell us what we already know. We hear
nothing of labour unions in the mines or the struggle for the
eight-hour day in San Francisco. The floating rural proletariat, so
evident by the 1870s, or the urban underclass which slept in
roominghouses and relied on episodic employment are not part of the
story here. That this is so is a result of the book's great
strength, its exposition of its theme of the effects of untrammeled
exploitation on the environment. But we need a work to complement
this, on the effects on those who came west to fail in their desire
to find gold and better their material lives significantly.
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Louis Proyect
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