California Gold Rush Research Papers

The California Gold Rush was a period of regional insanity.  At one point, so many abandoned ships filled San Francisco harbor that the port was effectively closed.  The crews had run off to the gold fields.  What this national fever created was something more than history.  It became myth, legend, apocrypha, and collective memories based on history.  Susan Lee Johnson’s Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush is an exploration of forgotten history.  It has become vogue in historical circles to bring out the tales of those not included in traditional (i.e. white male) history, “stories not customarily nourished by the dominant culture”.  Johnson devotes her efforts to doing just that with the Gold Rush.

Most traditional histories of America start on the East Coast and move westward.  Reaching California became a matter of Manifest Destiny, as the United States expanded in that direction.  But as other historians such as Richard White (It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own) and Patricia Nelson Limerick (Legacy of Conquest) have pointed out, there was a significant population for whom California, Texas, Arizona, etc. was el Norte, the North.  Not everyone came to the Gold Rush camps from the East.  Johnson begins her account with the narrative history of the Gold Rush bandit Joaquin Murrierta.

For Anglos, Murrierta was a bandit, whose eventual killing, decapitation and display of the severed head was a triumph of law and order.  Hispanic people, especially the many branches of the Murrierta family have a different story.  For them, the Gold Rush is “a series of outrages upon their people”.  In this version of the story, Murrieta and his male relatives were taking revenge upon Anglos who had attacked their family.  The Murrierta family also serves as an example of the way in which “the West” is a misnomer.  Theirs was a family that had been migrating north for three centuries, towards the outreaches of the Old Spanish Empire.  They reached Sonora in the waning days of Spanish control, and established lives in the three main activities considered stereotypical “Western”: “digging gold, raising stock, and fighting Indians”.

Johnson points out, that contrary to popular myth that “the world rushed in” to Northern California in 1849, mig ration to the region was concentrated from certain regions, and subject to both the allure of capitalism and geopolitical realities.  “Mexico and Chile sent more immigrant north to California than any other Latin American nation did”.  But immigration patterns from these two newly independent nations were different, and characterized the mining camps in different ways.  Those who came from Sonora, like the Murrieta clan, left for California because of years of political and social chaos and war.

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