| During the Gold Rush in California, customary gender relations were disrupted by skewed sex ratios, and racial and ethnic heterogeneity were the rule. There, too, the era's economic and concomitant social changes were now exaggerated, now reversed, now caricatured by the boom-and-bust ethos of what seemed an essentially male culture devoted to digging cash from the earth. Scholars have documented the capitalist trajectory of the mining West, describing a progression from individualized, surface (placer) mining to industrialized, underground (lode) mining. But they have de-emphasized the perennial world of prospectors and placers, dependent on but peripheral to the dominant economic order. This dissertation focuses on that world, nowhere more entrenched than in California's Southern Mines. There Gold Rush social relations and divisions of labor arose out of the backgrounds and aspirations of polyglot peoples--Miwok Indians as well as immigrants from France, northern Mexico, central Chile, the eastern U.S. (both Anglo and African Americans), and, later, from South China. The relative absence of women, the overwhelming presence of men of many nations and colors and creeds, and the wild fluctuation of local economies ensured that the diggings would be hotly contested terrain. This was especially true in the Southern Mines, where the foreign-born predominated in numbers, where native peoples persisted, and where the small female population included a large proportion of non-Anglo women. A protracted boom proved elusive in the Southern Mines, but what happened there contributed nonetheless both to an emerging language of success and to a prevailing cultural memory of the California Gold Rush as a past peopled only by white men. |
