Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush - Softcover

Johnson Ph.D., Susan Lee

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393320995 ISBN 13: 9780393320992

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000

Synopsis

Winner of the 2001 Bancroft Prize.

Historical insight is the alchemy that transforms the familiar story of the Gold Rush into something sparkling and new. The world of the Gold Rush that comes down to us through fiction and film―of unshaven men named Stumpy and Kentuck raising hell and panning for gold―is one of half-truths. In this brilliant work of social history, Susan Johnson enters the well-worked diggings of Gold Rush history and strikes a rich lode. She finds a dynamic social world in which the conventions of identity―ethnic, national, and sexual―were reshaped in surprising ways. She gives us the all-male households of the diggings, the mines where the men worked, and the fandango houses where they played. With a keen eye for character and story, Johnson restores the particular social world that issued in the Gold Rush myths we still cherish. Maps, illustrations.

About this title

About the Author:

Susan Lee Johnson is professor of history at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

From Kirkus Reviews:

A dutiful, ponderous reconstruction of daily life in the California gold fields. Johnson (History/Univ. of Colorado) argues that the commonly held view of the gold rush leaves out many of its principal actors; derived in large part from the chummy, mud-spattered writings of Bret Harte, that view centers on Anglo-American miners while elbowing thousands of Eastern-European, South-American, African-American, Mexican, and Chinese workers into the backgroundto say nothing of the Native Americans on whose territory the gold rush took place. Johnson looks beyond Hartes tales of camaraderie to depict the California gold camps as hotbeds of ethnic and cultural strife, battlegrounds on which Anglo- Americans not only sought their personal fortunes but asserted political dominion over the region, newly conquered from Mexico, a task that made them anxious about issues of gender, of race and culture, and of class. Their attempts to impose this control, Johnson suggests, were often misguided. A monthly $20 tax on foreign (that is, non-Anglo) miners, for instance, drove away much-needed cooks, haulers, and common laborers, and it was soon done away with. Johnson turns up useful correctivesfor one, that most Chinese workers came to California freely, rather than as indentured laborersand gives needed attention to the Miwok and other Indian peoples who often fell afoul of the gold seekers, sometimes because of simple cultural misunderstandings. The more interesting threads of her argument, however, are buried in a surfeit of incidental detail, and her narrative too often becomes a mere recitation of undigested facts, betraying its origins as a doctoral dissertation. Published a shade too late to join the flood of books commemorating the 150th anniversary of the gold rush, Johnsons study makes a useful yet decidedly secondary reference for scholars and students of the period. -- Copyright ©2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0393320995
• ISBN 13: 9780393320992
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 466