Gold! (20 page)

Of course, that left the issue of punishment. Someone in the crowd who looked like he himself had killed a few people shouted, “Hang 'em!” The mob roared its approval. Three ropes materialized, hanging from the limb of a sturdy white oak.

Half an hour later, the condemned men, barely able to stand and their backs still raw from their public flogging, were marched out and put into the back of a wagon, which then progressed a few feet to the hanging tree. A black handkerchief was put around the head of the three condemned men. Their arms were tied behind them. At a prearranged signal, the wagon was drawn out from under them, and they dangled into eternity.

The lynchings of those men, who became known as the Stanislaus Three, are among the first recorded homicides ascribed to vigilante justice in the Gold Rush camps. Shortly after the three met their Maker, a notorious
character, “Irish Dick” Crone, was hung at the same tree for gutting a man and killing him over a disagreement at cards. Other bad men also were hung for assorted crimes.

Thus Dry Diggings became infamous throughout the gold diggings as “Hangtown.”

Thirty days after the first hanging in San Francisco, “a security of life and property was felt throughout the whole length and breadth of the land, which had not existed since 1849. When, at length, order had been restored, and the courts began tardily to administer that justice for which they were designed, the Vigilance Committee, instead of executing the law themselves, acted as a people's police, to aid the constituted authorities in detecting villains, and left their condemnation and execution to the conservators of the law.”

The state legislature passed a criminal code similar in nature to the resolutions of the San Francisco Vigilance Committee. Crime in San Francisco and the mines slowed to a manageable crawl. But that wouldn't last for long. A man was about to emerge from the mass of “foreigners” who had come to the mines, a man who was not going to tolerate discrimination, and a man who would become a champion to his people and to oppressed people everywhere.

11.

THE FIVE JOAQUINS

Disagree as you would with whatever national policy the president of the United States set. The French were not enamored when Jefferson set Lewis and Clark on their westward trip; they knew the result would be forfeiture of their American territory. The Spanish knew even earlier, when the colonies declared independence from Britain, that eventually that would cost them their possessions in the New World.

Regardless of the president's policies, what no one in the world of the 1850s disagreed with was that the president of the United States told the truth. Period. The president was not a liar. President Polk's statement assured the rest of the world that gold had been discovered in California, and neither Taylor nor his successor Fillmore, said anything to the contrary.

It was there, a holy grail now to be found. To Americans in the slums of New York; on the Kansas prairie; in the Mississippi Delta, where slaves, fully aware of the gold strike, could look up and look to the West to a place where they could be free.

Even in 1849, before California became a state, slavery wasn't tolerated in the freewheeling Gold Rush. That's how Nancy Gooch got her freedom. Nancy was a slave who came to California with her owners, the Monroe family of Missouri. When they got to Coloma, Nancy was given her freedom. It was either that or the Monroes would face a lynch mob. Despite its isolation from the rest of the country, California had already grown in some ways into a politically progressive place that philosophically favored the North over the South.

Nancy Gooch was an industrious person, not surprising considering that she had been a slave to white people one minute, always at their beck and call, and the next, she was free. Whether she threw up her arms and danced a jig is unlikely. Nancy was pretty level-headed and was concerned about her son Andrew Monroe. He, too, was a slave.

Andrew had been sold to a different family and was still back in Missouri. Nancy's foremost identity was as a mother, but now, she realized, she could be a mother with a white person's freedom to earn money and turn it toward breaking a black man's chains. Nancy determined to earn enough money in the Gold Rush to buy Andrew's freedom.

Looking around her, she saw people in a pitiable state. The miners lived and worked in total filth. They
could certainly use some clean clothes and good grub. Nancy began hiring herself out as an independent, doing laundry and other domestic chores for the miners. She lived in a shack that didn't cost her very much, and she had no real needs except food and drink.

It took almost a decade until Nancy had accumulated enough money to buy the freedom of her own son. Nancy contacted Andrew's owners, negotiated a price for his freedom—and putting in something additional for Andrew's recently taken wife, Sara Ellen—and then sent them the agreed-upon sum.

Andrew and Sara Ellen traveled over the Oregon Trail to California by covered wagon and joined Nancy Gooch in her Coloma home. It was a joyful reunion; the Monroes moved in with Nancy. Soon the family prospered. As the placer gold ran out in the late 1850s and miners went to the new boomtowns, land could be had at a low price. The Gooch Monroe family began buying land, which could be had at deflated prices. Some of the land was later turned into orchards that were worked by Andrew and his sons Pearly and Jim.

The Monroes were well liked and respected for their integrity and honesty. All through the Gold Rush boom-towns, blacks were treated most equitably. The same did not hold true for the Chinese.

In 1849, thirty-five Cantonese miners arrived at Camp Salvado to prospect. They struck it rich, pulling out thousands from the pay dirt. The thing about rich claims is that they attract prospectors who think that they, too, can strike it rich. Never mind the majority who
don't; all it takes is one for people to flock like vultures to flesh. Soon white miners came to Camp Salvado and pushed the defenseless Chinese out.

In 1850 there were three thousand Chinese miners in California. The number doubled by 1852. Americans feared the Chinese because they would do any job to survive. That lowered the wages for all. Many camps chose to banish their Chinese rather than allow them to affect their pocketbooks. The Chinese could not even expect relief from the courts.

California state courts treated the Chinese as nonentities. They were not allowed to testify. But that still didn't stop them. The Chinese organized their own district unions to deal with disputes, to take care of the sick and infirm, and to bury their own.

The mining camps had a uniform ethnicity, but not every white man was a racist. Ironically, the American camp known as either Washingtonville or Camp Washington, located opposite Rocky Hill from Camp Salvado, accepted the outcast Chinese miners without problems. Camp Washington turned out to be a rich site. Other Chinese, who knew they would be accepted, flocked to the camp. Like the Lancaster boys, the Chinese knew that there was strength in numbers.

Unfortunately, the area they had gravitated to lacked water. The dirt had to be hauled out for cradling. Even the strong Americans who mined the placers pailed when it came to pailing dirt. But the Chinese didn't. Whatever it took to get the gold out of the dirt, they'd do it. They even made money on claims abandoned by non-Asian miners.

The mines around Camp Washington were mostly diggings, the rich gold scattered in the dirt. Mine a hilltop or a gulch, it made no difference; it was guaranteed to be pay dirt. Hilltops as well as gulches paid good money. That was only after the dirt had been brought out by muscle and mule to the Sims Ranch or Six Bit Gulch, where a creek was used to wash the dirt.

It seemed a lot easier to apply some basic tenets of irrigation. Trenches and flumes were built to allow a connection with Woods Creek. Water thus came to the camp, and with it, a new batch of miners. As the camp grew, and with it the Chinese population, it eventually became known as Chinese Camp. Its location made Chinese Camp a transportation center. Freight and stage lines used the place as a regular stop. By that time, the mid-1850s, most of the Chinese had been forced off their claims.

That kind of prejudice was tolerated because there was a dream that despite all of that, you could still get rich regardless of your ethnicity. It didn't make sense, given the facts, but then greed never does. As with any great upheaval, forces had been building below the surface and were now threatening to erupt. It came down to greed under the guise of racism.

From 1848 to 1851, fifteen thousand Latin Americans came to the gold fields. Most came from the Mexican state of Sonora, the rest from other parts of Mexico as well as Chile and Peru. The Mexicans and South Americans had centuries of experience as miners and easily surpassed their American competitors, who were jealous of their expertise that increased their profits.

Many of the Mexicans weren't even keeping the majority of the gold they mined. They came as encumbered peons, day laborers paying debts to their creditors by working in the mines. The peons were paid wages. To the “native” Americans, not only were they taking up valuable claim space, they were also doing it for an absentee owner.

Added to this racist brew were the Californios, the Californians of Spanish or Mexican descent whose families went back to the mission period of previous centuries. They became reluctant American citizens by the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo. They were already recipients of white settlers' enmity; the whites coveted their well-tended lands. It was as if, by some divine right, it belonged to them! These same Californios streamed to the mines, too, and of course, bringing their centuries-old experience, from their Spanish and Mexican cultures, were more successful than the “Americans” in mining.

When anti-Mexican and anti-Californio feelings were at their highest, the state began to act. The governor, Colonel John Mason, decided by executive order that foreigners working at the mines be treated as trespassers. That is, no foreigner could have a first “dibs” claim. They could only mine a claim after an American left it. Of course, Mason's edict was a contradiction in terms, since all the land being mined was public land, owned by the state and federal governments. His memo to Sutter, composed by Sherman, had seen to that. Therefore, all miners were trespassing, whether they were black, white, yellow, red, or any other color. But that made no difference.

Politicians did what politicians usually do: the cowardly thing. The California state legislature passed the Foreign Miners License Tax in 1850. Whereas Mason's edict had been just that, the tax was actually codified, albeit a racist law. Foreigners who were not U.S. citizens had to pay a monthly tax of $20.

Europeans frequently managed to avoid paying because they were the right skin color. The Mexican miners, who weren't, immediately protested. As peons they made all of $6 a month when they got lucky. Mexican-American War veterans gathered, fully armed, to help the tax collectors enforce this new law. They had no problem firing on the Mexicans, whom they still considered their enemy.

The state legislature, seeing they might just be fomenting a genocide they weren't prepared to accept, changed the law and made it $4 a month. That still was two thirds of what the Mexicans made, leaving them barely enough for anything in a place where everything cost a lot.

Despite the prevalent racism, many U.S. citizens, particularly traders, supported the foreigners by opposing the Foreign Miners License Tax, understanding that it was based only on racial prejudice. Nonetheless, the lines between the ethnic groups had been harshly drawn. Violent encounters between the races became common. Mexicans, whom the miners referred to as “greasers,” who had disagreements with whites, could expect little relief from the courts. While thefts committed by Americans were ignored, those committed by Mexicans faced the harshest punishment.

The idea of the tax, of course, was to drive the foreigners out, particularly the Mexicans. By 1851, not coincidentally when the state legislature came to its senses and repealed this “legislation,” ten thousand of the fifteen thousand Latin Americans who had been prospecting for gold gave up and went home. The remaining five thousand faced an intense hatred from the indigenous white “culture,” which was still jealous over their mining prowess.

Among the remaining five thousand were five Mexicans who became bandits. When Governor Mason later put a bounty on them, he referred to them as the Five Joaquins, because each had Joaquin as his given name. Only one became a revolutionary legend to his people.

There was no immediate indication that the Gold Rush was about to produce the first, legitimate, homegrown revolutionary since Revolutionary times seventy-four years earlier. Instead, everyday events proceeded at a rapid rate. Miners came in; miners came out. Some got rich; most didn't. But that
hope
was still there. You could see it in the golden glint in the stream, or the rock on a weight scale.

Then, Joaquin Murieta came to the Gold Rush.

In October 1852 the steamer
Sea Bird
, with Captain Haley at the wheel, landed at San Pedro Harbor, south of Los Angeles. Passenger Horace Bell, twenty-three years old, took a hansom up to Los Angeles, where he took a room in a boardinghouse. Bell had every expectation of heading north for the gold fields immediately. Writing
later in his
Reminiscences of a ranger; or, Early times in Southern California
, published in 188l, Bell takes up the story of what happened next:

“On the morning following my arrival in the city of the Angels, I walked around to take notes in my mind as to matters of general interest. First I went immediately across the street to a very small adobe house with two rooms, in which sat in solemn conclave, a sub-committee of the great constituted criminal court of the city.

“On inquiry I found that the said sub-committee had been in session for about a week, trying to extract confessions from the miserable culprits [of recent crimes] by a very refined process of questioning and cross-questioning, first by one of the committee, then by another. When the whole committee had exhausted their ingenuity on the victim, then all of their separate results would be solemnly compared, and all of the discrepancies in the prisoner's statements would be brought back to him. The prisoner would then be required to explain and reconcile them to suit the examining committee.