1. Helen Nye to Mother, January 6, 1853, Helen Nye Letters, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut; Charles Davis to Daughter, January 1, 1852, Charles Davis Letters, Beinecke Library. I use the term "immigrant" to refer to all newcomers in the Sierra Nevada foothills, including those from the eastern U.S.

2. For elaboration, see Susan Lee Johnson, "'The gold she gathered': Difference, Domination, and California's Southern Mines, 1848-1853" (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1993). See also Rodman Paul, California Gold: The Beginning of Mining in the Far West (1947; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), esp. pp. 91-115.

3. Edmund Booth, Edmund Booth, Forty-Niner: The Life Story of a Deaf Pioneer (Stockton, Calif.: San Joaquin Pioneer and Historical Society, 1953), p. 31.

4. Conceptually, I have been helped here by Denise Riley, " Am I That Name?" Feminism and the Category of "Women" in History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), esp. p. 6; and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, "African-American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race,'' Signs 17, no. 2 (Winter 1992): 251-74, esp. 253-56.

5. Much of the important scholarship on this and related points is summarized and critiqued in Thomas C. Holt, "Marking: Race, Race-Making, and the Writing of History," American Historical Review 100 , no. 1 (February 1995): 1-20. See esp. Barbara Jeanne Fields, "Race and Ideology in American History," in Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward, ed. J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982).

6. For years, the best overview of California mining has been Paul, California Gold, and of western mining more generally, Rodman Paul, Mining Frontiers of the Far West, 1848-1880 (1963; Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1974). Just as this article was going to press, a wonderful new overview appeared: Malcolm J. Rohrbough, Days of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the American Nation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). Scholarship on industrialized mining in the Far West has burgeoned of late, while work on placer mining has lagged behind. On hardrock mining, see, e.g., David M. Emmons, The Butte Irish: Class and Ethnicity in an American Mining Town, 1875-1925 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989); A. Yvette Huginnie, " 'Mexican Labor' in a 'White Man's Town': Race, Class, and Copper in Arizona, 1840-1925" (book manuscript, forthcoming); Elizabeth Jameson, All That Glitters: Class, Culture, and Community in Cripple Creek (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, forthcoming); Mary Murphy, Mining Cultures: Men, Women, and Leisure in Butte, 1914-1941 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997). A work that will shed light on the impact of placer mining regionally is Elliot West, Visions of Power: The Colorado Gold Rush and the Transformation of the Great Plains (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, forthcoming). On changes over time in class relations in California's Southern Mines, see Johnson, " 'The gold she gathered,' " esp. pp. 382-412. I have elaborated on the assertions made therein in the book version of this study, which is forthcoming from W. W. Norton.

7. For a discussion of the meanings of "the social" in this historical context, see Susan Lee Johnson, "Bulls, Bears, and Dancing Boys: Race, Gender, and Leisure in the California Gold Rush," Radical History Review 60 (Fall 1994): 4-37.

8. The earliest scholarly work on the Gold Rush appeared in the 1880s: Charles Howard Shinn, Mining Camps: A Study in American Frontier Government, ed. Rodman Wilson Paul (1884; Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1970); and Josiah Royce, California from the Conquest in 1846 to the Second Vigilance Committee in San Francisco, A Study of American Character (1886; Santa Barbara, Calif.: Peregrine, 1970). Shinn's was a happy account of the special genius of Anglo-Saxons for self-government. Royce took a darker view, indicting Gold Rush participants for their "social irresponsibility" and their "diseased local exaggeration of [Americans'] common national feeling toward foreigners." The 1940s brought two more key publications—Paul, California Gold; and John Walton Caughey, The California Gold Rush [formerly Gold Is the Cornerstone ] (1948; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975)—of which Paul's proved most enduring. Paul, too, rejected Shinn's notion of "race-instinct," and saw the managerial talents of white miners as something that developed over time, particularly as placer mining gave way to hydraulic and quartz mining. Starting in the 1960s, another group of historians began to situate the Gold Rush in larger narratives of racial domination, racial resistance, and race- and class-making in California, thereby centering the experiences of ethnic Mexicans, native peoples, Chinese immigrants, and African Americans in stories of mining and community formation that had long represented them as marginal characters: see Leonard Pitt, The Decline of the Californios: A Social History of the Spanish-Speaking Californians, 1846-1890 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966); Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971); Rudolph M. Lapp, Blacks in Gold Rush California (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977); Albert L. Hurtado, Indian Survival on the California Frontier (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988); Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (Boston: Little, Brown, 1989); Sucheng Chan, Asian Americans: An Interpretive History (Boston: Twayne, 1991); Tomás Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). The classic "new social history" of the Gold Rush is Ralph Mann's study of two towns in the Northern Mines: After the Gold Rush: Society in Grass Valley and Nevada City, California, 1849-1870 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1982). For Mann, the absence of women, the abundance of foreign-born peoples, and the emergence of clear class hierarchies come to life in the analysis of quantifiable data. Mann demonstrates the process by which Nevada City became a center of Anglo-American commerce and county government, while Grass Valley became a community of working-class Cornish and Irish miners. For a more recent account of social and religious themes in the Gold Rush period, see Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp, Religion and Society in Frontier California (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994). Along with Rohrbough, Days of Gold, the most important new work on the Gold Rush to appear in over a decade is David Goodman, Gold Seeking: Victoria and California in the 1850s (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994). Goodman's is a history of ideas about wealth, republicanism, order, agrarianism, the pastoral, domesticity, and excitement, and the ways in which those ideas helped people make sense of their participation in the Australian and American gold rushes.

9. See Johnson, " 'The gold she gathered,' " esp. chap. 3, for full consideration of these and other "domestic" tasks, including laundry, sewing, and care of the sick. For a trenchant analysis of related themes among cowboys, see Blake Allmendinger, The Cowboy: Representations of Labor in an American Work Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), esp. pp. 50-59. For helpful, but different, accounts of "domestic" concerns in Gold Rush California, see Goodman, esp. pp. 149-87, and Maffly-Kipp, esp. pp. 148-80, both of whom emphasize gender over race and ethnicity in their analyses of "domesticity.''

10. Analyses of productive vs. reproductive labor particularly characterized Marxist-feminist thought of the 1970s and 1980s. A culminating explication and critique appears in Joan Kelly, "The Doubled Vision of Feminist Theory," in Women, History and Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). See also the essays collected in Zillah Eisenstein, ed., Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979); and Heidi Hartmann, "The Family as the Locus of Gender, Class, and Political Struggle: The Example of Housework," Signs 6, no. 3 (Spring 1981): 366-94.

11. See Evelyn Nakano Glenn, "From Servitude to Service Work: Historical Continuities in the Racial Division of Paid Reproductive Labor," Signs 18, no. 1 (Fall 1992): 1-43; and Joan Scott, "Deconstructing Equality-versus-Difference: Or, the Uses of Poststructuralist Theory for Feminism," Feminist Studies 14, no. 1 (Spring 1988): 33-50.

12. J. D. Borthwick, The Gold Hunters (1857; Oyster Bay, N.Y.: Nelson Doubleday, 1917), p. 252, and see pp. 143, 302; Jean-Nicolas Perlot, Gold Seeker: Adventures of a Belgian Argonaut during the Gold Rush Years, trans. Helen Harding Bretnor, ed. Howard R. Lamar (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985), pp. 100-101, 153; Journal entry, December 18, 1852, Angus McIsaac Journal, Beinecke Library.

13. Journal entry, December 18, 1852, McIsaac Journal; Jesse R. Smith to Sister Helen, December 23, 1852, Lura and Jesse R. Smith Correspondence, Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

14. William Perkins, Three Years in California: William Perkins' Journal of Life at Sonora, 1849-1852, ed. Dale L. Morgan and James R. Scobie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964), pp. 101, 103. On Orientalism, see Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978).

15. These generalizations are based on wide reading in Gold Rush personal accounts that describe household organization; an adequate citation of the evidence would run several pages. But see, e.g., Moses F. Little Journals, Beinecke Library, items 12 and 14, passim; John Amos Chaffee and Jason Palmer Chamberlain Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, Chamberlain Journals 1 and 2, passim; Alfred Doten, The Journals of Alfred Doten, 1849-1903, 3 vols., ed. Walter Van Tilburg Clark (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1973), 1: 91-250, passim; Perlot, pp. 89-292, passim. Secondary accounts that address such issues include Paul, California Gold, pp. 72-73; Caughey, pp. 177-201; Mann, p. 17. While I have not undertaken a full statistical analysis of the 1850 census, even a spot check through the microfilm reels for Calaveras, Tuolumne, and Mariposa counties supports my contentions about household size. See U.S. Bureau of the Census, Seventh Federal Population Census, 1850, National Archives and Records Service, RG-29, N. 432, reels 33, 35, 36 [hereafter cited as 1850 Census].

16. See, e.g., John Doble, John Doble's Journal and Letters from the Mines: Mokelumne Hill, Jackson, Volcano and SanFrancisco, 1851-1865, ed. Charles L. Camp (Denver: Old West Publishing, 1962), pp. 38-39, 58; Doten, 1: 115-27 (Doten kept a store in Calaveras County, and these pages record the patronage of Chinese, Mexicans, and Chileans); Helen Nye to Mother, January 6, 1853, Nye Letters (Nye's husband was a merchant at Don Pedro's Bar in Tuolumne County); Account book entries, 1852-53, Little Journals, item 13; Charles Davis to Daughter, January 5 [1852], Davis Letters; Perlot, pp. 153, 154, 159-60; Howard C. Gardiner, In Pursuit of the Golden Dream: Reminiscences of San Francisco and the Northern and Southern Mines, 1849-1857, ed. Dale L. Morgan (Stoughton, Mass.: Western Hemisphere, 1970), pp. 95, 107, 164-65.

17. Perlot, pp. 56-57; cf. George W. B. Evans, Mexican Gold Rush Trail: The Journal of a Forty-Niner, ed. Glenn S. Dumke (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1945), p. 200. Gardiner, p. 95; cf. Perkins, p. 106.

18. Vicente Pérez Rosales, "Diary of a Journey to California," in We Were 49ers! Chilean Accounts of the California Gold Rush, trans. and ed. Edwin A. Beilharz and Carlos U. López (Pasadena, Calif.: Ward Ritchie Press, 1976), pp. 3-99, esp. 70-77. This event actually took place in Sacramento, entrepôt for the Northern Mines and some camps in the northern part of the Southern Mines.

19. See, e.g., Journal entries, October 20, November 15, and December 19, 1852, Little Journals, item 12; Perlot, pp. 155-60; A. Hersey Dexter, Early Days in California (Denver: Tribune-Republican Press, 1886), pp. 20-26.

20. Journal entries, December 21, 24, and 25, 1852, Little Journals, item 12; Journal entries, November 25 and 27, 1851, Timothy C. Osborn Journal, Bancroft Library; Journal entries, October 13-December 25, 1849, passim, William W. Miller Journal, Beinecke Library; Perlot, p. 272.

21. Perlot, p. 272. And see Journal entry, November 26, 1849, Miller Journal; Doten, 1: 85, 147-48, 151; Doble, p. 94.

22. On Miwok women's gathering, see Richard Levy, "Eastern Miwok," in Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 8, California, ed. Robert F. Heizer (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1978), pp. 398-413, esp. 402-05.

23. Evans, pp. 260-61. Cf. Perkins, p. 262; Borthwick, p. 57; Doble, p. 58; Journal entries, August 12-24, 1851, Chamberlain Journal no. 1; Benjamin Butler Harris, The Gila Trial: The Texas Argonauts and the California Gold Rush, ed. Richard H. Dillon (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1960), p. 123 (on scurvy among Mexican miners); Étienne Derbec, A French Journalist in the California Gold Rush: The Letters of Étienne Derbec (Georgetown, Calif.: Talisman Press, 1964), pp. 121-22, 40-41.

24. Perlot, p. 260; Doble, p. 245. See also Journal entries, August 24 and September 6, 1852, Little Journals, item 12.

25. Journal entries, October 24, November 22 and 24, 1852, Little Journals, item 12; Journal entries, December 22 and 30, 1849, January 1, 4, and 5, 1850, Miller Journal. And see Journal entries, July 14, 1850, January 12 and February 9, 1851, George W. Allen Journals, Beinecke Library.

26. Borthwick, pp. 255-56, 302-03.

27. John Marshall Newton, Memoirs of John Marshall Newton (n.p.: John M. Stevenson, 1913), pp. 48-50.

28. Gardiner, p. 166. Although Gardiner spent most of his time in the Southern Mines, this actually took place in the Northern Mines.

29. Journal entries, July 26 and August 23, 1850, Osborn Journal. See also Josiah Foster Flagg to Mother, March 9, 851, Josiah Foster Flagg Letters, Beinecke Library.

30. Journal entries, July 26 and August 23, 1850, Osborn Journal. For background on slavery in the diggings, see Lapp, esp. pp. 64-77; Johnson, " 'The gold she gathered,' " chaps. 2 and 5.

31. Perlot, pp. 258-71, esp. 259-60, 271.

32. Census 1850, reel 35; Samuel Ward, Sam Ward in the Gold Rush, ed. Carvel Collins (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1949), pp. 28, 149-52, 167; Charles Davis to Daughter, January 5 [1852], and January 6, 1854, Davis Letters.

33. Charles Davis to Daughter, January 5 [1852], and January 6, 1854, Davis Letters; Lucius Fairchild, California Letters of Lucius Fairchild, ed. Joseph Schafer (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1931), pp. 48, 63; Enos Christman, One Man's Gold: The Letters and Journal of a Forty-Niner, ed. Florence Morrow Christman (New York: Whittlesey House, McGraw-Hill, 1930), esp. p. 187.

34. Journal entry, April 18, 1852, P. V. Fox Journals, Beinecke Library; Ward, p. 168 (Julia Ward Howe would become a prominent participant in the U.S. women's movement and the author of "Battle Hymn of the Republic"). See also Journal entry, July 3, 1850, Osborn Journal; Journal entry, March 30, 1851, Allen Journals; Mrs. Lee Whipple-Haslam, Early Days in California: Scenes and Events of the '50s as I Remember Them (Jamestown, Calif.: Mother Lode Magnet [c. 1924]), p. 11. On women in dairy and poultry production, see, e.g., Joan M. Jensen, Loosening the Bonds: Mid-Atlantic Farm Women, 1750-1850 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986), and "Cloth, Butter and Boarders: Women's Household Production for the Market," Review of Radical Political Economics 12, no. 2 (Summer 1980): 14-24; John Mack Faragher, Women and Men on the Overland Trail (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979), esp. p. 51, and Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986), esp. pp. 101-05.

35. On domestic failures, see, e.g., Journal entry, December 22, 1849, Miller Journal; Doble, p. 54. For the triumphs, see Christman, p. 126; Journal entry, July 12, 1850, Osborn Journal.

36. Frank Marryat, Mountains and Molehills; or, Recollections of a Burnt Journal (1855; Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1962), p. 136; Dexter, pp. 23-24; Borthwick, PP. 342-44.

37. Borthwick, pp. 342-44.

38. Fairchild, p. 139. On gender as performative, see Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), esp. pp. 24-25, 33, 134-41, and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex " (New York: Routledge, 1993), esp. pp. 1-23, 223-42.

39. Antonio Franco Coronel, "Cosas de California," trans. and ed. Richard Henry Morefield, in The Mexican Adaptation in American California, 1846-1875 (1955; San Francisco: R & E Research Associates, 1971), pp. 76-96, esp. 93-94. And see Derbec, p. 128. Coronel may have exaggerated his cook's profits, but even if he doubled the amount she took in each day, her earnings would have been greater than those of the average miner in 1848. See "Appendix B: Wages in the California Gold Mines," in Paul, California Gold, pp. 349-50.

40. Perkins, pp. 105-06.

41. Harris, p. 124; Silvia Marina Arrom, The Women of Mexico City, 1790-1857 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1985), pp. 158-59, 192-93.

42. Helen Nye to Sister Mary, December 26, 1852, February 8 and March 14, 1853, May 20, 1855, Nye Letters.

43. For elaboration, see Johnson, " 'The gold she gathered,' " pp. 179-96.

44. Doble, p. 58; Derbec, p. 142; Christman, p. 132; Gardiner, pp. 69, 188-89; Perkins, pp. 157-58; Friedrich W. C. Gerstäcker, Narrative of a Journey Around the World (New York: Harper and Row, 1853), p. 225; Borthwick, pp. 82, 361. On Chinese laundry workers, see Takaki, pp. 92-94; Paul Ong, "An Ethnic Trade: The Chinese Laundries in Early California," Journal of Ethnic Studies 8, no. 4 (Winter 1981): 95-113. For the poem, see "The Miners' Lamentations," California Lettersheet Facsimiles, Huntington Library.

45. See, e.g., William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), pp. 52-58, 92; Glenda Riley, Women and Indians on the Frontier, 1825-1915 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984), esp. pp. 76-81.

46. Doble, pp. 42-50. See also Journal entries, November 16 and 17, 1852, Little Journals, item 12; Ward, p. 136; Derbec, pp. 154-56; Gerstäcker, pp. 210-11; Doten, 1: 212.

47. Derbec, p. 155; Christman, p. 180.

48. Gerstäcker, p. 217

49. See, e.g., Mary Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Charles E. Rosenberg, "Sexuality, Class, and Role in Nineteenth-Century America," American Quarterly 35 (May 1973): 131-53; E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993); Mark C. Carnes and Clyde Griffen, eds., Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); J. A. Mangan and James Walvin, eds., Manliness and Morality: Middle-Class Masculinity in Britain and America, 1800-1940 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987).

50. Leonard Withington Noyes Reminiscences, Essex Institute, Salem, Massachusetts, transcription at Calaveras County Museum and Archives, San Andreas, California, p. 75.

51. Journal entry, October 20, 1849, Osborn Journal.

52. Gerstäcker, pp. 217-18; Perlot, p. 181; Ward, pp. 51-52, 111, 125,126-27, 136-37. On the Mariposa War, see Johnson, " 'The gold she gathered,' " chap. 5.

53. William McCollum, California As I Saw It. Pencillings by the Way of Its Gold and Gold Diggers. And Incidents of Travel by Land and Water, ed. Dale L. Morgan ( 1850; Los Gatos, Calif.: Talisman Press, 1960), pp. 160-61. Cf. Harris, pp. 113, 123, 132-34, 136.

54. On vocational domesticity, see, e.g., Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: "Woman's Sphere" in New England, 1780-1835 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977), esp. p. 74. Catharine Beecher popularized the idea in her Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841), which was in its ninth printing at the time of the Gold Rush; see Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976), pp. 151-67.

55. Journal entry, August 31, 1852, Little Journals, item 12; Benjamin Kendrick to Father, September 25, 1849, Benjamin Franklin Kendrick Letters, Beinecke Library; A. W. Genung to Mr. and Mrs. Thomas, February 14, 1852, A. W. Genung Letters, Beinecke Library.

56. For elaboration of these themes, see Johnson, " 'The gold she gathered,' " chap. 2.

57. For discussion of collective memory of the Gold Rush, see ibid., chap. 1 and Epilogue; and Susan Lee Johnson, "History, Memory, and the California Gold Rush," paper presented at the Power of Ethnic Identities in the Southwest Conference, Huntington Library, San Marino, California, September 23, 1994, and the American Historical Association Annual Meeting, Chicago, January 8, 1995.

58. I completed this essay at the historical moment (during the summer of 1995) when affirmative action policies came under unprecedented attack across the U.S., but especially in the State of California.

59. Christman, pp. 204-05.