Roaring Camp by Johnson Susan Lee

Author:Johnson, Susan Lee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2000-12-17T05:00:00+00:00

A stock certificate from the Tuolumne County Water Company, 1854. Most stockholders were white men, but the owner of this share was an Elisabeth Klemm. Note the signature of the Democratic politician James W. Mandeville.

Courtesy of the Bancroft Library.

The full texture of this rivalry may be lost to the historical record, but surviving pieces of the fabric hint at what it all felt like in the hands of varied participants. Just as the politics of water spilled over into the politics of state, so too did it seep into the everyday politics of sex, of race, and of gender. For example, a month after the Columbia miners called the TCWC’s bluff and won lower water rates, newspapers reported that CSRWC President Coffroth had challenged TCWC President Alexander M. Dobie to a duel. Now the issue was not water but character. “A certain lady,” according to Dobie, had informed him that Coffroth had made remarks “derogatory to [Dobie’s] character.” Not to be outdone, Dobie told the woman that Coffroth himself was a “frequenter of houses of ill-fame in Columbia.” Coffroth, in turn, demanded “gentlemanly satisfaction” of Dobie. Dobie refused, smugly reminding Coffroth the lawmaker that dueling was not only “barbarous and inhuman” but illegal.51 For some, such crossing of swords made life in Tuolumne County read like a Shakespearean drama. After the miners’ strike in March of 1855, Coffroth broke loose from his Democratic moorings and drifted briefly into the Know-Nothing Party, which was making significant inroads into California politics. On the one hand, mainstream Democrats excoriated Coffroth. One partisan newspaper, for instance, racially taunted the nativist Know-Nothings by denouncing “the late political somerset of Mr. Coffroth into the embrace of the Hindoos.”52 On the other hand, not all Know-Nothings welcomed Coffroth into the fold, particularly not those who had ties to the TCWC. One of the original stockholders in the TCWC, who had recently left the diggings, wrote to Joseph Pownall several months after the miners’ uprising, anxiously inquiring about the state of his business affairs in Columbia. He also expressed glee that California had “gone K[now] N[othing]” in the late elections. “Hip Hip Huzza,” he penned, adding, “I hope however that our mutual friend the Hon J W Coffroth has been consigned to the ‘tomb of the Capulets.’”53 It was no accident that this TCWC stockholder identified Coffroth with Juliet’s family line rather than that of Romeo. When it came to white men hurling insults in the Southern Mines, manhood as well as whiteness were always on the side of the detractor.

All of these circles of intrigue, interest, and meaning, then, came to swirl around an economic contest between white miners, who had fought hard for exclusive access to the placers, and white water company managers, who had created a commodity out of the one thing placer miners most needed if that access was to translate into hard cash. In their opposition to the TCWC, the Columbia miners questioned not a company’s right to put a price on water

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