FOUR
From the standpoint of social order nearly everything that could have gone wrong on the American frontier did go wrong. Outside of family farming areas the frontier attracted armed bachelors filled with dangerous substances and deadly ideas: whiskey, racial contempt, and homicidal sensitivity about honor. Institutional restraints like efficient police, predictable justice, permanent churches, and public schools were lacking, as were the ordinary restraints of married life. Though most frontiersmen had been raised in intact families, they often had trouble forming their own families because of the shortage of unmarried white women.
Traditional accounts of frontier violence and disorder also emphasize the push effect of eastern legal troubles. Men who ran afoul of the law, accumulated debts, or killed someone headed for the Carolina back-country or the Indian Territory or Arizona or whatever distant place happened to be the current rogue's haven. Texas became so notorious as a refuge that a "gone to Texas" sign hung on an abandoned farmhouse or cabin door was universally understood as a kiss-off to creditors and sheriffs.1
But those who were in trouble with the law did not go to just any frontier region. They were concerned with future income as well as escape, and there was no point in robbers, gamblers, prostitutes, and whiskey peddlers preying upon farming families, who lacked cash and an appetite for vice. So they flocked instead to the mining camps and railroad towns and cow towns where they could fatten off the wages of workers targeted as victims, suckers, Johns, and drunks. The concentration of young male wage earners created a pull effect, a magnet for criminals and vice purveyors. The presence of commercialized vice in turn inflated the level of violence by inspiring drunken fights and shootings over gambling disputes and dance-hall girls. It also helped to bring about the sickness and early death of many young men and kept those who survived broke. "Like most young men we only wanted money to spend," confessed an Idaho gold miner, who spoke for many of his kind. "If I had taken my money and invested it I would have been a millionaire."2
The general pattern, then, was that frontier labor opportunities caused population abnormalities which in turn caused social disorder and vice parasitism. The relative absence of women, children, and old people and the oversupply of young bachelors created a pathological tangle of drunkenness, violence, gambling, prostitution, disease, neglect, and early death in male frontier groups. The rough, insalubrious, and generally short lives of railroad construction workers, buffalo hunters, teamsters, and enlisted soldiers all exemplify the process. I have chosen, however, to focus on two groups as case studies of the dangers inherent in frontier bachelor societies: the miners who took part in the great gold and silver rushes, and the cowboys who spread cattle ranching from Texas to Montana in the decades after the Civil War.
The California Gold Rush
The Gold Rush was triggered by James Marshall's celebrated discovery at Sutter's Mill in January 1848, the same year that Mexico ceded California to the United States. Eighty-nine thousand eager gold seekers from all over the world arrived in 1849; the ratio of men to women among them was twenty to one. The world they entered was almost totally anomic, a mass of unkempt men clad in flannel shirts and heavy boots who were inspired by the one desire to hurry on to the mines. Within six months one in every five of the forty-niners was dead—an astonishing statistic given that they had almost all started the journey in good health and in their prime years. So many died that life insurance companies refused to write new polices for Californians or charged substantial additional premiums for immigrants already covered.3
Some of the mortality was unavoidable. The Gold Rush coincided with the 1849 cholera pandemic. Cholera and other diarrheal diseases were frequent visitors along the fly-infested overland trail, which was littered with rotting food, fomites, and human excrement, and in the mining towns and camps, where sanitation was primitive. The immigrants brought malarial parasites with them; when they settled near rivers and streams, the local mosquitoes were infected and the disease became endemic. Some immigrants were also exposed to illnesses, such as Rocky Mountain spotted fever, which they had never encountered before.4
The lack of women ensured that illness claimed more lives than it would have in a balanced, family-centered population. Women were the everyday healers in the nineteenth century, the practical ones who, by virtue of their upbringing, were adept at nursing, sanitation, and nutrition. Men who were lucky enough to accompany them on the journey west benefited from their presence and skill. Catherine Margaret Haun, who traveled on the Oregon Trail, noted in her diary that women and their children "exerted a good influence, as the men did not take such risks with Indians and thereby avoided conflict; were more alert about the care of the teams and seldom had accidents; more attention was paid to cleanliness and sanitation and, lastly but not of less importance, the meals were more regular and better cooked thus preventing much sickness and there was less waste of food."5
Trail's end separated the bachelor immigrants from the women and families, who were bound for the fertile valleys rather than the gold fields. Culinary life in the latter left something to be desired. Unsoaked beans were baked in dutch ovens; puzzled men wondered why they were harder than ever when they came out. Rice was cooked without water, pans went unwashed, diets were unbalanced, scurvy was everywhere. The disease was caused by the vitamin C-deficient diet (salted meat, lard, coffee, sugar, and white flour) on which the miners subsisted during the long trip to California and in the camps. Men became weak, then listless and incapacitated, then died in cold, rain-soaked tents, victims of what has been called bachelor's scurvy.6
Dr. James Tyson, an eyewitness, found it strange that the men did not sooner avail themselves of such items as pickles or fresh meat or acidulous drinks. He attributed their fatal neglect to ignorance and inattention and to the fact that men were apt to neglect their health in the frantic pursuit of gold. Had women been present in larger numbers and able to collect, cultivate, and preserve more fruits and vegetables, there would have been less scurvy, to say nothing of more effective care for those who fell ill. As it was some California women profited handsomely from their dietary knowledge by retailing antiscorbutic remedies or by selling fruit from the orchards they planted for as much as a dollar a pear.7
What the miners had instead of women was doctors, or men who called themselves such. "The doctor can do well at practice," wrote Lt. William Tecumseh Sherman in October 1848, "as very many are sick or recovering from sickness, and all can afford to pay." Physicians poured in by land and by sea. One camp, Rich Bar, had twenty-nine doctors for its 1,000 miners. "In the short space of twenty-four days," wrote a physician's wife at nearby Indian Bar, "we have had murders, fearful accidents, bloody deaths, a mob, whippings, a hanging, an attempt at suicide and a fatal duel." Yet even this sort of sporadic mayhem was insufficient to keep the approximately 1,500 Gold Rush doctors fully employed. Many soon turned to other occupations, including barbering, prospecting, assaying, and innkeeping. The California medical market was saturated by 1850. "Most persons who come here to practice medicine are compelled to resort to some other means of obtaining a livelihood," wrote one observer. "Hydropathy is the popular treatment, and a good bath is thought to be far more conducive to health than bleeding or calomel."8
Those who survived their illnesses faced another problem, the ubiquity of bachelor vices. It became apparent early on in California that the only sure way to make money was to mine the miners. That meant providing goods and services of an unexceptionable sort, like groceries and laundering, or providing those of a more questionable variety, like tobacco, liquor, gambling, and prostitution. In the early days of the Gold Rush tobacco was sufficiently scarce as to nearly command its weight in gold dust. So many speculators rushed to fill the demand that the San Francisco warehouses were soon crammed with boxes of tobacco. San Francisco liquor importers were no less ambitious. In 1853 they received more bulk or wholesale containers of alcoholic beverages than there were people in the state. The imported spirits did not want for distributors, for as many as six of every one hundred Californians were involved in some aspect of the liquor trade.9
Eyewitnesses wrote of being astounded by the amount of liquor consumed; of seeing bottles strewn every few yards along roads and trails; of crippled and delirious men dying in shanty bunks while drunkards caroused below. They warned that alcoholic excess weakened men and made them vulnerable to infectious diseases. "The number of deaths is beyond all calculation," wrote San Franciscan Jerusha Merrill in October 1849. "Many have no friends to put them under the turf, yet those who take care of themselves and are regular in their habits enjoy good health. I warn all against the gaming house and grog shop." In a subsequent letter, written in January 1851, she noted that most of the cholera cases were drunkards. Alcohol was an insidious drug, a killer in the guise of a familiar friend. It gave the impression of warmth and well-being when in fact it lowered body temperature and depressed the nervous system. It delivered a caloric burst but was devoid of vitamins or minerals. Miners who drank their meals were starving their bodies and undermining their immune systems, setting themselves up for pneumonia or other common camp infections.10
Alcohol made men vulnerable to another type of parasitism, that of prostitutes and gamblers. Like all women, prostitutes were scarce, and they commanded high prices for their services. Miners paid an ounce of gold ($16) just to have one sit beside them at a bar or gaming table. San Francisco bar and cafe owners went further, paying women to serve as topless (and bottomless) waitresses or to pose nude in suggestive positions on elevated platforms. Those who wished to go beyond gawking paid anywhere from $200 to $400 for a night of sex. Such prices naturally attracted more prostitutes to San Francisco, which had an estimated 2,000 by 1853."
Though San Francisco was the principal center of vice, prostitution quickly spread to the outlying towns. One enterprising woman, who dressed in men's clothes and rode horseback from camp to camp, claimed to have earned $50,000 in 1849. Another, more ambitious, stocked a Placerville brothel with a dozen Hawaiian girls. She charged $100 a night for her own services, $50 for those of the girls, and was said to have accumulated $100,000 in less than a year, a fortune even by California's inflated standards.12
Professional gamblers were more common than prostitutes, and just as skilled at siphoning off miners' earnings. "I have seen men come tottering from the mines with broken constitutions," wrote the forty-niner Alfred Doten, "but with plenty of the 'dust,' and sitting down at the gaming table, in ten minutes not be worth a cent." Saloons and gambling rooms were everywhere. "They were on the first floor, with doors wide open," Ulysses S. Grant recalled of San Francisco. "At all hours of the day and night. . . the eye was regaled ... by the sight of players at faro." Or at monte, roulette, or poker. In California men bet on anything, even the prognosis of a shooting victim as he underwent treatment on a pool table."
Indeed, there was no clear distinction between what men did for a living—sinking their labor and capital into claims that might repay their investments with nothing or a fortune—and their recreational gambling. "In the spring of 50 I had about a thousand dollars," wrote a disappointed miner named William McFarlin, "but I left the place [I was working] and went to dam the river (and by the way I have damd it often) where everybody thought we would make a pile that summer and go home in the fall but we spent all we had & five months hard labour & never got one dollar & when we settled I owed $155.00 and had but seven dollars in my pocket—one of the company took a razor & cut his throat the same night."14
This was a story with many variations. Men bet their lives just to come to California and their health and fortunes to pursue its golden wealth. Most lost the bet. "There are thousands of persons here who hardly ever saw a sick day in the States and are completely broken-down," wrote the California physician J. D. B. Stillman, "and many of them, if they live, will never fully recover their health."15 In such a risk-all atmosphere, with death and illness daily prospects, gambling was a natural pastime, no more or less rational than the mining enterprise itself.
Much of the gaming and drinking took place in the winter, when men were unable to work, and on Sundays, when they flocked to towns like Coloma to gather news and gossip, lay in supplies, and patronize the saloons and gambling booths. "Sunday was the day when all the games were liveliest," wrote the forty-niner William Bennett; "the miners came in from all the gulches with big buckskin bags filled with gold dust, ounces of which they staked on a single card." Barkeeps dispensed whiskey for fifty cents or a pinch of gold dust, padding their profits by carefully sweeping up the dust that fell onto their counters.16
Sunday was also the day for masculine display. Miners tossed gold on the bar and bade their companions to name their drinks; reckless horsemen pulled knives from the ground at full gallop. Itinerant preachers bold enough to mount a stump and declaim against the desecration of the Sabbath were rewarded at collection time—a manifestation, perhaps, of latent guilt—but were ignored on the practical point of reformed behavior. Devout men who happened to find themselves in this milieu were appalled. One prophesied to an eastern minister that California "instead of being a blessing will prove a curse to the Union, morally and politically . . . You can form no adequate idea of the depths of sin and moral degradation to which most of the people are sunk or rather sink themselves and those too of whom we should not dream such things when they leave the States."17
These sentiments were shared by Hinton Helper. Later to achieve fame as a critic of southern slave society, Helper spent three weary and unprofitable years (1851-1854) in California and wrote a scathing account of the state's social and economic prospects. Helper was an unusual man, simultaneously a racist, abolitionist, Puritan, and amateur sociologist. He argued that California's social disorder stemmed from the mammonism of its polyglot population and from the lack of women, in whose absence "vice only is esteemed and lauded." Like many other observers he noticed that the moral tone of the mining communities immediately began to change when women were present. Though he worried about the possibility that wives would be seduced away from their husbands by the many determined bachelor suitors, he nevertheless looked forward to the day when California would experience "an influx of the chaste wives and tender mothers that bless our other seaboard."18
This sounds like Victorianism, and it was. But it was also something deeper and more modern. Helper had grasped the fundamental principle of what is now called the interactionist school of sociology, that the self emerges and evolves as people internalize the attitudes that significant others hold toward them. When the mix of significant others changes, so does the sense of self. The typical California immigrant was neither poor nor vicious. He had been raised in a respectable family in "the States," but his home was far away and the hurly-burly of camp life was close at hand. His sense of what was permissible and appropriate was shaped by his immediate social environment, which consisted of uprooted young men thrown together with opportunists and vice figures. His masculine companions were quick to ridicule conventional virtue as weakness and self-restraint as effeminate. If he avoided the saloons and faro tables, he stayed alone in his tent or room on Saturday night, bored and lonely. If he refused to smoke or drink, he risked insult and retaliation. A person who would not partake of whiskey or tobacco was "little short of an outlaw," complained the California miner George McCowen, who took up smoking simply to avoid trouble. Louise Clappe, the wife of a mining-camp physician, observed that men who had once considered swearing vulgar and had never uttered an oath now "clothe themselves with curses as with a garment," swearing being "absolutely the fashion" in masculine California. People who had never gambled became high-stakes players. In Stockton the proprietor of the leading gambling saloon was a Methodist minister. "Everybody gambled,'" recalled one San Franciscan; "that was the excuse for everybody else."19
Or almost everybody. William Swain, a devout emigrant who kept a detailed journal and wrote numerous letters home, remained mindful of the Bible and of his wife and family in New York. But communication was irregular and difficult, and other sources hint of reversion to bachelor behavior among men separated from their wives and families. "We are thousands of miles from home and comfort ourselves by thinking that a knowledge of our indulgence in vice will never reach them," confessed one heartsick miner. "Here, there is no parents eye to guide, no wife to warn, no sister to entreat, no church, no sabbath ... in short, all the animal and vicious passions are let loose . . . without any legal or social restraint."20
The one sure way to change this situation was family reunification, accomplished when disappointed gold seekers sailed home or, more rarely, when their spouses journeyed to the camps. "The wives of some of the wildest boys on the creek have come down to join their husbands," observed the forty-niner Alfred Jackson, "and it has sobered them down considerably."21 It was just this "sobering down" that Helper valued and anticipated would come about when gender balance was restored.
Helper saw something else clearly, that the violence in California was aggravated by the influx of criminals and the habit of carrying deadly weapons, the former being a justification for the latter. Ninety-nine out of a hundred miners went about armed with revolvers or Bowie knives, which were sold at local groggeries together with cigars, tobacco, and more than a hundred varieties of alcoholic beverages. This combination of young men, liquor, and deadly weapons produced a steady stream of unpremeditated homicides, most of which arose from personal disputes and occurred in or near drinking establishments. Helper estimated that California had experienced 4,200 murders in the course of six years, along with 1,400 suicides and 1,700 deaths due to insanity caused by disappointment and misfortune.22
Helper's estimate of murder seems too high (unless he was including murders of Indians, in which case it was almost certainly too low), but there is an abundance of other evidence that Gold Rush California was a brutal and unforgiving place. Camp names were mimetic: Gouge Eye, Murderers Bar, Cut-throat Gulch, Graveyard Flat. There was a Hangtown, a Helltown, a Whiskeytown, and a Gomorrah, though, interestingly, no Sodom. Even innocuously named places could explode into violence. The city of Marysville reportedly experienced seventeen murders in a single week, prompting the formation of a vigilance committee. Suicide and violent death occurred in all mining regions. Witnesses wrote of men suddenly pulling out pistols and shooting themselves, of bodies floating down the river, of miners stoned to death in gambling disputes. They described men who had become beasts, biting and pulling hair, flogging one another without mercy, cropping boys' ears, laughing at executions.23
Corporal punishment fell most heavily on nonwhites. A white thief might receive up to a hundred lashes, but a runaway slave got two hundred for stealing himself. Another black man, found guilty of larceny simply because he had a large sum of money, was ineptly hanged by a mob and then buried alive. During 1849-1853 more than a third of the lynch-court episodes involved nonwhites, who were occasionally convicted without firm evidence and sometimes without cause. In California as in other parts of the frontier, violence had a racial edge.24
Little Californias
In 1849 California was the most unfettered and individualistic place in the world, the exemplar of Jacksonian America and its egalitarian values. But the situation changed in the early 1850s. The most accessible placer gold was gone, continued immigration pushed the population past a quarter million, wages declined, and the industry passed under the control of companies with the machinery necessary for vein mining. By the middle of the decade California was becoming a much more capitalistic and class-bound society, proof of the Spanish proverb that it takes a mine to work a mine. Even so, the California immigration pattern—an influx of uprooted, youthful men, a kind of accidental and imperfectly disciplined army of miners and hangers-on—was to repeat itself in the subsequent gold and silver rushes from the late 1850s through the Klondike stampede of the late 1890s. Mining camps and towns in Nevada's Comstock Lode, in Colorado, Montana, Idaho, Arizona, and throughout the Cordillera were initially plagued by high mortality, heavy drinking, gambling, prostitution, ethnic conflict, and violence.25
This was the impression the newspaper editor Horace Greeley formed in his 1859 travels through Colorado, then experiencing a gold rush as hopeful men poured into the territory from the Mississippi Valley and points east. Greeley stressed that very few Colorado miners achieved a golden fortune. They either returned home poorer than before, fell victim to cheating gamblers, or died of insanity, suicide, or accident, their bodies found charred by forest fires or chewed by wolves. The mining-camp mix included a small but influential class of fugitives, "prone to deep drinking, soured in temper, always armed, bristling at a word, ready with the rifle, revolver or bowie knife." These toughs set the tone in mining towns like Denver, where the regular administration of justice was nonexistent and where brawls, fights, and pistol shootings were more common, Greeley believed, than any place of comparable size on earth.26
The Comstock Lode's most celebrated journalistic visitor, Samuel Clemens, was scarcely more charitable. Clemens, who took up silver prospecting and speculation in 1861, was sleeping at a remote Nevada inn when the Carson River suddenly overflowed its banks and surrounded the building, stranding him for eight days with an assortment of teamsters, stage drivers, and silver-rush vagabonds. Life in the inn, a diluvial microcosm of the mining frontier, was anything but pleasant. The men passed the time by swearing, drinking, gambling, and brawling. A particularly obnoxious bully named Arkansas managed to pick a fight with the landlord and was at the point of shooting him when the landlord's wife, the only woman among them, intervened. Brandishing a pair of scissors, she forced the astonished ruffian to back away from her husband. Though Arkansas was chagrined into silence, his companions went right on carousing and fighting until Clemens became so annoyed and disgusted that he tried to escape across the swollen river with two other men. He failed and in the attempt very nearly lost his life.27
Had Clemens perished the world would have been denied the writings of Mark Twain. One cannot but wonder, as Clemens did, how many extraordinary lives were cut short by the misadventures and violence of camp life. "Where are they now?" he inquired of California's miners, as fine a collection of young men as might be found anywhere. "Scattered to the ends of the earth," he answered, "or prematurely aged and decrepit—or shot or stabbed in street affrays—or dead of disappointed hopes and broken hearts—all gone or nearly all—victims on the altar of the golden calf."28
Or the silver one. Miners in the silver towns swooned into boiling slagpots, fell down mine shafts, froze in shanties, or caught their deaths from sleeping on drafty saloon floors, for which privilege they paid ten to fifty cents a night. So many died in Leadville, Colorado, in the late 1870s that the authorities took to burying them at midnight lest the death rate come to the public's attention and discourage the mining boom. In this they were successful, for the town's largely male population continued to grow, and with it the number of criminals, whiskey peddlers, prostitutes, and gamblers. By 1880 Leadville had a saloon for every 80 persons, a gambling establishment for every 170, and a bordello for every 200. There were 5,000 persons for each of its four churches, religion being less popular than sin.29
This was the pattern everywhere on the mining frontier. The ubiquitous vice industry reinforced a system of exploitation that, for all practical purposes, placed miners at the bottom of a hard-money feeding chain. They extracted precious metal from the ground; businessmen, professionals, saloon keepers, and vice operators extracted it from the them; and bankers, politicians, thieves, and robbers extracted it from anyone. This last sort of direct, armed parasitism was extremely dangerous, however. A Mexican outlaw named Joe Pizanthia, dispatched by Montana vigilantes in 1864, was shot, hanged, shofsome more, and then burned on a pyre made from the ruins of his cabin. The next morning prostitutes panned out the ashes to see whether he had had any gold in his purse. They were not rewarded for their labors.30
Vigilantism, often found in newly established mining areas, was both selective and emotionally charged. In a world without insurance, where men risked their lives and exhausted their bodies to accumulate wealth, the hatred of thieves and robbers was a visceral thing. When caught they were swiftly and ruthlessly punished, as were the murderers of innocent, uninvolved citizens. But when bullies and shootists and saloon brawlers attacked one another—when, in a word, violence was confined to "players"—usually nothing was done, save to summon the doctor and mop the floor. Don Maguire, a Rocky Mountain trader who made his money selling guns, knives, dice, cards, and sundry other items at a thousand percent profit, captured one such episode in his journal. The entry, composed in a hurried, stream-of-consciousness style, was written in the course of an 1877 trip to the mining town of Atlanta, Idaho:
The two noted characters of the town Coyote Smith and Poker Smith. My attention was first drawn to Coyote Smith. While he was engaged in a quarrel with two carpenters who were working lumber in front of a saloon, he being drunk made much disturbance and at the same time vowing to whip the two carpenters whereupon one of them gave him a kick in the hip. This set him wild. He snarled for a revolver swearing to kill the two. A revolver he could not procure. Midway up the street entered into a second altercation with Poker Smith and seizing a carving knife from the counter of a restaurant he made a stroke [passage obliterated] to sever the jugular vein for Poker Smith but missing his aim the knife struck the collar bone broke and his hand running down the blade he received a horrible wound cutting his hand from the hollow between the thumb and forefinger nearly to the wrist blood flowed freely from both parties but neither was fatally injured. There were no arrests made."
"No arrests made" was the outcome of many a similar confrontation. This sort of affray kept the local surgeon busy, but not necessarily the sheriff or vigilance committee. One of the busiest surgeons was George Kenny, a physician in Salmon City, Idaho. Before he was through he managed to fill half a coffee mug with bullets dug from miners.32
Mining-Camp Virtues
Mining camps had their attractions. Their inhabitants were open, generous men who valued deeds above words, deplored hypocrisy, and were friendly to strangers, at least when sober and unprovoked. Their language was direct and colorful. Samuel Clemens, who knew the vernacular better than anyone, judged Nevada slang "the richest and most infinitely varied and copious that had ever existed anywhere in the world, perhaps, except in the mines of California in the 'early days.'" Miners' swearing was also wildly inventive, though abruptly curtailed in the presence of respectable women, who were treated with courtesy and deference. "I do not recall ever hearing of a respectable woman or girl in any manner insulted or even accosted by the hundreds of dissolute characters that were everywhere," a resident of Bodie, California, recalled. "In part, this was due to the respect that depravity pays to decency; in part, to the knowledge that sudden death would follow any other course.""
If women were honored, erstwhile aristocrats ("biled shirts") were not. The miners' political spirit was thoroughly democratic. Practically everyone could vote. In a camp's early days even miners in their mid-teens were permitted to cast ballots. This spirit of inclusive (white) democracy, manifest in California in the late 1840s and early 1850s, was evident in all subsequent gold and silver rushes. Frederick Jackson Turner ascribed the egalitarian ethos to the frontier environment, boldly declaring: "American democracy is fundamentally the outcome of the experiences of the American people in dealing with the West."34 This famous assertion is not so much wrong as in need of rearrangement. Democracy was a fundamental outcome of the mix of people who went to the West, or at any rate to the western mining regions. In a country where adult white men were the only voters, mining camps, which consisted mainly of adult white men, were necessarily democratic. The same eastwest gender polarization that exacerbated frontier disorder enhanced frontier democracy. Or temporarily enhanced it, for as the male surplus inevitably disappeared, frontier regions became less egalitarian even as they were becoming more stratified.
Put formally, the assortment of traits found in frontier mining regions—violence, cruelty, recklessness, irreligion, dissipation, neglect of hygiene, bad cooking, and widespread bachelorhood on the one hand; friendliness, camaraderie, sharing, and democratic decision-making on the other—was a biologically, culturally, and socially determined byproduct of an economically driven migratory process that initially screened out the very young, the very old, and women. The demographic circumstance of many peers and few wives and children made for a world of arrested male adolescence. One of the striking things about male frontier language was the tendency of men, particularly single men, to refer to themselves and their compatriots as "boys," as in the riposte of a faro dealer to a preacher: "Now, boys, the old man has been showin' you how to save your souls; come this way and I'll show you how to win some money!" The familiar "boys," of which there are thousands of examples in miners' memoirs and letters, was a peculiar and subtly revealing usage in a republic where the customary plural form of adult male address was "gentlemen"; where men were properly addressed singly as "mister" or "sir"; and where the word "boy" often was insulting or implied servility, as in "Fetch me some water, boy." Miners looked anything but boyish. They were muscular men with weather-beaten and heavily bearded faces. Yet they called themselves boys.35
Equally striking was the tendency of men in remote frontier regions to go by nicknames and to dispense with their surnames altogether. One California miner labored for a year beside another, "Doc," before learning his companion's last name. This was a reflection of frontier informality, but also an indication that these men had entered a new world where family background counted for little. One's standing in the male peer group, which assigned the nicknames, counted for much. The elimination of surnames eliminated social and historical ties, perfectly illustrating Tocqueville's dictum that democracy breaks the chain of community. But it was also liberating, freeing a man to realize his ability and talents. "In the east the Yankee was walled about by forms, creeds, and conventions," observed the California miner Richard Hale. "But here there were no questions asked about pedigree. 'Can he fill the position? If he can, well and good, if not—let us have one who can fill it.'" The habit of dropping surnames, using nicknames, and judging by deeds was common throughout the Far West. In Montana a man might simply be called Soap or Frenchy or Whiskey Bill. The lastnamed, born William Graves, was hanged by vigilantes in January 1864. The frontier world of arrested adolescence was not without its norms, the violation of which could have abruptly fatal consequences.36
Counting the Bodies
Western miners, and frontiersmen generally, loved to tell and retell stories of violence, often embellishing them with new details and additional victims. The gambler Doc Holliday may have wounded or killed one black adolescent in a youthful shooting spree; in later years he was said to have deliberately massacred several.37 Because this sort of exaggeration was common, historians interested in an accurate tally of homicides have turned from literary and anecdotal sources to the drier prose of newspapers and court files. Combing the public record is not a fool-proof method for establishing relative levels of violence, as some murders were ignored or undetected. It is nevertheless the most objective procedure available. For ease of comparison the results are expressed in the modern Uniform Crime Reports format of so many homicides per 100,000 persons per year.
Those who have systematically cataloged reported murders in frontier mining areas have found extremely high rates of homicide relative to both contemporaneous non-frontier regions and metropolitan areas in the late twentieth century. Figure 4.1 displays the rates in comparative fashion. Nevada County, California, location of Gomorrah, Gun Town, and other boisterous mining camps, had an average homicide rate of 83 during 18511856. The mining town of Aurora, Nevada, had at least 64 during its boom years of 1861-1865. However, because its records are incomplete and because a grand jury report enumerated other killings, it is quite possible that the actual Aurora rate was as high as 117. That would have been almost identical to the rate of Bodie, California, a nearby mining town that averaged 116 homicides per 100,000 during its boom period of 18781882. Leadville, a Colorado mining town that boomed at the same time as Bodie, had a rate of 105 in 1880.
Non-frontier or post-frontier regions with more normal gender ratios experienced far less homicidal violence. Henderson County, a rural backwater in western Illinois, had an average rate of 4.3 during 1859-1900, or just nineteen murders in over forty years. Two eastern cities, Boston and Philadelphia, had criminal homicide rates of 5.8 and 3.2 in the two decades after 1860. By comparison the average rates for Boston and Philadelphia in the early 1990s were 19.1 and 28.6, respectively.'8
The inescapable conclusion is that the western mining frontier was an exceptionally violent place. This is also a conservative conclusion, for the mining-frontier rates almost certainly do not include all homicidal killings of Indians. These were particularly common in California, where the distinction between killing Indians in battle and simply shooting them down meant little in practice, and where Indian deaths of any sort were of little concern to law enforcement officials.39
The historian Roger McGrath, who compiled the statistics for Aurora and Bodie, has pointed out that the dark cloud of miningtown violence had a silver lining. He found that rates of robbery were comparable to, and rates of burglary lower than, those of eastern cities at the same time. McGrath believes that gun-toting citizens deterred property crime. Would-be robbers and burglars knew they stood a good chance of getting shot and that nothing would happen to anyone who killed them save highly favorable newspaper publicity. But the same guns that deterred theft made homicide all the more likely. What happened in Aurora and Bodie was a trade-off, more fatal gunplay for less larcenous crime.40 Whether (or when) this was true of other frontier mining areas remains an open, intriguing question.
Another open question is whether the mining towns were in fact the most violent places on the frontier. The Union Pacific railroad towns—the end-of-the-line construction depots where graders and bullwhackers flocked to saloons and gambling tents at the end of their day's toil—were apparently even deadlier places. Among the most notorious was Julesburg, which served in 1867 as the temporary dwelling place for four thousand people in the northeastern Colorado Territory. An army colonel stationed there, Richard Irving Dodge, counted 127 graves, only 6 of whose inhabitants had died natural deaths. There had been, he reckoned, at least one slain man buried every day of Julesburg's brief, tumultuous existence. Many of the dead were victims of vigilante justice, hanged from the Union Pacific's telegraph poles.41
The end-of-track towns that succeeded Julesburg as the railroad pushed into Wyoming were as bad or worse. The journalist James Chisholm described early Cheyenne as a human cesspool containing the roughest elements from all parts of the country, outlaws who would not scruple to kill for $10. Laramie boasted a Dickensian saloon, the Bucket of Blood, in which men were robbed and murdered and their bodies tossed into a back room, loaded onto wagons, and hauled onto the plains to be devoured by coyotes. In Benton, farther down the tracks, the 100 bodies that accumulated in the course of the town's two-month existence in the summer of 1868 were disposed of more formally, buried in graves shoveled out of the choking alkali dust. Like Julesburg, Benton averaged a murder a day. The equivalent homicide rate, in excess of 24,000, would have sufficed to wipe out the town's entire population of 1,500 in a little more than four years.42
Benton, of course, was exceptional, a short-lived and murderous singularity in the expanding universe of American frontier violence. What is important is the reason for, not the typicality of, its extraordinary mayhem. Like Julesburg, Cheyenne, and Laramie, Benton was an agglomeration (the word "community" is not appropriate) of young, transient, expendable, bachelor laborers whose self-image was one of toughness and whose unregulated vices attracted criminals, gamblers, prostitutes, and other armed opportunists eager to siphon off their wages. This was essentially the same set of demographic and social circumstances that made the mining camps and towns so violent relative to agricultural and eastern urban areas.
The Debate over Frontier Violence
It may seem strange that there has been a long-running debate among historians as to whether the frontier was violent. The debate pits those who believe that frontier violence, especially as portrayed in motion pictures, pulp fiction, and anecdotal histories, has been grossly exaggerated, against those who believe that the frontier's reputation for fighting and killing, even if embroidered by popularizers, is nevertheless grounded in historical reality.43
The debate has been complicated by the usual skirmishing about the completeness and trustworthiness of records and the uses to which they have been put, but the real reason for its persistence is that the question it poses—how violent was the frontier?—is miscast. There was no such thing as "the" frontier. Different frontier communities had different social and population characteristics. The Mormon religious colony of Orderville, Utah, and the mining town of Bodie, California, were contemporaneous American frontier settlements, but in terms of gender balance, family life, religious restraint, and the presence of liquor and vice they might as well have been on different planets.44 In explaining the historical pattern of western violence and disorder, the key is the structure and composition of the local population, not some intangible quality of "frontierness." Mining towns like Bodie, with nine men for every woman, were places where normal marriage and family patterns were disrupted and where vice flourished, with all the increased illness and violence that such vice activities entailed.
A nice illustration of this principle is the contrast between two American gold rushes of the 1840s and early 1850s, the famous one in California and a largely forgotten one in the Gold Hill region of North Carolina. The latter attracted Cornish miners, many of whom brought their families or married local women, who were much more plentiful than on the distant Pacific coast. Aside from the inevitable mining accidents and sporadic fights, the Cornish immigrant miners experienced little in the way of premature death and violence, at least nothing to compare to what happened to the young men who flocked to California. One was an overwhelmingly single and masculine environment, the other was not, and the difference in gender balance translated into a difference in the local social order.45
The mining camps of California and the interior cordilleran frontier, like the end-of-tracks railroad construction depots and other boom towns with abnormally male and youthful populations, had exceptionally high levels of violence and disorder. This was true both for the straightforward statistical reason already mentioned—more young men equals more violent and disorderly behavior—and because of the pull effect that concentrated male wage-earners had on vice purveyors and criminals. Their presence made a bad situation worse, as did the weakness of social institutions and the interpersonal dynamics of male groups, which licensed and reinforced aggressive and reckless behavior.
The western miners were not alone in this predicament. The cowboys of the Great Plains also inhabited a social milieu with few women and much vice and they suffered the same consequences of more violence and disorder. The chief difference was that the cowboy got to ride to his places of dissolution while the humble miner usually walked.