Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush

by Susan Lee Johnson

christening their cabins with names that suggested, even celebrated, the absence of sharp-tongued spouses: Loafers’ Retreat, Main Top (a cabin of sailors), Temperance Hole, and Jackass Tent. Like the Anglo miners a bit to the north who called their camp Whooping-boys Hollow, McIsaac and friends took a certain pleasure in the canvas-covered world without women they created.19

Doble seems to have been quite comfortable with the homosociality of the diggings.

men in California sometimes had bright eyes for each other.

every man “who had a patch on a certain part of his inexpressibles” would be a woman for the night,

The Gold Rush did occur in an era of increased possibilities for same-sex eroticism.

Indeed, the only unambiguous extant record of sex between men in the Southern Mines occurs not in a letter or diary but in the divorce proceedings of Hanna and Jeremiah Allkin of Calaveras County. Jeremiah had come to California in 1851, and Hanna joined him there in 1854. Two years later she divorced him, in part because “of his frequently sleeping with certain men, in the same house then occupied by her as his domicil—for the diabolical purpose of committing the crime of bugery.”84

I appreciated the author being very clear about this being the only unambiguous historical record.

To those who heard them, stories about married white women cavorting with men at parties or forcing men to copulate when husbands were off at work made all too much sense.

Jason had a guest book for the travelers who passed through on their way to the park, and some of the entries in that book suggest that his partnership with John was an intimate one indeed.

this one narrows the field of vision considerably, cutting short as it does the intimate—and, no doubt in some cases, erotic—ties between men that the Gold Rush fostered. Indeed, no historical silence is so deafening as that which surrounds the intimacies among men who spent a night, or a lifetime, together in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. Groveland was not Greenwich Village, to be sure. But neither was it a land of lonely hearts.