American Fun (16 page)

Not content with just reforming hard drinkers, which had been the failed policy of their smaller-scale predecessors, the ATS went to the source, pillorying distillers and distributors and accusing them of corrupting American society. They also pricked the moderate drinkers’ consciences—shaming them for dragging a productive young nation down. The message took. By 1833, when the
Second Great Awakening was vibrating the pulpits, the ATS had expanded to six thousand societies and a million national members. In the decade to follow they promoted full-on teetotaling—total abstinence, even from small beer, which had been drunk up until then like an early American soda pop. Unlike the patrician ATS, however, the more demotic and ragtag
Washingtonians—and their women’s wing, the
Martha Washingtonians—rose to prominence in the 1840s and represented the full sweep of the U.S. republic, drawing their numbers from all classes and persuasions and making temperance a mainstream cause. By 1851, the year J. D. Borthwick set sail for California, the concerted efforts of the American temperance
groups had scored a major political goal—prohibition for
Maine, the nation’s original frontier.

While Europe and the United States campaigned for reform, California was going feral: whoring, drinking, gambling, swearing, shooting, killing, and going for broke. During Borthwick’s three years in California, it impressed him that “
the natural bad passions of men, with all the vices and depravities of civilization, were indulged with the same freedom which characterizes the life of a wild savage.” But what can be, and often is, easily seen as a septic sinkhole in American social history was likewise remarkably fertile ground. When these “wild savages” nurtured their “California education,” taking pains to enjoy each other’s freedoms, exotic new varieties of civility took root: rude varieties, fun varieties that could flourish only in the Wild West.

Preachers and teetotalers were far outnumbered. Borthwick saw sprouts of civilization cropping up in San Francisco—a “
sufficiency of schools and churches for every denomination” and “the influence of the constantly-increasing numbers of virtuous women,” thanks to whom “the standard of morals was steadily improving.” But there were also “gorgeous temples for the worship of the mammon,” and the main currents of society congregated in bars, most profusely in Sidney Town’s round-the-clock carnival of gambling halls,
saloons, and factory-like brothels.

Borthwick approved of what he called the Californian’s “intense rivalry in all pursuits”—particularly of the pluck required to survive it. “To keep one’s place in the crowd,” he said, “required an unremitted exercise of the same vigour and energy which were necessary to obtain it.” Mere survival called for a leathery social hide, and success in this “hand-to-hand struggle with [one’s] fellow-men” required “an excess of unscrupulous boldness and physical energy.” Among such fierce competitors, “a polished education”—an Old World training like Borthwick’s own—“was of little service, unless accompanied by an unwonted amount of democratic feeling.” Decorousness just didn’t cut it. Rivals and competitors in a lawless community needed common ground and mutual understanding, and nowhere was this “democratic feeling” stronger than in the saloons, where lonely men had the sorest need to overlook their differences.

Though Borthwick saw San Francisco’s weakest competitors surrender to
the “disease” of “drunkenness,” he was impressed by the infrequency of
alcoholism, especially “considering the enormous consumption of liquor.” The way he and other
gold rush chroniclers presented it, the noon-to-night guzzling of booze in saloons set the standards for polite society. It may have
looked
barbarian: “here, at all hours of the day, men are gulping down fiery mouthfuls of brandy and gin, rendered still more pungent by the addition of other ingredients.” But in fact it disguised a delicate game:

The game grew rowdier, though strangely daintier, the farther he drifted away from the city. While traveling among the diggings—a few days after witnessing a
lynching-by-jury in the Mexican camp of San Andres (the condemned man blew “
a farewell whiff of smoke through his nostrils … and politely took leave of the world with ‘Adios, caballeros’ ”)—Borthwick paid a visit to
Angels Camp, which he considered more “civilised” than San Andres, and in the pub of a jam-packed, ramshackle hotel, he encountered a roomful of mangy fellows in the throes of a
miners’ ball.

Here he saw California society laid bare. All it took was a fiddler, and in this case a flute, to spring the most hardened miners to life. The fiddler shouted instructions to the crowd—“ ‘Lady’s chain,’ ‘Set to your partner,’ with other dancing-school words of command”—and the miners faithfully took their positions, despite the small inconvenience that “none of the fair sex were present.” No worries. Miners were used to making do, and in this case enough of them had volunteered to be “ladies”—marking their “inexpressibles” with distinctive canvas patches—that they could execute all the couples dances.

The dances themselves in the clapboard-walled ballroom were “very
severe gymnastic exercise.” “For here the men danced, as they did everything else, with all their might.” Borthwick doesn’t say whether he joined the dance, but clearly he examined these “long-bearded men, in heavy boots and flannel shirts” for their fragile balance of courtesy and aggression. They executed steps with “a great deal of grace,” with “hearty enjoyment depicted on their dried-up sunburned faces,” all the while their “revolvers and bowie-knives” kept “glancing in their belts.” Just as menacing, and just as sweet, was the “crowd of the same rough-looking customers” who “stood around, cheering them on to greater efforts, and occasionally dancing a step or two quietly on their own account.”

Such happenings were common among the diggings, especially in camps lacking proper gambling halls. Some folks had adopted the practice on their way to California, either dancing all-male “
cotillions upon the green prairie” or aboard the ships where Jack Tars had danced hornpipes for centuries. “
Dame Shirley,” a doctor’s wife living in Indian Bar, delighted in the details of an 1852 “Holiday Saturnalia” in which the most “
generous, hospitable, intelligent, and industrious” of men rejuvenated themselves for three therapeutic weeks of nights-long dancing, continuous binge-drinking, and an “amusing” mock trial of local teetotalers—only to regret her “duty” of recording its salacious details in what she called an “unpleasant letter.” But the Angels Camp event earned Borthwick’s full admiration: he knew he was seeing the California schoolhouse. In his exuberant ink drawing of the same event, he shows a mixed-race crowd in loose white blouses, gaping and laughing, guzzling and smoking, while three burly couples dominating the floor put centrifugal force to the test. The focal couple is pulled in tight, their opposing arms locked, their beards up close. They smoke and hold each other’s eyes with equal parts contest, defiance, and joy. If they weren’t dancing, surely they’d be fighting.

What the picture doesn’t show is the quaint détente, when “
the ‘ladies,’ after their fatigues, tossed off their cocktails and lighted their pipes just as in more polished circles they eat ice-creams and sip lemonade.” But which of these men plays the “lady” ’s role? In Borthwick’s drawing it’s impossible to tell. Their easy display of this “domesticating” culture suggests that all of them do, and none.

This miners’ ball, as Borthwick presents it, swirled at the vortex of a
gold rush Zeitgeist of excitement and antagonism. Men who lived lives of toil and danger, most of them thousands of miles from home, came together for orgies like this one that suited their peculiar needs. Part dance, part fight, part saucy masquerade, these mildly erotic democratic maelstroms were founded on the purest common pleasure.

“For here the men danced, as they did everything else, with all their might.” (J. D. Borthwick. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.)

IN MARCH
1849, nineteen-year-old Alfred Doten sailed from Plymouth, Massachusetts, to chronicle Merry Mount’s legacy in the West. That wasn’t what he set out to do, but California had a way of changing plans. His father, a sea captain, was a direct descendant of one of the Mayflower Compact’s two
bondservants; his mother,
Rebecca Bradford, descended from the governor himself. Alfred left his job as a cod fisherman and boarded a refurbished whaler, the
Yeoman,
to get his California education. In his subsequent half century out west (he died in
Nevada in 1903), this New England teetotaler became a loose bon vivant (and eventual alcoholic) living at the center of American fun. He recorded nearly every day of it, either in his cheeky
newspaper dispatches or in the
lively, illicit, unflinching episodes that riddle his seventy-nine leather-back journals like bullet holes.

His Puritanism clung like barnacles, at first. Two months into his rocky voyage, he was one of twenty-five stalwarts to sign an anti-tobacco pledge, declaring it “
a very good move indeed.” And just off
Cape Horn, on July 4, a date that would soon become the annual peak of his otherwise raucous daily revels, Doten gloried in the reveille of guns, pipes, and drums, but he scoffed at the crew members who were such “
slaves of King Alcohol” that they deigned to drink potato whiskey, “vile stuff.” His temperance held strong up the Pacific coast—he admired sober Chileans in the streets of Concepción, in contrast to “
several of the Americans drunk”—but a short while after arriving in San Francisco, which he assured his father was “
the most civil country in the world” (“stealing is a rare thing, and murder is scarce, although every body goes ‘armed to the teeth’ at the mines”), his Plymouth morals started to loosen.

It took him a while to warm his hands on
serious
gold rush fun. As late as 1851, despite confessing here and there to a “fandango” or to “cards,” he admired the
miners who sang psalms more than the ones who spent their days “
drinking and gambling.” He scorned the Chileans and “
howling drunk” Mexicans who held “a big spree” on the Sabbath, and he prided himself on “singing sacred music.” But around 1852 his tune began to change. Holing up that September on the Calaveras River with some Chilean roughnecks (identified as “Alfaro & co”), he mused that they’d had “
a hell of a spree and
some of us
got a little tight.” Three days later it was “a big fandango spree,” this time with “my four Mexicans from up the gulsh.” After that the party was never-ending, usually with Doten and his fiddle to blame.
He “astonished” crowds deep into the winter months with his “playing and singing,” “broke the ice … with an old fiddle,” and instigated parties throughout the snowy diggings. The following February, after more than a week of debauchery, he declared, “
This is one of the best
‘benders’
I have been on for a long time.” And so would it go in the years to come, as the Plymouth boy recorded firsthand accounts of California “
jollification.”

Doten’s daily sketches of his first six years, when he chased down rumors of lucky strikes from Spanish Gulch to Fort Grizzly, also detail
the labors and daily dangers that characterized diggings life. Many folks he encountered were impoverished or killed—by fighting, mining disasters, stupidity—and a few commit suicide in his thousands of pages. But Doten was a survivor and a devoted hedonist. The industrious lad could learn to build a kiln while killing two rattlers and reading
Nicholas Nickleby,
or he could devote an evening to baking a “
plum cake” after spending the day digging “30 rods.” Like J. D. Borthwick and
Bayard Taylor, Doten was curious about California society, but he was also more apt to join the party—or fire one up with his fiddle or banjo. In the manner of many African-American miners—who feature in countless journals and historical records for their dancing, fiddling, and banjo picking—Doten raised roof beams throughout the camps. And shaped though he was by his ingrained biases for Yankees over Southerners, Americans over Mexicans, whites over blacks and Indians, Doten moved freely throughout the populace, making friends wherever he went. He was keenly aware of racial tensions—like the near war among Chileans, Americans, and Italians that was narrowly avoided by a jury verdict; or that “
Mexicans are robbing and killing the Chinese at a great rate.” He railed into his diary against “
thieving Mexicans,” who he believed at one point were stealing his gold, and he lent a hand to hanging a Mexican convicted of murder, a somber duty he appeared to regret. And he slows now and then to mention a fistfight—or knife fight or even the occasional gun battle—but
friendly
conflict was more to his taste. His rule, if he had one, was fearless abandon, and whenever possible he kept an open guest list.