BOOK: Andrea G. MCDOWELL, We the Miners: Self-Government in the California Gold Rush (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022), 336 pp., ISBN 9780674248113, $39.95

 

(image source: Harvard University Press)

Book description: 

Gold Rush California was a frontier on steroids: 1,500 miles from the nearest state, it had a constantly fluctuating population and no formal government. A hundred thousand single men came to the new territory from every corner of the nation with the sole aim of striking it rich and then returning home. The circumstances were ripe for chaos, but as Andrea McDowell shows, this new frontier was not nearly as wild as one would presume. Miners turned out to be experts at self-government, bringing about a flowering of American-style democracy—with all its promises and deficiencies.

The Americans in California organized and ran meetings with an efficiency and attention to detail that amazed foreign observers. Hundreds of strangers met to adopt mining codes, decide claim disputes, run large-scale mining projects, and resist the dominance of companies financed by outside capital. Most notably, they held criminal trials on their own authority. But, mirroring the societies back east from which they came, frontiersmen drew the boundaries of their legal regime in racial terms. The ruling majority expelled foreign miners from the diggings and allowed their countrymen to massacre the local Native Americans. And as the new state of California consolidated, miners refused to surrender their self-endowed authority to make rules and execute criminals, presaging the don’t-tread-on-me attitudes of much of the contemporary American west.

In We the Miners, Gold Rush California offers a well-documented test case of democratic self-government, illustrating how frontiersmen used meetings and the rules of parliamentary procedure to take the place of the state.

Table of contents: 

• Introduction
• 1. Before Property
• 2. Powerless Judges and Discharged Soldiers
• 3. Indian Miners
• 4. The Mining Codes
• 5. Resolving Disputes
• 6. Cooperation and Conflict with Mining Companies
• 7. Lynch Trials and Frontier Criminal Law
• 8. Trial by Judge Lynch
• 9. Whipping, Branding, and Hanging
• 10. The End of the Hangtown Oak
• 11. Massacring Indians and Ejecting Spanish Speakers
• 12. Outside Capital and the End of the Gold Rush
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index

About the author: 

Andrea G. McDowell is a historian and Professor of Law at Seton Hall Law School. A Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, she has also taught at the University of Leiden, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Before turning to law, McDowell was an Egyptologist and authored three books on the ancient Egyptian workers who built the tombs in the Valley of the Kings.

More information can be found here.