California in the late 1860’s

I’m often asked why I chose to write about 1860s California, and I guess the quick and easy answer is that the “Gold Rush” has always been a part of me, because I grew up on a farm near Thames – one of the richest gold mining areas in New Zealand – and I used to holiday every summer along a coast where there were many disused mines in the hills. (The New Zealand and Australian “Gold Rush was later than California’s – but followed many of the same patterns)

With our poor mother non the wiser, my sisters and I would scramble up the bank behind our rented summer house and explore the old mine shafts which went vertically back into the hills.. We never did go in very far because of the dark and the wet and the cave wetas, but every summer I lugged home great hunks of quartz as souvenirs.

So why is my Of Gold & Blood trilogy set in California more than ten years after the Gold Rush – and not with the first 49ers?

Wouldn’t the time of the Gold Rush itself (1849) be more exciting, and hold more possibilities for drama and action? When I started researching this story I might have thought so too.

There’s no doubt the early years of the Californian Gold Rush – the days when the legendary ‘Forty Niners’ were rushing in – were unique and never-to-be-repeated. And the ‘world did rush in’ as one famous historian noted.

But the golden years were short. After 1850, as gold became more and more difficult to reach, the growing industrialization of mining drove more and more miners from independence into wage labor. Not too much ‘romance’ – or many big pay days – about that. After 1852 the total take declined gradually, leveling off to around $45 million per year by 1857.

In the early years the absence of women was frequently remarked on, and many of those who did venture into mining towns turned to prostitution or running boarding houses to support themselves. I wanted my story to reflect a more diverse community, and I didn’t want too much ‘hard scrabble.’ – all hard labor and no home comforts!

I wanted a story which could reasonably include women from many different corners of the world, with a wide variety of talents, interests and occupations.

I wanted a society which was on the verge of being civilised, but not quite there yet. Where French, and Irish, and Chinese, and Spanish and freed slaves, and Germans, and Australians and New Zealanders, Cornishmen and Southerners could all flourish, even if they had to endure hostility from the ‘Yankees’ at times. (I’ve got pretty well all those nationalities represented somewhere somehow over the three books written so far.)

The Californian frontier in the late 1860s was a place where many of the ‘wild card’ elements remained, where law and order was sometimes non-existent, where women did not have to follow all the rules, where they still had the freedom to flourish in the boardwalk cracks before the middle class moralizers arrived to try and force everyone to live according to their more conservative expectations. In a world like that, random and arbitrary events can happen and life gets very interesting.

While married women in California did not gain control over their own money until 1871, California was probably one of the most best, most freeing states in which to be a woman in the 1860s.

That’s how I see it anyway.  I imagine it as a world  we’d feel strangely familiar in – apart from the huge differences in technology . . .  because there’s really not better time to be a woman than now!

Have Your Say

If you haven’t yet discovered Poisoned Legacy, Book One in the Of Gold & Blood series, its available for FREE Download. If you’ve got a few minutes to share your thoughts I’d be thrilled to hear them and will endeavor to respond within a day. It means a lot to find a lot of people feel the same way as I do about early California.

Jenny

PS.For those who are interested, historians calculate the Gold Rush officially ended in 1855 or 1858 depending on who you read.) 

And just one final personal note: After I embarked on Of Gold & Blood I discovered doing some totally unrelated family research that a great great uncle of mine, Thomas Wheeler, went off to San Francisco from Auckland in the 1840s and came home ten years later with an American wife. People have always liked to venture forth, and long before the age of jet travel they were busy creating a melting pot of vitality in many ports.