We continue visiting gold-rush-era California this week, primarily because that historic earthquake shaped or reshaped almost every aspect of California as we know it today.
There were very few women among the new arrivals so busy shaking up the Golden State, but, many of them were literate and articulate, and engaged observers. Including Eliza Farnham, a popular lecturer, writer, abolitionist, prison reformer, phrenologist, and spiritualist who fully engaged the public imagination. She frequently lectured on the natural superiority of women, though, because she believed women superior, she did not push for equal rights.
Not all of Farnham’s ventures succeeded. Her tenure as prison matron at New York’s Sing Sing was controversial, given her belief that she could determine a woman’s character by studying skull shape and size. (A quick aside: The pseudoscience of phrenology led to some notably racist conclusions. On the plus side, it helped establish present-day neuropsychology, at least the understanding that the brain is an organ that influences emotion, thought, and behavior.)
Another Farnham failure was her campaign to bring 130 marriageable women to gold-rush California—a simple way to civilize the Wild West, she reasoned. (California was 90 percent male.) Newspaper editors on both coasts were captivated by the notion, but those potential brides, apparently not so much: only
three went west.
Farnham came to California to clean up the business affairs of her attorney husband, Thomas Jefferson Farnham, who died in 1848 and left her land in remote Santa Cruz. But first she had to sue the ship captain who had left her in Venezuela and sailed off with her two young sons and her belongings. Then her Santa Cruz farming venture failed. She also failed at a second marriage, and then lost her
infant daughter and youngest son. She finally quit California, after getting one of the state’s first divorces, and headed back East.
But Farnham’s gold-rush era experiences did introduce the place to a national audience, thanks to her 1856 first-person account, California In-Doors and Out. About early gold mining she observed:
In these dry diggings, a shovel, pick and pan are the implements required. . . . A panful [of earth] is taken to the water, and washed, and from the amount it yields, the richness of the earth is estimated. . . . My own experience in mining is confined to this variety. I washed one panful of earth, under a burning noon-day sun, in a cloth riding-habit, and must frankly confess, that the small particle of gold, which lies this day safely folded in a bit of tissue paper, though it is visible to the naked eye, did not in the least excite the desire to continue the search.
She congratulated the forty-niners for their “perseverance and industry,” hoping that “true manhood, with all its honor, purity, and faithfulness” would remain among them. But she was much less amused by miners’ alcohol abuse than Dame Shirley—because even young boys were prone to the “drunkenness, carousing, and profanity” particularly common on the Sabbath—everyone’s day of rest—especially when they washed their own gold: The children participate in all the vices of their elders. I saw boys, from six upward, swaggering through the streets, begirt with scarlet sash, in exuberant collar and bosom, segar [sic] in mouth, uttering huge oaths, and occasionally treating men and boys at the bars.
Which makes you wonder: If Eliza Farnham had succeeded with her bride-import venture, would there have been fewer drunken six-year-olds, or more of them? Hmm.
