Review on Professor Susan Lee Johnsons Roaring Camp the Social History of the California Gold Mines
... Losing sight of this idea often leads to taking history at face value. ... Professor Susan Lee Johnson, author of Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush writes a secondary account of the California Gold Rush from a much different approach and perspective than modern elementary scholastics popularly teach. The perspective of modern scholastics simply gives the image of the “White Anglo-American with a scratchy beard holding a pan of gold to the afternoon sunlight.” With many primary sources confided, Johnson explains that this popular perception of the California Gold Rush is grossly simplified. In the preface Professor Johnson says that the “task of this book (Roaring Camp) is both to interrogate and to dismantle the stories white American’s have told themselves about the California Gold Rush, and furthermore to offer a pastiche of tales that will help us to think as complexly and critically about the conquest of history as we have begun to think about the history of conquest. ... 11)” In doing so Professor Johnson investigates the Southern Mines, the area in the Sierra Nevada foothills. In explaining the social complexity of these foothills Professor Johnson goes so far as to call the mid-nineteenth century West the “most multiracial, multiethnic, multinational event that had yet occurred within the boundaries of the United States (Johnson, pg. ... With this vast array of demographics and a collection of primary sources Johnson proves the social complexity of the California Gold Rush. While guiding the reader through the complexities of the mid-nineteenth century West Professor Johnson breaks down the history using the chronological sign posts, “Rush”, “Boom”, and “Bust”. Within these chronological signposts Johnson uses a number of first hand sources from letters to relatives and friends, to dairies kept by gold miners of the time. The “Rush” section of Professor Johnson’s Roaring Camp describes socially how and why there was a surge of people heading West to the gold mining camps. Her “Boom” section illustrates the mining camps social structure and its complexities. The “Bust” section is an explanation of why the mining camps of Southern California decayed and died out. Johnson breaks down the rise and the fall of the mining towns in California chronologically to show how the California Gold rush was born and why it ultimately failed.