The Songs of the Gold Rush

By Richard E. Lingenfelter

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1964.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520338616

Book preview

Edited with Introduction

by

Richard A. Dwyer and Richard E. Lingenfelter

Music edited with guitar arrangements by

David Cohen

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley and Los Angeles

1965

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

BERKELEY AND LOS ANGELES

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

LONDON, ENGLAND

©1964 BY THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 64-20871

SECOND PRINTING, 1965

DESIGNED BY ADRIAN WILSON

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

ACKNOLEGGEMENTS

THE COMPILATION of these gold rush songs would not have been possible without the generous aid of John Barr Tompkins and Helen Bretnor of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; Anne Basart of the University of California Music Library, Berkeley; Mary Schmelzle of the Sutro Library, San Francisco; and Irving Lowens of the Music Division of the Library of Congress. For their assistance in locating biographical information on the gold rush song writers, particularly John A. Stone, we are most grateful to Allan R. Ottley of the California State Library, Sacramento; James Abajian of the California Historical Society, San Francisco; Mrs. Hester Robinson of the Society of California Pioneers, San Francisco; and John W. Winkley of Walnut Creek, California. We wish also to express our thanks to Professors Wayland D. Hand, D. K. Wilgus, and Charles Seeger for their useful suggestions.

David Cohen, as music editor, wrote the final section of the Introduction, dealing with the musical settings.

R. A. D.

R. E. L.

I would like to thank Professor D. K. Wilgus for sharing with me his knowledge of the musical background of these songs. I am also grateful to Professor Charles Seeger, who looked through my musical settings and gave them his good-natured approval even while making it clear to me that, had he provided the settings, there would not be nearly so many fancy minor chords.

D.C.

CONTENTS 1

CONTENTS 1

INTRODUCTION

HO! FOR CALIFORNIA!

COMING AROUND THE HORN

CROSSING THE PLAINS

SEEING THE ELEPHANT

WHEN I WENT OFF TO PROSPECT

AN HONEST MINER

A LIFE BY THE CABIN FIRE

LIFE IN CALIFORNIA

CALIFORNIA BLOOMER

CALIFORNIA HUMBUGS

THE UNHAPPY MINER

I’M SAD AND LONELY HERE

THEN HURRAH FOR HOME!

CALIFORNIA AS IT IS AND WAS

INTRODUCTION

WHETHER or not the music of California’s first rush will outlast that generated by the emigration to Hollywood, we do not know. But some of the songs of the forty-niners have proved sturdy enough not only to survive a century but, during its course, to provide the bones for other songs suiting far different situations. It is folklorically relevant to confirm this claim. John A. Lomax1 collected five songs in forms essentially the same as those in Old Put’s songsters: The Fools of ’49, A Ripping Trip, The Happy Miners, The California Stage Company, and Sweet Betsey from Pike. Three other songs he presents show considerable alteration: The California Trail is a greatly changed version of Crossing the Plains, and The Days of ’49 and Joe Bowers appear in slightly altered form. Joe Bowers, also printed in collections by John and Alan Lomax2 and Louise Pound,3 is, in fact, almost as general as Sweet Betsey. Robert McReynolds records a song, sung by a miner called Sluice Box about the turn of the century, of which he remembers only the lines,

I stole a dog, got whipped like hell, And away I went for Marysville. Then leave, ye miners, leave.

Then leave, ye miners, leave,⁴

which turn out to be the last two lines of the eighth stanza and the first two lines of the chorus of Seeing the Elephant. Black and Robertson, in their collection,5 give the words and melodies of four songs set down from oral tradition rather than from printed sources; they have recorded renditions by Leon Ponce of Columbia, Tuolumne County, of The Days of ’49, The Lousy Miner, Joe Bowers, and Sweet Betsey.

In addition to these general survivals, other songs have maintained a local currency, but the majority, which deal with contemporary history and placer mining, have disappeared with the passing of both. As placer mining in the Mother Lode gave way to farming, lumbering, and ranching, the miners left for new mineral fields at Mono Lake, Washoe, and Pike’s Peak, carrying with them their songs and popular performers. Jesse Hutchinson’s Ho! For California! for example, was adapted to the new rush at Pike’s Peak as Cherry Creek Emigrants’ Song:

We’ll rock our cradles around Pike’s Peak

In search of the dust and for nuggets seek.

If the Indians ask us why we are there,

We’ll tell them we’re made as free as the air.

Then Ho, boys, ho, to Pike’s Peak we’ll go.

There’s plenty of gold In the West we are told In the new El Dorado.

Other departing miners carried their songs down under to the mines in Australia, where The Days of ’49 may well have inspired a new parody, The Days of ’84, recalling the good times and rough characters at Broken Hill.

Here, then, are the original songs of the gold rush —the inspiration for the latter-day versions noted above—written and sung in the mining camps of California in the first decade following the discovery of gold. Into these songs was decanted the spirit of the Great Excitement. As Old Put observed in his first California songster, they give in a few words what would occupy volumes, detailing the hopes, trials and joys of a miner’s life. They exhibit in fact every facet and mood of the great rush — the voyage around the Horn or by the Panamanian isthmus, the trek across the plains, the humor and the drudgery of mining, the hopes and the disillusionment of the miners, the hardships and humbugs of life in California, and the last reminiscences of the days of ’49.

The mode of composition of these songs, like the way of life of their subjects, was adaptation. No forty-niner was born in California, nor were his songs ever so strange or so new as the gold he sluiced from the placers or crushed out of quartz. He mended his tunes to suit his life, and, as that life was hard, the songs were rough. Parody was the chief result. Many familiar songs composed amid more clement scenes by such favorite musicians as Stephen Foster, Dan Emmett, and Henry Russell were recut in the Mother Lode diggings of Gouge Eye, Rat Trap Slide, and Mad Canyon. Here will be found imitations of Oh! Susanna, Old Folks at Home, Massa’s in de Cold Ground, My Old Kentucky Home, Camptown Races, Old Dog Tray, Old Dan Tucker, A Life on the Ocean Wave, Woodman Spare That Tree, Comin’ Through the Rye, New York Gals, Wait for the Wagon, and Pop Goes the Weasel. But their familiarity suffers an amusing contempt in transformation.

Above the manly baritone of complaint and satire there is a second voice — sentimental and conventional — which praises outdoor life, motherhood, children, freedom, and the like. The suspicion that such notes are reached by shutting your eyes is the price of our sophistication. In any event, the proportion of sentiment to satire in these songs is about the same as that of gold to gangue in the average mine.

That mining songs of the past and present are usually parodies has been observed by Duncan Emrich, who offers this explanation:

The prospector did not have the steady saddle job of the cowboy or monotonous hours of work in the cotton fields, both of them conducive to the reflective and slow creation of a personal music. His work was difficult, tense, and exciting. His full attention was concentrated in the gold he searched for as the gambler s desire is centered in the extra ace needed to round out his hand. One does not burst into song at such moments. On Saturdays and Sundays, however, he relaxed: parodies, whether provided for him or created by him, came easily then as now.6

This theory, however, does not really explain why so many of the miners’ songs were parodies; rather, it attempts to account for their not being work songs. Neither does Emrich’s description of the prospector, or even of placer mines, seem very accurate, for a mass of forty-niner diaries and other contemporary accounts testify to the long hours of boredom and solitude endured by the placer miner working his rocker, long tom, or pan. And the same is echoed in accounts of prospecting by such writers as Dan De Quille, who tells of the long hours spent rambling among the lonely foothills prospecting by horseback. We are left, therefore, to speculate on what was sung, if anything, during these times. It seems not too improbable that prospectors sang the same parodies they heard in the saloons, for the miners’ taste for the familiar-with-a-difference may have been more basic than has hitherto been suspected.

A curious piece of parallel evidence, more symbolic than decisive, supports this possibility. Soulé’s Annals of San Francisco7 preserves the program for one of the first regular amusements presented to the citizens of that city. It announced a concert given by Stephen C. Massett and others on July 2,1849. Six songs, all sentimental ballads, are on the card, but there are also six imitations to be recited. Among them were An imitation of an elderly lady and German girl, who applied for the situation of soprano and alto singers in one of the churches of Massachusetts; An imitation of the N.Y. Razor Strop Man; and, finally, A Yankee Town Meeting; in which Mr. Massett will give imitations of seven different persons who had assembled for the purpose of ‘suppressing the press.’ Apparently, along with their diet of imported Eastern ballads and plays, the forty-niners relished a saltier draught of their own making. The parodic note seems to have been pervasive in their entertainment, and not restricted to song.

We do not know if the miners maintained a habitual and unlyrical silence over their pans and long toms, but the songs they paid to hear in the canvas saloons were professionally sung and, at least originally, were not folk songs. The way in which these songs were presented is revealed in contemporary newspaper accounts. Only four months after the Mono ville placers were discovered, the San Francisco Evening Bulletin8 printed this notice of Sierra entertainment:

A theatre as it is called has been in operation [at Monoville] for some time. Mart Taylor is the feature, and his songs, to which are sung words of his own manufacture and of local adaptation, meet with great applause. His company is not large, consisting, beside himself, only of one or two others —one Joe Bowers and somebody else. The