Empire of Dirt: History of the US West: Week 5: Gold Rushes & The Mexican-American War

Required Reading: 

• *Susan Lee Johnson, “‘Domestic’ Life in the Diggings: The Southern Mines in the California Gold Rush,” from Valerie J. Matsumoto and Blake Allmendinger, eds., Over the Edge: Remapping the American West
• *Elliott West, The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado, Scanned excerpt on Course ISite [Note: The most important thing here is to be able to articulate the differences and similarities in the CA gold rush vs. Colorado]
• *An Appeal for the Indians by Lydia Maria Child

• *Brian DeLay, “Independent Indians and the U.S.-Mexican War,” The American Historical Review, 112:1 (February 2007): 35-68

• *Albert L. Hurtado, “Empires, Frontiers, Filibusters, and Pioneers: The Transnational World of John Sutter,”  Pacific Historical Review 77:1 (February 2008): 19-47

 Blog Post

1. Analyze and give a close reading to at least two of the images below using this week’s readings as a reference point. As always, be sure to cite specific examples from the text to back up your claims. Things to think about: Who is represented, who is not? What about angle, framing, composition, lines, color, printing techniques, tone, space, foreground and background, texture? What is their overall argument? What is the larger context here?

2. Please post a question you would like to discuss for this week’s readings in class.

Image 1: The Miner’s Lamentation 

Image 2: Malakoff Diggings, Nevada County, California (Courtesy of Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley) 

Image 3: Malakoff Diggings. North Bloomfield Gravel Mining Co. Process of separating the ore from earth. [California.] Watkins’ Pacific Coast. (Courtesy of Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley). 

Image 4: Head of Auburn Ravine, 1852. Cased photographs selected from the collections of the California History Section of the California State Library. 

Image 5: In Auburn Ravine, 1852. (California State Library) 

Image 6: Six miners with rocker, wheel barrows, picks, shovels and gold pans. Men stopping work to pose at mining site. Two display gold pans, one carries buckets balanced from a bar across his shoulders. Several rockers or “cradles” are also displayed. (1850). (Courtesy of Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley) 

Image 7: Nisenan Indian With Arrows (1850-1860) Daguerreotype (From the Braun Research Library, Autry National Center; 1346.G.1)

Want to learn more? Check out these resources: 

• Sandweiss, Martha, Print the Legend: Photography and the American West (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).

• *S. Shufelt, “A letter from a gold miner, Placerville, California, October, 1850”
• *Letter 2, Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe, aka Dame Shirley,“The Shirley letters from California mines in 1851-52”
• *Letter 6, Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe, aka Dame Shirley,“The Shirley letters from California mines in 1851-52”