The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52

From September 1851 to November 1852, Louise Clappe sent twenty-three letters to her sister in Massachusetts from Rich Bar and Indian Bar, two camps on the East Branch of the North Fork of the Feather River. Signing herself Dame Shirley, she set down what she saw: canvas tents and pine-bough shanties, flour packed from Marysville at forty cents a pound, and the harsher business of theft, murder, and lynching. She copied out a fluming company’s accounts: thirteen men who reckoned their dam alone at two thousand dollars and closed the season with forty-one dollars and seventy cents in gold-dust. She also noticed what most Gold Rush chroniclers left out, the women and children, and the Spanish-speaking and Native residents the miners pushed aside. Historians rate them among the most reliable records of the diggings, and her eye is dry and exact.