1852
‘Who writ this ’ere?’ is his first remark, taking up one of my most precious books, and leaving the marks of his irreverent fingers upon the clean page. ‘Shakespeare’, I answer as politely as possible. ‘Did Spokeshave write it? He was an almighty smart fellow, that Spokeshave, I’ve hear’n tell’, replies my visitor. ‘I must write hum [home] and tell our folks that this ’ere is the first carpet I’ve seen sin I came to Californy, four year come next month.’
When Dr Fayette Clapp decided to practise in the mining camps of the California Gold Rush, his wife went along with him, rather than repine at home. Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe (she added the terminal ‘e’ for style), a tolerably well-educated woman from Massachusetts, relished the adventure. Her letters, purporting to be written to her sister back home, were later published in San Francisco’s fledgling (and short-lived) literary monthly, The Pioneer, under the pseudonym ‘Dame Shirley’.
Dame Shirley was really one of those traveller-journalists like Leonard Kip, J.D. Borthwick and Bayard Taylor (see 19 August) who ‘wrote up’ the Gold Rush for readers further east. Like her, they thought the western vernacular was both demotic and inventive. In Three Years in California (1857) Borthwick recalled a man being described as ‘“strapped”, “dead broke” – Anglicé, without a cent in his pocket’. Quote marks and Latin serve to separate the observers writing for their cultural equals back home from the specimen under observation. There’s lots of defensive over-production of diction and rhetoric.
Dame Shirley begins her letter of 4 September with an elaborate inability topos: ‘If only I … could weave my stupid nothings into one of those airy fabrics, the value of which depends entirely upon the skill-ful work … which distinguishes it’ – and so on for over a page. Just under half-way through the letter she constructs an elaborate occupatio, or list of topics she won’t discuss while actually doing so:
I will not tell you, how sometimes we were stepping lightly over immense rocks, which a few months since, lay fathoms deep below the foaming Plumas … nor shall I say a single word about the dizziness we felt, as we crept by the deep excavations lying along the road …
But at least she conveys a sense of the mine workings and their environment. And she doesn’t shrink from the darker truths of the Forty- Niner experience. Forget any notions about the romance of crossing the plains:
The poor women, looking as haggard as so many Endorean witches, burnt to the color of a hazel-nut, with their hair cut short, and its gloss entirely destroyed by the alkali, whole plains of which they are compelled to cross on the way.
Details like these go well beyond local colour, and set Dame Shirley apart from the other Gold Rush journalists.