A Book Review

Michael Mouritsen, RP

Andrea G. McDowell. We the Miners: Self-Government in the California Gold Rush Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2022, Harvard University Press, 327 pp.

In popular imagination, the California Gold Rush was part of the ‘wild west’— lawless, violent, and chaotic. In a lively and well-researched challenge to this view, however, historian and law professor Andrea G. McDowell documents how, largely in the absence of formal state government, miners held orderly meetings and made decisions by majority vote to regulate their communities, build infrastructure, run companies, and conduct criminal trials.

We the Miners: Self-Government in the California Gold Rush is a remarkable story of the power of parliamentary procedure in moderating what was otherwise a life of rough frontier justice . Over 100,000 men flooded into California during the peak of the gold rush between 1848 and 1855, most of them from the eastern United States where, as members of the many church groups and civic associations that flourished in most American towns, they had learned basic rules of order—what McDowell calls the vocabulary and culture of meetings . “The main advantage of a shared knowledge of how to ‘do’ meetings,” she writes, was the ability of “large groups of strangers to act together on very short notice”.

It was not until 1850 that California joined the Union, but there was no effective government or law enforcement in much of the state for years afterwards . Using diaries and letters, as well as newspaper accounts and other primary sources, We the Miners describes the use of parliamentary procedure as a form of governance in matters that would ordinarily belong to the legislature, municipalities, or the courts . Although criminal trials were obviously held in ‘Judge Lynch’s

Court’, they were almost always very formal, with an elected jury, a chairman to preside, and a secretary to take minutes . Witnesses were called and the accused was given a chance to speak . Motions were made from the floor and adopted by majority vote, and the record was sent to the newspapers to show that the participants had acted properly . The concept of voting and majority rights, however, did not encompass foreign miners or the native population . French and Mexican miners were often ejected from the mines by vote, and atrocities against natives went unpunished, highlighting the weakness of a purely majoritarian system that failed to recognize fundamental rights . It would be another twenty years before Henry M . Robert published his Pocket Manual of Rules of Order (in 1876), which balanced both individual and group rights in the first comprehensive and consistent procedure for use by voluntary groups .

Andrea McDowell believes the centrality of parliamentary procedure to miners’ self-government has been overlooked by scholars, in part because 19th century writers took the formalities for granted, while modern readers likely find them boring.

“Sheriffs, posses and vigilantes of popular literature” may seem more exciting, but the real story of the Gold Rush is “one of chairmen and committees, motions and resolutions, elections [and minutes]”—in other words, exactly the book every parliamentarian should love!