Life in the Gold Rush

Mrs. Louise Clappe, who was the wife of a physician that had gone to the camp at Rich Bar in the summer of 1851, describes what the life was like in San Francisco and the Feather River mining communities of Rich Bar and Indian Bar. They first lived in mining camps and her husband, Dr. Clappe, practiced medicine after which they moved to San Francisco. The Shirley letters are a series of letters that Mrs. Clappe wrote to her sister in 1851 to 1852. Dame Shirley’s (Mrs. Clappe) letters focus on the experiences of women and children as well as the miners, their work, crimes and punishment as well as the relations with native Hispanic residents and Native Americans.

In the letters to her sister she describes the place they ended up in known as the Empire Hotel:

 “California herself might be called the Hotel State, so completely is she inundated with taverns, boarding-houses, etc. The Empire is the only two-story building in town, and absolutely has a live "upstairs." Here you will find two or three glass windows, an unknown luxury in all the other dwellings. It is built of planks of the roughest possible description.”

“The roof, of course, is covered with canvas, which also forms the entire front of the house, on which is painted, in immense capitals, the following imposing letters: "THE EMPIRE!" I will describe, as exactly as possible, this grand establishment.”

“You first enter a large apartment, level with the street, part of which is fitted up as a barroom, with that eternal crimson calico which flushes the whole social life of the Golden State with its everlasting red, in the center of a fluted mass of which gleams a really elegant mirror, set off by a background of decanters, cigar-vases, and jars of brandied fruit; the whole forming a tout ensemble of dazzling splendor. A table covered with a green cloth, --upon which lies a pack of monte-cards, a backgammon-board, and a sickening pile of "yallow-kivered" literature, --with several uncomfortable-looking benches, complete the furniture of this most important portion of such a place as "The Empire." The remainder of the room does duty as a shop, where velveteen and leather, flannel shirts and calico ditto, --the latter starched to an appalling state of stiffness, --lie cheek by jowl with hams, preserved meats, oysters, and other groceries, in hopeless confusion.”

 “From the barroom you ascend by four steps into the parlor, the floor of which is covered by a straw carpet. This room contains quite a decent looking-glass, a sofa fourteen feet long and a foot and a half wide, painfully suggestive of an aching back, --of course covered with red calico (the sofa, not the back), --a round table with a green cloth, six cane-bottom chairs, red-calico curtains, a cooking-stove, a rocking-chair, and a woman and a baby, (of whom more anon,) the latter wearing a scarlet frock, to match the sofa and curtains.”

“A flight of four steps leads from the parlor to the upper story, where, on each side of a narrow entry, are four eight-feet-by-ten bedrooms, the floors of which are covered by straw matting. Here your eyes are again refreshed with a glittering vision of red-calico curtains gracefully festooned above wooden windows picturesquely lattice-like. These tiny chambers are furnished with little tables covered with oilcloth, and bedsteads so heavy that nothing short of a giant's strength could move them. Indeed, I am convinced that they were built, piece-by-piece, on the spot where they now stand.”

“The entire building is lined with purple calico, alternating with a delicate blue, and the effect is really quite pretty. The floors are so very uneven that you are always ascending a hill or descending into a valley. The doors consist of a slight frame covered with dark-blue drilling, and are hung on hinges of leather. As to the kitchen and dining room, I leave to your vivid imagination to picture their primitiveness, merely observing that nothing was ever more awkward and unworkmanlike than the whole tenement. It is just such a piece of carpentering as a child two years old, gifted with the strength of a man, would produce, if it wanted to play at making grown-up houses.”

“And yet this impertinent apology for a house cost its original owners more than eight thousand dollars. This will not be quite so surprising when I inform you that, at the time it was built, everything had to be packed from Marysville at a cost of forty cents a pound. Compare this with the price of freight on the railroads at home, and you will easily make an estimate of the immense outlay of money necessary to collect the materials for such an under-taking at Rich Bar. It was built by a company of gamblers as a residence for two of those unfortunates who make a trade--a thing of barter--of the holiest passion, when sanctified by love, that ever thrills the wayward heart of poor humanity.”

“To the lasting honor of miners be it written, the speculation proved a decided failure. Yes! These thousand men, many of whom had been for years absent from the softening amenities of female society, and the sweet restraining influences of pure womanhood, --these husbands of fair young wives kneeling daily at the altars of their holy homes to pray for their far-off ones, --these sons of gray-haired mothers, majestic in their sanctified old age, --these brothers of virginal sisters, white and saintlike as the lilies of their own gardens, --looked only with contempt or pity on these, oh! So earnestly to be compassionated creatures. These unhappy members of a class, to one of which the tenderest words that Jesus ever spoke were uttered, left in a few weeks, absolutely driven away by public opinion. The disappointed gamblers sold the house to its present proprietor for a few hundred dollars.”