In late July 2021, the fast-moving Dixie fire scorched the California Gold Rush settlement of Rich Bar, approximately 120 miles northeast of Sacramento. The fire ultimately consumed almost one million acres, mostly in Plumas National Forest, earning the rather shameful notoriety of being the second-largest wildfire in California history. The devastation of the region that once yielded $23 million in gold now stands charred and largely deserted. Hopefully the most long-lasting legacy of the region is not the fire, but the letters of of Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe (1819-1906)–nom de plume Dame Shirley–a gold-camp doctor’s wife who lived in Rich Bar and neighboring Indian Bar from 1851-52. Her twenty-three letters, written to her sister Molly back home in New England, were published in Ferdinand Ewer’s The Pioneer: or, California Monthly Magazine. Ultimately becoming the book edition of The Shirley Letters, they were collected for the first time in 1922. A woman in a miner’s camp, the anomalous Clappe brought her unique perspective and wit to life on the Feather River, focusing her missives on the beauty of her surroundings juxtaposed with the dangers of miners’ work, the oddity of being a woman among the miners, ethnic tensions, and vigilante justice. Her letters were so popular that Bret Harte may have based portions of “The Luck of Roaring Camp” and “The Outcasts of Poker Flat” on her work.
Whether or not Clappe intended her letters for a broader audience is debatable, but as editor Marlene Smith-Barnanzini notes in her authoritative preface to The Shirley Letters,
When Louise Clappe arrived in California with her family, she was not a published writer. This simple fact may have led historians to dismiss her Marysville Herald writing and to assume the Shirley letters were private compositions meant for her sister’s enjoyment, or as a diversion to save herself from idleness. The structural composition of the Shirley letters themselves, and her other recovered writings, however, advance a more likely conclusion. The entire body of Clappe’s published writing, from the first penstroke, I am persuaded, was the work of a woman determined to be recognized for her writing. (xxviii)
And while the letters were certainly intended for her sister, the fact that she kept copies of them for herself and only fourteen months passed between penning her final letter and its publication also implies that she aimed to reach a larger audience (Lockart 143). Taking the title “Dame” for herself also helped her craft a narrative voice that allowed for greater creativity: “The ‘Dame’ title insinuated the teacher, the educated, lightly authoritative matron–a worthy if conventional role for a nineteenth-century woman” (Smith-Baranzini xxx). Clappe’s persona thus allowed her to change voices, “using the engaging Dame Shirley’s humorous and self-deprecating comments to introduce something of a fictional element to the account” (xxx).
I set off this past October to see the region Clappe so colorfully depicted. Family in tow, we meandered north up Highway 89 to Highway 70 from Truckee to visit Rich Bar and Indian Bar. The drive was impressive for its sheer geographic diversity. After driving though Tahoe National Forest and pausing to admire the open expanses of Sierraville, the Plumas National Forest looms ahead, before once again breaking into Quincy, a small community in the American Valley. And then as now, Clappe’s description applies: “The American Valley is one of the most beautiful in all California. It is seven miles long and three or four wide, with the Feather River wending its quiet way through it, unmolested by flumes, and undisturbed by wing dams. It is a superb farming country, everything growing in the greatest luxuriance” (162). From there, the drive steepens and the mix of Douglas fir and lodgepole pines thins out. The railroad lines and North Fork of the Feather River emerge almost simultaneously as the highway hugs the mountainside with all its twists and turns. You can imagine Clappe making her way through the pass on muleback:
The hill leading into Rich Bar is five miles long, and as steep as you can imagine. Fancy yourself riding for this distance, along the edge of a frightful precipice, where, should your mule make a misstep, you would be dashed hundred of feet into the awful ravine below. . . . The Rich Barians are astonished at my courage in daring to ride down the hill. . . . I of course feel very vain of my exploit, and glorify myself accordingly. (14-5)
Indeed, I was grateful that I wasn’t behind the wheel, and as the road got closer to the ravine’s edge, I was determined not to look down. It’s there that suddenly, only a few miles out of Quincy, the devastation of the Dixie Fire shows itself: the pine trees are scorched, the ground is charred, and little grows. A few burnt-out homes scatter the hillside.
Today, you can skip the mule and drive your car down to the River (although things are still rustic–the road sign marking the turnoff is actually handwritten); I found a modern bridge and stood over the low water crossing. Another sign reminded me that the land next to the bridge is a mining claim and not to touch it. This is near where the settlement of Rich Bar would have been:
Through the middle of Rich bar runs the street, thickly planted with about forty tenements; among which figure round tents, square tents, plank hovels, log cabins, &c.–the residences, varying in elegance and convenience from the palatial splendor of “The Empire,” down to a “local habitation,” formed of pine boughs and covered with old calico shirts. (23)
Clappe’s dwelling wasn’t much more spectacular, but she is determined to make do with what’s offered to her. Her cabin, she writes, “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” (18-19). She quickly adjusts to cabin life, however, and comes to realize she does not need as much luxury as she was accustomed to in order to be happy:
How I shall ever be able to content myself to live in a decent, proper, well-behaved house, where toilet tables are toilet tables, and not an ingenious combination of trunk and claret cases, where lanterns are not broken bottles, book cases not candle boxes, and trunks not wash-stands, but every article of furniture, instead of being make-shift, is its own useful and elegantly finished self, I am sure I do not know. (51)
Her husband ultimately moved them a few miles away to build his own cabin for them on Indian Bar, but the accommodations were still not exactly luxurious: “Enter my dear;” Clappe writes to her sister, “you are perfectly welcome; beside, we could not keep you out if we would, as there is not even a latch on the canvas door, though we really intend in a day or two to have a hook out to it” (47). However, she relishes the challenge of country living, admitting “I am in reality as thoroughly comfortable here as I could be in the most elegant palace” (49). While a palace would certainly have even floors and matching furniture, it would lack the rustic charm and sense of pride that certainly came from surviving the elements and being more self-reliant.
After making our way back up the ravine, we drove a few more miles north and stopped at a lookout above Indian Bar, the site of this second cabin. I tried to channel my inner Dame Shirley and muster the courage to look down into the canyon. It was here that 171 years ago, Clappe penned most of her letters. Today’s wildfire devastation, combined with the low water level from the ongoing California drought, no doubt would have shocked her. When she lived there, nature–and the miners–were thriving on Indian Bar:
This Fork of the Feather River comes down very much ‘as the water does at Lodore,’ now gliding along with a liquid measure, like a river in a dream, and anon bursting into a thousand glittering foam-beads over the huge rocks, which rise dark, solemn, and weird-like, in its midst. The crossing are formed of logs, often moss-grown. Only think how charmingly picturesque, to eyes wearied with the costly masonry or carpentry of the bridges at home. At every step gold diggers or their operations greet your vision. Sometimes in the form of a dam, sometimes in that of a river, turned slightly from its channel, to aid the indefatigable gold hunters in their mining projects. (43-4)
Juxtaposing the stunning beauty of the Feather River with the machinery and business of the mines, the reader is left sensing the tension between the calm of nature and how humans are trying, often unsuccessfully, to exploit nature in a get-rich-quick scheme. Today, no trace of the machinery remains, but I’m acutely aware of how the mining business would have changed the environment of the river and its surroundings. Clappe explained to her sister, “There is a dreadful flume, the machinery of which keeps up the most dismal moaning and shrieking all the livelong night–painfully suggestive of a suffering child. . . . A flume, then, is an immense trough, which takes up a portion of the river and, with the aid of a dam, compels it to run in another channel, leaving the vacated bed of the stream ready for mining purposes” (39). And instead of taking a care-free stroll by the river, Clappe must take care to avoid unmarked mine shafts: “This is an awful place for children: and nervous mothers would ‘die daily,’ if they could see little Mary running fearlessly to the very edge of, and looking down into these holes–many of them sixty feet in depth–which have been excavated in the hope of finding gold, and of course left open” (37). And despite all the work that was put in to “get the color” (44)–literally finding even the smallest piece of gold–and the environmental wreckage mining left behind, miners were still attracted by the promise of Plumas County. Clappe recognized this, noting “But in truth, the whole mining system in California is one great gambling, or better, perhaps–lottery transaction. It is impossible to tell whether a “claim” will prove valuable or not” (39). In fact, less than one year later, nearly all the fluming companies in the region failed, and operations on the Bars suddenly ceased. By November 1852, in a typical tale of boom to bust during the Gold Rush, there were “not twenty men remaining on Indian Bar, although two months ago you could count them up by hundreds” (172).
It’s also where she would have stood out as “petticoated astonishment” (52) in the camp. And although she was a minority because of her gender, her position as the doctor’s wife made her even more separate. The mere sight of an upper-middle-class woman was met with shock and awe:
. . . I was introduced to one of the finders of Rich Bar – a young Georgian, who afterwards gave me a full description of all the facts connected with its discovery. This unfortunate had not spoken to a women [sic] for two years; and in the elation of his heart at the joyful event, he rushed out and invested capital in some excellent champagne, Which I, on Willie’s principle of ‘doing in Turkey as the Turkies do,’ assisted the company in drinking to the honor of my own arrival. (24)
It wasn’t always champagne, however. Well-aware of her position, Clappe would alternate between embracing her own novelty and drinking to her own arrival and fight the fact she could not, due to social circumstance, take part in the same activities as the men. When there was a murder at the camp towards the end of her stay, she annoyedly had to leave her cabin because of fears of mob violence and retreat to where to other women were living on the hill: “At this time, it seemed to be the general opinion that there would be a serious fight, and they said I might be wounded accidentally, if I remained on the Bar. As I had no fear of anything of the kind, I pled [sic] hard to be allowed to stop, but when told my presence would increase the anxiety of our friends, of course, like a dutiful wife, I went on to the hill” (136). As Sandra Lockhart points out in her informative article about Dame Shirley, this sense of independence and self-confidence, combined with some detachment from her husband and other people in the camp, highlights the role she carved out for herself (144). She had the leisure time to write, and the self-reliance to investigate seemingly what everyone else was up to, all while retaining a self-imposed distance from others in the camps.
Although in the minority due to her gender, Clappe provides commentary about others in the camp who were also outliers. As Marlene Smith-Barnanzini argues, “Nearly everyone in this ‘strangely amalgamated community’ was subject to her friendly dissection. . . . Mexicans, whom she called Spaniards, won her sympathy, both for their cultivated manner and the abuse they suffered from Americans” (xxi). She also was fascinated by Native Americans living in and around the camp, again reflecting the attitudes of her times. Smith-Barnanzini continues, “When describing the California Indians, Louise probably brought no firsthand experience to California. . . . Although she had been warned she was not safe among them, she not only did not fear them, she even tried to coax a shy Indian boy into her cabin. She admired their basketry, their firm limbs, and the grace of their movements” (xxi-xxii). Some Native Americans were interested in seeing what she was up to in the camp, and Clappe knowingly or unknowingly reflects the idea of “the noble savage” that was so common in her time, especially in the popular literature of James Fenimore Cooper, commenting that “their childish curiosity amuses me” (123). This idea of the “noble savage” was hard to compete with, “and she had no sense of what her relationship living (as compared to fictionalized) Indians could or should be” (Smith-Baranzini xxii). Although her views are jarring to the modern reader, within the context of the times, her views and actions were relatively tolerant, albeit condescending.
The letters also provide a valuable insight into the domestic life of the mines. For instance, when one of the four women of Rich Bar dies after a brief illness of peritonitis (a bacterial infection easily cured with antibiotics today), she describes the somber scene when she goes to offer her support to her neighbors:
“On a board, supported by two butter-tubs, was extended the body of the dead woman, covered with a sheet; by its side stood the coffin of unstained pine, lined with white cambric. . . . The bereaved husband held in his arms a sickly babe ten months old, which was moaning piteously for its mother. (34-5)
Clappe shows us how makeshift the operation was with a dead body laying across two tubs, while also eliciting the reader’s sympathy for those left behind. “Poor little thing!” she declares about the six-year old motherless daughter. “It was evident that her baby-toilet had been made by men; she had on a new calico dress, which, having no tucks in it, trailed to the floor, and gave her a most singular and dwarf-womanly appearance” (35). However, not all domestic life was grim; there were also times of great excitement and celebration, such as a Saturnalia and Christmas Eve celebration. “The bar was re-trimmed with red calico, the bowling alley had a new lining of the coarsest and whitest cotton cloth, and the broken lampshades replaced by whole ones. . . . the floor (wonderful to relate, it has a floor) was washed, at a lavish expenditure of some fifty pails of water, the using up of one entire brook, and the melting away of sundry bars of the best yellow soap” (86). The mines, then, were not simply places where the miners gathered and gold extracted, but truly people’s homes, full of all the emotions one might expect.
Despite the contrast with her previous life in San Francisco and Massachusetts, Clappe appreciated the natural beauty around her and the uniqueness of her opportunity, reflecting on her good fortune to her sister–even when her good fortune perhaps seems dubious. “Ah! The heaven of the Golden Land. To you, living beneath the murky skies of New England, how unimaginably lovely it is!,” she wrote in her letter from March 15, 1852. Of course, sometimes she takes this back: “In the short space of twenty-four days, we have had murders, fearful accidents, bloody deaths, a mob, whippings, a hanging, an attempt at suicide, and a fatal duel” (133) and couldn’t face the thought of spending another year on the banks of the Feather River. When it is finally time to leave after the mining operation went bust, in her final letter, she admits, “My heart is heavy at the thought of departing forever from this place. I like this wild and barbarous life; I leave it with regret. . . . Here, at least, I have been contented” (178). Standing and squinting into the sun–or the “wondrous depths of the California Heaven” (106)–a bit so the burn-marked hills almost disappeared, I, too, could imagine how contented one could be with the escape from what was surely more hectic life in a city.
In November 1852, the Clapps returned to San Francisco. A few years later, they divorced, and Louise Clappe remained in the City, joining the ranks of some of San Francisco’s most illustrious writers. However, The Pioneer went out of business after a mere two years, and Clappe turned to teaching secondary school to support herself. Further records of her life and teaching are sparse, perishing in the 1906 earthquake and fire. In 1878, after teaching for twenty-four years, Clappe retired, ultimately moving to a home in New Jersey where she spent her final years studying art and art history, architecture, and literature (Smith-Baranzini xxxii-xxxiv). While it’s disappointing that certainly some of her work was lost–and perhaps even more devastatingly, the region of Rich Bar also destroyed by fire–we can be grateful that her twenty-three letters from the mines remain. Years from now, the hills around Rich Bar will hopefully regrow and we will appreciate a similar view to the one Clappe once gazed upon, with “. . . the foam-flaked river” and mountains “splashed here and there with broad patches of snow” that stare “reverently upward into the stainless blue of our unmatchable sky” (97). No doubt countless miners sent letters home to their families around the world, but none have become so famous or useful as Dame Shirley’s. She gave us all a richer understanding and appreciation for this significant time in California–and world–history. You could even say she struck gold.
Sources
Alexander, Kurtis. “Dixie Fire leaves Rich Bar, a Gold Rush-era ghost town, in ashes.” San Francisco Chronicle, 3 August 2021, https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Dixie-Fire-leaves-Rich-Bar-a-Gold-Rush-era-ghost-16362063.php. Accessed 20 October 2022.
Clappe, Louise Amelia Knapp Smith. The Shirley Letters From the California Mines 1851-1852. Edited with introduction by Marlene Smith-Baranzini. Heyday Books, 2001.
“Dixie Fire.” Cal Fire, 2022, https://www.fire.ca.gov/incidents/2021/7/14/dixie-fire/updates/54c2adaf-2934-400a-96f7-ba7860cc4673/. Accessed 20 October 2022.
Lockart, Sandra. “Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe (Dame Shirley) (1819–1906).” Legacy, vol. 8, no. 2, Fall 1991, pp. 141-148.
