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Volume 069-2 - April 2015 (6 pages)
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Page: of 6
NCHS Bulletin April 2015
of the idea of his sister doing so. Nathan’s view on this
subject was a conventional one in American middle and
upper class society, but the mass migration of men to the
Gold Rush had upended gender roles, both in California
and in the East.
It is estimated that about thirty percent of California
immigrants were married men. All but a tinypercentage left their wives at home to run the family farm or
business, a situation that created financial pressures and
tensions between husbands and wives that were often reflected in their diaries and letters. The families of the
seventy percent of immigrants who were single men or
widowers were not exempt from these pressures and tensions, for they too left women behind: sisters, mothers,
daughters, and other female relatives whose financial
conditions were negatively affected by the man’s departure for the West.??
Such was the case with Mary, who was unmarried and
living at home with aging parents in impoverished circumstances. Although we don’t have Mary’s letters, it
is clear from Nathan’s responses that during his time in
Grass Valley she expressed a desire to be more “useful,”
and had proposed taking employment as a governess or
teacher outside the home. The idea was clearly distressing to Nathan, who wrote an emotional letter to Mary on
September 12, 1852:
I do not see that your life is not as useful as anybody’s. Are you not the prop and solace of Father and
Mother, and doesn’t Bun value your good opinion above
all else, and don’t you write to this poor “critter” when
no one else does, and keep him from doing a great many
wrongs, and doesn’t he send your letters down to Jona
who thinks that everybody has forgotten him, and don’t
everybody love you and don’t you show the world that
you have a good father and mother else you couldn’t
have been so good yourself. And don’t the world know
that your wandering brothers might have been good too
if they had stayed at home and attended to their precepts
and examples of their parents and submitted to the influence, the prayers and entreaties of their little sister? Go
on my good sister, and be happy and content and it will
all come right yet.
Mary, however, was apparently not deterred. A series
of letters between March and December illustrate the insoluble dilemma for male immigrants who chose to remain in the West without offering viable solutions for
women whose “wandering brothers” were unable to send
much-needed money home. Eventually, in January 1853,
Mary seems to have abandoned her plans, and a much
relieved Nathan wrote:
Your last letter... gave me such pleasure to find that
you had abandoned the idea always so unpleasant to me
of leaving home to seek your fortune. I know you were
activated by the best motives, but my dear Mary, if men
find it hard to succeed in a changed land and to suffer
the ills and inconveniences of fortune seeking, what
must it be for a delicate girl [Mary was then 28 years
old] unused to rough and tumble life. I hope you will
never be used to it. I do not like the idea of my sister
knowing of all the sin of this life which rough contact
with the world teaches.
(To be continued in the July 2015 Bulletin)
Author’s Postscript
I encountered Nathan H. Davis purely by accident. My
initial research focus was on William F. English and the
Kentucky Ridge Mine, so Nathan’s connection to him,
and the possibility that he had been involved in English’s
legal affairs in California was a line of inquiry that I wanted to follow. Once I discovered the collection of Nathan’s
letters housed at Furman University in Greenville, South
Carolina, I was hooked on his distinctive voice and his
perceptions of the California frontier. Eventually, I became fascinated by the entire Davis family and more
generally by the roles that South Carolinians and other
southerners played in the early years of the California
Gold Rush. LK.
Endnotes:
1. Unless otherwise noted, the Nathan H. Davis letters
are courtesy of Special Collections, James B. Duke Library,
Furman University, Greenville, South Carolina. The author would like to thank Julia Cowart, Special Collections
Librarian and University Archivist, and her staff for their invaluable help in obtaining the letters.
2. http://www.maritimeheritage.org/passengers/ca062350.
html
3. 1830; Census Place: Fairfield, South Carolina; Series:
M19; Roll: 169; Page: 408; Family History Library Film:
0022503.
4. Drew Gilpin Faust, James Henry Hammond and the Old
South: a Design for Mastery. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1982, p. 13.
5. Maximillian La Borde, South Carolina College from
Its Incorporation, December 19, 1801, to November 25, 1857,
Carlisle, MA; 1859, p. 207.
6. South Carolina College, p. 219.
7. Nevada Journal, 2:45, March 4, 1853, p. 1.
8. Catalog of the Students of Law in Harvard University
From the Establishment of the Law School to the End of the
First Term in the Year 1842, Cambridge: Harvard University,
1842, p. 16.
9. Daily Alta California, 1:161, July 6, 1850, p. 2.
10. Ancestry.com. California State Census, 1852 [database