Roaring Camp

"Susan Lee Johnson's Roaring Camp explores the dynamic social world created by the gold rush in the Sierra Nevada foothills east of Stockton. In it we find Mexican families like the Murrietas who worked the mines, did the wash, and rose up against Anglo rule. There are the California Indians who tried to maintain their customary practices even while helping to construct the sawmill at Sutter's fort where gold was discovered in 1848. We enter the all-male households of the diggings, the mines where the men worked, and the fandango houses where they played. At places like Casa de los Amigos in Stockton, the Long Tom Saloon in Sonora, and Madame Clement's in Mariposa, California, gold found its way out of the hands of men from around the world into the hands of women from Mexico, Chile, and France.". "Johnson charts the ways in which the conventions of identity were reshaped in the diggings. More explicitly than back home, where gender could be mapped predictably onto bodies understood as male and female, gender in California chased shamelessly after racial and cultural markers of difference, heedless of bodily configurations."--BOOK JACKET.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.