Return to the El Dorado County Page Return to El Dorado County TalesWritten by Joanne Burkett from research taken from Paolo Sioli's History of El Dorado County California, from El Dorado Co. birth, marriage, death and land records and often from interviews.
Miners, young and old, during the California Gold Rush, suffered miserably from homesickness. Many of them chose to work right through the holiday. Some, as a diversion, chose to party their heads off. For the almost eight years that Stephen Wing spent in El Dorado County, from 1852 to 1860, he documented his busy days, filling five journals as he moved from claim to claim, but it does not appear that he enjoyed much holiday frivolity.
For the first two years, as he worked claims near Ophir, then Johntown and Garden Valley, Christmas wasn't even mentioned. Then, on Christmas Eve, 1855, Wing made this entry: "Did not do a thing today. Find I make more by lying still." The next day, Christmas, there was this: "Worked today. Cut about a hundred yards of ditch." The following year, his journal entry for Dec. 25 claimed it was "a very rainy, chilly, cold day." Nothing more.
The next day, this: "I worked through the day in misery and at night came home with one foot nearly frozen and the other aching with cold out of pure sympathy. Oh, how I longed for the old habitation and for the old folks at home, and the young ones, too."
Then, on Dec. 23, 1857, while in the vicinity of Uniontown, he called on his wry sense of humor to record in his diary that he had gone to bed right after dinner, suffering with a "pleasant sore throat and a comfortable backache."
Dec. 25: "Christmas day! Did not work this forenoon. Weather cloudy and warm."
On the day before Christmas, 1858, his journal entry shows he did nothing, then on Dec. 25: "Christmas! Cloudy and chilly all day. Shooting match for turkeys and chickens back of our cabin most of the day. I did not participate in the sport. Don't sabe shooting!" I wonder if he participated in the eating.
Disappointingly, there was nothing entered in his trusty journal for his last Christmas in California, 1858. The days leading up to and after the holiday were filled with bad weather and endless work. By this time, Wing had given up hope of ever making his fortune. He soon departed for his home in Cape Cod.
Twenty-two year-old Andrew Hall Gilmore was working a claim near Placerville when the Christmas holiday of 1851 arrived. According to a letter he wrote to one of his brothers back home in Indiana, he spent Christmas Eve hard at work, washing mud, as they called it. "It is pretty muddy, disagreeable work, I can assure you."
Christmas Day, a Thursday, he wrote of his homesickness in a letter home: "Oh, I wish that I could be at home today. I think we would have a Christmas party. We would have the old gobbler roasted with a score of fat hens, pound cakes, pies, and lots of other good things. But the best of all would be the pleasure of seeing you all. Probably if we live we may be with you next Christmas."
He wrote that they had donned their oilcloth outfits and spent the day working their claims, despite the fact that it "has been the most rainy day I believe that I have ever seen in this country." This was not a bad thing, though. According to Gilmore, the rainwater would allow them to "wash" for some time to come.
"As we had no invitations to any Christmas parties and feeling no inclination to go on a 'bust,' we thought we might spend the day as profitably by going down to our diggings and working like fine fellows, even if it was Christmas and awful rainy at that."
Gilmore and his partners, Aaron, Nathan and Joe, made a total of $31.25 for that day's work. They spent $14 for a new Tom, which was a type of container that they used to wash, or separate, the gold from the dirt. Louise Clappe, better known as Dame Shirley, and the author of "The Shirley Letters," published initially in The Pioneer Magazine in 1854
and 1855, reported on a mining camp "Saturnalia," an event argonauts on the Feather River, near Marysville, devised to reward themselves for their hard work and deprivations.
An oyster and champagne dinner on Christmas Eve started things off. Wagon loads of brandy and champagne fueled the celebration and raucous music and dancing rocked the place around the clock, growing wilder and wilder over the next three days, until, finally, exhausted, the fiddlers and revelers dropped from exhaustion.
For a handful of years, throughout the gold country, smaller, but similar festivities no doubt occurred. It was a time of excitement and ambition that so far has gone unrivaled in the state's history.
Permission is granted by the author to use or republish this article, but proper attribution to the author -- Joanne Burkett -- is requested.
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Last Updated on: 8 January 2005