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GOLD!
GOLD IN
CALIFORNIA!
By David
Littlejohn
Unknown Maker, George Bomford in Buckskins
andSuspenders, quarter plate daguerreotype.
Collection of Matthew R. Isenburg
Courtesy of the Oakland Museum |
The Oakland Museum of California is
housing the central event of the state's
commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the
discovery of a small gold nugget at Sutter's Fort
(near present-day Sacramento) in January 1848,
and the frantic emigration of hundreds of
thousands of people to California during the next
four years, most of them hoping to find more
gold. At the museum, a team of curators headed by
L. Thomas Frye has assembled more than two
thousand 19th Century California artifacts into
an ethically updated reconstruction of the Gold
Rush and its dubious effects; then put together
separate exhibitions of contemporary artwork and
daguerreotypes illustrating the event. |
This
three-part exhibition, entitled as a whole
"GOLD RUSH! [the capitals and exclamation
point are the museum's]: California's Untold
Stories" is the most costly ($3 million) and
ambitious display the Oakland Museum has
undertaken since it opened in 1969. The
historical portion leads the visitor through a
circuitous series of tableaux and displays,
guided by personal earphones through an elaborate
CD-ROM audionarrative--part lecture, part
dramatic recreation--which is included in the
cost of admission. As you amble from one setting
to another, voices in your ear automatically pop
on to tell you about the basic events depicted:
the lives of pre-Gold Rush Californians, the 1848
discovery, the spread of the news throughout the
states, preparations for the journey, the mass
emigrations of 1849, and so forth. Along the way
we hear sounds of ocean storms or creaking wagon
wheels, actors reading from historic letters and
diaries, and the jaunty Ken Burns-style
harmonica, fiddle, and accordion music that has
become electronic shorthand for "American
History."
Unknown Maker, Miner with Shovel,
Quarter plate daguerreotype.
Collection of the Oakland Museum
of California
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At more than 150 stations en
route, you can punch a number on your
portable CD player to gain additional
information, much of it blasting the
49ers for their greed, intolerance, and
environmental insensitivity. This
obviates the need for wall labels or
placards, and pleases people impatient
with silent, inactive museum displays.
(The show is heavily geared towards
school tours, and offers a separate audio
tour for young children.) But it does
tend to force a response, even though the
mellow voices in our ear occasionally
invite us to think for ourselves. (Was
Joaquin Murietta an evil bandit or a
Mexican Robin Hood? Was the devastation
of the California landscape worth the
huge profits of hydraulic gold mining?) |
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The exhibits are housed in 10,000 square
feet of galleries walled in canvas stretched
between pine timbers. They vary from standard
museum arrays of costumes, weapons,
pictures,letters, oxbows and the like to
"interactive" side shows: you can put
your hand under the original nugget (encased in
Plexiglas)found at Sutter's, swirl your own
panful of gold and gravel, guess the best place
on a map to strike it rich. Among a few
impressively large objects are a reconstructed
miner's cabin from Siskiyou County, a Wells Fargo
coach, the stern of a Gold Rush era ship dug out
from under San Francisco, a set of very
uncomfortable looking wooden ship bunks, and some
huge iron tools of early industrial-era mining. A
mock "theatre" in the middle of the
main hall shows imaginary 1850s Gold Country
entertainers on a large video screen.
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Isaac Wallace Baker (1818-c.1862), Native
Californian, Sixth platedaguerreotype.
Collection of the Oakland
Museum of California |
The centerpiece exhibit is a diorama of
ten life-sized mining camp denizens, going about
their business in five supposedly independent
locales connected by an imaginary stream. Their
mining techniques and settings look authentic
enough.What appears slightly tendentious (though
it may appeal to the museum's visitors and
funding sources) is that, of the ten fiberglass
figures, two are women, two Chinese; one is
Native American, one African American, one
Mexican, and one Hawaiian. Of course, the vast
majority of the gold seekers who came to
Californiabetween 1849 and 1852 were young white
men from the thirty United States. But this
exhibit is designed to tell "California's
Untold Stories," and in particular those of
people in California other than young white men. |
In the exit gallery hang enlarged
photographs of contemporary Californians, whose
words are the last we hear on our earphones.
Novelist James Houston suggests we could learn
from the Indians, who were here 10,000 years
before 1848, how to thrive in California without
destroying it; his wife Jeanne
Wakatsuki("Farewell to Manzanar") finds
a way to work in the state's World War II
internment camps for Japanese-Americans. Julia
Parker, a Pomo Indian basketmaker, says, "In
spite of all effort to exterminate California's
first people, Indians are still here." David
Brower denounces the Gold Rush for the damage
itdid to his state and the environmentally
careless attitudes it fostered. Former Governor
Jerry Brown (now running for mayor of Oakland)
waffles in typical fashion about California's
"throbbing" potential. Teenage
immigrants from Mexico and Ethiopia mouth pieties
about diversity and the future. On the whole,
California comes out of this show as a pretty
shameful place, tainted from birth by any number
of original sins.
Unfortunately,
much of the Gold Rush art on display
tilts the miner's scales in the other
direction, sentimentalizing life in the
mining camps into Victorian magazine
illustrations. Miners pose in heroic
attitudes overlooking spiky Alpine
vistas, or die in the snow alongside
faithful dogs. The best-known painting
here, Charles C. Nahl's "Sunday
Morning in the Mines" of 1872,
squeezes five separate episodes into one
big bright Caravaggio-realist cartoon.
Works like this, or Henry Burgess's
"View of San Francisco in 1850"
(painted in 1878), or Ernest Nargot's
rustic cabins in leafy Barbizon glades
(painted in the 1880s) reflect how
quickly anostalgically distorted vision
of the Gold Rush entered into legend. The
art curators, too, are perhaps overly
eager to criticize Californians of 150
years ago by the enlightened standards of
1998. But the argonauts' own
contemporaries oftensaw them through the
filters of equally deforming aesthetic
and ethical standards.
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Sunday Morning in the
Mines |
Charles Christian Nahl
(1818-1878), 1872, oil on canvas. Crocker
Art Museum,
Sacramento, California, E.B. Crocker
Collection
Art courtesy
the Oakland Museum of California
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Uknown Maker, California
Forty-Niner, Quarter plate
daguerreotype. Collection of Amon
Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas,
P1983.20Courtesy
of the Oakland Museum of California
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The unique and fragile
daguerreotypes and ambrotypes
(reproducable photographson paper arrived
in 1860) offer the surest piece of
history here. Most of these are tiny
silver plates preserved behind glass in
velvet-lined cases, installed behind more
glass in rooms that are kept very dark.
Looked at from an angle, the images
disappear; ceiling spots cast distracting
reflections. When the galleries are
uncrowded, you can see them all more
clearly in two albums of reproductions
(with accompanying explanations)
installed at the entrance. The 15-second exposures required
for these early photographs tended to
make most of their human subjects look
gimlet-eyed and grim. But these 154
images bring to life an astonishing cast
of characters: miners posed in required
49er costume (their woolen workshirts
often tinted red or blue), with
appropriate props: picks, pans, guns,
nuggets, bags of gold. Later come worn,
unsmiling women with children, corpses in
coffins, memorial shots of gravesites to
send back home. Venturing outside their
tent or store studios, early California
photographers captured you-are-there
views of diggings, cabins, and mining
camps, as well as the streets and harbor
of infant San Francisco.
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Here
again the heavy hand of the contemporary critic
can be felt. Images ofIndians, Mexicans, and
Chinese are accompanied by texts describing their
mistreatment at the hands of Yankee emigrants.
"In their unrelenting quest for gold, the
forty-niners decimated the natural environment
around them" is the curators' way of
explaining the cut-down trees, the dammed and
diverted rivers (phenomena apparently unknown
east of the Mississippi) in a picture of miners
at work. A primitive tent-store in a the
mountains is seen as "embodying the crass
commercialism of the gold rush."
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Despite a
tendency to nag the past for not being as wise and
tolerant as thepresent (and a degree of dumbing-down in
the audio tour), the historical exhibition has been put
together with considerable ingenuity, and is well worth a
couple of hours' visit. The daguerreotypes add a valuable
human dimension. An even better way to bring the Gold
Rush to life, for people who still read books, might be
to spend a few days with the letters of its participants,
in compelling works like J. S. Holliday's "The World
Rushed In," Malcolm Rohrbough's "Days of
Gold," or any one of many published collections.
Graphic image courtesy of the
Oakland Museum
The Gold
Rush Exhibit
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The daguerreotypes and the
history display stay in Oakland through July 26.
Theformer then go (with the paintings) to the
National Museum of American Art at the
Smithsonian (Oct. 1998-March 1999). The latter
travels to the Gene Autry Museum in Los Angeles
(Sept. 1998-Jan. 1999), then to Sacramento's
Memorial Auditorium (July-Oct. 1999). The two
exhibitions of images will be shared with
Sacramento's Crocker Art Museum, which helped
create them--the paintings thisfall, the
daguerreotypes in Fall '99. Meanwhile, the
Oakland Museum's website (www.museumca.org/goldrush) offers a good sampling of all
three exhibitions, including two nifty 360-degree
panoramas of the historical displays. |
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