GOLD! GOLD IN CALIFORNIA!

By David Littlejohn

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 art

work 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 audio narrative--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."

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?) 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.

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 California

between 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 it

did 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 a

nostalgically 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 often

saw them through the filters of equally deforming aesthetic and ethical standards.

The unique and fragile daguerreotypes and ambrotypes (reproducable photographs

on 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.

Here again the heavy hand of the contemporary critic can be felt. Images of

Indians, 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."

Despite a tendency to nag the past for not being as wise and tolerant as the present

(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.

The daguerreotypes and the history display stay in Oakland through July 26. The

former 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 this

fall, 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.