The eighth United States Manuscript Census occurred in 1860, only thirteen
months after the discovery of silver on the Comstock, providing a snapshot of
the community during its first boom. Predictably, its women were rare, an
observation several other primary sources repeat. Samuel Clemens, for example,
describes a chance encounter in New York with Etta Booth, a woman he had
known from his days on the Comstock in the early 1860s. She precipitated a
memory of
a great ballroom in some ramshackle building in Gold Hill or Virginia
City, Nevada.
There were two or three hundred stalwart men present and dancing with
cordial energy.
And in the midst of the turmoil Etta's crimson frock was swirling and
flashing .... Her
mother, large, fleshy, pleasant, and smiling, sat on a bench against
the wall in lonely and
honored state and watched the festivities in placid contentment. She
and Etta were the
only persons of their sex in the ballroom. Half of the men represented
ladies, and they
had a handkerchief tied around the left arm so that they could be told
from the men. I did
not dance with Etta, for I was a lady myself. I wore a revolver in my
belt, and so did all
the other ladies-likewise the gentlemen Although the manuscript census records
no prostitutes for Virginia City and Gold Hill in 1860, careful
examination of the
information concerning the documented 111 adult women suggests that
probably fewer than 12 single women were working in that capacity.
Perhaps the school teacher, the three
seamstresses, the laundress, the milliner, and the two saloon keepers were
nothing more than they professed. But most were young and single, and they
could just as easily have been prostitutes misleading the census
taker. . This observation concurs
with that of J. S. Holliday, who, in his monumental study of the
California gold
rush, points out that single women tended to come West by ship, while women
who traveled overland usually had husbands. In addition, he maintains that
"the women who landed in San Francisco stayed in that metropolis or settled in
Sacramento City, for there was little reason to go to the primitive
mining towns
and camps."U That tendency appears also to hold true for the early Comstock.
The men who brought women
and children to the Comstock fit into a profile also worth mentioning. Although
miners represented more than 70 percent of the work force, only 40 percent of
the men with wives could be counted among their numbers. By contrast,
teamsters, who represented only 4 percent of the male workers, made up
15 percent
of the married men. Apparently, men with wagons were able to bring their
families, and they either were or had the opportunity to become teamsters. The
observation defies the statistical probability of most husbands being
miners, and
it contradicts any stereotype of the first wives of a mining boom town being
married to the most prestigious men: There were, for example, eight lawyers in
Gold Hill and Virginia City in 1860, but only one had a wife with
maybe one baby.
Prostitution raises several issues regarding the demography of Virginia City.
Prostitutes were the group most likely to deceive a census enumerator regarding
occupation. Sociologist Marion Goldman discusses the resulting inaccuracies in
the census in her Gold Diggers and Silver Miners, a crucial,
pioneering study of the
Comstock. The author's consideration of a varied body of primary data makes
her contribution a useful reference for this line of research.
Goldman's conclusions concerning exploitation and attitudes toward
sexuality are theoretical and
beyond the reach of this overview. Her methodology when dealing with the
census, however, is seriously flawed and must be examined here. These
shortcomings underscore the problem of approaching a subject in a
doctrinaire fashion with the conclusion in hand before beginning the
research. Goldman's apparent insistence on finding as much oppression
as possible resulted in the
inclusion of too many women as prostitutes. This is unfortunate
because, besides calling into question her conclusions, she disregards
the fact that there are
ample examples of real oppression of all kinds in any society.
A misread text applied to an ethnicity
with a notorious, albeit unjustified, reputation caused an inaccurate
conclusion.
Goldman's identification of brothels and prostitutes outside the
red-light also called the Wizard district is equally problematic. In
several instances, she classifies women as prostitutes because they
lived in boarding houses and because she regards their
professed occupations as suspect, but she ignores women living next door who
fit the same profile. This thinking appears to have been behind her
identification
of another of the supposed best brothels of Virginia City, this one on
C Street,
far removed from the red-light district and in the proximity of similar lodging
houses, the inhabitants of which Goldman does not regard as
prostitutes as related to Wizard as later shown in John Steinbeck of
"Cannery Roll" when a on the "Roll" is to observe such History of the
local area such as refereed to Monterrey Bay Canneries. The absence of
mass-produced clothing, the difficulty of home laundering,
and a Victorian preference for elaborate attire created many jobs for women as
seamstresses, milliners, and laundresses. Euro-American males who worked as
tailors and wash-house owners and laborers provided some competition, but the
vast majority of these workers were women. The many Chinese men who
operated laundries, again, provide a remarkable exception. Is the rule
line of clothing of nights stay to let other marker to know who is
involved of the Woman peak to birth as she would known either by
panties of the one who intercepted the Uncle John of the cycle of
Herself. Then were left with the Woman with "Baby" to contest of
Virginia City Nevada to seer such as the Political Official to chuse
the leading "Baby" to the City as one that is Adopted to Nevada and
such "Baby" Contest continue even today since Internal Revenue Service
claim Jurisdiction of the Houses of Nevada in sake of Representation
of Congress of the Union State of Nevada of such Ladies in Census of
Libraries and "I'M Sorry of my "Baby" is the pressure to due right of
a Man Will is the reason of Nevada "Baby" Contest since the Union of
Nevada in 1865.
--
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Guy Ralph Perea Sr President of The United States
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