A Financial Times Best History Book of the Year

A surprising account of frontier law that challenges the image of the Wild West. In the absence of state authority, Gold Rush miners crafted effective government by the people-but not for all the people.

Gold Rush California was a frontier on steroids: 1,500 miles from the nearest state, it had a constantly fluctuating population and no formal government. A hundred thousand single men came to the new territory from every corner of the nation with the sole aim of striking it rich and then returning home. The circumstances were ripe for chaos, but as Andrea McDowell shows, this new frontier was not nearly as wild as one would presume. Miners turned out to be experts at self-government, bringing about a flowering of American-style democracy-with all its promises and deficiencies.

The Americans in California organized and ran meetings with an efficiency and attention to detail that amazed foreign observers. Hundreds of strangers met to adopt mining codes, decide claim disputes, run large-scale mining projects, and resist the dominance of companies financed by outside capital. Most notably, they held criminal trials on their own authority. But, mirroring the societies back east from which they came, frontiersmen drew the boundaries of their legal regime in racial terms. The ruling majority expelled foreign miners from the diggings and allowed their countrymen to massacre the local Native Americans. And as the new state of California consolidated, miners refused to surrender their self-endowed authority to make rules and execute criminals, presaging the don't-tread-on-me attitudes of much of the contemporary American west.

In We the Miners, Gold Rush California offers a well-documented test case of democratic self-government, illustrating how frontiersmen used meetings and the rules of parliamentary procedure to take the place of the state.

About the Author
Andrea G. McDowell is a historian and Professor of Law at Seton Hall Law School. A Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, she has also taught at the University of Leiden, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Before turning to law, McDowell was an Egyptologist and authored three books on the ancient Egyptian workers who built the tombs in the Valley of the Kings.

Reviews
Andrea McDowell's engaging study of the ensuing Gold Rush challenges Wild West stereotypes and explains how the miners who poured into California built workable forms of self-government. * Financial Times *
An important law and economics study of an 'anarchistic' episode, going much deeper than some earlier accounts on matters involving Native Americans, fairness of trials, dispute resolution, miner-mining company interactions, and more. -- Tyler Cowen * Marginal Revolution *
[This] book does admirable work unearthing overlooked dimensions of U.S. democracy and frontier law, while enriching our understanding of a storied chapter of American history. -- John Suval * Civil War Book Review *
The California mining camps are legendary experiments in self-government. McDowell mines thousands of primary narratives to separate fact from fable and extracts a precise and elegant account of how the miners made laws and enforced them by means of meetings conducted by parliamentary procedure. We the Miners is expert and authoritative on details of miners' property law and criminal law and of mining technology, and unsparingly detailed about their cruelty to outsiders like Mexicans and Native Americans. It is not likely that there will ever be a better history of the law of the Gold Rush than this one. -- Robert W. Gordon, Emeritus, Stanford Law School
Rooted in the bold and intriguing idea that the organizational skills of California mining camps transcended the originality of their legal ideas, We the Miners is a provocative, well-argued book. McDowell goes beyond the old question of the nature of mining codes to the processes of meeting and decisionmaking in mining camps, especially in the miners' use of American 'parliamentary procedure as a form of governance.' This wide-ranging, carefully researched work also explores the impact of mining codes on Native Americans and Spanish-speaking miners. Gracefully written with passion as well as fairness, it will appeal to a broad audience. -- Donald J. Pisani, author of Water, Land, and Law in the West: The Limits of Public Policy, 1850-1920



Book Information
ISBN 9780674248113
Author Andrea G. McDowell
Format Hardback
Page Count 336
Imprint Harvard University Press
Publisher Harvard University Press