"Life's Prizes Are by Labor Got": Risk, Reward, and White Manliness in the California Gold Rush

Abstract

The California Gold Rush reshaped both Anglo American attitudes toward risk and notions of white manliness. The Gold Rush upset many of the social structures that regulated individual behaviors in the East while challenging received wisdom about the relationship between work, reward, and an individual's worth. Mining itself was a "gamble" that seemed to reward men of dubious character as much as, if not more than, men of obvious moral character. Yet the risks involved in such labor dif?fered from those in games of chance, for the former could still be portrayed as at once daring and respectable; the latter could not. Anglo American men used the physical risk of mining to differentiate themselves from non-white men, but they understood the social risk of gambling as having the potential to collapse the boundaries between white men and "others."