A Rendering of Josefa's Hanging From Downie's "Hunting For Gold" (1893)
Courtesy of the Huntington Library
The first hanging of a woman in California took place on the North Yuba River in the town of Downieville. It was a lively gold rush town in the early 1850s and it still retains some of the architecture and integrity of setting. Part of the town’s notoriety is based on the story of the hanging of Josefa Segovia or Josefa Loaiza, sometime called Juanita, a tale with many variations and accents that varies wildly based on who’s telling it. Today Downieville is trying to create an economy based on outdoors tourism. Most of the surrounding land consists of conifer forest with steep canyon streams and is part of the Tahoe National Forest.
THE SOCIAL SETTING
Downieville was originally known as “The Forks” and renamed for Major William Downie, in the spring of 1850. With the exception of the indigenous Nisenan, who were here for centuries, everyone was here to profit from gold mining, either directly or indirectly. They had absolutely no intention of settling in the area – in their pursuit of gold they were at best hopeful and cooperative and at their worst greedy and aggressive. In May of 1851 there were 15 hotels and gambling houses, 4 bakeries, 4 butcher shops and a scattered population of 3,000.
Downieville is a much smaller and peaceful place today but 168 years ago on July 5, 1851 a woman was hanged either from a bridge over the North Fork of the North Yuba River or the North Yuba. Her name was Josepha and she was a Mexican woman in her early twenties. She was convicted of a murder by 12 men, some of whom were friends of the deceased, after a two hour “trial”. Jiffy justice at best. Before we get to the event that precipitated her hanging some background might be useful.
“THE SPANISH”
“Nowhere else, save perhaps as conqueror in Mexico itself, did the American show so blindly and brutally as he often showed in early California his innate intolerance for whatever is stubbornly foreign.” – Josiah Royce in California: A Study of American Character (1886)
Spaniards arrived in what would later become California in 1769. Their intent was to colonialize, establish encomiendas and convert the indigenous population to Catholicism. Alta California, as they called it, was seen as a distant outpost and therefore difficult to govern. By 1820 Mexico declared its independence from Spain but California remained remote and ungovernable to the federal government based in Mexico City. When the missions proved unmanageable and ultimately disbanded, Mexico awarded large land grants to retiring military officers and others who were owed political favors. The resulting ranchos engaged, to varying degrees in meat, hide and tallow production. With business as a secondary concern, a distinctive vaquero-based culture with hospitality, horsemanship and fiestas as core functions developed. Despite the attempt by the grantees to maintain a veneer of Spanish decorum California became a mestizo-based population and those born in California became known as Californios.
When Mexico lost the war with the United States they signed the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. One of its provisions gave Spanish speaking residents of former Mexican land one year to choose whether they wanted American or Mexican citizenship – over 90% chose American citizenship. So then, most of the Californios were American citizens who were already here when gold was discovered on Sutter’s 48,000 acre land grant.
Spanish speakers were called “Spanish”, regardless of country of origin. The residents of Valparaiso, Chile; Lima, Peru and the Mexican state of Sonora were among the first to hear about the gold discovery as they were already on the west coast. They were among the first to arrive in California to search for gold and many of them, particularly Sonorans who were also the most numerous, had prior experience or familiarly with gold mining techniques. Among the tools they introduced were the batea, the arrastra and the Chile mill. Most of the Spanish speaking miners congregated in the Southern Mines, in the foothills east of the San Joaquin Valley.
Americans resented the mining skills of Spanish speaking miners, somehow seeing their experience as an unfair advantage. The Yankees made no distinction between the Californios, some of whose ancestors had arrived in California in 1769, and newly-arrived Mexicans, Chilenos, and Peruvians. They lumped them all together as “greasers.”
One of the first laws passed by the California legislature was the “Foreign Miners Act of 1850” and its purpose was to eliminate most of the Spanish-speaking miners and other undesirables like Kanakas, Blacks and the French, among others. When they refused to pay the impossibly high tax of $20 per month, white Americans had an excuse to drive them out of rich mining areas. In the California mining town of Sonora, Mexicans, Chilenos, and Peruvians joined with French and German miners to protest the tax, only to be subdued by a hastily formed militia of white Americans. Although the fee was later reduced, and the act repealed in 1851, the damage was done; it drove an estimated 10,000 Latinos from the mines. The bill’s sponsor was a malicious Texas-born racist and state senator named Thomas Jefferson Green, who had been run off of Rose Bar on the Yuba River because he was using black slaves to mine.
[*In 1852 more than 20,000 Chinese arrived in San Francisco intending to mine for gold. The California legislature then passed a second Foreign Miners Tax at the rate of $3 a month this time targeting Chinese competitors. This law was enacted until 1870 when it was declared unconstitutional.]
In the early 1850s, when North Yuba towns like Downieville and Goodyears Bar were only accessible by pack trails, Mexican and Californio men ran pack trains that brought food, tools, stoves and everything needed into the mountainous regions. Known as arrieros, they were to be found in every town because they were an integral part of the booming freighting business. [See my previous post about Arrieros, 12/6/18]. Mexican women typically worked as inn-keepers, store-keepers, waitresses, cooks and laundresses. They were also artists, entertainers, card dealers and prostitutes.
Downieville in 1851
THE BASIC STORY
This is one of the most popular gold rush stories – a story that is continually retold and spun. There are many versions of the event and they all have their biases running from political and unconsciously personal interpretations to blatant racism and sexism.
California became a state in 1850 and the Fourth of July celebration for 1851 would have been its first – the miners were anticipating a hearty party. On the night of the Fourth of July, a woman identified as Josefa, who was alone in her home, was awakened by a rude disturbance. A drunken man named John (AKA: Frederick or Jack) Cannon had torn the door of her cabin from its hinges (either accidently or deliberately), then trespassed in her home and picked up her scarf from the floor (possibly with the intention of subduing her with it). The episode apparently enraged Josefa (some speculate that it was not the first time Cannon had accosted her). Cannon returned the next morning to apologize and settle the damages to her home, but instead he and José, Josefa's partner or husband, argued in Spanish. Everything accelerated when Cannon reputedly called Josefa a whore (according to Josefa and Jose). She responded by grabbing a sharp bowie knife and fatally stabbing Cannon in the heart. After the stabbing, José and Josefa fled to Craycroft's Saloon where they were apprehended, and Josefa was taken to the town plaza to be tried. The assembled mob wanted them both lynched on the spot.
Another View of Downieville in 1851. Illustrator Unknown
From James Sinnott's Classic, "Downieville: Gold Town on the Yuba" (1972)
Cannon was well-liked and nativist sentiments were running high in light of the celebrations the previous day. Two men tried to defend Josefa. One was Dr. Aiken, a physician and a friend of Josefa’s, who claimed she was pregnant; the other was a man named Thayer. He was ordered by the crowd to look out for his own safety and, like Aiken, was brushed aside as Josefa was sentenced to die. José was run out of town and told never to return. Josefa was then escorted to the Jersey Bridge or the Durgan Bridge, where she slipped the noose over her head and walked out on a plank that was then cut out from under her. There are many accounts of what happened to Cannon, why Josefa stabbed him, and why she was lynched. Historians more or less agree on the wobbly facts related above.
Newspaper and eyewitness accounts consistently expressed a general sense of discomfort over this violent episode. John B. Weller, who would later become California’s Governor (1858-1860), was part of the unruly crowd. He was running for state senator and gave a patriotic speech the day before. Weller watched the entire event and was later accused of pandering to the mob to secure votes because he participated in the lynching as a spectator.
The Craycroft Building
Here is the text of the first newspaper article describing the event as it appeared in the Daily Alta on July 9, 1851: A Woman Hung at Downieville– “We are informed by Deputy Sheriff Gray, that on Saturday afternoon a Spanish woman was hung, for stabbing to the heart a man by the name of Cannan (ibid), killing him instantly. Mr. Gray informs us that the deceased, in company with some others, had the night previously entered the house of the woman and created a riot and disturbance, which so outraged her, that when he presented himself the next morning to apologize for his behavior, he was met at the door by the female, who had in her hand a large bowie knife, which she instantly drove into his heart. She was immediately arrested, tried, sentenced, and hung at 1 o'clock in the afternoon, of the same day. She did not exhibit the least fear, walking up a small ladder to the scaffold, and placing the rope round her neck with her own hands, first gracefully removing two plaits of raven black hair from her shoulders to make room for the fatal cord. Some five or six hundred witnessed the execution. On being asked if she had anything to say, she replied, "Nothing; but I would do the same again if I was so provoked.”
DISCUSSION
Sources like eye-witnessed events can become questionable when retold years later. Is the hurried, and sometime inaccurate, information gathered by the press better than digested but muddied, if not befuddled, information available in reminiscences? It depends? There are still disagreements about whether Josefa was hanged from the Jersey Bridge, over the North Fork of the North Yuba River or the Durgan Bridge over the North Yuba River.
Then there is the seemingly irresistible practice of retelling stories in the florid style of quip-ridden frontier correspondents like “Old Block” (Alonzo Delano), “Squibob” (George Derby) and “Norio” (Mark Twain’s brother, Orion, editor of the Meadow Lake Sun). Humor, guns, whisky, gambling, notorious women and free-wheeling interpretations of events are characteristic elements of this style which continues into the present with shabby samples available on the internet.
The Durgan Bridge Across the North Yuba, Mid 1880s
The Original Was Swept Away by a Flood in 1862
Photographer Unknown
The confusion about Josefa’s name is fascinating. Some sources refer to her as “the Spanish woman” and others, with a bit more accuracy, as “the Mexican woman.” Although original newspaper accounts calls her Josefa somehow her name changes to Juanita, a blanket stereotypical name like “John Chinaman”, or simply “John”, in other words not a person but a demeaning category. A white woman of the same era was always addressed as Miss or Mrs. and never on a first name basis.
Josefa Segovia and Josefa Loaiza are the most credible candidates for her full name. Jose Maria Loaiza, Josefa’s companion, in the 1877 “Schedule of Mexican Claims against the United States”, filed a suit against the U. S. requesting damages for “the lynching of his wife and the banishment of himself by a mob.” Jose Loaiza's claim for damages was denied but it substantiates the claim that they were married.
Josefa was employed as a waitress at the Craycroft Saloon where Jose worked as a monte dealer. There were few women and thousands of men in this part of the North Yuba canyon – the county history by Farris and Smith (1882) published the reminiscences of George Barton, where he says, “There was an absence of women in 1850 and well on into 1851. There were not a half a dozen women in town, white or Spanish.” In 1851 the Downieville precinct counted 1,132 votes (all American men, of course). This may be apocryphal, but if you’ve been in a male environment like a sports team, in the military, or worked on a physically brutal job (like mining) the level of discourse and behavior can sink to a common denominator which is often crude or brutal and it’s likely that this was the case in Downieville. Do you doubt for a moment that Josefa was frequently propositioned?
Some sources suggest that she was a prostitute and others say so directly, with the implication that she got what she deserved. R. H. Dana, author of Two Years Before the Mast (1840) and a young Protestant man from New England who was in California before the gold rush had this to say about the Californios: “The men are thriftless, proud, extravagant, and very much given to gaming; and the women have but little education, and a good deal of beauty, and their morality, of course is none the best.” There is no reason to believe that the gold miners of 1851 had evolved beyond this stereotype in their thinking.
There is no evidence that Josefa was a prostitute. But even if she was, she still deserved a fair trial. There are those who defend frontier justice (primarily lashing and lynching) and maintain that it puts just limits on human excesses. I’m not a fan of this kind of thinking because when it reaches the level of mob rule there is no thinking going on at all – it’s all emotion and revenge driven. We can do better than that.
The North Fork of the North Yuba, Now the Downie River
You may ask yourself if Josefa was justified in killing a man because he (only) insulted her, assuming you believe that version of events. In the wilds of California in 1851 a woman who was called a prostitute may have had a legitimate defense, or at least given some leniency, but none of this applied if you were a Mexican or Indian woman.
Internationally, the hanging was controversial with condemnation from the London Times and other papers. Even Fredrick Douglass commented, saying that if she had been white she would have been lauded for her behavior instead of hanged for it. She simply had no standing. Josefa expressed no regrets and retained her dignity but lost her life.
Posted on the Craycroft Building
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