Edmund Wysinger was a slave who worked as a gold miner in Grass Valley, California in 1849 where he earned enough to buy his freedom.
Photographer Unknown
Courtesy of the Tulare County Library
“And happy are they who live in this agitation and assist in its development! How strange that great lessons of truth must be forced upon the mind by error as the contrast, and a startling wrong perpetrated to ensure right, and a long lethargic sleep to produce a full awakening!” – Jennie Carter
INTRODUCTION
Hundreds of popular histories have promoted a naïve and false narrative about diversity in California before, during and after the gold rush despite the genocide of California Indians, a continued coziness with slavery, a Foreign Miners Tax, the Chinese Exclusion Act and other inhumane practices, committed individually and institutionally. Yes, there has been progress, but there is still an unjust legacy of racism that erodes what we could be. Former California State Historian, Kevin Starr, identified “surviving traces of the Forty Niners disease – hostility to people who are different, the Other – [are] as lingering today and self-evident as today’s headlines.”
There is no innovative research or fresh insights in this blog post. I’ve only combined a few stories out of many that hopefully give a feeling for Black resilience and determination that characterized their 19th century sojourn in Yuba–Bear River country.
The California gold rush began in 1848 when placer gold was discovered on the American River, which originates in the Sierra Nevada and flows west southwesterly to the Sacramento River. To the north are the Bear River and the Yuba River, both tributaries of the Feather River, a tributary of Sacramento River. These three rivers were the most lucrative in the northeastern region of California. At this time California was part of Mexico, where slavery was abolished in 1827.
Marysville is on the north side of the Yuba River, where it joins the Feather River. Because it was as far as steamboats could travel upstream, it was well-positioned as the gateway to the gold producing regions, particularly the North Yuba River and its tributaries. Josiah Roop, a gold miner, wrote a series titled “Interesting Letters from California” for his hometown newspaper, the Huron Reflector, in Norwalk Ohio. In an entry dated August 13, 1850, he describes Marysville: “It is beautifully located; high above Sacramento city. It is the county seat of Yuba county, and contains some 2,000 inhabitants, although four months ago it was not even surveyed. Steamboats arrive and depart daily from Sacramento City … Marysville is destined to be one of the largest towns of California. Its proximity to the richest mines, (being only some 10 miles to the first rich diggings) … must make it a large city.”
Indeed, by the 1860 census Marysville had become the 3rd largest city in the state with a population of 10,000. It’s not always possible to determine ethnicities from the census but an estimated 150 to 200 Blacks lived there and the most common occupation for Black men was barbering.
CIVIL RIGHTS FOR BLACKS
California was admitted to the union as a free state in 1850. But in the national picture was forced to make a concession to the South in the form of the Fugitive Slave Act. In his message to the legislature in 1850, Governor Burnett, a former slave owner himself, recommended the exclusion of “free Negroes”, as well. The Fugitive Slave Law was passed in 1852 and protected only the rights of the slave-owner. By the time the Fugitive Slave Laws expired in 1855 many Blacks had been captured by bounty hunters and were carried back into slavery. But Black people still had no right to testify in court against a White person, receive a public education, homestead public lands or vote.
Bounty Hunters
Illustrator Unknown
THE COLORED CONVENTIONS
The A.M.E. (African Methodist Episcopal) Church in California was committed to issues of liberation and prejudice and sought political representation. To this end the church made available financial support, meeting rooms, and an educated leadership.
The decision was made in 1854 for the first State Convention "to take into consideration the propriety of petitioning the Legislature of California for a change in the law relating to the testimony of Colored People in the Courts of Justice of this State." Forty-nine delegates from 10 counties were present at the First Colored Convention of California, held in Sacramento's Bethel African Methodist Church November 20-22, 1855. A formal statewide campaign against statutory disenfranchisement was crucial and to that end the general assembly created an association with county auxiliaries and a $10,000 discretionary fund. The right to testify for Blacks was essential for free status. Without it, individuals could not protect personal status or property from either the allegations or assault of others.
Yuba County (includes Marysville) delegates were E. P. Duplex, J.J. Brown, George Symes and T.J. Vosburg while Nevada County (including Grass Valley and Nevada City) sent Dennis D. Carter, Daniel Mahoney and George Duval.
Sacramento's A.M.E. Church formally established the A.M.E. Church of California and for more than three decades it was the principal Black denomination in the state. A.M.E. churches emerged in various towns built on the efforts of the church's educated leadership and the strength of its political program.
By the time the Third Annual Convention of Ministers and lay delegates to the California Conference met in September of 1863, substantial houses of worship stood in CoIoma, Marysville, Sacramento, Stockton, San Francisco, Grass Valley and Nevada City. Historian Rudolph Lapp acknowledged in his Blacks in Gold Rush California (1995) that “Black Protestant Christianity had become the one and only truly black-controlled institution of American life in the North, and from it sprang much of the Negro leadership of the nineteenth century.”
The first Colored Convention in California was held on November 20, 21, and 22, 1855 at St. Andrews A.M.E. Church in Sacramento. Abolitionists and church leaders who had participated in earlier conventions on the East Coast led the proceedings. They called for the abolishment of slavery, voting rights for Black men, and the repeal of testimony exclusion laws that made it illegal for Black and Native Californians to testify in court against Whites. Delegates represented a wide swath of Black leadership, including prominent writers, newspaper editors, organizers, and entrepreneurs. The convention leadership established an executive committee to raise funds for their lobbying efforts.
Progress was slow because California’s Legislature continued to ignore petitions to repeal the testimony exclusion laws, thereby enabling anti-Black racism and slavery to flourish in this “free” state. In 1863, the Legislature finally overturned the ban on Black testimony after an eight-year campaign by Colored Convention delegates. The Convention met for the last time in California in 1865 and would serve as an inspiration for later civil rights movements
In 1858 California's last and most famous fugitive slave case revolved around a young Black man named Archy Lee, who at the age of 18, migrated from Mississippi to California in 1857 with his “owner” Charles Stovall. Stovall attempted to take Lee back to the South but Lee refused to leave. When the free African American community in Sacramento encouraged Lee to flee from Stovall he was eventually arrested by police as a fugitive. Fortunately, Lee was represented in court by Edward D. Baker, a personal friend of President Lincoln. After considerable debate and plenty of publicity Lee was freed, but the racist attitudes of White Californians was clearly revealed and prompted Black Americans to look for other locations to build a new life. In the Spring of 1858 news reached California that gold had been discovered on the Fraser River in British Columbia. With the news of the gold discovery an estimated 400 Blacks left California to settle in Canada where they could be free from prejudice and legal restrictions – Archy Lee was one of them.
Major events of the 1860s
• The Civil War commences on April 12th, 1861.
• On January 1, 1863, President Lincoln issues the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring “that all persons held as slaves within the rebel states are, and henceforward shall be free.”
• In 1864 Black soldiers in the Union Army are finally paid the same wages as White soldiers.
• In April of 1865 the Civil War ends and President Lincoln is assassinated a week later.
• The 13th Amendment abolishing slavery is ratified in December of 1865.
• In 1868 the 14th Amendment grants citizenship and civil liberties to freed slaves.
• Completion of the transcontinental railroad
• Congress ratifies the 15th Amendment in 1870. It prohibited federal and state governments from denying a citizen the right to vote based on that citizen's race, color, or previous condition of servitude. Black men now had the right to vote, but the vote was still denied to Native Americans, Chinese and women.
|
Cover of Harper's Weekly
Illustration by A.R. Waud
MINING ON THE NORTH YUBA
In 1849, William Downie, for whom Downieville was named, was approached by about 40 Kanakas and a group of Black miners at Fosters Bar on the North Yuba River. He assembled a group consisting of seven “colored men”, an Irish boy and another White man who was replaced at Slate Bar by an Indian and a Kanaka. Kanakas were Polynesians (mostly Hawaiians), therefore not White. Among the almost all Black company members were Albert Callis, a runaway slave from Virginia, Charley Wilkins and Mamoo, an Egyptian sailor from Alexandria. Albert Callis settled in Downieville where he worked as a barber, married and raised a family.
The Kanaka was Jim Crow, for whom Jim Crow Ravine and Crow City, a mining camp, were named. When Downie’s party was running low on food Jim Crow was asked to take Downie’s eight mules back downstream to purchase supplies for the mining company; he headed out but never returned. Crow, who remained on the North Yuba, was later confronted by Downie and members of his party but there are no documented repercussions.
THE INCIDENT AT ROSE BAR
Major Edwin P. Sherman, a former military man, mined at Rose Bar on the Yuba River in 1849 and 1850. In his recollections he described an incident in July of 1849, “… which grew into matters of state and national importance.” “It so happened that General Thomas Jefferson Green, with nearly a dozen other Texans and about fifteen negro slaves, came to Rose's Bar, and without regard to the mining laws of the district, proceeded to occupy and claim about a third of a mile on the left bank of the river, making their own measurements and locating claims in the names of their negro slaves as well as their own. This aroused the miners. A meeting was called, which was largely attended. They denounced the action of the Texans, as it not only violated the mining laws of the district, but also the laws of the United States with regard to public lands, which could be preempted or settled only by citizens of the United States, or those who had declared their intention to become citizens. Slaves were not citizens, and their owners could not take claims for them.”
“A committee of the oldest men was appointed to go to General Green and his company and inform them that they must comply with the laws of the district and have the claims of the white men, only, measured and duly recorded. The committee was rebuffed by the Texans.”
Slaves Mining
Unknown Location and Illustrator
A meeting was called for all the miners on the lower Yuba River, on Sunday, July 29, 1849. “At the meeting, a resolution was passed that no slaves or negroes should own claims or even work in the mines, and a new committee was appointed. We went unarmed to the Texans' camp and informed them of the action taken at the general meeting.” The Texans declared they “... did not care for that ... and they ... would fight." The rest of the committee tried to reason with them but to no avail. Then Sheridan, the youngest man present, spoke to them: “There are veterans of the Mexican War here who are just as brave as you and your men, and it is foolish for you to defy our mining laws, which will be enforced by every man on this river who has regularly located his claim. If you want slaves, you will have to go back to Texas or Arkansas, or by tomorrow morning you will not have one slave left, for the miners will run them out and you will never get them again. My advice to you is to get them together and leave for Texas. We bade them a good-by and departed. That night the negro slaves vamoosed, and early the next morning their masters followed them and abandoned their camp.”
The incident at Rose Bar is sometimes interpreted as a just rebuttal of the slave system but realistically it was more about the Texans taking unfair advantage by amassing more claims than they deserved and the general morality of one man profiting off the labor of another. It was more of a philosophical Yankee value than a principled action on behalf of civil rights.
According to local lore the nearby mining settlement of Timbuctoo was named for a former slave who found one of the region’s larger nuggets. While there is no verification of this event, the story persists. Another unsubstantiated story is that Daguerre Point, on the Yuba River and downstream from Timbuctoo, was named for Spotswood DeGuirre, a Black farmer.
BLACK MEN MINING
In the early 1850s a group of Black miners organized a company and worked a claim in the Browns Valley area, a few miles northeast of Marysville. They called their mine the “Sweet Vengeance”, stylishly suggesting that it was profitable, but little is known about the mine’s productivity. The company included Gabriel Simms, James Cousins, M. McGowan, Abraham Freeman Holland, Edward Duplex and Fritz Vosburg. By the time the mine closed in 1854, each of them had become prosperous enough to either accumulate property, establish their own businesses or pay for their freedom and the freedom for other family members. Simms, a native of Virginia, opened the Franklin Hotel on First Street in Marysville. Cousins, an Ohio native, worked as a barber on D Street in Marysville. He purchased the freedom of several relatives and brought them to California. Holland, too, was also able to purchase freedom for family members. Vosburg, a native of Pennsylvania, also worked as a barber on D Street and became a Yuba County delegate to the 1856 State Convention of Colored Citizens.
The “Rare Ripe Gold and Silver Company”, also near Browns Valley, was prosperous enough to maintain an office in Marysville. John Gassaway was president of the board of trustees and company members included Edward Duplex, Gabriel Simms and J. H. Johnson. An article in the San Francisco Elevator (a Black newspaper) in 1868 described this mine as a "first class" company. An interesting comment, since quartz mining required heavy machinery and few Black men had the capital to properly outfit that kind of mining operation. More research, I’m sure, would reveal a story worth hearing.
Edward Duplex emerged as one of the most important leaders of the African American community outside of San Francisco. He was a Yuba County representative at the first California Colored Citizens State Convention in 1855, where he was selected to become a member of the Executive Committee. According to Delilah Beasley, a historian and newspaper columnist for the Oakland Tribune, the Executive Committee was involved with the Underground Railroad. The Committee assisted fugitives, whenever possible, by providing temporary lodging, food, medicine, employment or small amounts of money, as well as offering legal protection against kidnappers.
Edward Parker Duplex, formerly of Connecticut, settled in Marysville in 1855 where he married Sophie Elizabeth – they had a son and daughter together. In 1855, Duplex represented Yuba County at the first California Colored Citizens State Convention in Sacramento and in the following year, he served as a member of the convention’s Executive Committee. He was also active in the Mt. Olivet Baptist Church and by 1858, the ever-enterprising Duplex opened his Metropolitan Shaving Saloon employing seven barbers during the California State Fair in Marysville. Ten years later he was serving as secretary-treasurer on the board of trustees of the Rare Ripe Gold and Silver Company.
After 20 years in Marysville the Duplex family moved to Wheatland, located near the confluence of the Bear and Feather Rivers, less than fifteen miles to the southeast. Duplex’s Hairdressing and Shaving Saloon is still located at 415 Main Street, near the Central Hotel, in the central business district of Wheatland – but today it’s closed. The Saloon, in addition to offering hair care, quickly became a center of political and social information.
Duplex's Hairdressing and Shaving Saloon
Wheatland, California
Photographer Unknown
Black barbershops had become communication centers for the activities of the Underground Railway and other concerns of the Black community. By 1858, nearly 20% of Blacks in Marysville either owned or worked in barbershops. So many of the Black owned barbershops were located on D Street in Marysville that it became known as “Barber Row.” Jessie McGowan, “the lightning barber”, arrived in 1852 as did the Gassaway brothers, James and John, who in their advertising in the Marysville Herald, featured “cupping” and “leaching.” Many of their customers were described as “wealthy White men.” We can only assume that barbershops for White and Black men were segregated, not only because of prejudice, but because of the sensitive status of Black barbershops regarding cultural and political matters.
On April 14, 1888 the Marysville Daily Appeal reported that “The board of trustees have elected E. P. Duplex Mayor of their city (Wheatland). Duplex is a colored man, the first ever honored with such a position on the coast.”
The town of Marysville was a good place for Blacks to settle and raise families. In 1854 the African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Church was formed. The congregation initially met in a building on California Alley between Sixth and Seventh streets and was pastored by circuit ministers for many years. The Mt. Olivet Baptist Church was built in 1856 and by January of 1858 included a basement school for children with the Marysville City Council appropriating $500 to assist in the remodeling. The school opened in 1859 and its first teacher was Mrs. Sherman.
Amy’s Marysville Directory for 1858 has enough detail to determine that Black residents lived in buildings scattered throughout the city, thereby integrating with people from all over the nation and world. Some lived in integrated (with Hispanics) boardinghouses and some were families, including several farm families. It appears that Marysville, in 1860, was one of the more integrated cities in the West.
Institutionalized racism began to emerge in the latter decade of the nineteenth century, and by 1920, even displaced Black barbers from the prosperous luxury shops operated for White businessmen in choice downtown locations. For more than 50 years prior to that, Black men enjoyed a near monopoly on this trade.
Cupid Blue was one of the founders of Marysville's Mt. Olivet Church in 1853. He was born a slave in Virginia in 1792 and as a young boy, he accompanied his owner who was a trader on the Missouri River. In 1799, at age 7, he was captured by Indians while on a trading excursion. He spent sixteen years with them, secretly leaving the tribe at age 23 and returned to Virginia where he was granted his freedom. Cupid Blue came to Marysville in the 1850s where he worked as a drayman, married Susan Blue and eventually bought two lots. Susan Blue, Julia Bland and Dorothea Mc Gowan were some of the Black women who were very active with the Mt. Olivet Church – Mc Gowan was its Treasurer for 30 years.
GRASS VALLEY and NEVADA CITY
Both of these mountain towns were based on gold mining and despite being only four miles apart were very different cities. Both towns are in Nevada County. Some of the distinctions were based on them having different geology and therefore different methods of mining.
Grass Valley was on Wolf Creek, a tributary of the Bear River, and the gold occurred in underground quartz mines. These mines required sophisticated and expensive equipment. There was already friction between Cornish and Irish miners and definitely no room for Black miners. Nevertheless, it was a prosperous town with jobs of all sorts and it had a Black community with churches and a school. Historian Ralph Mann in his meticulously researched, After the Gold Rush: Society in Grass Valley and Nevada City, California 1849-1870, found that when Grass Valley shifted to a quartz mining economy in 1865, they excluded black miners. “In 1860 there had been almost as many black miners in Grass valley as unskilled laborers, but in 1870 eight in ten blacks were unskilled and only one black man called himself a miner.”
Nevada City is situated on Deer Creek, a major tributary of the Yuba River and was more engaged in placer mining (river mining, hydraulicking and drift mining). The Black population of Nevada City increased slightly with several artisans and two farms. Mercantile-oriented crafts offered more possibility for employment while Grass Valley’s dependence on underground mining did not. Nevada City’s Blacks dominated the relationship between the two towns.
Jennie Carter was a Black woman and a journalist and essayist who wrote for the San Francisco Black newspaper The Elevator from her home in Nevada City, California during the Reconstruction Era. In 1866 she married her second husband, musician and Civil Rights activist, Dennis Carter. Beginning In 1867 and continuing for the next seven years Jennie Carter published over 70 pieces in The Elevator. Using the pen name Anna J. Trask (and later Semper Fidelis) she covered diverse topics including slavery, racism, women's suffrage, temperance, politics and immigration. She was opposed to the persecution of the Chinese reminding her readership to "remember those in bonds as being bound to us." Her writing was widely circulated in late 19th century Black communities, especially in the West.
Jennie Carter's Grave in Pine Grove Cemetery in Nevada City, California
Lisa Redfern, of Grass Valley, has created a very good video about Jenny Carter and some of her writing: http://followingdeercreek.com/jennie-carters-thoughts-words-from-nevada-city-1867-1874-video/. (See also Lisa’s informative and entertaining blog about Deer Creek, a major tributary of the Yuba River, – I’m a fan: http://followingdeercreek.com).
There are two other places in Nevada County with connections to Black lives. In 1852 two Black men planted a cabbage patch where the Smartsville and Spenceville Roads divide on the south side of Dry Creek, a tributary of Bear River. This was a wise move because cabbage is a versatile food and a good source of Vitamin C, necessary to prevent scurvy. Teamsters named this small settlement Cabbage Patch and the name stuck until 1898 when the occupants applied for a Post Office under the name of Waldo.
The other place is the Kentucky Ridge Mine, near Kentucky Flat and Deer Creek in Nevada County, which operated in 1851 and 1852, using slaves as workers. These Black men and women came to Nevada County from Georgia as the slaves of Colonel William F. English, a Georgia planter. He sold his plantation in 1850, then journeyed to Philadelphia, where he purchased a ship to transport machinery and workers to California to establish a mining enterprise. English died in an accident when his horse threw him leaving the former slaves to relocate for themselves.
Preston Alexander of Nevada City
Photograph Courtesy of the Nevada County Historical Society
Linda Jack of the Nevada County Historical Society used online resources and traditional sources to piece together a picture of the community. She estimates there were anywhere from 150-350 Blacks living in Nevada County during the second half of the 19th century. That population includes enslaved Blacks, former slaves who had escaped captivity and free Blacks.
Two Streets in Nevada City are named for Black men: Alexander Street was named for Preston Alexander and Nimrod Street is named for Nimrod Wellington Jones, a native of Virginia, who purchased a lot in Nevada City for $50 on June 14, 1859. If you’d like more information on the black population of Nevada County and their activities, I recommend the two Bulletins created for the Nevada County Historical Society that are listed in the Selected References.
SCHOOLS
The first state-supported Colored School in Marysville, California opened in 1858 in the basement of the Mt. Olivet Baptist Church, with funding from the Marysville City Council. Black communities had to organize for their own schools, first as self-supported schools and later as publicly funded, state-supported schools. Five years after California became a state, the first public schools for Black children began.
The School Law of 1855, Section 18, provided school funding based on the number of White students attending a school. This threat of loss of funding based on race was extended in 1860, when schools were prohibited from admitting “Negroes and Mongolians” under threat of losing all funding. By 1864, a new school law went further and required that districts had to open separate schools for Black children, providing there were 10 Black families in a town whose families would submit a written petition requesting such a school. When a town had fewer than 10 Black children the Revised School Law of 1866, Section 57-59, provided that districts could choose how to educate those children, whether it be in separate schools or in the regular public schools (provided that no White parents make a written objection).
The Marysville Appeal reported in the June 27, 1872 issue that the Black residents of the city had petitioned the Board of Education for “free admission of their children to the public schools.” This was an early effort to end segregated schools – San Francisco, Oakland, Sacramento, and Vallejo had already abolished separate schools for Black children. Finally, in 1880, Section 1662 required that schools must be open for the admission of all children.
Black and Chinese Railroad Workers
Photographer Unknown
Still school segregation continued. Edmond Wysinger was a slave brought from South Carolina to the town of Grass Valley in 1849. After working in the gold mines for more than a year, Wysinger saved up $1,000 and purchased his freedom. He then traveled south to Merced, where he met his future wife and the couple settled in Visalia where they had eight children. In Visalia a new high school was being built, and Wysinger wanted his 12-year old son Arthur to attend but was told that only White children would be allowed to attend. Edmond Wysinger refused to accept this blatant inequality. Wysinger sued the Visalia School District but lost his case in Tulare County court. Undeterred, he appealed to the California Supreme Court and won in a decision that would impact Black public school students for generations (Wysinger v. Crookshank, January 29, 1890). Arthur Wysinger was the first Black child admitted to Visalia High School. The case was later used as legal precedent in briefs filed with the United States Supreme Court in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education.
THE N-WORD IN HISTORICAL RESEARCH
I’m a historian and I find a lot of value in historical place names. This is especially true in the gold mining regions of California where people came to mine from all over the world. For the namers it was a way to appropriate a place in a climate where claim jumping was an issue.
As I write, monuments to former heroes, now remembered for their bad behavior, are being toppled, smashed and sunk. History is process – despite the static way that it’s taught – there is always the next big change brewing. De-sanctifying monuments is a way to attack the quasi-spiritual underpinnings of outdated values. Monuments carry symbolic meaning and what they mean depends on your stance. There was a world outcry when, in 2001, al Qaeda bombed the world’s tallest Buddhas in the Bamyan Valley in central Afghanistan. Among those offended were most of my friends, who were not at all bothered by the abuse of Christopher Columbus or Jefferson Davis monuments. Incidentally, the order to bomb the Buddhas was given by the Minister of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice who considered them idols.
In 2018 many Black people took offense at the development of a recreational area near Sacramento, California at what was known historically as “Negro Bar.” Ironically, cartographers of the 20th century changed maps containing the N-word to Negro because they saw it as less racist. Among historians there is a strong impulse to not change the past because it reflects the mind set of a particular era. I understand that, but we live in the present, and as much as I hate to say it, people are content with a superficial rendition of the past – not everyone is a historian. And I don’t care much about trigonometry.
Who has the right to choose the stories we tell ourselves? Does repeating what has already been written assign guilt to the one doing the repeating and not to the original author? I’m White and my position is that it’s not possible for me to experience the sting, rejection or hate that a Black person feels when these words are used. I do know that they’ve heard these words used for far too long and I do not to use them because of the pain and anger (conscious and unconscious) that they evoke. James Braxton Peterson, the Director of African Studies and Associate Professor of English at Lehigh University says he would prefer them (the Black population) to avoid it out of a certain respect for history and for the ongoing struggle of the Black community in dealing with it. “It was used so systematically, so overtly for so long throughout history, it’s important to understand how, when Black folks use it, they were and still are engaged in very complex socio-linguistic process of reclamation,” he says. “And I don’t see an end-game for this process. I don’t see a ‘post-race’ America happening in our lifetime, nor do I think that should be the goal. I think the goal is an equitable celebration of various cultures: cultural competency. We are not going to be living in a color-blind, post-race world; it’s going to be a multiracial world.”
• • •
Selected References
American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California: Gold Chain: A Fight for Equal Education. https://www.aclunc.org/sites/goldchains/explore/wysinger.html
Beesley, Delilah L. Slavery in California. Chicago (1918) and Negro Trailblazers of California. San Francisco (1919).
Chamberlain, William H. & Harry L. Wells. History of Yuba County, California. Oakland (1879)
Downie, William. Hunting for Gold: Reminiscences of Personal Experience and Research in the Early Days of the Pacific Coast from Alaska to Panama. San Francisco (1893).
Gardner, Eric (Ed.). Jennie Carter: A Black Journalist of the Early West. Jackson (2007)
Jack, Linda K. Civility to All, Servility to None” Nevada City (2016).
Jones, Pat. Nevada County’s Black Pioneers. Nevada City (1985)
Lapp, Rudolph M. Blacks in Gold Rush California. New Haven (1995)
Mann, Ralph. After the Gold Rush: Society in Grass Valley and Nevada City, California, 1849-1870. Stanford (1982)
Noel, Jana. The Creation of the First State-Supported Colored School in Marysville, California: A Community’s Legacy. Paper presented at the Annual Conference of the History of Education Society. Sacramento (2004)
Redfern, Lisa (Website & Video) Jennie Carter’s Thoughts & Words from Nevada City 1867-1874. (2018.)
Sherman, Edwin A. Sherman Was There: The Recollections of Edwin A. Sherman. San Francisco (1944)
Washington, Guy. California Pioneers of African Descent. National Park Service. Oakland (2010) https://www.nps.gov/subjects/ugrr/discover_history/upload/California-Pioneers-of-African-Descent.pdf
Withington, Carol. The Black Pioneers of Yuba County. Self-published. Yuba City (1987)
