Made In America - Bill Bryson [84]
But that didn’t stop anyone – not at least after gold was found there in 1849. In the first four years of the gold rush, the population of California went from 20,000 to just under 225,000. In those same four years, $220 million in gold was pulled from the ground or sluiced from its glittering creeks. The gold rush not only enriched a fortunate few, but enlivened the language. Many of the terms that arose from it soon made their way into more general usage, among them pay dirt, pan out, to stake a claim and to strike it rich,18 all of which were soon being used in senses far removed from the idea of scrabbling in the earth for nuggets of gold.
One of the many side-effects of the gold rush was the invention of hard-wearing canvas trousers and bib overalls in San Francisco in the 1850s. The inventor was of course Levi Strauss, who had travelled west with a load of canvas (or twill) intending to make tents, but found a much greater demand for trousers that would stand up to the wear and tear of life in the mining camps. He didn’t call them jeans. In the 1850s the word signified not an item of apparel but a type of cloth. It is a corruption of Genoa, the Italian city where it was first woven. Not until this century did denim (itself a corruption of serge de Nîmes, from the French city) trousers become generally known as jeans and not until the 1940s were people calling them Levis.
The traffic to California wasn’t all from east to west. Many thousands came from China. At the beginning of the gold rush, just 325 Chinese lived in California; two years later the number had jumped to 25,000. In the next three decades it increased twelvefold, to over 300,000, or nearly one-tenth of the population. Because of political turmoil in China, almost all of them came from just six small districts in Guangdong province.
The Chinese, who for entirely mysterious reasons were commonly known in the West as ‘Johnnies’, were treated exceptionally badly. Because they were prepared to work hard for little pay, and because their appearance precluded easy assimilation, they were often pointlessly attacked and occasionally even massacred. Even banding together didn’t provide much protection. In 1885, in Rock Springs, Wyoming, a mob swooped on a community of five hundred Chinese for no reason other than that they didn’t like them, and left twenty-eight dead. Such was the prejudice against the Chinese that in some western courts they were not even permitted to plead self-defence. Thus there arose the telling western expression ‘He doesn’t have a Chinaman’s chance.’
Many of the terms that we most closely associate with the West were not coined there at all. Abigail Adams used desperadoes to describe the participants in Shays’ Rebellion long before the word attached itself to western bandits.20 Though the chuck wagon (from a slang term for food, which survives incidentally in the expression upchuck) became widely used in the West – one of the most popular models was built by the Studebaker Company of Detroit – the term was widely used in Kentucky long before the Oregon Trail was even thought of. Son of a gun and to bite the dust were both Anglicisms brought to America by early colonists. Posse has been in English since the Middle Ages. Much of the inflated speech that seems such a natural accompaniment to the high-spirited lifestyle of the West – formations like absquatulate and rambunctious – had originated long before in New England.21 Likewise, the Stetson hat, also often called a John B., was an eastern innovation. Its originator, John Batterson Stetson,