THE TOWN OF SECOND GARROTE in California got its name because it was the other camp on Moccasin Hill where folks might gather to witness the hanging of claim-jumpers or other desperados. The name reflected the inhabitants of the town, with the first word pronounced as English and the second as Spanish. There was a fandango near the hangman’s tree where you could dance, but Second Garrote was best known as the home of the wedded bachelors.
Before a switchback road was cut into the hillside for the stagecoach, about the only way to reach Second Garrote was on foot or on horseback, the latter being preferred, as the trek was up a long and steep ascent. On a hot day, with the sun directly overhead as you trudged, each step would send up a small puff of parching tawny powder, though for part of the way at least there was a narrow pack trail blazed by the Miwok Indians that wound along the edge of Rattlesnake Creek at the bottom of a deep arroyo, where you might find some shade if you were lucky. Then, at last, you crested the hill and there was their cabin. Chaffee might be on the front porch offering a pitcher of cool cider pressed from their own orchard, and Chamberlain might be sitting with his long legs splayed out in front of him. Looking at the couple you might wonder: who is the husband, and who the wife? But such questions had no meaning on Moccasin Hill.
John Amos Chaffee was born in 1823 in Woodstock, Connecticut, and Jason Palmer Chamberlain two years earlier in Windsor County, Vermont, but they met in Worcester, Massachusetts, where Chaffee worked as a wheelwright and Chamberlain as a carpenter. The attraction was immediate and mutual, and they pledged to spend their lives together, but New England was not a welcoming place for men who loved men. Sodomy prosecutions were mercifully few, but gossip alone could make a man’s life a misery, so they decided to flee the meddlers and the magistrates. In 1849, the Eastern seaboard was abuzz with news about gold discoveries in California—it seemed half the young men of New England were rushing to wade ankle-deep in icy mountain streams—so Chamberlain and Chaffee slipped quietly into the surging crowd, through the hugging of mothers and the kissing of sweethearts, and set off to make a new life for themselves far away, and on their own terms.
The couple sailed from Boston on January 24, 1849, aboard the ship Capitol, Monckton Proctor captain. They discovered there were four other young men from Worcester aboard, and since none of them had the foggiest idea of how to pan for gold, they decided to stick together and share whatever fortune brought. After a voyage of 176 days around the Horn, the men arrived in San Francisco. “We found a very great change from the staid and steady habits of our New England home,” Chamberlain later wrote. “Here gambling was the prevailing amusement. Men just returned from the mines would bet their last dollar on the turn of a card. Suicides and murders were of a frequent occurrence.”
Chamberlain and Chaffee arrived with the first wave of the Gold Rush, a period when the sleepy village of Yerba Buena, with a population of only a few hundred, exploded almost overnight into the boomtown of San Francisco, with tens of thousands of immigrants arriving from all over the globe—95 percent of them young men. Ships clogged the waterfront, unable to leave because their crews had deserted for the gold fields. Buildings were being thrown up quickly, made only of canvas stretched onto wooden frames and painted to look like wood or brick. Fires could consume entire blocks within minutes. Unpaved streets turned to quagmires whenever it rained, leaving the drunk and the sober alike knee-deep in muck. The price of everything, everyone agreed, was absolutely insane.
The Worcester boys decided to pitch their tents in the area just south of Market Street known ironically as Happy Valley, a stretch of flea-infested sand dunes where men could squat rent-free until they got their bearings. Construction workers of all kind were in high demand, and Chamberlain, a carpenter, and Chaffee, a wheelwright, found they could make twelve dollars a day just pursuing their chosen professions. After a few weeks, their finances shored up, the crew decided to head for the area southeast of San Francisco Bay known as the Southern Mines.
In the following months, the men from Massachusetts moved from mining camp to mining camp, having only mixed success. When funds ran low, and during the winter months when rain turned the mountain streams to torrents that made stream-bed mining impractical, they worked at construction in Stockton or in San José. In time, they accepted that they were unlikely to strike it rich, and with that realization the itinerant life quickly lost its charm. Chamberlain and Chaffee decided to head off on their own, to find a place where they could send down roots.
They chose a small encampment in Tuolumne County known as Second Garrote, where their arrival was long remembered. The couple may have slipped quietly from Worcester, but their entrance into their new home had all the subtlety of a circus parade. They rode up Moccasin Hill in a two-wheeled cart low on axle grease, a vehicle that could be heard “squeaking and groaning for a mile along the grade.” Chamberlain and Chaffee bought a plot of land and proceeded to build their own house and to plant a vegetable garden and a small orchard. Their nearest neighbors were the Schmidt family, whose sons Fred and Charlie Schmidt were elderly men still living in the family home when they were interviewed about their memories of growing up next door to the wedded bachelors. “We lived close to them,” Fred remembered, “as you can see plainly enough; and, in those days, to be a neighbor really meant something. As boys we were in and out of their house day after day. They divided up their work, each one to do what he liked best. And they had a common purse. It was worth while to raise vegetables and melons and to cook and keep things straight because there were two of them to enjoy everything.”
California became a state in 1850, and with statehood came a Federal bureaucracy eager to ask questions and tick boxes. Chamberlain and Chaffee were able to register a small act of protest against a government that refused to acknowledge their union. On the census sheets for Tuolumne County, Chamberlain is listed as the “Head” of their household, but Chaffee refused to accept the designation of “Boarder” or “Lodger” or “Tenant” (the terms customarily used by census takers to describe a non-related adult male residing in the same household). Beside Chaffee’s name appears the defiant term “Partner.”
It was not uncommon in 19th-century America for two or more unrelated straight men to “keep bachelor hall”—to share a living space (though not a bed, something that occurred with frequency only among travelers in crowded inns and on ships)—and yet it was clear to nearly everyone that Chamberlain and Chaffee were sharing more than a roof. Their special relationship became a local legend, and in 1869 their fame became international thanks to a short story by the American author Bret Harte. Harte was living in San Francisco, editing and writing for the Overland Monthly magazine, when he mentioned to a colleague that he had an idea for a short story. He wanted to write about two Gold Rush miners who formed a lifelong bond. His colleague told him what he knew about Chamberlain and Chaffee. Harte’s short story titled “Tennessee’s Partner” appeared in the October issue of the magazine, and while its plot had little to do with the lives of Chamberlain and Chaffee, they quickly became associated in the public’s mind with Harte’s fictional couple, and the men took their place alongside Mark Twain’s celebrated jumping frog of Calaveras County as literary nostalgia for a California that was rapidly disappearing.
In 1874, stagecoach service to Yosemite was inaugurated, and the road through Second Garrote to the valley was rerouted to pass directly in front of the men’s cabin. Particularly after 1890, when Yosemite was designated a national park, visitors by stagecoach, carriage, and horseback became so numerous that Chamberlain and Chaffee decided to turn their place into a way station where travelers could stretch their legs and purchase refreshments, or stock up on homegrown fruits and vegetables for their camping trip. And, of course, visitors could also meet the famous originals of Tennessee and his partner. The wedded bachelors became another roadside attraction.
The men kept a guestbook for visitors’ comments (now preserved in the Bancroft Library at Berkeley). The entries in the book are unfailingly warm and appreciative, with only a few sly references to the nature of the couple’s relationship. “The artistic inclination of these gentlemen is quite apparent,” wrote one visitor, “tho which one is the ‘ladies man’ we could not discover, each modestly declining the honor.” Others entries were more explicit. One praised the wild scenery of the area, but felt that the most impressive feature created “by the convulsions of nature” was not the mountainous terrain but the affinity between “the wedded batchelors [sic].” Another wished the couple many years of happiness together: “On Our Trip to the Yosemite Providence directed us to the Cheerful Cabin of Messrs Chamberlain and Chaffee Two Characteristic ‘49ers’ whose attachment to each other has the true ‘Damon and Pythias’ ring, that touches sentiments so welcome. May their ‘Golden Wedding’ to be celebrated in 1899 be the crowning event to their long history of Hospitality.”
As the couple approached their eighties, decades of living in what was in many ways still a rough frontier environment began to take their toll. Chaffee was diagnosed with “a skin disease” (unspecified) which in time became debilitating. The disease was probably lupus, as he was admitted to the East Bay Sanatorium, a private clinic in Oakland where Dr. Clark R. Krone was conducting experimental treatments for lupus using X-rays. The treatments were unsuccessful; Chaffee died on January 31, 1903, and was buried in Oakland. Unable to afford a long stay away from their cabin and their one source of income, Chamberlain had returned to the mountains. He learned of his partner’s death in a letter.
A pall settled over Second Garrote. The town mourned with Jason Chamberlain and couldn’t imagine how the old man would adjust to life without his partner of over fifty years. They were right to worry. Neighbor Fred Schmidt spoke of a scene from his childhood that was seared into his memory: “My brother Charlie had gone hunting and it was late in the afternoon. I walked onto Chamberlain’s porch and there he sat with his head about shot off. The muzzle of the gun rested against his chin and stood between his legs. He had tied a string from the trigger to his toe and that’s the way he shot himself. God, how I ran home!”
Jason and John had selected a spot in the mountains where they wanted to be buried so they would always lie side-by-side, the way they had their very first night together in New England when their bodies were young and strong. But it was not to be. Chamberlain was buried alone in the nearby town of Groveland, a pleasant little community of trees and families and automobiles that no longer wanted to be called by its Gold Rush name of First Garrote.
The short story “Tennessee’s Partner” ends with the unnamed partner mourning Tennessee’s death. “But from that day,” Harte writes, “his rude health and great strength seemed visibly to decline; and when the rainy season fairly set in, and the tiny grass-blades were beginning to peep from the rocky mound above Tennessee’s grave, he took to his bed.” In a fevered delirium, the grieving partner imagines that Tennessee is wandering alone among the hills, and insists he must hitch up the buckboard to go find him. “Sometimes, you know,” he explains as in his hallucination he searches for his lost mate, “when he’s blind-drunk, he drops down right in the trail. Keep on straight up to the pine on the top of the hill. Thar—I told you so!—coming this way, too—all by himself, sober, and his face a-shining. Tennessee! Pardner!” Harte’s story ends with a simple sentence: “And so they met.”
References
Chamberlain, Jason. “Day Before Yesterday: The Search for Gold Beginning 1849” (manuscript), Huntington Library, 1901.
Johnson, Susan Lee. Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush, W.W. Norton, 2000.
Paden, Irene and Margaret Schlichtmann. The Big Oak Flat Road: An Account of Freighting from Stockton to Yosemite Valley. Yosemite Natural History Association, 1959.
William Benemann is the author of A Year of Mud and Gold: San Francisco in Letters and Diaries, 1849-1850, and Men in Eden: William Drummond Stewart and Same-Sex Desire in the Rocky Mountain Fur Trade.
