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As the night continues into the day, the cries of “historical erasure” throughout the country as monuments fall in favor of the Confederacy.
Complaints are almost false. Most of the statues, markers and inverted symbols of The Confederacy are fashionable examples of Jim Crow’s propaganda, not monuments to honor the heroic occasions of the terrible civil war. Confederate monuments sometimes rewrite the past, covering the truth. Shout “Save History!” it’s just a way to cover prejudice with a respectable erudition varnish.
The night followed the day recently in little Placerville, California, when a boost to replace the graphic design of the municipal logo ended in front of the town hall. This time, Confederate sympathies weren’t at stake. Instead, a vaguely similar murder consultation was made for vigilante.
The Placerville city logo shows a lynching.
Possibly, a small town of about 11,000 more people would be proudly identified with a history of lynchings, especially when tourism is the main driving force of the local economy. But the symbol of a rope hanging from the branch of a mighty oak stands out on the emblem of the city.
The concept of cutting the debatable rope of the drawing was first presented to the city council in June and then discussed in a Zoom assembly on July 14, with an hour of public, pro-node and anti-assent comments. Money doesn’t seem to be the problem, as a review would charge only about $5,350 for labor and fees.
But the council kicked. A vote to postpone a resolution until next year, following the lifting of pandemic restrictions on face-to-face debate, followed by four to 1.
The writers of Mountain Democrat, the local newspaper that reported the grueling meeting, yelled.
“Let’s not erase our history,” insisted one.
The erasure of the lynching tree represents “a liberal force that must suppress history,” another shouted.
“Please don’t erase the history of our city,” begged a third, while a fourth argued that “Old Hangtown is just an old statement.”
The ancient city of Hangthe is what Placerville nicknamed before, much more than a makeshift 19th-century mining camp set up next to a modest creek. It is just 16 km from where James W. Marshall stumbled upon gleaming steel flakes in the water sawmill owned by his boss, Swiss-born immigrant John Sutter. The city played a key role in the California Gold Rush that began in 1848.
This story is not an explanation for why to sneeze. Placerville has a distribution center in a source chain that has noticed billions extracted from the Gold Rush fields in the foothills of the Sierra East of Sacramento (there is not much left). California’s non-native population grew from about 800 to more than 100,000 until the end of the following year. Just 20 months after the first golden strike, Golden State joined the Union.
The avalanche of newcomers has led to a national transformation in an impromptu, planned, infrequently unwanted and unforeseen way. During the process, a thousand threads were woven: elaborate stories of phenomenal luck, frustrated hopes and bloody chaos. Each tale of the gold rush turns out to have spawned another and another, multiplying like “Star Trek” Tribbles.
The story blends smoothly with myth and legend, and classifying among them is dangerous. But the quest for the wild, lawless treasure has ignited Hangtown’s nickname, a violent position in which they “hang them first and interrogate them later,” as a cheerful local saying goes.
One credible story had a trio of desperadoes getting caught after robbing the sleeping owner of a gambling parlor of his gold-dust stash and threatening his life. He may have been murdered (accounts vary). A makeshift judge and jury were convened on the spot and the trio was convicted, sentenced to death and promptly strung up from a massive oak tree at a place next door known as Elstner’s hay yard.
The lynchings are coming.
Three other villains were hanged for stealing horses, others for having an unfortunate miner in his cabin. “Irish Dick,” a Recently Richard Crone of New Orleans, was hanged by his trusting Bowie knife to separate a player’s center of blows from his chest after an insult at the game table.
A mob lynched five for filming a visiting Mexican player, the first example of Placerville’s civic fear of jeopardizing the tourism trade.
The design of the Placerville logo is derived from all this. The symbol tells a very story.
A rope frame surrounds a cartoon-like flat symbol in which a bearded miner searches for gold in the foreground, his body crouched outwardly through a swollen white cloud floating in a transparent blue sky. This giant oak that hangs from a rope places it like a remote sentry.
Prominent rustic lyrics call the town of Placerville, which abandoned the nickname Old Hangthe city in 1854. The date and the cancelled call are modestly represented in the logo.
Originally, the city called Old Dry Diggins, a casual reference to the approach of open pit minerals extraction in the absence of water; however, this story is overlooked by the logo. The appearance of Hangthe city replaced the vernacular, cautious to possible thugs without subtleties.
Soon, a thorny scenario appeared. The hasty practice of lynching proved less than useful for a developing village that sought to update Coloma, the dusty Sutter Mill, as the burgeoning seat of El Dorado County.
Hangtown had an incorrect symbol problem. Widespread extrajudicial executions are not compatible with the establishment’s preference for civic power.
To make a credible appeal to gain governing authority, residents needed to shake off a sordid reputation for vigilante justice. The town postmaster, apparently urged on by local churches and a busy temperance league, is said to have sought something a bit more dignified.
That’s how Placerville was born. The operation of the places, which is a sieving approach to the mineral deposits of a bed of a stream, corresponds to the turnover of renewal of the smart taste.
Four years after the impressive discovery of the Sutter Mill, a new official call has been established. Today’s contested municipal logo necessarily represents a call change: Lawless Hangtown is on the remote horizon, in the background, and the tough placerville employee is at the forefront.
Who designed the logo, and when, I cannot say. City officials told me they are not quite sure how long it has been in use — perhaps since early in the 20th century, certainly before 1970 — and the artist’s name is apparently lost. But it is easy to see why many people today would be offended by a visual salute to vigilante justice, which is more accurately described as mob rule.
In particular, the offense of a lynching tree becomes austere in the era of Black Lives Matter, when the country, in spite of everything, is grappling with a ubiquitous legacy of white supremacy. (As Meleko Mokgosi, a former Botswana-born artist founded in Los Angeles, said recently, “America not only has a racial problem, America is a racial problem.”) Between post-Civil War reconstruction and World War II, more than 4,400 lynchings of racial terror occurred across the United States. The logo cannot yet help evoke these vicious crimes.
This horrific tale of vigilantes would likely be different from past occasions in Placerville, however, The California Gold Rush is not immune to the sinister spectre of racial brutality. Sutter himself enslaved heaps of Aboriginal people as a source of loose work. Some of them took Marshall to the gold, which he “discovered” through a euphemism. Raping one of Sutter’s horrific coertion teams while amassing what an observer described as a “harem” of Native American women and girls.
In the year of Hangtown’s call change, the new state’s youngest Supreme Court added the Chinese to the black exclusion list and aboriginal already banned in orders to testify against whites in court proceedings. Thomas Nast, the brilliant editorial cartoonist who later worked on Harper’s Weekly, the so-called Journal of Civilization, as his banner put it, mocked the California People v. Hall court ruling.
Juxtaposing cool animated film figures depicting the south and west of the United States, Nast’s pen dripping acid. In essence, he wrote, the resolution said that “deficient barbarians cannot perceive our form of civilized Republican rule.”
So what does Placerville do now with the local low-risk lynching history on its municipal logo? Here’s a suggestion: get inspired by the solution to the challenge of the symbol that gave the city its name. Don’t erase the lynching, cut it.
Redesign the graphic so that the oak, its infringing branch and the hanging rope extend across the floor, while the cut stump is left behind. That, after all, is what happened.
In 1853, the town’s population toppled the wonderful oak tree at Elstner’s Hay Yard, where all these convenient Mafia executions had taken place. It is imperative to end the practice of lynchings to awaken the reputation of the new Placerville. Four years later, the California Legislature chose the disjointed city to host El Dorado County. The rehabilitation of the symbol was successful.
This is the story that a cleverly redesigned logo can tell: a good fortune by abandoning anything barbaric in favor of anything civilized. The existing logo loses the key point, making it a bad story.
The stump tree stump still exists, hidden from everyone’s sight. A bronze plaque in front of an old living room built in Elstner’s hay backyard explains: “The tree stump is under this building.” Since 1934 – the 80th anniversary of the so-called city replenishment – the humble stump is the historical monument of the state No. 141, marked with a sign on what is now the main street.
In the abyss of the Great Depression, honoring the immense riches of the legacy of the gold rush has given hope. For Placerville’s long story, what counts most is the stump, not the rope.
It’s time to bring it out. Then scrape the rope on the city logo and cut the tree. Abrogate a civic monument to the reign of the crowd and update it with a commemoration of civilized progress.
This is the original story of the Golden State. Who can object?