(Previously published in the California Gazette April 2006)

When we hear the phrase “The French Revolution”, we immediately conjure up images of Versailles, The Guillotine, and Marie Antoinette not California Gold Miners and the city of Sonora!

John Marshall found gold at Sutters Mill in 1848.   The next year, The California territory was flooded with those in hopes of making it rich.  Aside from Yankees in the east and Midwest a stream of foreign immigrants flooded the new American Territory not to mention the Mexican’s left over from their golden age of ranchos.  In the mix of all these rich ethnicities and cultures were the French.

As is the tradition in America, each group that is different gets a “name” and the French were not spared their derogatory name.  Because of language barriers, most of them stuck together in the mines because they didn't know English. They were known as Keskydees because they were often saying "Qu'est-ce qu'il dit?" (What is he saying?).

The French participated in the rush and some of them became rich very quickly; a certain Claude Chana collects $25,000 worth of gold in a one-year period. Another person, Pierre Théodore Sicard mines $60,000 in gold. On May 15, 1848, the French Consul in Monterey, sends the news to the Ministry of Foreign affairs in Paris. Several newspapers spread the news in France. Soon, 25 to 30 thousand French miners and adventurers arrive in California. The first French boat, La Meuse, arrives in California in September 1849 after a 173-day trip. Between November 1849 and April 1851, 91 French boats from Bordeaux, Saint Malo, Marseilles, and Le Havre arrive in San Francisco.

The Keskydees work in the gold mines and as a result, many mines had French names such as: French Town, French Canyon, French Creek, French Corral, French Ravine, French Flat, French Gulch, French Hill, and Gravel lot (from Gravelotte). The Keskydees are considered part of the population of "foreigners," just as the Mexicans, Chinese, and others, with whom they get along well.  The “Yankees” use the distinct advantage of citizenship as a tool to neutralize their advantages as miners. They legislated, in the good-old All-American way.

In April 1850, the newly chartered California state legislature, known as the "Legislature of a Thousand Drinks" for its prolific consumption of booze during the hard-rain winter they first convened, passed the Foreign Miners' Tax Law intended to drive Latino and immigrant miners out of the gold fields by demanding a huge amount of money.   The bill assessed a $20 per month levy on any mine claim held by a non-citizen. This tax stirred a mood among the miners of Sonora, California. Some had just arrived from Europe's revolutionary upsurges of 1848--where the revolutionary working class had appeared on history's stage and the red flag had flown for the first time over street barricades.  Violence and protests broke out across the state because of this tax.

However, in Sonora miners refused to pay the "Foreign Miners Tax."  The French-speaking miners - Quebeckers, Frenchmen, Cajuns and even a few Polynesians - took a Napoleonic approach. They organized a full-scale rebellion, led by two radicals, exiled from France for their role in the Revolution of 1848. On a Sunday, May 19, 1850, the rebels amassed a cavalry of 4,000 French and Spanish-speaking miners in a hollow outside of Sonora.  Fully regaled in the tricolors of the French Revolution, the army marched onto the main streets of Sonora, completing their occupation of the town.

The next day, 400 American troops marched on the miners’ camp. The soldiers arrested two French miners described as belonging to "the Red Republican order."  Following this arrest 500 French and German miners stormed into town shouting revolutionary slogans and demanding that the two French Miners be freed.