Descendants of enslaved people want land seized by the state returned and recognition of the gold rush’s rich, and largely ignored, Black history.
The twin brothers Jonathan and Matthew Burgess are descendants of Rufus Burgess, who owned property that was seized by the state of California during the gold rush. Photographs by Rahim Fortune
BLACK FAMILIES SEEKING REPARATIONS IN CALIFORNIA’S GOLD COUNTRY
Descendants of enslaved people want land seized by the state returned and recognition of the gold rush’s rich, and largely ignored, Black history.
During the final years of the Great Depression, officials in California set out to build a state park to commemorate the centennial of the discovery of gold in 1848, an event that set off the largest mass migration in U.S. history and transformed the American West. They offered to buy plots of land from a dozen local families and businesses in Coloma, in the Sacramento Valley; this was where John Marshall, nearly a hundred years earlier, had famously found gold. He discovered the precious metal in rocks near a sawmill he was building for John Sutter—a Swiss German businessman and early settler of California—on the banks of the American River. Hundreds of thousands of people from around the world swarmed the Pacific Coast to mine for gold, sparking a vast economic boom.
One of the local landowners was Pearley Monroe, who worked as a janitor in California’s State Capitol building, about fifty miles away. In the late nineteen-thirties, state officials offered Monroe twenty-five hundred dollars for “the place of shifting gravel and flowing water where Sutter’s Mill once stood,” as a local paper put it. By the nineteen-thirties, Coloma had become a faded, rural town, with few economic prospects.
A Black descendant of enslaved Americans brought to California during the gold rush, Monroe was proud of the family’s land holdings. He declined the offer, hoping for a higher price. Monroe’s grandparents had eventually settled as free citizens in Coloma, where they raised kids and fruit orchards and became prominent, suit-wearing members of the community. Monroe inherited his part of the Sutter’s Mill property and bought the rest “on speculation,” according to a news report.
After the state made its offer, Monroe, who had also spurned offers from gold-dredging companies and a local historical group, set his price at ten thousand dollars. By 1941, he had become known in the papers for his stubbornness. “I would rather see the land turned into a park and swimming pool for my people,” he told the Los Angeles Times. That same year, California’s attorney general, Earl Warren—who would later become a famed Supreme Court Chief Justice—moved to condemn the property owned by Monroe and other local families under eminent domain. In 1942, a county judge fixed the government’s price for Monroe’s land at just over three thousand dollars, and forced him to sell.
Officials compelled a dozen or so other local families to sell their holdings as well, and established the Marshall Gold Discovery State Historic Park, just in time for the centennial, in 1948. The property seizures affected some Asian and white families. But two large Black families descended from enslaved people, the Burgesses and Monroes, lost significant amounts of land. Today, their relatives are demanding restitution from the California Reparations Task Force, which was established by Governor Gavin Newsom, in 2020, after the murder of George Floyd, to study racial injustice. On May 6th, the task force voted to formally recommend a large set of proposals to the California state legislature—which will soon have to make a decision regarding reparations.
Jonathan Burgess, a fire-battalion chief from Sacramento and a descendant of the Burgess family, has become a well-known advocate for reparations. He and Dawn Basciano, whose great-grandmother was Pearley Monroe’s wife, showed me around the state park one afternoon last fall. They contend that their families were underpaid in the forced sales, and that more land has been lost through faulty record-keeping—and they want more recognition of the gold rush’s rich, and largely ignored, Black history. “Our history,” Burgess said. “I like to say ‘our’ history because we’re all Americans.”
Burgess and Basciano described the arrival of their ancestors in California as they led me through the park’s green lawns and reconstructed workers’ shacks. According to family lore and historical records, which often ignored or omitted Black Americans, one of Burgess’s forebears—Rufus Burgess—was brought to the Coloma area in 1850 as an enslaved person, probably with an owner who travelled by ship from New Orleans to San Francisco.
Either way, those two years of slavery for Rufus Burgess were illegal, because, in 1850, California established itself as a free state. The gold rush, though, continued to draw plenty of fortune-seeking slaveowners who brought enslaved people with them to the rivers and mountains around Sacramento. Law enforcement was slack. “Hundreds arrived before the state’s constitutional ban on slavery went into effect in 1850, but many others came after,” the historian Kevin Waite, author of “West of Slavery,” has written. “California . . . was a free state in name only.”
Once freed, Rufus worked on local farms as a homesteader and started a successful blacksmith’s shop on the site of what’s now the Coloma Lotus Community Center. By the eighteen-seventies, he had purchased property of his own. He built a family home and was granted a deed to the African Church of Coloma. After the El Dorado County seat moved, in 1857, from Coloma to Placerville, about nine miles away, and took some white families with it, the town’s nonwhite population grew steadily more powerful. “The town was left to the Negroes and the Chinese,” Jonathan Burgess told me. (Some Coloma residents dispute this claim, noting that several white families also remained in town.)
When we arrived at a spot in the park where state officials had built a wooden replica of Sutter’s Mill, Burgess seemed unimpressed. “So this is the sawmill,” he said, in a flat voice. “There’s a picture of my Uncle Marion down there,” Burgess added, motioning into the distance. “They credit my Uncle Marion, working with the Gallaghers and some other prominent families, and they said he dug his shovel down and hit the foundation of the sawmill. It’s a great story, right?”
Burgess doesn’t believe it. He doubts many of the state’s official gold-rush accounts, including the traditional location of Sutter’s Mill. Citing the curve of the river and the strength of the current, he believes the mill stood about two hundred yards upriver from where state officials say, behind the community hall on the site of Rufus Burgess, Sr.,’s blacksmith shop. If that was where Sutter’s Mill was really situated—instead of the long-recognized spot on Pearley Monroe’s old land—it would strengthen Burgess’s claim that his family owned far more property in the eighteen-hundreds than the ten acres that the state claims they did.
But state officials backed up their assessment of the mill’s location. Standing by California’s replica of Sutter’s Mill, Steve Hilton, a cultural-resources supervisor at the state park, later told me the official location is correct. He also showed me a nearby spot in the American River where, he said, a few timbers of the old mill sometimes resurface.
One reason for the confusing historical record is that California was a northern province of Mexico when Marshall found gold in 1848. Days after Marshall’s find, the United States and Mexico signed a treaty that ended President James Polk’s expansionist war with Mexico, and that granted a huge swath of territory, including California and much of the American West, to the United States. Soon after, the gold rush started in earnest. Prospectors dismantled Sutter’s sawmill for scrap lumber. Marshall, despite his discovery, was out of a job. And the village of Coloma became a wild and dangerous frontier town, full of claim lawyers, gamblers, saloon owners, and other threats to a lucky miner’s wealth.
Jonathan Burgess has written a children’s book about the land controversies in Coloma that contains his corrections to the official state history, as well as what he admits are his own fictionalizations about Rufus. He and the state agree that the Burgess and Monroe families cultivated orchards on the riverside land in the late nineteenth century, but he feels the two Black families were shortchanged out of more than just their property when the state forcibly seized their land. “If there’s gold in the hills,” Burgess said, “there was gold beneath the orchards.”
The Sacramento Bee, he pointed out, reported that several plots of land along the river were being sifted for gold by private dredging boats in the nineteen-thirties and forties. President Roosevelt had raised the price of gold to thirty-five dollars per ounce, up from about twenty. As a result, extracting small amounts of gold from rocks in the American River in Coloma was newly profitable. “The General Dredging Co. is handling about 4800 cubic yards of material daily,” reported the Los Angeles Times, in the summer of 1941. “One dredge is working close to the lines of the Pearley Monroe property, where Marshall found gold in Sutter’s millrace. The management of the company states that the historic site will not be disturbed.”
A local paper also noted that a dredging company had been trying to negotiate with Monroe to purchase his land when state officials began the process of seizing it through eminent domain. Burgess believes that timing was no coincidence, telling me, “When Pearley refused to allow the dredgers to come and dredge, to get the remaining gold, eminent-domain proceedings happened shortly thereafter.”
Finally, Burgess cites an aerial photo from the late forties showing most of the plots around Pearley Monroe’s land whitened by vast dredging trails. The photo, Burgess argues, proves that, five years after state officials forced Monroe to sell his land, boats had dredged both sides of the American River for gold tailings. He argues that the plots of land would be a source of generational wealth for his family if the state had not seized them.
The record—like everything else in this story—is complicated. Burgess has paperwork showing ownership dating back to some of Rufus’s holdings in the eighteen-seventies. State records, though, show that the Burgess family possessed only ten acres of land in 1879. Burgess says those state documents are incomplete, citing fires that burned old census and property records. He finds it suspicious that the town’s original 1873 property map, for example, has gone missing.
Today, Jonathan Burgess and his twin brother Matthew spend most of their time in Sacramento, where they grew up. Both are media-savvy public figures: Matthew is an officer with the California Highway Patrol who ran for state senate, briefly, in 2022. The brothers used to own a food truck called Burgess Brothers Barbecue, and they’ve appeared on the Home Shopping Network to sell their B.B.Q. sauces and cornbread mix. In some ways, they are an American success story, but they also describe a deep sense of loss.
Jonathan and Matthew both remember driving down to Coloma on family trips and hearing about their ancestors and the land around Sutter’s Mill. They also remember that, when they were kids—in the nineteen-seventies and eighties—there was a distinct lack of acknowledgment in the state park that Black families had existed, never mind thrived, in Coloma. Now several signs in the park show where the Monroes, Burgesses, and Gooches—another family descended from enslaved people—owned houses and land, most of which is now park property. Jonathan wants the unoccupied portion of his family’s holdings back and turns up at every Reparations Task Force meeting in Sacramento.
