SeeCalifornia.com

Aretha Franklin wanted respect: All I’m askin’ is for a little respect — when you come home — (just a little bit).

Rodney Dangerfield wanted respect, too! “I don’t get no respect, no respect at all! When I was a kid I got no respect. I told my mother, I’m gonna run away from home. She said, On your mark.”

According to historian Craig MacDonald, “Respect meant a lot in many California and Nevada mining camps. Getting it might take years, it might never happen or it might come with the change of a name. Ragged Ass Bar became Canyon City. Murderer’s Bar evolved into Happy Camp. Whiskey Diggings was sometimes called Newark.”

In “Getting Respect in Old West Mining Camps,” MacDonald uncovers printed news stories and documents describing angry housewives who threatened to forfeit the pleasures of marriage if their husbands didn’t do something about “sleazy denizens of the dark, who drank, cavorted and acted lewd in the saloons.”

He also discovered The Single Men’s Protective Association, an association formed “to protect the men from the encroachments of the female sex, which is making the poor male an object of pity,” according to the  July 8, 1876 edition of the Pioche Daily Record.

While some men did their best to capture the hearts and attention of women who entered their sphere, other male miners did not need anyone else to help them become respectable. J. Ross Browne wrote about visiting Bodie, where a dozen men lived together in a shanty. “These jolly miners were the happiest set of bachelors imaginable,” he wrote. Read MacDonald’s story…>