Coming Clean — Baths in the Gold Rush

© Craig MacDonald & Franklin MacDonald, Ph.D.

Digging for gold was back-breaking, laborious, tiresome, dirty work. It often meant swinging a pick all day or shoveling gravel until your body ached or slogging about in icy, muddy water, until you lost the feel of your feet. It was exhausting. It was filthy. And miners usually repeated this tedious experience day after day after day.

Relief, however, was eventually on the way for some lucky mining camps when they got their first official "bathing facility." It usually was a circular tin bathtub, with a seat on the edge, managed by the town barber. It would cost you from 50-cents to $2.50, depending on which Sierra diggings you were in.

Miners and others flocked to the baths and even stood in line to "come clean", making the tub owner quite prosperous.

Fritz Braun was such a Sierra barber whose foresight turned to fortune. Bathing at Fritz's became one of the most popular activities in Rabbit Creek during the 1850s. He had the first bathtub in town and people waited in long lines to use it, especially before social events on Saturday night and Sunday.

In fact, Fritz's tub was so popular it attracted miners from miles around and long lines meant many could not get clean in time to attend their functions. Some even paid $5 just to secure a good spot in line. But one new resident of the Sierra County community did not want to have anything to do with it. Mike Murphy, a barber from Sacramento, thought the whole thing disgusting.

The idea of bathers using the same water did not appeal to his sense of cleanliness. So Mike opened up a nearby barbershop of his own, complete with the latest bathtub and he reportedly changed the water after every customer.

Yet, water was too precious to do that in some mining camps. Ironically, it was another canny barber who designed an ingenious gadget that conserved the valuable commodity while meeting most miners' needs. He designed a "showering system" and taught other barbers how to use it.

With this device, you'd dig a hole behind your shop; lower a barrel of water into the ground; place a pump in the barrel and a piece of grating (connected to the pump) on top of the barrel in a teeter-totter fashion. The frame supported an old kerosene can overhead with holes punched in its bottom.

When the customer stood on this odd contraption and shifted weight from one foot to the other, he/she would become showered with water, which in turn filtered back down into the barrel to be used again. Four bits bought permission to take a shower, plus the use of a bar of soap and towel.

The customer would undress in a small tent surrounding the contraption. A reporter wrote what happened next: "Quickly the bather ducked into the shower, where—with teeth chattering—he rapidly teetered the wooden grating and was rewarded with an icy trickle from the rusty kerosene can overhead." (Needless to say, no one took long showers!)

These innovative devices were used in California and Nevada mining camps. But the "Tonopah Daily Sun" carried an ad for another type of bath: "Sponge baths, alcohol massage, lady attendant. Center St., Third Door below Capitol Hotel."

Some larger California towns had "bathing rooms" that charged a dollar a head or more. One promoted "Aquatic Experiences—complete with women attendants to scour and scrub you."

The 1855 Marysville Directory had an ad for "City Baths" in the basement of William H. Clark's Lager Beer & Refreshment Saloon: "Bathers can be furnished with refreshments in private rooms. No similar establishment is kept with greater regard to cleanliness and every attendant is paid to the wants of its patrons."

A Placer County Directory told about "The U.S. Restaurant and Bakery" (near Auburn) that featured its own "bath," consisting of a large swimming pond "always kept in good order with a running stream of pure water for those wishing to take a genuine bath."

Maybe there should have been a WARNING that comes with every bath: "Beware of changed appearance and Side Effects from cold and hot water."

After taking his first bath in many weeks, a miner noted: "I got out my glass and looked at myself. But for certain unmistakable evidence of identity would have as soon believed myself almost anybody else."

William Swain, in J.S. Holliday's "The World Rushed In," warned of the consequences of too good a thing: "This morn we had a rare opportunity to have a warm bath...swam in a lake of hot water...very pleasant to the feelings—making the veins extend and increasing the circulation but the effect was not so beneficial as that of cold baths, for I experience a languid feeling in the muscles...."

Hot or cold, baths were here to stay in the Sierra and elsewhere—helping Californians come clean.

(There was even a mining camp known as "Bath," one mile above Forest Hill in Placer County. It produced more than $2.5 million dollars between 1850-68 and was still showing color in the 20th Century. Judging from its name, it may have had some of the cleanest people in the Sierra.)