The Wedded Bachelors Of Second Garrote by
John Chaffee and Jason Chamberlain were gold miners who arrived together from Boston in 1849 to stake a claim in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California. They would remain there as a couple for more than fifty years. Together they braved nineteenth century San Francisco, saw the inside of prison brigs and dance halls, weathered floods and survived mine collapses, and befriended fellow argonauts from around...
John Chaffee and Jason Chamberlain were gold miners who arrived together from Boston in 1849 to stake a claim in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California. They would remain there as a couple for more than fifty years. Together they braved nineteenth century San Francisco, saw the inside of prison brigs and dance halls, weathered floods and survived mine collapses, and befriended fellow argonauts from around the world during the single most culturally diverse event in all of history. After winning their very own mining camp in a card game, the pair held legendary Thanksgiving dinners there every year for decades, and eventually opened their home as a way station for travelers to Yosemite. Neither man ever married or expressed in letters any desire to do so. Their devotion to one another is thought to have inspired Bret Harte’s short story Tennessee’s Partner. This is their adventure.
While posthumous tributes stop short of naming their union anything but a ‘partnership’, there is ample evidence from correspondence and from the way station’s guest book that Chaffee and Chamberlain’s acquaintance was, in every way, a ‘bachelor marriage’. Such unions were not uncommon in the mining camps of the gold rush era, where women were scarce and men lived in close quarters. Few were as plain or as enduring as Chaffee and Chamberlain’s.
Inspired by their true story, The Wedded Bachelors of Second Garrote imagines John Chaffee and Jason Chamberlain’s private lives by drawing inspiration from their journals and guest books, Frederick Stocking’s reminiscences of the pair, and Bret Harte’s mining camp fiction.
While posthumous tributes stop short of naming their union anything but a ‘partnership’, there is ample evidence from correspondence and from the way station’s guest book that Chaffee and Chamberlain’s acquaintance was, in every way, a ‘bachelor marriage’. Such unions were not uncommon in the mining camps of the gold rush era, where women were scarce and men lived in close quarters. Few were as plain or as enduring as Chaffee and Chamberlain’s.
Inspired by their true story, The Wedded Bachelors of Second Garrote imagines John Chaffee and Jason Chamberlain’s private lives by drawing inspiration from their journals and guest books, Frederick Stocking’s reminiscences of the pair, and Bret Harte’s mining camp fiction.