The sight of Jesse Stahl whirling atop a bucking bronc surprised the crowd of 4,000 gathered at the 1912 Salinas rodeo, where Stahl was featured as its first Black contestant. Despite his first place performance, he was awarded second place. After the judge announced his decision, Stahl jumped on an exhibition horse and, either out of protest or merely mockery, set off on a victory lap around the arena, riding backwards to the thrill of the crowd.
Stahl’s backward exhibition became a popular spectacle in subsequent competitions, where he continued to place second or third, but never first, until the day he competed in a rodeo judged by Tommy Caulfield, Jr.
“Regardless of nationality or color,” Caulfield announced in awarding Stahl his first place winnings, “the man who makes the most points deserves the most money.” Glancing at the other contestants, some of whom had refused to compete against Stahl because he was Black, Caulfield added, “If there is anybody looking for an argument, I’ll be glad to meet him right after the show.”
No one took him up on his offer, probably because, in addition to judging rodeos, the redheaded Caulfield also judged boxing matches, having spent time as a prizefighter himself.
After the rodeo, Stahl became a regular visitor to Petaluma, either breaking wild horses shipped in from Nevada to Caulfield’s corral beside the trainyard, or competing in rodeos at Kenilworth Park (now the Sonoma-Marin Fairgrounds). He made it clear he considered Caulfield not only one of the best rodeo judges, but also the fairest, an opinion shared by many.
But there was another side to Caulfield, one that clouds this image of him as a principled man without prejudice: he liked to perform in blackface at minstrel shows. In one review, a Petaluma newspaper reported that “as a coon, Tommy is in a class all by himself.”
Like most white performers who donned blackface’s coal-black makeup, woolly wigs, and outlandishly red lips, Caulfield grew up far from the racial prejudice of the South. The sixth child of a fiery Irish immigrant who became Petaluma’s largest cattle dealer, Caulfield did his best after high school to escape the confines of his hometown.
Following a failed attempt at medical school, he knocked around railroading, playing semi-pro baseball, boxing, and touring the country with a vaudeville theater troupe, before finally returning to Petaluma and the family cattle business.
The consummate Irish storyteller, he continued to perform in local vaudeville shows, often in blackface.Following one of his performances, the author Jack London invited Caulfield and his fellow cast members to dinner. Throughout the evening, London made many offers of whiskey and wine, all of which Caulfield, a lifelong teetotaler, politely declined. “Son,” London finally said, “you’re the first man I’ve ever met who stands by his principles.”
Caulfield subsequently became a good friend of London’s and his personal cattle buyer. He also served as the basis of a character in Valley of the Moon, London’s 1913 novel that expresses the happiness he found at his Glen Ellen ranch, as well as his xenophobia and white supremacy.
By the time Caulfield and his brother Will inherited their father’s cattle business, he had become one of the Petaluma’s best liked and most illustrious citizens, known for making generous loans of livestock, acreage, and cash to new ranchers, and also for providing an annual Christmas dinner to the migrant workers who lived in camps near the train yards. Petaluma’s annual cattle drive, which extended from the Caulfield Stockyards on Lakeville Street to the Caulfield’s slaughterhouse on McDowell Road east of town, was a revered tradition for ranchers. But for the broader public, Caulfield’s popularity stemmed primarily from his role in Petaluma’s minstrel troupe.
Minstrelsy—comedic performances in which white men blackened their faces, adopted heavy dialects, and performed what they claimed to be Black songs, dances, and jokes—began in 1830 when a white performer in New York City named Thomas Dartmouth Rice created a blackface character called “Jumping Jim Crow.”
Minstrel shows quickly became a national sensation, influencing white composers of the day like Stephen Foster, who wrote “Camptown Races,” “Oh, Susanna,” and other popular songs for the shows, and eventually leading to the development of vaudeville.
Blacks also performed in minstrel shows, forced ironically to don blackface, as it was often their only way to break into the entertainment business. Some subverted blackface’s primitive representations with political commentary in their comedic minstrel routines, while others blended cultural influences, like William Henry Lane—better known as “Master Juba”—who set an Irish jig and reel dance to syncopated African rhythms, giving birth to tap dancing.
Although intended to be light, meaningless entertainment, minstrel shows also perpetuated negative stereotypes of Blacks as being lazy, ignorant, superstitious, hypersexual, criminal, and cowardly. They depicted the South as a genteel land of benevolent planters and happy servants, the most popular of whom were the caricatures of the mammy and the old uncle. The underlying message was that Blacks belonged on Southern plantations. Even after the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, minstrels still sang of pining for the old plantation.
The shows were most popular outside the South. By providing a means of looking down upon and laughing at Blacks, blackface helped ease the discomfort and fear many whites felt toward them, while at the same time allowing them to enjoy and appreciate Black culture.
Many of the early blackface actors were working-class Irish from the Northeast. As Catholic immigrants, they were consigned to a low social, political, and economic status. Blackface became their means of Americanization, authenticating their whiteness by comically dehumanizing those who were not white.
Petaluma’s first blackface minstrel troupe, the Petaluma Ethiopian Minstrels, was formed by a group of white amateurs for a Christmas benefit in 1875, just as Reconstruction was coming to an end and many of the 44 members of Petaluma’s small Black community were moving on to friendlier enclaves in Oakland and Vallejo.
The troupe followed the traditional three-act format of the minstrel show, opening with a band and chorus followed by the grand entrance of fourteen minstrels strutting, singing, waving their arms, banging tambourines, and prancing around a semicircle of chairs, until the interlocutor, a white man not in blackface dressed in formal attire, finally called out, “Gentlemen, be seated!”
Occupying his place in the middle of the semicircle, the interlocutor moved the first act along by asking questions of the “end” men at either edge of the semicircle—Mr. Tambo, who played the tambourine, and Mr. Bones, who rattled a pair of clappers known as “the bones.”
“Mr. Bones, I understand you went to the ball game yesterday afternoon. You told me you wanted to go to your mother-in-law’s funeral.” “I did want to,” Bones answered back, “but she ain’t dead yet.”
These fast-moving exchanges were interspersed with ballads, comic songs, and instrumental numbers, chiefly on banjo and violin. The second and third acts usually consisted of a series of individual performances—the Petaluma Ethiopians premiered with “Rascal Billy,” “The Stage-Struck Darkey,” “Uncle Tom’s Visit,” and “Woman’s Rights”—concluding with a hoedown or walk-around, in which every member did a specialty number while the others sang and clapped.
The immense popularity of minstrel shows during the late 19th century paralleled the passage of “black codes” meant to restrict Black behavior by southern state legislators, who, in a nod to minstrelsy, referred to them as “Jim Crow laws.” In parts of the country that had small Black populations like Sonoma County, blackface caricatures took on semblances of truth, with older Black men commonly designated with the title “uncle.”
The Petaluma Ethiopian Minstrels reigned as the most popular entertainment troupe in town until the turn of the 20th century, when local minstrel shows were displaced by nickelodeons, which featured silent short films interspaced with vaudeville acts, many of which included blackface routines.
As society modernized, so did the ways in which blackface was portrayed, particularly in the film industry. In 1915, “The Birth of a Nation,” the epic silent film about the Civil War and Reconstruction that glorified white supremacism, featured white actors in blackface portraying Blacks as sexual predators and simpletons. The film became a box office blockbuster, inspiring a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, which by the 1920s grew to more than two million members across the country.
Petaluma’s chapter, established in 1924, staged a night time cross-burning beside the Petaluma Adobe for the initiation of new members. Given that Petaluma’s Black population in 1920 consisted of just six individuals, the local KKK largely focused their nativist attention on Sonoma Country’s Mexican, Mexican-American, and Japanese-American field laborers.
That same year, George Ott, owner of a Petaluma stationery store and president of the local Chamber of Commerce, decided to revive the Petaluma Minstrels as a means of raising money for charitable organizations. For help, he called upon his best friend and the town’s most popular blackface performer, Tom Caulfield. With Ott serving as the interlocutor and Caulfield as an end man, they recruited 14 local merchants to the group, including businesswomen, and adopted as their motto “to scatter sunshine.”
In 1926, the Petaluma Minstrels made their radio debut on an Oakland broadcasting station, after which they were inundated with booking requests from all over California. Playing on Petaluma’s egg boom at the time, they changed their name to the Egg City Minstrels, and began performing at benefits around the state for hospitals, orphanages, fire departments, military bases, and prisons.
The Egg City Minstrels’ popularity coincided with a minstrelsy craze on radio and film, most notably 1927’s “The Jazz Singer,” which ushered in the talkies. Featuring a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant named Al Jolson performing as an aspiring singer in blackface, it became a huge hit.
Although Jolson positioned himself as an ally of Blacks in helping to popularize Black jazz, his designation as the “king of blackface” echoed for cinematic historian Nic Sammond the Americanization that Irish blackface performers before him had sought with the white Protestant majority.
After Petaluma’s egg boom foundered during the Depression, the Egg City Minstrels changed their name to the Redwood Empire Minstrels. They continued to stage benefit performances until the start of World War II, by which time minstrel shows had fallen out of favor. Ott estimated that during their seventeen years together the troupe had raised $44,000 for charity ($750,000 in today’s currency), none of which they pocketed themselves.
In 1948, Petaluma’s minstrel troupe reunited for one final benefit performance at the local Masonic Lodge, giving 60-year old Caulfield his last opportunity to perform in blackface. That same year, Caulfield led local ranchers on the last annual cattle drive across the flat prairie east of town. Beginning in 1950, the prairie began to fill up with new suburban homes as Petaluma transformed into a bedroom community for San Francisco. Caulfield’s roundups became the fodder of local legend, as did Jesse Stahl, the Black cowboy who had once ridden broncs in Caulfield’s corrals.
Stories about Stahl usually underscored the lack of prejudice Petaluma had toward the cowboy. Henry Howe, a cousin of Caulfield’s who competed against Stahl on the rodeo circuit and later worked as a horse wrangler for Hollywood filmmakers, recalled that he and Stahl were drinking at a bar with other cowboys after a particular rodeo in Texas, when a group of local Ku Klux Klan members walked in. “If you don’t want a fight,” they said, “hand us that n—– cowboy.” Instead of handing over Stahl, Howe and the rodeo cowboys beat the daylights out of the Klan members.
Or, so the legend goes. The sad truth is that Stahl, having retired from the rodeo circuit in 1929, died poor and alone in Sacramento in 1935, at the age of 55. He was destined for a pauper’s grave until old rodeo friends chipped in to give him a proper burial. In 1979, he was posthumously inducted into Oklahoma City’s Rodeo Hall of Fame, only the second Black cowboy to receive that honor.
Caulfield, the man who had once bravely stood up for Stahl on the rodeo circuit, died in 1960, twelve years after his last blackface performance and his last cattle drive. Not long afterward, the Caulfield Stockyards were converted into a shopping mall.
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Video features:
“Camptown Races,” sung by Al Jolson:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tuu5YtkPIo
California Rodeo at Salinas, 1935:
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=197222941224193
SOURCES:
Publications & Websites
Edwin S. Grosvenor, Robert C. Toll, “Blackface: the Sad History of Minstrel Shows,” American Heritage, Winter 2019, Vol. 64, Issue 1.
The Atlantic: Jennie Rothenberg Gritz, “New Racism Museum Reveals the Ugly Truth Behind Aunt Jemima,” April 23, 2012; Tony Horowitz, “The Mammy Washington Almost Had,” May 31, 2013.
Tricia Wagner, “Jesse Stahl (CA. 1879-1935),” Blackpast.org, September 7, 2010. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/jesse-stahl-c-1879-1935/
“Minstrel Show, American Theater,” Encyclopedia Britannica, May 19, 2020. https://www.britannica.com/art/minstrel-show
Johann Hari, “Jack London: Not Just the Voice of the Wild,” The Independent, August 23, 2010.
New York Times: Holland Cotter, “We Don’t Have to Like Them, We Just Need to Understand Them,” June 25, 2020; Riché Richardson, “Can We Please, Finally, Get Rid of ‘Aunt Jemima?” June 24, 2015.
Susan J.P. O’Hara, Alex Service, “Champions of the Rodeo,” North Coast Journal, July 19, 2018.
Petaluma Argus: Petaluma Minstrels Ad, December 17, 1875; “The Vaudeville At the Hi School,” October 18, 1923; “Klan Principles Disclosed to Large Assemblage,” October 24, 1924;
Petaluma Courier: “Will Study Medicine,” July 23, 1902; “Native Sons Vaudeville Show a Great Success,” April 17, 1912; “Petalumans Give Minstrel Show at Kenwood,” February 8, 1924; “Initiation of KKK Before Guests,” June 2, 1925.
Petaluma Argus-Courier: “Ku Klux Klan Visit Petaluma,” April 21, 1930; “Noonie, Mike Monroy Train Hard for Bout,” May 15, 1930; “Remember Petaluma’s First Theater?” April 15, 1954; “Tom Caulfield is Packed with Stories,” October 27, 1955; “Tom Caulfield—His Story,” So They Tell Me column, May 3, 1960; “Ex-Petaluma Horse Trainer Hangs Up His Spurs,” February 3, 1972; “The Last Round-up,” Bill Soberanes column, April 16, 1980; “Tom Caulfield, Livestock Yard Owner,” December 29, 1990; “Petaluma’s Fabulous and Versatile Tom Caulfield,” December 8, 1998.
Sacramento Bee: “Jesse Stahl Will Be Given a Decent Burial,” April 20, 1935.
Santa Rosa Press Democrat: Lou Leal, “Let the Public Speak: Jack London’s Evolution,” June 29, 2020.
“Blackface: The Birth of An American Stereotype,” Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture. https://nmaahc.si.edu/blog-post/blackface-birth-american-stereotype
U.S. Census Data, 1870 and 1820, Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library.
Books
William Courtright, The Complete Minstrel Guide: Containing Gags, Jokes, Parodies, Speeches, Farces, and Full Directions for a Complete Minstrel Show (Dramatic Publishing Company, 1901)
William Loren Katz, The Black West (New York: Touchstone Book, Simon & Schuster Inc., 1996)
Jack London, Valley of the Moon, 1913 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 17.
Gina M. Rosetti, Imagining the Primitive in Naturalist and Modernist Literature (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006), p. 36.
Nic Sammond, Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation (Duke University Press Books, 2015).
Yuval Taylor, Jake Austin, Darkest America: Black Minstrelsy From Slavery to Hip-Hop (W. W. Norton & Company, 2012).