“Slumgullion” Began in Gold Rush Mining as Slippery Yellow Waste Mud

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, I’m Susanna King and I’m calling from Aiken, South Carolina.

And my dad had an interesting expression that he would use. It started when I was a baby. My parents used to feed me baby food mixed with baby cereal and fruit in it. And it was sort of this sticky, gooey mess. And my dad would call it slumgullion. And it sort of stuck with our family. Whenever anyone was eating something like oatmeal with a bunch of stuff in it, he would call it slumgullion. And it’s such an odd word. He’s the only person I’ve ever heard use that word.

So I was wondering if you’d ever heard anyone else call sort of sloppy, goopy stuff slumgullion.

Slumgullion. That’s great. Did he give you any clue? Did you ever quiz him about it?

You know, I never did. It was just always the family story was, oh, that’s what he called the baby food that you ate when you were little. It doesn’t sound very appetizing.

No, and I guess it really kind of wasn’t, was it? But here you are, an adult. It worked. You survived the slumgullion.

Yes.

Well, there is a great story about slumgullion, and it has to do with the gold rush days in the United States. During the California Gold Rush, there was a lot of high-volume mining, and it involved, as it still does, a lot of water, just huge amounts of water running through soil, and it flushes away the lighter stuff and leaves behind the heavier bits. And this makes it easier to find the gold. And what is created from this, the stuff that is discarded, is this gross, muddy waste mixture. And this was called slumgullion. And we knew the term was used in California during the Gold Rush as early as 1853.

One report from the time describes it as, quote, a softer sediment which settles lightly on the surface of the sand, a slippery yellow mud that looks like a large pond of cake batter, just ready for baking, yet with a glazed surface reflecting the surrounding scenery as beautifully as water could do it. But I’m sure it did not taste like cake batter.

You wouldn’t eat it, obviously. And the word itself, you can break down the two parts. The slum part is probably related to the word slime. Slum, slime, you can kind of hear it. Not related at all to a bad urban neighborhood. It’s just a different word completely than that kind of slum. The gullion part is either related to a word meaning a muddy hole or a cesspool.

That makes a lot of sense. Although it could be related to the same word gullion, meaning a type of severe stomachache in horses.

Yeah, and there’s another little interesting fact. It’s got a connection to Moby Dick and the haunting of whales. In 1851, Herman Melville published Moby Dick, and in there he refers to the discarded offal, O-F-F-A-L, and the waste from the butchering of whales as slob gullion. That’s S-L-O-B-G-O-L-L-I-O-N. And his description, here it is, in his words, it is an ineffably oozy stringy affair most frequently found in the tubs of sperm oil. After a prolonged squeezing and subsequent decanting, I hold it to be the wondrously thin, ruptured membranes of the case coalescing.

Ew. That sounds awful. Nobody writes like Melville.

So, yeah. So slumgullion is S-L-U-M-G-U-L-L-I-O-N. So you can hear that they’re spelled very similar and they sound very similar. So that word that he used, Susanna, that slumgullion when he was feeding you baby food, has got all this history connected to it from the Gold Rush days.

That’s really neat. And I’m so glad that it’s part of California history, too, because that really connects to my family.

Yeah. Cool, right? Thank you for sharing that with us. And we are so happy that you called.

Thank you very much. Take care now.

Bye-bye.

Thanks, Susanna.

Bye.

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