by Iris Chang
Between 1848 and 1850, this sleepy village of five hundred people exploded into a boom town of thirty thousand, roughly the size of Chicago. By 1851, when the Chinese began arriving by the thousands, it was one of the largest cities in the United States. But it exhibited none of the respectability of the older, staid communities of the East Coast. San Francisco was a roaring frontier town—boastful and ambitious, shameless in its filth and greed. It made no effort to hide its excesses or sins. Rowdy young men roamed the streets, determined to spend their gold as fast as they found it. The first two-story buildings in San Francisco were not churches, city halls, or courthouses, but hotels and casinos, and by 1853 the city enjoyed 46 gambling halls, 144 taverns, and 537 places that sold liquor. So dizzying was the pace of growth that within only a few years the newly rich had moved from their shacks to luxurious, palatial establishments, gorging on twenty-course dinners served to them on gold-plate dishes.
As in many gold rush towns, those who profited most handsomely were not just the miners, but those who supplied them with essential goods and services. Fortunes were made in small businesses, most started by former prospectors themselves, who reaped unheard-of profits selling food, equipment, and clothing. Eggs fetched a dollar apiece, and an 1848 price list showed a pound of butter selling for six dollars, a pair of boots for a hundred. Anticipating the needs of miners for rugged wear, Levi Strauss made pants out of denim tent canvas and created an empire. Those who provided domestic help, such as laundering clothes, also prospered. The granddaughter of one forty-niner recalls a local washerwoman wearing a shawl with a diamond brooch “worthy of an Empress.”
Women were scarce in San Francisco. Most prospectors were single, or chose not to bring their wives and children to this raw frontier. In a town with only one woman for every dozen men, the mere rumor of a female newcomer was enough to empty saloons and hotels, causing a stampede to the docks. In this respect, San Francisco hardly differed from the entire state: census reports show that 92 percent of California was male, and 91 percent were fifteen to forty-four years of age. Wrote one California pioneer woman, “Every man thought every woman in that day a beauty. Even I have had men come forty miles over the mountains, just to look at me, and I never was called a handsome woman, in my best days, even by my more ardent admirers.”
With these demographics, brothels inevitably flourished. Some enterprising women in San Francisco charged more than a hundred dollars a night—the equivalent of the price of a house, or about a year’s wages in other parts of the country. Entrepreneurs in the world’s oldest profession rode furiously on horseback from camp to camp, trying to fit as many clients as possible into their schedules.
In a city of young men on the make, violence was the rule in the settling of disputes. Rogues of all kinds—cutthroats, charlatans, professional gamblers—naturally gravitated toward a city where no one questioned your past, where no authority checked your records. No court or police system existed until 1850, no California land office until 1853. Inevitably, then, disputes over property and land titles were most often settled by force, the decision often going to the disputants less averse to or more adept at using fists, pistols, or knives. Since the city was populated mainly by aggressive, ambitious men who had braved disease, robbers, frozen mountain passes, and the desert to make the journey, it is not surprising that during the early 1850s, San Francisco witnessed an average of five murders every six days.
Without a government in which the people had confidence, mob rule prevailed, often in the form of public hangings, in particular scapegoating foreigners without sufficient evidence. For a while, San Franciscans—who created the “Committee of Vigilance” in 1851—tended to blame all crimes on arrivals from Australia, viewing them as rabble from a penal colony. The vigilantes thought nothing of stringing up suspicious characters, defying and even intimidating whatever little public authority existed—on one occasion abducting and holding hostage a California state supreme court justice.
Strangely enough, however, a progressive element also thrived in San Francisco. The city drew not only criminals and capitalists, but also intellectuals, attracted like the others not only by the opportunity for quick wealth but also the romance of adventure. By 1853, the community supported a dozen newspapers and a strong subculture of writers. It soon boasted more college graduates than any other city in the country. Despite its rough-hewn beginnings, San Francisco swiftly became the most cultured city on the West Coast, where even callused, weather-beaten gold prospectors could be seen attending theater performances. The presence of intellectuals fostered a certain tolerance in the city, a fascination for anything different, even as just under the surface ran a current of barely restrained hair-trigger tempers and murderous rage.
It was against this backdrop—a weird juxtaposition of greed and violence on one hand and an avid curiosity about new ideas and experiences on the other—that the first wave of Chinese made their appearance in the American West. If San Francisco did not initially resist their arrival, perhaps it was because almost everyone in San Francisco had come from somewhere else. By 1853, more than half of the San Francisco population was foreign-born, and in a city united by the single, driving obsession to make money, only one color seemed to matter: gold.
This would change.
CHAPTER FOUR
Gold Rushers on Gold Mountain
The gold rush was born out of the sense among people living bleak lives of interminable desperation, Chinese or otherwise, that here at last was a chance to change the unchangeable—to wrench themselves out of the endless and demeaning routine of their daily existence and maybe catapult themselves into another class entirely. People more conservative in outlook might regard with contempt those who would invest all they had in such pie-in-the-sky hopes, and China had always been a land where the conservative outlook—respect for one’s elders, one’s betters, one’s rulers—was highly revered. But wherever the future was the dimmest, there, too, would be found people most eager to grab at this last chance at a better life, a chance that according to rumor had already led some few to great riches.
Like the thousands of others who had come to San Francisco to find their fortunes, the Chinese quickly set out for the gold fields. During the early 1850s, some 85 percent of the Chinese in California were engaged in placer mining. Over the next months and years, they wandered the western wilderness, sometimes walking hundreds of miles in response to news of fresh discoveries. They soon replaced their Chinese silk caps or straw hats with cowboy hats and their hand-stitched cotton shoes for sturdy American boots. But along with their blue cotton shirt and broad trousers, they retained one vestige of Qing tradition: a long, jet-black queue that swayed gleaming down their backs.
The daylight hours of a gold miner’s life were spent bent over a stream panning for gold. He might live in a primitive tent, a brush hut, an abandoned cabin, or a shack hastily slapped together from scrap lumber and flattened kerosene cans. The Chinese gold miners, not surprisingly, stayed to themselves, even when it meant that twenty to thirty Chinese miners had to cram themselves into a space hardly large enough to “allow a couple of Americans to breathe in it,” as one San Francisco Herald correspondent reported. Then again, another contemporary writer, J. D. Borthwick, described a Chinese mining camp he visited as “wonderfully clean.” After glimpsing the evening rituals of the Chinese, he wrote, “a great many of them [are] at their toilet, getting their head shaved, or plaiting pigtails.” In a hectic time and place, on an almost mad mission, when most men had neither time nor energy to spare for the threshold requirements of civil society, many Chinese maintained strict standards of personal hygiene.
The Chinese also established a reputation for hard work. “They are quiet, peaceable, tractable, free from drunkenness,” Mark Twain wrote in admiration. “A disorderly Chinaman is rare, and a lazy one does not exist.” They further astounded white observers with their creative use of nature’s laws of physics, particularly their astonishing ability t
o balance heavy burdens on long poles. Describing one miner’s descent into a gulch with a sack of rice, two large rolls of blankets, two hogsheads, several heavy mining tools, a wheelbarrow, and a hand-rocker all swinging from his pack-pole, the editor of the Madisonian wrote, “It was a mystery how that Chinaman managed to tote that weary load along so gracefully, and not grunt a groan.”
A few Chinese prospered through sheer luck, finding enough gold in a single day to last them a lifetime. When one group discovered a forty-pound nugget, they prudently chiseled it into small pieces to sell along with their gold dust, because many small nuggets would ensure both that each man received his fair share and that the find would not draw unwanted attention to the group. Two Chinese miners who had never earned more than two dollars a day stumbled upon a 240-pound nugget worth more than $30,000, a considerable fortune during that era. Like most gold rushers of the time, the Chinese chased after rumors of new findings, wherever such rumors might take them. In 1856, a few Chinese ventured out of California into the Rocky Mountains and the Boise Basin of Oregon Territory (now southern Idaho), where friendly Shoshone and Bannock Indians led them to placer beds so rich in gold that their deerskins soon bulged with nuggets.
Other Chinese prospered not just by luck or hard work, both of which were always needed, but by resourceful use of technology. The Chinese introduced the water wheel to American placer mining. This device, modeled after irrigation techniques used by rice paddy farmers back home, allowed them to pump and sluice water from the river, which was then used to wash gravel from gold. The pumping method was not only derived from Chinese agriculture, but from generations of experience from tin miners in Guangdong, who had originally acquired their knowledge from Chinese miners in Malaysia.
Still other Chinese benefited from the fact that they were willing to work as a group. When a group of Chinese miners working in northern central California realized that a rich vein lay underneath the riverbed, they agreed to work together to build a dam across the Yuba River to expose the gold. In Utah Territory, another group of Chinese dug an irrigation ditch from the Carson River to Gold Canyon, which made mining possible in that desert region and greatly impressed the Mormons living there.
At night, a lively bachelor culture sprang up in these scattered mining camps. The miners formed bands and played Chinese music with instruments brought over from their homeland. Not everyone enjoyed their performances: in 1851, one writer compared the local Chinese orchestra to the “wailings of a thousand lovelorn cats, the screams, gobblings, braying and barkings of as many peacocks, turkeys, donkeys and dogs.”
The miners also gambled—gambling being possibly the greatest Chinese vice in the American West. (“About every third Chinaman runs a lottery,” Twain remarked.) In gambling shacks, loud, excited groups of Chinese bet on dice, lots, and tosses of coin. A Montana editor complained about the noise, which began after dark: “We don’t know and don’t care how many years they claim to have been infesting the earth, and only wish they would go to bed like decent people and stop playing their infernal button game of ‘Foo-ti-hoo-ti,’ so a fellow can get a nap.”
Still, the Chinese mining life was very similar to all life in the American West—rough and lawless. An English-Chinese phrase book, published in San Francisco, reflected their experience through its selection of what a Chinese prospector needed to be able to say in English:
He assaulted me without provocation.
He claimed my mine...
He tries to extort money from me.
He falsely accused me of stealing his watch.
He was choked to death with a lasso, by a robber.
She is a good-for-nothing huzzy [sic].
As always, everywhere, absent any effective rule of law, the rule of brute strength prevailed, posing a special threat to those less aggressive or poorly armed. Gangs of thugs roved through the countryside, relieving unwary Chinese prospectors of their gold. One of the most notorious was led by Joaquin Murieta, a young Sonoran whose gang would descend on a Chinese camp, round up the miners, and tie their pigtails together. Slowly, deliberately, he and his men would torture them until someone disclosed where they had hidden their gold dust, at which point Murieta would slit their throats with a bowie knife. In May 1853, the state of California finally offered a $1,000 reward for Murieta’s capture, dead or alive, to which the Chinese community contributed an additional $3,000. Two months later—by which time, according to some accounts, the price on his head had grown to $5,000—Murieta was reportedly ambushed by a posse and shot to pieces.
While in this instance the government of the newly created state of California came to the aid of all miners, including the Chinese, a year earlier it had revealed a xenophobic strain when it passed two new taxes directed against foreign miners. As popular sentiment dictated that gold in California should be reserved for Americans, in 1852 legislators proposed excluding the Chinese migrants, as well as gold rushers from Mexico, Chile, and France, from further work in the fields. The Chinese work ethic that so impressed Mark Twain had engendered special resentment among American miners, who had also come to California to change their luck, but discovered that in gold mining, as in most pursuits, luck favors the industrious. The Chinese, more dissimilar from Americans in appearance and cultural norms than other immigrant gold rushers, were singled out for particularly harsh criticism, and the Committee on Mines and Mining of the California state legislature declared that “their presence here is a great moral and social evil—a disgusting scab upon the fair face of society—a putrefying sore upon the body politic—in short, a nuisance.”
A week after the assembly’s declaration, Governor John Bigler went a step further, urging the legislators to impose heavy taxes on the Chinese “coolies” and stop the “tide of Asiatic immigration.” In response, in 1852, the California legislature enacted two new taxes, the first to discourage other Chinese from coming to the United States and the second to penalize those Chinese already working the gold mines.
The commutation tax required masters of all vessels arriving in California to post a $500 bond for each foreign passenger aboard. Because the bond could be commuted with payment of a fee ranging anywhere from five to fifty dollars, most ship captains simply added the fee to the price of passage. The resulting revenue, extracted from the sweat of Chinese laborers, went to the largest California hospitals; although the Chinese ended up paying over half of all commutation taxes, they were barred from the city hospital in San Francisco.
The foreign miner’s tax stipulated that no Chinese could work his mining claim unless he paid a monthly license fee in gold dust, a fee arbitrarily increased by the state of California over the next few years. Designed ostensibly for the “protection of foreigners,” the loose way the law was written, and the way it was administered and enforced, effected the opposite. Some collectors backdated the effective date of a miner’s license, obligating the miner to pay money he didn’t even owe. Others pocketed money from miners and gave them bogus receipts, leaving the miners vulnerable to legitimate collection efforts later on. One tax collector wrote in his diary, “I had no money to keep Christmas with, so sold the chinks nine dollars worth of bogus receipts.” The worst of the collectors used physical coercion to compel Chinese miners to pay the tax more than once a month: they tied the Chinese to trees and whipped them; pursued them on horseback, lashing at them with rawhide as they fled. Corruption aside, no law restrained the methods collectors could employ. “I was sorry to have to stab the poor fellow,” one collector wrote, “but the law makes it necessary to collect tax, and that’s where I get my profit.”
The Chinese, however, had come to America with some experience in thwarting corrupt agents of an indifferent government. To evade the tax collector, they devised various warning systems, such as arranging for runners to sprint from one village to the next, alerting the inhabitants to the collector’s approach. These stratagems were so effective that the government found it necessary to employ the services
of Maidu Indians to track down Chinese miners who had fled without paying their taxes.
While these first two tax laws unfairly burdened the Chinese miners, the most damaging government action was a legal decision barring them from testifying against whites in court. In 1853, a grand jury in Nevada County indicted George W. Hall and two others for the murder of a Chinese man called Ling Sing. After three Chinese and one Caucasian testified on behalf of the prosecution, Hall was found guilty and sentenced to be hanged. Hall’s lawyer appealed the verdict on the ground that Chinese testimony was prohibited under the state’s Criminal Proceeding Act, which stated that “no black or mulatto person, or Indian, shall be permitted to give evidence in favor of, or against, any white person.” In People v. Hall, the state supreme court reversed Hall’s conviction on the grounds that “the evident intention of the act was to throw around the citizen a protection for life and property, which could only be secured by raising him above the corrupting influences of degraded castes.” Further, in a bizarre decision illustrative of the absurd workings of the California jurisprudential mind of the time, Chief Justice Hugh Murray asserted that the Chinese were, in reality, Indians, because Christopher Columbus had mistaken San Salvador as an island in the China Sea. “From that time,” he wrote, “down to a very recent period, the American Indians and the Mongolian, or Asiatic, were regarded as the same type of the human species.”
Then, to shore up what he must have expected would be read as weak legal reasoning, Murray declared that even if Asians were not the same as American Indians, the word “black” should be understood to include all nonwhite races. Noting that the Naturalization Act of 1790 prohibited the Chinese and other nonwhites from becoming U.S. citizens, Murray further justified his decision as necessary for social stability: if the Chinese were admitted as witnesses in court, he said, the state would “soon see them at the polls, in the jury box, upon the bench, and in our legislative halls.” Where would it all end?
