CHAPTER FOUR
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 to 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?
In many criminal acts, the complaining victims are the principal if not the only witnesses, so denying them the right to offer in court their account of what occurred makes prosecution impossible. Before People v. Hall, many whites had physically expelled Chinese miners from the most desirable locations. Once white miners understood that they could now terrorize Chinese camps without fear of legal consequences—that the law had in effect immunized them—they simply posted signs warning the Chinese to leave the premises immediately. In 1856, the people of Mariposa County gave the Chinese ten days’ notice to vacate the area: “Any failing to comply shall be subjected to thirty-nine lashes, and moved by force of arms.” In El Dorado County, white miners torched Chinese tents and mining equipment and turned back stagecoaches filled with Chinese passengers. As one scholar of the period has written, the ruling “opened the way for almost every sort of discrimination against the Chinese. Assault, robbery, and murder, to say nothing of lesser crimes ... so long as no white person was available to witness in their behalf.” This was the era that coined the term “a Chinaman’s chance”—meaning not much of a chance at all.
Legalized persecution turned the Chinese into gold rush scavengers. Rather than compete directly with whites, Chinese prospectors picked over abandoned claims. From now on, most of those who succeeded would do so through a combination of patient toil and a frugal lifestyle, though more than a few resorted to ingenuity. One smart and determined man named Ah Sam bought a log cabin from six miners for twenty-five dollars. Past experience had told him that he might make a killing by washing the gold dust from the dirt floor. He left with $3,000 worth of gold dust, a nice return on his investment.
Eventually, Chinese miners took millions of dollars’ worth of placer gold out of America. Within a few decades, some had returned to China, where they invested their wealth in farmland and became powerful landlords. Other stayed in the United States, living on money that lasted for another generation or two; family oral histories of Chinese Americans recount tales of dilettante ancestors sustained by their own fathers’ earnings during the gold rush. There were even a few who, despite the extensive racial discrimination against Chinese gold miners, legal and otherwise, managed to become mining capitalists—staking their claims, hiring their own workers, expanding their operations into vast enterprises. One of the wealthiest in this class was a man called Wong Kee, who employed as many as nine hundred men in his mining company.
Gold Mountain dreams came true for a few, but many more Chinese immigrants found only heartbreak, failure, and loneliness. One man worked as a prospector from his arrival in America till his death many years later, yet died with only enough gold to pay for his funeral. Newspapers contained reports of failed Chinese prospectors who, rather than return home in disgrace, ended their misery by committing suicide. Between the two extremes of wealth and wretchedness lay the vast majority of Chinese immigrants, who, recognizing the odds against them, pragmatically turned their sights on San Francisco, the site of their arrival. One by one, they made the decision to forgo their mining stakes, staking out instead a piece of the town to call their own.
According to the noted historian Hubert H. Bancroft, the first ship to sail from Canton to San Francisco was the American Eagle, which landed in February 1848—a month after the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill, but well before the news had reached China. Two Chinese men and one Chinese woman disembarked. That April, the San Francisco Star reported that “two or three ‘Celestials’ ” (as the Chinese were called) had found employment in the city.2 The mere fact that this appeared in a newspaper suggests that these three may have been the very first Chinese to take up residence in San Francisco.
As more Chinese arrived (according to one estimate, 325 Chinese arrived in California in 1849, and then 450 in 1850, although more than 90 percent quickly moved to rural mining camps), those who remained in the city clustered in a region centered on Sacramento and Dupont Streets, which soon grew into ten blocks bounded by California, Jackson, Stockton, Kearney, and Pacific Streets. Known as “little China,” “little Canton,” or the “Chinese quarter,” this neighborhood eventually evolved into what we now call Chinatown. Like the rest of San Francisco, the area gradually filled in, from isolated shacks to congested city blocks. Some Chinese hammered shanties together using local materials, while others used prefabricated structures carved out of tree branches brought over from Hong Kong. Inside their shanties, the Chinese created a rough semblance of home. They built brick stoves and chimneys like those used in their homeland—a brick bench, or tin box packed with earth, constructed near a window or on a balcony to permit smoke to escape. They called San Francisco Dai Fou, literally, “Big City.”
Ethnic grocery stores were not far behind. By the early 1850s, as one white observer noted, they were filled with tea, ham, dried fish, and duck. Vendors hawked fruits and vegetables from reed baskets suspended from bamboo poles, and small shopkeepers spread game meat on sidewalk mats. The area reeked of fish as Chinese fishermen who worked along the bay sold their catches to miners. They dried their fish on the ground and later sorted them into sacks, boxes, and barrels. Some were salted and heaped on top of gravel rooftops to cure in the sun.
The San Francisco Chinese community continued to expand. By 1851, more than 2,716 new immigrants had arrived on the shores of San Francisco, and by 1852 the number had jumped to more than twenty thousand, though for many of them San Francisco would be only their port of entry, as they wandered out into the gold fields. In addition, around this time, an increasing number of Chinese miners were also returning to San Francisco. Plenty of money could be made from serving their dietary preferences, and not surprisingly, a thriving business catering to various Chinese needs soon developed.
In most cultures, eating is a social as well as a nutritional experience. But food occupies an even more important place in Chinese culture, which for millennia has revered its cuisine as not just a biological necessity but an exalted art form. So it should come as no surprise that Chinese restaurants soon followed the Chinese miners. As early as December 10, 1849, the San Francisco Daily Alta California newspaper reported a gathering of some three hundred Chinese at the “Canton” restaurant on Jackson Street. Here, lonely immigrants had an opportunity to forget, if only for an evening, that they were thousands of miles from their families back home.
But the Chinese were not the only San Franciscans enjoying a home-cooked Chinese meal. Soon people of all nationalities were flocking to Chinatown to eat. Beckoning to sightseers with triangular flags of yellow silk, some of the first Chinese “restaurants” were little more than cheap dining cellars, where customers ate as much as they wanted for a dollar, spitting bones and gristle onto the floor. But soon more ambitious, upscale establishments appeared, lit by lanterns hanging from green and red balconies. Sitting in rooms filled with regal decor—wood screens imported from China, gas lamp chandeliers, marble and carved mahogany furniture—customers could enjoy rare delicacies such as bird’s nest soup and shark’s fin.
Chinese restaurants became so beloved by San Franciscans of all races that in short order they became a featured selling point to encourage Americans to visit the city. During this era, travel guides urged people to eat a Chinese meal in San Francisco, some referring to the food as Chinese “chow chows.” In his 1851 memoir Golden Dreams and Waking Realities, miner William Shaw announced, “The ibest eating houses in San Francisco are kept by Celestials and conducted Chinese fashion. The dishes are mostly curries, hashes and fricasee served up in small dishes and as they are exceedingly palatable, I was not curious enough to enquire as to the ingredients.”
Not all the dishes served, however, were traditional Chinese fare. According to gold rush folklore, a group of drunken white miners invaded a San Francisco restaurant late one evening, demanding service. On the verge of closing for the night, the Chinese proprietor prudently decided to feed them and avoid trouble. His cook stir-fried the table scraps in his larder—a melange of fried vegetables, meat, and gravy—and called it chop suey. The miners raved about this new Chinese delicacy, and soon people all over San Francisco were clamoring for it.
After their success in the food industry, the Chinese soon began to seek other ways to earn money. Many recognized that the path to riches lay, ironically, in domestic service. In those days before care-free fabrics, washing and ironing was difficult as well as tedious work, something most white men considered beneath their dignity. It was considered women’s work, but few women could be found to help them. Many Californians during the gold rush era, both Chinese and white, shipped their laundry to Hong Kong to be cleaned, but the prices were exorbitant—twelve dollars for a dozen shirts—and the process took four months. Still, sending dirty linen to be washed in Asia was cheaper and faster than mailing it back east. Laundrymen in Honolulu soon captured the business by washing shirts for only eight dollars a dozen. Finally, Chinese men in San Francisco saw a market need and moved to meet it. The first Chinese laundryman in the city was Wah Lee, who washed shirts for five dollars a dozen and advertised his services in 1851 by hanging the sign WASH‘NG AND IRON’NG.
The Chinese also opened curio stores, enticing white miners to trade gold dust for a variety of collectibles: porcelain vases, carved ivory and jade art, Oriental chess pieces, inkbrush scroll paintings, fans, shawls, and teapots. The modest shops advertised themselves with gaudy signboards and red ribbons, but in the grander establishments merchants installed glass windows in their storefronts and kept lavish shrines to bring them good luck: luxurious, gilded altars decorated with silk scrolls and ritual artifacts of worship.
By 1853, the Chinese had occupied most of Dupont Street, one of the best retail areas in San Francisco. Although the structures in that neighborhood were hardly exceptional (the San Francisco Daily Alta California noted they were “mere shells and tinder boxes, which could be fired by a single spark”), the location was excellent. As a group, the Chinese were mostly tenants, not homeowners, renting from white landlords who preferred the Chinese because of their willingness to pay more than Caucasians. For instance, one house that rented to a white man for $200 a month (an exorbitantly high figure at that time) went to a Chinese for $500 a month. On this street and others, a sophisticated Chinese business community soon appeared. By 1856, a Chinese directory called the Oriental listed thirty-three merchandise stores, fifteen apothecaries, five herbalists, five restaurants, five barbers, five butchers, three boarding homes, three wood yards, three tailors, two silversmiths, two bakers, one carver, one engraver, one interpreter, and one broker for U.S. merchants.
Not all of the Chinese settlers could read or write their own language, so this new community soon had need of professional writers. Some of the better-educated Cantonese picked up languages quickly, a few becoming fluent not only in English but also in Spanish. Most hired out as scribes, so illiterate Chinese could dictate letters to relatives back home. A few with journalistic skills published small ethnic newspapers in San Francisco and across the state. In 1854, the Gold Hills News became quite possibly the first Chinese newspaper published in the United States. Two years later, the Chinese News appeared in the northern California town of Sacramento, causing a local historian to later comment, “It is a little singular that the only paper ever printed in a foreign language in our city should have been a Chinese publication, particularly when we remember the considerable German and French elements in our population.” If this historian had been aware of the Chinese respect for education, he might have been less surprised.
The Chinese émigrés also hungered for art and entertainment. In 1852, the first Chinese theater was constructed in San Francisco from a prefabricated kit. The building, with a pagoda as its edifice, housed an auditorium for a thousand people and a stage of embroidered panels and gilt walls, gleaming with pictures of men, animals, and sea monsters. Visiting troupes from Guangdong province performed Cantonese operas there, performances that could last for weeks, attended by both Chinese and curious whites. The actors sometimes narrated in minute detail the epic sagas of an entire dynasty, providing audiences with nightly entertainment; according to one observer, “two or three months are generally consumed before all the acts of a play are finished.” At these performances, Chinese immigrants far from home could lose themselves in heroic stories of the past, forgetting for a short while their demeaning roles in everyday life and how far they had had to go to achieve their dreams.
White San Franciscans, watching the Chinese community expand and thrive, felt emotions ranging from awe and fascination to fear and hatred. Although details remain sketchy, the earliest Chinese in San Francisco seem to have received a warm welcome when they arrived—a mix of genuine excitement and curiosity. In 1850, when the Chinese colony numbered only a few hundred, the city fathers invited their participation in rites observing the death of President Zachary Taylor, assigning them a prominent place in the memorial procession. That year, Mayor John Geary and other city officials also honored the Chinese with a special ceremony, and when California became the thirty-first state in the union, the Chinese took part in the lavish celebrations. In May 1851, the San Francisco Daily Alta California went so far as to predict that the “China Boys will yet vote at the same polls, study at the same schools and bow at the same Altar as our own countrymen.”
But as the Chinese population grew, so did consternation among certain whites. In April 1852, Governor John Bigler called for an exclusionary law to bar future Chinese immigration. Although ignored by the federal government, his request may have been the first expression by a public official of an emerging anti-Chinese sentiment. Infuriated or alarmed, or both, by Bigler’s proposal, several Chinese in San Francisco published a long reply, defending their character and their ability to assimilate. “Many have already adopted your religion as their own, and will be good citizens,” they wrote. “There are very good Chinamen now in the country, and a better class will, if allowed, come hereafter—men of learning and of wealth, bringing their families with them.”
Such assimilation, however, was what some whites feared most. In 1853, the San Francisco Daily Alta California changed editors, and its tone swiveled from pro-Chinese to a virulently racist, pro-Bigler position. The Chinese, asserted a series of editorials, were “morally a far worse class to have among us than the negro. They are idolatrous in their religion—in their disposition cunning and deceited, and in their habits libidinous and offensive. They have certain redeeming features of craft, industry and economy, and like other men in the fallen estate, ‘they have wrought out many inventions.’ But they are not of that kin that Americans can ever associate or sympathize with. They are not of our people and never will be, though they remain here forever ... They do not mix with our people, and it is undesirable that they should, for nothing but degradation can result to us from the contact... It is of no advantage to us to have them here. They can never become like us.”
These sentiments echoed faintly in Washington. During this time, a few federal lawmakers began to express concern that the Chinese would not only remain in the United States, but would eventually demand their rights as Americans. Religious differences were cited as justification for exclusion. In 1855, for instance, William Russell Smith, a congressman from Alabama, raised the issue of excluding the Chinese from citizenship. “How long, sir, will it be before a million of Pagans, with their disgusting idolatries, will claim the privilege of voting for American Christians, or against American Christians?” he asked. “How long before a Pagan shall present his credentials in this Hall, with power to mingle in the councils of this Government?” Smith insisted that legislation eradicate such a possibility: “The American Party demands a law to prevent it.”
In the 1850s, however, with the country working its way toward civil war, these discussions in Congress had little immediate impact on Chinese American daily life in California. For many Chinese, the right to suffrage or election to public office were the last things on their minds: their ambition lay not in becoming part of the governing class, but in earning a living. And the reality of the time was that the antagonism toward the Chinese on the West Coast was not broadly reflected in the corridors of federal power. Many in Washington saw the Chinese as a valuable source of manpower. Soon, when war came and coincided with grand plans to construct a transcontinental railroad, American capitalists eyed the industrious Chinese as labor for one of the most ambitious engineering feats in history.