Gold Mining

California

Although historical tradition says that Manila men made up the majority of the population of one of the earliest gold camps in Mariposa County, California, most of the Asian miners and immigrants during the Gold Rush era were Chinese. By the time the first Chinese arrived in San Francisco in 1848, they had already established a tradition of leaving China to work in other countries of the world. After the Opium Wars, high taxes drove many peasants and farmers off their land, and several years of floods and droughts economically devastated many more. When merchant vessels brought news of the Gold Mountain in California, many Chinese men signed on for voyages to the world of better possibilities.

This illustration depicts a group of 19th-century Chinese miners completing the various tasks involved in gold mining in California. Chinese miners made up about one-fifth of the entire population of California mining areas in the 1850s.

By 1851, Chinese gold seekers arrived in California in such great numbers that they soon comprised about a fifth of the entire population in the mining areas. Many Chinese immigrants made a living by working claims that other miners had abandoned, and they also took other jobs, including launderers and merchants, hoping to return to China with a small fortune. Low pay, discriminatory hiring practices, and a monthly license tax for foreign miners made their goal of a nest egg to take home nearly impossible to reach. In May 1852, California imposed the second Foreign Miners Tax on non-Americans in two years and levied this $3-per-month fee on Chinese miners. Violence increased, and according to the Alta California, 200 Chinese miners were robbed and four murdered at Rich Gulch.

Although Chinese miners were beaten and killed, they continued to come to America to try to make their fortune. When Chinese miners sent their gold home, the gold quickly assured their families' rapid climb up the social ladder. Women married to successful miners were called Gold Mountain wives. As they spent the gold on new houses and new possessions, less-fortunate people gossiped about them and were envious of them, but stories about the hard work and the daily [Page 417]discrimination that the miners faced rarely followed the gold across the Pacific Ocean.

By 1870, there were 63,000 Chinese people in the United States, with 77 percent of them living in California. That same year, Chinese miners contributed more than $5 million, almost a quarter of the state's revenue, to the California treasury through the Foreign Miners Tax. Chinese miners continued to immigrate until in 1876; Chinese in the United States numbered 151,000 with 116,000 living in the state of California. In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, the only American law to specifically ban one ethnic group from immigrating to the United States.

...