The Lure of the Gold Mountain
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The Lure of the Gold Mountain
"They [Chinese] are industrious, docile, cleanly, frugal; they are dexterous of hand, patient of toil, marvelously gifted in the power of imitation, and have but few wants.”--Frederick Douglass
I’m delighted to announce the release of the 2nd edition of "The Broken Welcome Mat: America’s unAmerican immigration policy and how we should fix it." You can order the Kindle version now by clicking here. The paperback format will be released soon. Since May is Asian Heritage Month, I’d like to share the following book excerpts about a brief history of Chinese immigrants in the U.S. to celebrate this book’s release and honor all immigrants who came before me.
San Francisco in Chinese means “the gold mountain.”
A majority of Chinese immigrants during the Gold Rush era were poor and unskilled laborers. Like some of the 17th-century English immigrants, their passage to the U.S. was paid for by rich Chinese merchants, and these Chinese laborers had to earn money in whatever ways they could to pay back the debt. Chinese immigrants were often called “coolies,” a derogatory term that generally refers to indentured unskilled laborers. It’s not an accurate description, because most Chinese laborers came to the U.S. voluntarily. They wanted a better life for themselves and their families. Their wages were low by American standards but quite high by Chinese standards. They shared a hard-working attitude and were willing to take low-wage jobs that the locals considered “dirty.”
Frederick Douglass, the famed abolitionist, praised the Chinese as being “industrious, docile, cleanly, frugal; they are dexterous of hand, patient of toil, marvelously gifted in the power of imitation, and have but few wants.” When there was plenty of gold to be mined, these Chinese workers’ strong work ethic was welcomed by Californians. John McDougal, governor of California during most of the Gold Rush, even exclaimed Chinese laborers as being “one of the most worthy of our [California’s] newly adopted citizens.”
However, when the gold mines began to be exhausted and people from other parts of the U.S. as well as overseas kept coming, the welcome turned into hatred. The Chinese laborers were specifically targeted because of their unique culture, language, living habits, dress codes, and especially their willingness to take on “dirty” jobs for less. Chinese laborers were accused of stealing American jobs and driving down wages. They soon became “the constant victims of cruel harshness and brutal violence” (Frederick Douglass, 1869). For instance, 200 Chinese miners were robbed and four were murdered at Rich Gulch, California, in 1852.
Even the government of California used its legislative power against Chinese immigrants. In 1852, California demanded a special foreign miner tax from non-U.S. citizen miners. Since Chinese immigrants were the largest non-citizen miner group, they bore most of the tax burden. This tax required a payment of three dollars each month at a time when Chinese miners were making approximately six dollars a month. Tax collectors could legally take and sell the property of those miners who refused to or could not pay the tax. Consequently, many Chinese immigrants were forced out of the mining industry and took on work in other fields.
In 1861, California passed the Swamp and Overflow Act to encourage levee building. Building levees was strenuous work. It required workers to stand in waist-deep water for long hours in an area where malaria was endemic. Only Chinese workers were willing to take up this kind of labor. Consequently, American developers hired several thousand Chinese workers to build hundreds of miles of levees in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta region. These Chinese workers were referred to as the “wheelbarrow brigade” because they used mostly primitive hand tools, earning less than one dollar per person per day. Thanks to their hard work, a total of 88,000 acres of fertile farmland were reclaimed from the swamps between 1860 and 1880.
Besides building levees, Chinese workers also helped American landowners cultivate various fruits and vegetables, such as asparagus and Bing cherries, on that reclaimed farmland. It is fair to say that without these Chinese immigrants, California would not have become the agricultural powerhouse it is today.
Although the majority of early Chinese immigrants settled on the West Coast and slogged through various types of manual labor, some of them made it to the East Coast around the time of the Civil War. Historian Ruthanne Lum McCunn estimates that about 50 Chinese immigrants participated in the Civil War, mainly for the Union Army. One of them was John Tomney. He joined the New York Infantry in 1861, and gave his life at the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863. Also, in 1863, William Ah Hang became the first Asian American to enlist in the U.S. Navy. The highest ranked Chinese-American in the Union Army was Joseph Pierce, a corporal in the Army of the Potomac.
Image of Joseph Pierce
Unfortunately, no matter how hard Chinese immigrants worked, and sacrificed for this nation, some Americans still viewed and treated them with utter hostility. Naturally, politicians often touted their anti-Chinese immigrant rhetoric to appeal to their electorates. In 1867, Democrats won a congressional election on the west coast by proclaiming the Republican Party’s ideal of racial equality would “lead to an ‘Asiatic’ influx and control of the state by an alliance of ‘the Mongolian, Indian, and African.’”
Yet when the Central Pacific Railroad couldn’t find many willing Americans to take on the back-breaking and often dangerous work of building the transcontinental railroad, it turned to the group it knew it could depend on—Chinese immigrants.
To secure Chinese laborers, the United States and the Chinese government-run by the Manchu emperor, signed a new treaty that “promised the Chinese the right to free immigration and travel within the United States, and allowed for the protection of Chinese citizens in the United States in accordance with the most-favored-nation principle.” The treaty was often referred to as the Burlingame-Seward Treaty, which was named after two chief negotiators: U.S. Secretary of State William Seward and Anson Burlingame, an American diplomat who gave up his post to negotiate on behalf of the Chinese government. The Burlingame Treaty was the first international agreement signed since the Opium War (1839-42) that dealt with Chinese on equal terms.
Chinese workers soon became the majority of the labor force of the Central Pacific Railroad Company (CPRC). For working six days a week and 10-12 hours a day, each Chinese worker earned a wage of only $26 per month, less than half of what a white worker made. John T. Doolittle, House of Representatives from California remarked in 1999,
“By the summer of 1868, 4,000 workers, two thirds of which were Chinese, had built the transcontinental railroad over the Sierras and into the interior plains . . . Without the efforts of the Chinese workers in the building of America’s railroads, our development and progress as a nation would have been delayed by years. Their toil in severe weather, cruel working conditions and for meager wages cannot be under appreciated.”
We don’t know how many Chinese workers died during the construction of the railroad. We do know that they encountered some of the worst winter weather while building tunnels deep in the Sierra Nevada, and many of them lost their lives in avalanches. When the railroad was completed on May 10, 1869, a Chinese crew was selected and joined an Irish crew to place the last 10 miles of rail, as a symbol to honor their hard work. But images of Chinese railroad workers are nowhere to be found in Andrew Russell’s famous photo that commemorates this historic achievement, East and West Shaking Hands at Laying Last Rail.
Image of Chinese railroad workers
The Chinese workers’ sacrifice and contribution had been all but forgotten until recently, when scholars and documentary film makers sought to recover and retell this neglected history. To know more about Chinese railroad workers' stories, please check out independent filmmaker Min Zhou's short film trilogy, “Iron Road Builder.”
Not all Chinese immigrants were poor and uneducated laborers. Yung Wing (1828-1912) was the first-known Chinese student to graduate from Yale College in 1854. According to Yale’s website:
“A native of Guangdong Province, Yung excelled in his studies and impressed Samuel Robbins Brown, a Yale-educated missionary, who brought him to the United States for preparatory school at Monson Academy and then sent him to Yale in 1850. At Yale, Yung Wing was a member of the choir, played football, was a member of the Boat Club, and won academic prizes for English competition.”
Yung persuaded the Chinese government to send a Chinese Education Mission (1872-1881) to the U.S., which allowed about 120 young Chinese students to study science and engineering in the United States. Later, many of these students returned to China, and became leaders in education, engineering, and science, and helped modernize China by building factories and railroads. Yung was awarded an honorary Doctor of Law degree by Yale University in 1876. He married Mary Kellogg, an American, in the same year. Two years later, Yung, in appreciation of his Yale education, donated many of the 1,237 volumes of his Chinese book collection to his alma mater. This gift formed the basis of Yale University’s East Asia Library.
