Not All Were Driven Out: the Many Chinese Who Found a Peaceful Haven in Late Nineteenth
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Virginia Review of Asian Studies 100
NOT ALL WERE DRIVEN OUT: THE MANY CHINESE WHO FOUND A PEACEFUL HAVEN IN LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY CALIFORNIA
Daniel A. Métraux Mary Baldwin College
Recent scholarship on the Chinese experience in the American West in the late 1800s and early 1900s focuses on the brutality, discrimination and other hardships they faced. Although this research is certainly accurate, it fails to give the whole picture. There were several communities where Chinese were able to live peaceful settled lives, generally tolerated and in some cases developing good relationships with their White neighbors. This paper puts forward three rural Chinese communities in California where Chinese lived peaceful and even fruitful lives for many decades: Chinese Camp, Fiddletown and Locke.
The Chinese diaspora is one of the great but now largely forgotten episodes of the late 19th century. Large numbers of Chinese migrated to Southeast Asia, Hawaii, and North and South America. The first few Chinese arrived in California in 1848 at the start of the Gold Rush and between 1860 and 1870 over 123,000 Chinese immigrated to the United States. Significant numbers also immigrated to British Columbia. In some quarters, Chinese workers were welcomed. The Central Pacific Railroad, for example, recruited many Chinese to work on the transcontinental railroad in the mid-1860s.
The late 1840s were a period of growing desperation for many Chinese. Wide spread starvation accompanied domestic rebellions and further incursions by the West in the wake of the Opium War (1839-42). At the beginning of the year 1849 there were in the state only fifty-four Chinese. At the news of the gold discovery a steady immigration commenced which continued through the 1870s and early 1880s during which time an average of 4,000 Chinese a year immigrated to the United States. By the time the United States halted Chinese immigration in 1882, over 300,000 Chinese had entered the United States, most of them living in California. This increase in their numbers, rapid even in comparison with the general increase in population, was largely due to the fact that previous to the year 1869 when it became possible to travel across the U.S by rail, China was nearer to the shores of California than was the eastern portion of the United States. Another circumstance which contributed to the heavy influx of Chinese was the fact that news of the gold discovery found southeastern China in poverty and ruin caused by the Taiping rebellion of the 1850s and early 1860s.
When news of the California Gold Rush reached Canton in 1848, many thousands of Chinese boarded boats to “Gum Shan,” or “Gold Mountain” Many of the Chinese made their way to Tuolumne County to such towns as Sonora, Columbia, Jamestown and Chinese Camp where they staked their claims and built significant Chinese communities. The vast majority of Chinese were young men looking for a quick strike so that they Virginia Review of Asian Studies 101 could return to China, buy a plot of land and start their own families. The few women who came were mainly prostitutes, virtual “slaves,” although a few Chinese merchants brought their wives. This was a man’s world, lonely, and very isolated surrounded by a hostile white population, but the dream of wealth and memories of the misery of life in China gave them incentives to stay.
Unfortunately, many white Americans feared being overwhelmed by the influx and resented the fact that Chinese and other Asians would work hard for lower wages, thus threatening their own welfare. A severe nationwide depression in the mid-1870s made jobs hard to find for all. Special taxes and restrictive laws began to target only the Chinese. In 1882 Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Acts, legally suspending further immigration and denying them the basic rights of citizenship that were granted to other races. Individual cruelties and mob massacres in "Chinatowns" across the United States illustrated the hatred that had infiltrated white America."
Jean Pfaelzer, a professor of English and Asian Studies at the University of Delaware, has produced a book, Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans,1where she carefully documents the efforts at “ethnic cleansing” against Chinese settlers in the West. Pfaelzer depicts in vivid detail how angry whites working together with malicious politicians, law officials and journalists wreaked a savage and violent war against often defenseless Chinese settlers. There was indeed a contagion of violence in the late 1800s and early 1900s against Chinese including major massacres in Los Angelesb(1871), Rock Springs Wyoming (1885) and Douglas Bar, Oregon (1885). Chinese were herded out of towns across California although there were a few towns where relations with Chinese went well. The Sacramento Delta, a major population center for Chinese a century ago, was one of the few areas that the violence. Pfaelzer also describes how some Chinese fought back, often through the courts, to gain some security and civil rights.
Economics played a role in the vicious attacks on Chinese. During the early days of the Gold Rush, when gold was plentiful and miners were still relatively few, Chinese miners were left alone, especially since Chinese often mined areas already abandoned by white miners. This tolerance did not last long when gold became less plentiful in the late 1850s when new immigrants, especially Germans and Irish, flooded into the region and became increasingly resentful of the non-white population, especially the Chinese.
The Civil War also played a role in increasing tensions. The war caused a cessation of the flow of any manufactured goods from East to West and led to the growth of some manufacturing in California. The shortage of labor led to high wages in manufacturing, but the end of the war and the extension of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 led to a flood of immigrants and manufactured goods from the East. Prices declined as did the demand for labor. Lower wages in turn led to fury against Chinese workers who were willing to work harder for longer hours and
1 Jean Pfaezler, Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans (New York: Random House, 2007). Virginia Review of Asian Studies 102
lower pay. A national depression in the mid-1870s led to greater unemployment and calls for excluding future Chinese immigration.
The 1870s also brought growing agitation against the use of drugs and the presence of brothels in Chinatowns across the West. Diana L. Ahmad, a historian at the University of Missouri-Rolla, in her book The Opium Debate and Chinese Exclusion Laws in the Nineteenth-Century American West2demonstrates that today’s war on drugs and drug addiction is not the first in American history. An opium-smoking epidemic in the latter half of the nineteenth century helped to fuel outrage against Chinese immigrants and played a key role in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and other later legislation against the entry of Chinese into the United States. She notes that opium-smoking was denounced far and wide as a major social and public health problem, especially in the West. Opium addiction had become a major problem in China by the mid-1800s and opium dens were a common feature of Chinese enclaves in the United States.
Although only a very small minority of Chinese immigrants were involved in the opium business, the public image of Chinese were of a sleazy people deeply involved in the drug and prostitution trades. When a growing number of white Americans took up opium, the drug was perceived as a genuine threat to the stability of American middle-class life. The fact remains that the smoking variety of opium, unlike its medical relative, found its way into the United States with the Chinese who arrived at the start of the California gold rush. It is also a fact that in addition to building restaurants, general stores and laundries, the Chinese also built opium dens. Although initially employed as a pain reliever, smoking opium soon became a recreational drug, first among Chinese and then among white Americans.
Physicians, journalists, religious and political leaders as well as many self- appointed monitors of morality expressed deep concern about the spread of the drug. They believed that smoking opium had real side effects such as insanity, sexual promiscuity, and nonproductivity. Indeed, as Ahmad notes that these concernc Americans considered smoking-opium detrimental to everything they held dear. One of the ways the ways to achieve their goal [to remove opium] was to eliminate the immigration of Chinese because many in this group believed the Chinese, who imported the narcotic, were responsible for seducing Americans with it.
Ahmad also depicts the negative image of prostitution in the Chinese communities of the West. Prostitution in the American West was another related problem. A huge majority of the early Chinese immigrants were young men who lived in bachelor communities. Many of the Chinese women who came to the U.S. were prostitutes, in effect sex slaves who had no escape from the drudgery of their lives. Brothels and opium dens were places where single Chinese men could find an escape from loneliness and everyday tensions. Nearly every Chinatown possessed at least one opium resort and brothel and one could find scattered communities of
2 Diana L. Ahmad, The Opium Debate and Chinese Exclusion Laws in the Nineteenth-Century American West (Reno and Las Vegas: University of Nevada Press, 2007) Virginia Review of Asian Studies 103
Chinese all over the West, even in Wyoming and in small towns in Montana. In the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas in northern California, there were close to three thousand Chinese miners near the village of Sonora in the early and mid-1850s. When white Americans began to visit these brothels and dens, others denounced Chinese as a threat to the moral character of the nation. As one Nevada-based writer wrote his former Senator in 1901: “No civilized home can exist, when brought into contact with the degradation of the Orient.” The Chinese were a “festering sore. We have seen the youth of this country enticed into their dens of vice and ruined morally and physically.” The letter ended wishing the Senator “God-speed” in his efforts to “protect the American manhood from the threatened peril.”
Despite these very negative feelings against Chinese and other later Asian arrivals, there were also some communities where Chinese and Whites lived in close proximity of each other without resorting to any real sustained attacks against each other. They grew to tolerate and in time to respect and help each other in times of need. There were other instances where economic necessity brought the two groups together and mandated mutual cooperation. One saw examples of this phenomenon in the huge and incredibly rich Sacramento River Delta where Chinese farm labor and tenant farming became essential ingredients in the pre- World War II prosperity and growth of the entire region.
I begin the discussion by looking at the Sacraento River Delta region and the town of Locke, California and end by looking at two former mining towns, Fiddletown and Chinese Camp, where Chinese and Whites lived in relative peace for many decades. There are, of course, many other towns where Whites and Chinese co- existed together for many years including the infamous mining center at Bodie in the eastern Sierra, but they will be covered in a later work.
Chinese Communities that Escaped Violence
The Sacramento River Delta is one of the richest farming areas in the United States. The region’s growth as a major agricultural area began in the 1850s and expanded rapidly in the 1860s and 1870s. Usage of the region’s fertile land required the building of massive levees – and in those days much of the work was done manually. The decline in mining and the completion of the first transcontinental railroad meant that there were many thousands of young Chinese looking for work. White landowners desperately needed Chinese labor to build the levees and to help farm the land. It became very common for White land developers to work closely with an English-speaking Chinese with a plan for a levee and to have the Chinese foreman then hire a certain number of Chinese to do the actual building. By the time much of the land had been reclaimed in the 1880s, many Chinese became farm laborers. White farmers owned hundreds and in some cases thousands of acres of land used to produce a wide range of agricultural goods ranging from tomatoes to asparagus, potatoes\, wheat and fruit. The farmers hired Chinese to work the land and soon became dependent on Chinese labor to make agriculture work. Some farmers leased Virginia Review of Asian Studies 104 significant stretches of their land to Chinese tenant farmers who began growing significant amounts of agricultural products and who in turn hired other Chinese and on rare occasions Whites as farm laborers. There soon developed a highly complex network of mutual dependence. Chinese needed jobs and were willing to work hard while the White farmers could not survive without Chinese labor.
The land leased by the Chinese farmers was rarely if ever quality land. Their land included island in the Delta which were out of reach of the mega-farmers, swampy areas which were too bothersome for the American farmers to deal with, and wooded land of the periphery of the Delta. Chinese leased land to grow Irish potatoes, onions, beans and other vegetables. The tenant farmers could not become rich from all their travail, but the land provided them with food as well as enough income to survive. The white farmers, on the other hand, made some rent money for land which was not of much use to them.
Historian Peter C.Y. Leung writes: American farmers and landowners in the delta have been concerned with their land and crops. They realized that Chinese labor was needed on their ranches and farms. Therefore, they have traditionally been reasonably sympathetic to the Chinese. The contact between Chinese and Americans was most direct in the case of tenant farmers who lived on the American ranches, and Chinese merchants, labor contractors, and foremen, who acted as intermediaries between Americans and the Chinese workers. American farmers did not have direct contact with the Chinese laborers, since the latter did not speak English well and went from job to job, ranch to ranch. Their work was supervised by Chinese foreman and labor contractors.
Chinese tenant farmers and their families lived on the ranches, however, so the opportunity for concern and communication was greater. Tenant farmer’s children and the American farmer’s children sometimes played together. Some ranch owners got to like the tenants’ children so well that they helped provide the tenants’ children with educational opportunities. Many offered the tenants “permanent” tenant’s rights….
Life for the Chinese farm laborers and tenant farmers was certainly not too easy, but it was not too harsh either. Locke’s residents had to work hard, but they could get by and except during the Depression, they could even save money if they didn’t gamble too much. Their style of living was reasonably healthy. Although most lacked families in the Delta, their fellow workers were usually congenial, and whites in the area maintained reasonably friendly relations. Finally, it was possible to advance from a farm laborer to a tenant farmer or even small businessman or landowner.3
Mechanization and assimilation, however, eventually brought an end to the huge Chinese presence in the Delta region. A century ago large-scale farming required the presence of myriads of farm workers and small scale tenant farming was feasible for farmers willing to live very simple lives. Large scale mechanization of agriculture in the 1940s and 1950s, however, lessened the need for many farm workers and made small-scale farming untenable. The result was a
3 Peter C. Y. Leung, One Day, One Dollar: The Chinese Farming Experience in the Sacramento River Delta, California (Taipei: The Liberal Arts Press, 1993), 36-37, 40. Virginia Review of Asian Studies 105
rapidly accelerating decline in the number of Chinese involved in agriculture in the Delta.
The Chinese Town of Locke
When the levees were completed during the 1870s and 1880s, many of the levee builders stayed in the area to become farm laborers and tenant farmers. Since very few of them spoke much English and both Chinese and non-Chinese tended to stick to their own kind, the Chinese bonded together to form small Chinatowns throughout the Delta region. Some of the major Chinese settlements occurred in Rio Vista, Isleton, Walnut Grove, Locke and Courtland. Most of these towns had mixed populations with distinct Chinatowns. Only Locke was a distinctly Chinese settlement.
[Main Street in Locke. www.locketown.com/locke%20photo%20gallery.htm] Roving reporter Ron Gluckman wrote recently:
The three-block town is an anthropological treasure, the last independent enclave built by and exclusively for the Chinese. In the layers of dust on Locke's decaying streets, one can mine the memories of the first Chinese immigrants, who came searching for Gum Shan, the Golden Mountain. When the gold mines closed, they laid the ties for railroads that spanned the continent.
During the shameful years of suppression, the "Driving Out," when Chinese were forced into railroad cars in Seattle and Tacoma, massacred in Los Angeles and Wyoming, they found shelter in the farmlands of California's Central Valley. The flooded Delta marshlands needed reclaiming. Here was work too dirty for the whites, so the Chinese were once again welcome. Virginia Review of Asian Studies 106
Chinese villages dotted the Delta. In fact, this is the only area in North America that can claim a continuous Chinese presence for over 125 years. They built the levees that made this the most productive agricultural land in America. Here, they were safe from the racial violence, left alone to sow asparagus and pears and potatoes, backbreaking work for $1 a day. Pitiful pay, perhaps, but enough to lure thousands more from China.
Chinese villages dotted the Delta. In fact, this is the only area in North America that can claim a continuous Chinese presence for over 125 years. They built the levees that made this the most productive agricultural land in America. Here, they were safe from the racial violence, left alone to sow asparagus and pears and potatoes, backbreaking work for $1 a day. Pitiful pay, perhaps, but enough to lure thousands more from China.4
Locke became a settled Chinese community quite late. There were Chinese in nearby Walnut Grove from the late 1800s, but in 1907 the Southern Pacific Railway established a packing shed along the Sacramento River a short walk north of Walnut Grove which attracted many Chinese workers. A Chinese merchant, Chan Tin San leased land across from the shed from the heirs of a deceased Anglo merchant, George Locke and built a store and saloon. Other enterprising Chinese, realizing the needs of a semi- migrant labor force, quickly built a boarding house, a gambling hall, and other stores and social centers. These businesses soon served as a mecca for other Chinese and before long a thoroughly Chinese community. Why did so many Chinese congregate in Locke? Chinese-American historian Sucheng Chan provides an answer:
The Delta was one of the few places in rural California where [Chinese women settled in appreciable numbers and] Chinese families were established. Though their children had to enroll in segregated schools, and the social hierarchy and racial division of labor were rigid – with old stock Americans and immigrants from Great Britain and Germany owning the best land, leasing tracts out to Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, and Italian tenants, who in turn hired newer and darker-skinned immigrants to work for them— Chinese in the delta, especially those living in Locke felt comfortable in the area. The deep attachment that Locke’s inhabitants have to their village is best expressed by Bing Fai Chow, who said, ‘In the past, the whites would attack you with stones when you walked through some of their towns. We never dared to walk on the streets alone – except in Locke. This was our place.’5
It is important to note that Locke served not only as a refuge from White violence, but also from other Chinese groups as well. During the 1920s and 1930s Locke gained a reputation as a place with a wild vitality with its speakeasies, brothels as well as many stores, restaurants, and boarding houses. Most of the residents were single men who worked in agriculture. Many other Chinese workers who lived nearby came to relax, shop or gamble one or more times a month. Most of the businesses were run by Chinese for Chinese – the only white-run businesses were the brothels and speakeasies. But there seemed to be a live and let live attitude by both Whites and Chinese.
4 Ron Gluckman, “Locked in Time,” http://www.gluckman.com/Locke.html 5 Sucheng Chan, “Introduction” in Jeff Gillenkirk and James Motlow, Bitter Melon: Inside America’s Last Rural Chinese Town (Berkeley: Heyday Books, 2006), 24. Virginia Review of Asian Studies 107
Later in the 1920s and 1930s Locke also became a place where Chinese families could find a refuge. It is estimated that there were 30-40 families lived in Locke during the Depression era. As noted earlier, there were more Chinese women in the Delta and when they married, they often preferred to live in an all Chinese village. Chinese business made it easier to shop and there was a Chinese school in Locke for the teaching of Chinese language and culture (the school is now a museum). Chinese and other Asians could attend an integrated school with Whites in neighboring Walnut Grove – which in the long run allowed Chinese to get a good education, to attend college and build lives for themselves away from Locke.
Commenting on this, author James Motlow, who lived in Locke in the 1970s, notes: While it might seem strange to think of a small town with three gambling halls, five whorehouses, and several speakeasies as an ideal place to raise children, for them it was….[T]he Chinese are a practical people, and were well aware of the needs of a townful of single men. And to Chinese people – Cantonese at least – gambling is not a vice: it’s a recreation. Few of Locke’s residents ever referred to gambling with any kind of moral overtone: regret, yes, from those who lost some money, but moral objections, hardly ever. The gambling houses also served social functions in town. They were meeting places where men could read Chinese newspapers, play dominoes, fan-tan or chess, enjoy a cup of tea, or relax by playing Chinese musical instruments. They went there to get their mail and share the latest news from home. And when local farmers came to find workers, the gambling houses served as labor hiring halls as well.6
Today the town of Locke sits astride the Sacramento River much as it did in decades past. The old buildings line the two main streets looking much as they did in old photographs. The only thing that is different is the almost total lack of Chinese. I met a Chinese- American gentleman who owns a bookstore and ate at a decent Chinese restaurant which also serves as a social gathering place for the town. Locke certainly is not a ghost town —other immigrants have moved in and most of the buildings seem occupied. The old Chinese school is now a locally-run museum and the State Park service has taken over an old boarding house which too will become a museum. Many tourists from near by San Francisco, Oakland or Sacramento come each week-end to walk the two main streets, shop in specialty boutiques, eat the local food and tour the town’s museums. But Locke too is a relic – a reminder of what once was a thriving center of Chinese culture in North America.
Time has really taken its toll. Locke's mostly aged Chinese residents number less than two dozen, and they are slowly dying out. Locke's newer generations went away to college and never returned except to visit the old folks. I talked to some of the craftspeople who have bought up little boutiques on the town’s main street, catering to the 10,000 or so curious tourists like me who annually visit the quaint settlement.
The Chinese Miners of Fiddletown
6 Gillenkirk and Motlow, 15. Virginia Review of Asian Studies 108
Fiddletown is a village located southeast of Sacramento along the Sierra Nevada foothills in Amador County. Fiddletown grew quickly during the Gold Rush period, known for its rich placer gold deposits. The area around the town attracted thousands of eager miners, but only a few stayed after the gold petered out. Miners came from all over the world including China, and a surprising number of Chinese stayed on as farmers and merchants after most residents had moved on.
Inside the Chew Kee Store in Fiddletown CA [http://www.sierrafoothillmagazine.com/fiddletow.html]
Today Fiddletown is a small community with a generally White population. There are no longer any Chinese here, but their presence is still felt in three impressive structures in the lower part of the village which once had a thriving Chinese community. There is the old Chew Kee Store, an incredibly well-preserved former Chinese pharmacy and store that is today a museum to honor the village’s Chinese heritage. Two recently restored brick buildings across the street once served as a store and the other as a community center and gambling hall for the local Chinese. These structures date back to the mid-1800s. Amador County had many Chinese—in 1860 census records tell us that there were 2719 Chinese in San Francisco and 2568 in Amador County. Census records for Fiddletown indicate 290 Chinese in 1860 (29% of the population), 363 in 1870 and 134 (45%) in 1880. The town history indicates that while there was certainly some discrimination and fear of the Chinese in the White Community, the Chinese were very much part of the vital fabric of life in the town.7 The vibrant Chinese community featured numerous stores, restaurants, boarding houses, houses for gambling and prostitution, and a joss house. Food, herbs, porcelain ware, cooking utensils, clothing, and other products were imported directly from China. There were a variety of jobs to occupy the Chinese including merchants, boarding house
7 Elaine Zorbas, Fiddletown from Gold Rush to Rediscovery (Altedana CA: Mythos Press, 1997), 30-31. Virginia Review of Asian Studies 109 operators, butchers, farmers, packers, washermen and women, clerks and so on. As was the case in almost every Chinese community in North America at the time, women were few – a few were wives of merchants and other workers while several others worked in the brothels (the 1860 census noted the presence of six prostitutes in Fiddletown).
Chinese early on were targets for discrimination in mining areas, but those in Fiddletown were lucky to have a friend and advocate in the local constable, Stephen Davis. Davis is said to have been a very gifted linguist who had a deep interest in China in its people. After his arrival in 1851-1852, he learned several dialects of Chinese and acted as an interpreter for the community. He also made sure that the mining claims of the Chinese were accurately written. It was a great loss to the community -- his wife and child remained as highly revered persons in the Chinese community.
As Fiddletown’s population dwindled after the 1870s, the percentage of Chinese grew, even though their overall numbers sagged. The Chinese farmed the land, did a variety of jobs in and around the town, and as the percentage of women increased, raised their families. There is every indication that though Chinese and Whites lived in different parts of town, they respected each other and did business in respectful manner.
There is strong evidence as the population shrank and many of the residents grew older that they went out of their way to care for each other. An older American woman, remembering her days at the turn of the last century, describes how her family liked and trusted the local Chinese and how the people in the town raised money so that an older Chinese woman could return to China before she died. Others writings indicate that younger Fiddletown children developed friendships with their Chinese peers. There is no record of any effort to drive out the Chinese or to seize their property—and little sign of any harmful animosity. 8
The Chinese population petered out in the early 20th century as older Chinese returned to China and younger ones, now better educated, sought a better life in San Francisco and other large cities. Today the people of Fiddletown remain very proud of their Chinese heritage and have worked very hard to restore the old gambling / social hall and the general store. The Chew Kee store / Chinese pharmacy which supplied herbal remedies to area Chinese for several decades, is today a marvelous little museum open Saturdays during warmer months. It is an incredible window into rural California’s now fading Chinese past.
The Ghosts of Chinese Camp
As a scholar and teacher of Asian history, the very idea of a Chinese ghost town in California generated even greater excitement. It was thus with great anticipation that I spent the better part of a day in May of 2007 exploring the remains of “Chinese Camp” deep in the heart of Gold Rush country in northern California. A return visit in May 2010 permitted deeper insights into the lives of the thousands of Chinese who once sought their fortunes there. The ordinary traveler just passing by would see nothing but a bunch of
8 Ibid., 96-97. Virginia Review of Asian Studies 110 decaying and deserted buildings—it is not a place of any beauty—but if you look at the old iron doors on what used to be Chinese stores, it is perhaps possible to transport oneself back in history to a time when the village was humming with several thousand Chinese.
Today any casual motorist driving along California Route 49 through Tuolumne County in western California on their way to nearby Yosemite National Park would hardly recognize the clump of abandoned buildings adorned by a sign “Chinese Camp” as being one of the biggest and most significant early settlements of Chinese in the United States. It was a placer-mining center settled by Chinese miners in 1849. Much work was done in the 1850s, and the piles of soil and gravel turned over in the search for gold can still be seen in nearly every gulch. The placer mines of this area are credited with producing $2.5 million in gold. Today the town consists of numerous Gold-Rush era buildings, most of them abandoned. Several ramshackle dwellings on the outskirts of town house a few remaining residents, but there are no Chinese left here and one can’t even buy a dish of chow mein. The last of the Chinese left in the 1920s leaving behind one of the most significant Chinese ghost towns in the United States.
Ruins of abandoned stores dot Main Street in Chinese Camp
The first settlement here was known as Camp Salvado after a group of Savadorians who worked as miners, but a group of Cantonese miners arrived by 1849. Who they were and why they came remains a bit of a mystery. In 1849, a group of three dozen Cantonese miners arrived at the Camp and began prospecting. Where they came from remains a mystery. Some accounts imply that a ship’s captain abandoned his ship in San Francisco bringing his entire crew with him. Another version has it that the Chinese were employed by a group of English speculators. What is known is that the mining brought large amounts of gold which in turn brought thousands of additional miners, including first hundreds and later thousands of Chinese. Miners including many Virginia Review of Asian Studies 111
Chinese developed a number of towns, but most Chinese settled in what became known as “Chinese Camp.” Facing virulent discrimination in other areas, and after being driven away from other diggings, or having just arrived in the country, the Chinese miners gravitated here, feeling safe and comfortable among others of their nationality. There were some white miners there, but by the mid-1850s the Chinese residents of the settlement vastly outnumbered the whites.
At first the streets of Chinese camp were solidly settled with store tents, built mostly of pine boughs with canvas stretched over the top and dirt floors. Others were of pine boughs topped with brush. The first substantial building was an adobe structure completed in 1851 which served as a store. A Catholic church, St. Xavier, first constructed in 1854, still stands today – in good shape, but clearly abandoned sitting forlornly on a hill outside the town. The Chinese later built several distinctively Chinese buildings including three Joss houses, traditional places for worshipping a variety of indigenous Chinese deities. By 1859 Chinese Camp had settled into what contemporary accounts say was a “law-abiding and respectable community.” At its peak, perhaps 5,000 Chinese resided here. Even as late as the 1880s, patient Chinese miners were still eking out a living here mining gold.
The camp continued to grow, and due to the large number of Chinese inhabitants, it became known by such names as Chinee, Chinese Diggins, and Chinese Camp. When the post office was established on April 18 of 1854, the town became officially known as Chinese Camp. The only reminder of its earlier cognomen, Camp Washington, lies in the road Washington Street. The town’s location made Chinese Camp the center of transportation for a large area, several stage and freight lines made regular daily stops here on their way to other points. Today a plaque on the tumble-down and long-deserted Wells Fargo office honors a stage coach driver who connected the town by coach to such distant points as Sacramento, Carson City and Salt Lake City.
Most of the Chinese who came to California and thus to Chinese Camp were unskilled and uneducated laborers. Many found solace through the “Six Companies,” Chinese benevolent associations who helped Chinese survive in an alien environment. Most of the business transactions of the Chinese were done through the “Six Companies.” The Companies often contracted for large bodies of laborers. These Companies simply acted as clearing-houses for all sorts of transactions among the Chinese, as they had found that they could handle things in a strange land more satisfactorily through such associations than they could individually. Four of these “Companies” were represented in Chinese Camp.
Life could be rough for the Chinese in the early days. In 1856, it was the site of one of the earliest tong wars in the gold fields, when members of the Tan Woo Tong faced off against Sam Yap members. About 1,000 men scuffled; fortunately casualties were light due to the preferred choice of weapons--swords. When American lawmen finally intervened to halt the bloodshed, there were four dead and several more wounded. Oddly, there is no tangible evidence that Whites inflicted any violence against their Virginia Review of Asian Studies 112
Chinese neighbors here and that Chinese and non-Chinese lived side-by-side with a minimum of friction for eight decades.
When the gold mines in the area petered out after the Gold Rush, many of the Chinese miners moved on, but a few brave Chinese hung on until the last two elderly survivors left by train to Chinatown in San Francisco. They left behind a remarkably preserved ghost town and, one presumes, the ghosts of many of the lonely Chinese miners who died there, their dreams of returning to China with pockets full of gold permanently thwarted.
Today one can walk the streets of the old town. A few residents live on the outskirts of town, but most of the buildings stand in the blazing sun, empty save for the ghosts of the original miners who gave life to this town. Main Street is an oddity—it once must have been the heart of the Chinese community there, but all of the buildings including the old Wells Fargo office stand empty and in a state of virtual collapse. Many decades have passed since anybody lived there. However, a stone and brick post office dating from 1854 is still in use; the St. Francis Xavier Catholic Church is still maintained.
Ironically, the village’s modern school is built in the shape of an old Chinese pagoda with a gaily painted Chinese-style roof. It seems that the area’s largely white residents enjoy this quaint reminder of the village’s lively past. Chinese Camp’s one tiny general store and saloon sells large blankets and rugs festooned with Chinese-looking tigers. The Chinese have gone, but their memory lingers on.
These three towns, Locke, Fiddletown and Chinese Camp, remain today as reminders that Chinese played a very important role in the development of the state. Like many other immigrant groups, they formed their own communities that allowed them to slowly adapt themselves to a very foreign culture, but as their grandchildren and great- grandchildren became educated and better assimilated into American society, they moved away and their communities began to fade away.
Another factor that has led to the deaths of these communities is that Chinese immigration was greatly curtailed by the various Chinese exclusion acts that began in 1882. New waves of immigrants that might have replaced the original Chinese never came, so the original Chinese communities faded when the younger Chinese moved on. Chinese immigrants who have come since restrictions on Asian immigration were lifted in the mid-1960s have gone to larger metropolitan areas like New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Nevertheless, these communities serve as clear reminders that tens of thousands of Chinese came to the American West in the latter years of the nineteenth century and that while all of them had to work hard to survive, at least some were not forced to confront the violent reception of some of their peers.