By Susan Lee Johnson

  By 1852, the average daily yield for placer miners was less than a third of what it had been in 1848-just $6, down from a high of $20 in the year following the gold discovery. Frustrated miners were sure the decline was even steeper.

  In 1851, A. W. Genung wrote home from Toulumne County that he had given up on making his "pile" quickly. Genung believed that "the first digging of the river banks and beds of the creeks . . . gave from four to six ounces a day," or $64 to $96. Provisions ran $5 a day, and a glass of whiskey cost $2. "The second digging and washing," he wrote, "which I arrived in time to get a parting glance at, gave from one to 2 1?2 ounces per day," or $16 to $40. Daily provisions went for $3, and a glass of whiskey sold for 50 cents. Now, he thought, an individual miner made only $4 or $5 each day. Daily provisions cost him a dollar, and a glass of whiskey set him back 12 or 13 cents. Genung predicted that the area would "all be worked over again at one or two dollars per day," adding, "I don't wish to be here then." An 1853 correspondent to the San Joaquin Republican wrote: "California, is herself, no more. The mines are much too crowded for all to do well."

  Most Chinese gold seekers arrived in California during this season of dashed hopes, taking up placer claims others abandoned. Perhaps because they had missed the earliest days of the Gold Rush, or perhaps because most could not communicate easily with their disappointed neighbors, or perhaps because circumstances in their homeland were dire, Chinese miners did not seem to share white men's pessimism. As late as 1858, an Amador County newspaper reported that Chinese men were digging gold not at some remote foothill stream but at the creek that ran right through the center of Jackson, the county seat. Although this was ground that had been "worked over at least a dozen times," the paper said, the men were making "from $2.50 to $8 per day to the hand" and showing off specimens that weighed from an ounce to six ounces each.

  In 1854, a Mariposa County paper noted that the Guadalupe mining district had "gone over to China," and that the men there were making from $3 to $5 per day. And in Calaveras County in 1856, a newspaper remarked that in just three months, Chinese miners had bought up over $21,000 worth of claims along the Mokelumne River. Employing the name Anglo Americans used for all Chinese men in California, "John Chinaman," the paper noted that such purchases proved the value of the area mines, since "John is a good judge of diggings, a close prospector, and a successful miner."

  Over the course of the 1850s, river mining increasingly became the province of Chinese gold seekers. In the last days of 1850, Timothy Osborn, mining along Little Humbug Creek noted in his diary that a group of Chinese men had set up camp nearby. This early-arriving Chinese party mined in the same area and probably used the same methods Osborn did, shoveling bucket after bucket of gold-bearing dirt and washing it out in a rocker.

  Although he had been in the diggings only six months, Osborn was tired of it all: "I am sick . . . of the dog life of a miner . . . and would give all I have to be at home . . . and forget the word California and never hear it spoken again!" He left the diggings for good just days later, settling in the supply center of Stockton.

  Meanwhile, Chinese men poured in to the areas white men like Osborn left behind. A Mariposa newspaper noted in 1857 that Chinese men were busy working the bed of the Merced: "The whole flat along the river has been staked off by them." Rumor had it that these miners recently had unearthed a seven-pound piece of gold. Such a lump would have been worth almost $1,800.

  True or not, reports like these must have galled white men who had given up on gold as well as those who hung fire in the mines. For those who left the diggings, Chinese miners' accomplishments belied the Anglo axiom that the placers were all but played out. For those who stayed but complained about decline, Chinese success made white men seem like whiners. It must have been hard to see Chinese men come in and repeat the same labor to good account. Anglo response to the influx of Chinese and their enterprise in the diggings was swift.

  Some white men were content to deny that enterprise altogether, ridiculing Chinese mining practices as crude and inefficient. Scottish writer J. D. Borthwick maintained that the Chinese lacked the "force" and "vigor" of the Americans and Europeans, that they handled their mining tools "like so many women, as if they were afraid of hurting themselves." Borthwick noted American men called Chinese mining methods "scratching." Some of this was sheer silliness, as Chinese involvement in large-scale river mining showed. But there was some truth to the contention that many Chinese men mined in ways that differed from those of other gold seekers. Many did limit their gold-washing tools to the smaller rocker rather than the larger long tom or sluice. They did so in large part because of discrimination. Chinese soon learned that whites would not hesitate to expel groups of Chinese men from mining claims. Smaller tools simply were easier to gather up and cart to new diggings when the need arose.

  For many gold seekers, the situation called for more than feminizing their new neighbors as men with small tools, which they handled "like so many women." Expulsion seemed a better solution. In May of 1852, San Francisco's Alta California declared that the people of Columbia had proved themselves "entirely without a precedent or a parallel in their hatred and hostility for the Chinese." Men of that town had passed in a mass meeting resolutions designed to assure that "no Asiatic or South Sea Islander" would work in local diggings. The resolution included a charge to create a vigilance committee that would enforce exclusion in Columbia and encourage white men throughout the Southern Mines to follow suit.

  The miners, however, singled out for verbal abuse not only Chinese men but those "shipowners, capitalists, and merchants," who supported the "importation of these burlesques on humanity." By 1852, the fissure that had started to separate the miners from merchants during the fight over a foreign miners' tax in 1850 was widening.

  California's legislature settled on a new foreign miners' tax as a way of dealing with Chinese men in the diggings. They debated a variety of measures, from laws that would have made labor contracts drawn up abroad enforceable in California to those that would have expelled Chinese from the mines altogether. Reviving the defunct miners' tax was a compromise between these two extremes, but one that ultimately leaned toward merchants' interests over those of white miners.

  At first, merchants and their allies-notably newspaper editors-worried that a new tax would simply bring back old troubles. The San Joaquin Republican could not forget that the 1850 bill had "convulsed society in the southern mineral region." What the Southern Mines lost in 1850, and stood to lose again in 1852, were prospectors, laborers, and customers, though before these had been largely Latin American and now they were Chinese: Have not this race of men . . . discovered new placers, and been . . . the hewers of wood and drawers of water for our citizens? In the cities are they not our attendants in our houses, and in our public rooms? Do they not wash our shirts? The Chinese, in this city alone, must expend, and thus throw into circulation, money to the amount of $500 a day, at the very smallest calculation. This money goes into the hands of our merchants.

  In fact, legislators did seem to recall the 1850 fiasco. This time around, they levied a foreign miners' tax at a substantially lower rate-three dollars per month as opposed to the earlier twenty dollars a month, a rate that had driven Spanish- and some French-speaking gold seekers out of the mines.

  The 1852 tax did not scare Chinese miners away. To be sure, some resisted paying the fee. In 1855, groups of Chinese men attacked collectors at least twice. In each case, the tax collectors survived, but one or more Chinese lay dead by the end of the incident. More common was the kind of evasion described by a white man who had been a young boy in Mariposa County then. He recalled that the "tax collectors had a hard time collecting," because when Chinese men saw one coming "they would run & hide in holes & some would climb trees." But many Chinese must have decided to pay the moderate fee and go on about their business. By 1856, the San Joaquin Republican could report that Toulumne County received more revenue from the foreign miners' tax than from any other single source, including property taxes. What had once been a bugbear was now a bullish sign of growth.

  The arrival of the Chinese in the diggings coincided with the growth of local capitalist enterprise that threatened the autonomy of white placer miners: companies that supplied miners with water to wash gold-bearing dirt. In the Southern Mines, antipathy toward Chinese miners and white water company managers went hand in glove.

On the same day that the Alta California reported Columbia's mass meeting to expel Chinese miners, the paper also ran a notice that there would be a new water supply for the diggings. A company in Tuolumne County had succeeded in bringing water to Columbia through a ditch that connected the diggings to a tributary of the Stanislaus River. Water had always been scarce in the Southern Mines, but its use had been free. Now it might be more plentiful, but miners would have to pay to use it. And those they would have to pay looked a good deal like "capitalists" in the making: In the case of Tuolumne County Water Company (TCWC), a group of men who formed a joint stock corporation capitalized at more than $200,000.

  White miners' unease did not surface immediately. In January of 1853, eight months after the first water deal, white miners gathered again in Columbia, this time to protest the exorbitant rates they paid for the use of water supplied by the TCWC. It would not be until 1855 that the miners succeeded in forcing the company's hand, but the meeting did serve to unite them against the TCWC and to broadcast their complaints.

  Anti-Chinese activity in the diggings continued through the 1850s, but not with the same intensity as in 1852. White miners came to tolerate the foreign miners' tax as a means of policing and exacting tribute from Chinese miners. Chinese men themselves carefully orchestrated their gold seeking in order to minimize contact and conflict with Anglo Americans. Beyond the mining districts, white men committed a range of anti-Chinese acts; they attacked Chinese brothels and also turned armed struggles between rival groups of Chinese men into a gruesome spectator sport for Anglos. In the diggings, however, an aggrieved and anxious peace emerged.

Susan Lee Johnson is associate professor of history and the Chican@ and Latin@ Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Johnson received NEH fellowships to prepare her book ROARING CAMP, winner of a Bancroft Prize.

"I am sick . . . of the dog life of a miner . . . and would give all I have to be at home . . . and forget the word California and never hear it spoken again!"

Chinese men themselves carefully orchestrated their gold seeking in order to minimize contact and conflict with Anglo Americans.