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By Root 1476 0

of all kinds—cutthroats, charlatans, professional gamblers—naturally gravitated toward a city where no one questioned your past, where no authority checked your records. No court or police system existed until 1850, no California land office until 1853. Inevitably, then, disputes over property and land titles were most often settled by force, the decision often going to the disputants less averse to or more adept at using fists, pistols, or knives. Since the city was populated mainly by aggressive, ambitious men who had braved disease, robbers, frozen mountain passes, and the desert to make the journey, it is not surprising that during the early 1850s, San Francisco witnessed an average of five murders every six days.

Without a government in which the people had confidence, mob rule prevailed, often in the form of public hangings, in particular scapegoating foreigners without sufficient evidence. For a while, San Franciscans—who created the “Committee of Vigilance” in 1851—tended to blame all crimes on arrivals from Australia, viewing them as rabble from a penal colony. The vigilantes thought nothing of stringing up suspicious characters, defying and even intimidating whatever little public authority existed—on one occasion abducting and holding hostage a California state supreme court justice.

Strangely enough, however, a progressive element also thrived in San Francisco. The city drew not only criminals and capitalists, but also intellectuals, attracted like the others not only by the opportunity for quick wealth but also the romance of adventure. By 1853, the community supported a dozen newspapers and a strong subculture of writers. It soon boasted more college graduates than any other city in the country. Despite its rough-hewn beginnings, San Francisco swiftly became the most cultured city on the West Coast, where even callused, weather-beaten gold prospectors could be seen attending theater performances. The presence of intellectuals fostered a certain tolerance in the city, a fascination for anything different, even as just under the surface ran a current of barely restrained hair-trigger tempers and murderous rage.

It was against this backdrop—a weird juxtaposition of greed and violence on one hand and an avid curiosity about new ideas and experiences on the other—that the first wave of Chinese made their appearance in the American West. If San Francisco did not initially resist their arrival, perhaps it was because almost everyone in San Francisco had come from somewhere else. By 1853, more than half of the San Francisco population was foreign-born, and in a city united by the single, driving obsession to make money, only one color seemed to matter: gold.

This would change.

CHAPTER FOUR

Gold Rushers on Gold Mountain

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