The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [25]
The daylight hours of a gold miner’s life were spent bent over a stream panning for gold. He might live in a primitive tent, a brush hut, an abandoned cabin, or a shack hastily slapped together from scrap lumber and flattened kerosene cans. The Chinese gold miners, not surprisingly, stayed to themselves, even when it meant that twenty to thirty Chinese miners had to cram themselves into a space hardly large enough to “allow a couple of Americans to breathe in it,” as one San Francisco Herald correspondent reported. Then again, another contemporary writer, J. D. Borthwick, described a Chinese mining camp he visited as “wonderfully clean.” After glimpsing the evening rituals of the Chinese, he wrote, “a great many of them [are] at their toilet, getting their head shaved, or plaiting pigtails.” In a hectic time and place, on an almost mad mission, when most men had neither time nor energy to spare for the threshold requirements of civil society, many Chinese maintained strict standards of personal hygiene.
The Chinese also established a reputation for hard work. “They are quiet, peaceable, tractable, free from drunkenness,” Mark Twain wrote in admiration. “A disorderly Chinaman is rare, and a lazy one does not exist.” They further astounded white observers with their creative use of nature’s laws of physics, particularly their astonishing ability to balance heavy burdens on long poles. Describing one miner’s descent into a gulch with a sack of rice, two large rolls of blankets, two hogsheads, several heavy mining tools, a wheelbarrow, and a hand-rocker all swinging from his pack-pole, the editor of the Madisonian wrote, “It was a mystery how that Chinaman managed to tote that weary load along so gracefully, and not grunt a groan.”
A few Chinese prospered through sheer luck, finding enough gold in a single day to last them a lifetime. When one group discovered a forty-pound nugget, they prudently chiseled it into small pieces to sell along with their gold dust, because many small nuggets would ensure both that each man received his fair share and that the find would not draw unwanted attention to the group. Two Chinese miners who had never earned more than two dollars a day stumbled upon a 240-pound nugget worth more than $30,000, a considerable fortune during that era. Like most gold rushers of the time, the Chinese chased after rumors of new findings, wherever such rumors might take them. In 1856, a few Chinese ventured out of California into the Rocky Mountains and the Boise Basin of Oregon Territory (now southern Idaho), where friendly Shoshone and Bannock Indians led them to placer beds so rich in gold that their deerskins soon bulged with nuggets.
Other Chinese prospered not just by luck or hard work, both of which were always needed, but by resourceful use of technology. The Chinese introduced the water wheel to American placer mining. This device, modeled after irrigation techniques used by rice paddy farmers back home, allowed them to pump and sluice water from the river, which was then used to wash gravel from gold. The pumping method was not only derived from Chinese agriculture, but from generations of experience from tin miners in Guangdong, who had originally acquired their knowledge from Chinese miners in Malaysia.
Still other Chinese benefited from the fact that they were willing to work as a group. When a group of Chinese miners working in northern central California realized that a rich vein lay underneath the riverbed, they agreed to work together to build a dam across the Yuba River to expose the gold. In Utah Territory, another group of Chinese dug an irrigation ditch from the Carson River to Gold Canyon, which made mining possible in that desert region and greatly impressed the Mormons living there.
At night, a lively bachelor culture sprang up in these scattered mining camps. The miners formed bands and played Chinese music with