Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
and with few doctors around, injuries often proved lethal. With only one woman for every
400 men in some camps, many turned to paid company, booze and opium for consolation.
Find out more about the traditions and lifestyles of indigenous tribes with
California Indi-
ans and Their Environment,
a readable natural history guide by Kent Lightfoot and Otis
Parrish.
Vigilantes, Robber Barons & Railroads
Gold prospectors who did best arrived early and got out quick, while those who stayed too
long either lost fortunes searching for the next nugget or became targets of resentment.
Successful Peruvians and Chileans were harassed and denied renewals to their mining
claims, and most left California by 1855. Native Californian laborers who helped miners
strike it rich were denied the right to hold claims. Also frozen out of mining claims, many
Chinese opened service-based businesses that survived when mining ventures went bust.
Meanwhile, criminal wrongdoing was sometimes hastily pinned on Australians - starting
in 1851, San Francisco's self-appointed Committee of Vigilance tried, convicted, lynched
and deported the 'Sydney Ducks' gang, so when another gold rush began in Australia that
same year, many were ready to head home.
Inter-ethnic rivalries obscured the real competitive threat posed not by fellow workers,
but by those who controlled the means of production: California's 'robber barons.' These
Californian speculators hoarded the capital and industrial machinery necessary for deep-
mining operations. As mining became industrialized, fewer miners were needed, and job-
less prospectors turned anger toward a convenient target: Chinese workers, who by 1860
had become the second-most populous group in California after Mexicans. Discriminatory
Californian laws restricting housing, employment and citizenship for anyone born in China
were reinforced in the 1882 US Chinese Exclusion Act, which remained law until 1943.
Laws limiting work options for Chinese arrivals served the needs of robber barons, who
needed cheap labor to build railroads to their mining claims and reach East Coast markets.
To blast tunnels through the Sierra Nevada, workers were lowered down sheer mountain
faces in wicker baskets, planted lit dynamite sticks in rock crevices, then urgently tugged
the rope to be hoisted out of harm's way. Those who survived the day's work were con-
fined to bunkhouses under armed guard in cold, remote mountain regions. With little other
