CHINESE IN THE EARLY DAYS
While at this camp, I went down the river two or three miles to see a
place called Mississippi Bar, where a company of Chinamen were at work.
After an hour’s climbing along the rocky banks, and having crossed and
recrossed the river some half-dozen times on pine logs, I at last got
down among the Celestials.
There were about a hundred and fifty of them here, living in a perfect
village of small tents, all clustered together on the rocks. They had a
claim in the bed of the river, which they were working by means of a
wing dam. A “wing dam,” I may here mention, is one which first runs
half-way across the river, then down the river, and back again to the
same side, thus damming off a portion of its bed without the necessity
of the more expensive operation of lifting up the whole river bodily in
a “flume.”
The Chinamen’s dam was two or three hundred yards in length, and was
built of large pine trees laid one on the top of the other. They must
have had great difficulty in handling such immense logs in such a place;
but they are exceedingly ingenious in applying mechanical power,
particularly in concentrating the force of a large number of men upon
one point.
There were Chinamen of the better class among them, who no doubt
directed the work, and paid the common men very poor wages--poor at
least for California. A Chinaman could be hired for two, or at most
three dollars a day by any one who thought their labor worth so much;
but those at work here were most likely paid at a still lower rate, for
it was well known that whole shiploads of Chinamen came to the country
under a species of bondage to some of their wealthy countrymen in San
Francisco, who, immediately on their arrival, shipped them off to the
mines under charge of an agent, keeping them completely under control by
some mysterious celestial influence, quite independent of the accepted
laws of the country.
They sent up to the mines for their use supplies of Chinese provisions
and clothing, and thus all the gold taken out by them remained in
Chinese hands, and benefited the rest of the community but little by
passing through the ordinary channels of trade.
In fact, the Chinese formed a distinct class, which enriched itself at
the expense of the country, abstracting a large portion of its latent
wealth without contributing, in a degree commensurate with their
numbers, to the prosperity of the community of which they formed a part.
The individuals of any community must exist by supplying the wants of
others; and when a man neither does this, nor has any wants of his own
but those which he provides for himself, he is of no use to his
neighbors; but when, in addition to this, he also diminishes the
productiveness of the country, he is a positive disadvantage in
proportion to the amount of public wealth which he engrosses, and
becomes a public nuisance.
What is true of an individual is true also of a class; and the Chinese,
though they were no doubt, as far as China was concerned, both
productive and consumptive, were considered by a very large party in
California to be merely destructive as far as that country was
interested.
They were, of course, not altogether so, for such a numerous body as
they were could not possibly be so isolated as to be entirely
independent of others; but any advantage which the country derived from
their presence was too dearly paid for by the quantity of gold which
they took from it; and the propriety of expelling all the Chinese from
the State was long discussed, both by the press and in the Legislature;
but the principles of the American constitution prevailed; the country
was open to all the world, and the Chinese enjoyed equal rights with the
most favored nation. In some parts of the mines, however, the miners had
their own ideas on the subject, and would not allow the Chinamen to come
among them; but generally they were not interfered with, for they
contented themselves with working such poor diggings as it was not
thought worth while to take from them.
This claim on the Yuba was the greatest undertaking I ever saw attempted
by them.
They expended a vast deal of unnecessary labor in their method of
working, and their individual labor, in effect, was as nothing compared
with that of other miners. A company of fifteen or twenty white men
would have wing-dammed this claim, and worked it out in two or three
months, while here were about a hundred and fifty Chinamen humbugging
round it all the season, and still had not worked one half the ground.
Their mechanical contrivances were not in the usual rough
straightforward style of the mines; they were curious, and very
elaborately got up, but extremely wasteful of labor, and, moreover, very
ineffective.
The pumps which they had at work here were an instance of this. They
were on the principle of a chain-pump, the chain being formed of pieces
of wood about six inches long, hinging on each other, with cross-pieces
in the middle for buckets, having about six square inches of surface.
The hinges fitted exactly to the spokes of a small wheel, which was
turned by a Chinaman at each side of it working a miniature treadmill of
four spokes on the same axle. As specimens of joiner-work they were very
pretty, but as pumps they were ridiculous; they threw a mere driblet of
water: the chain was not even encased in a box--it merely lay in a
slanting trough, so that more than one half the capacity of the buckets
was lost. An American miner, at the expenditure of one-tenth part of the
labor of making such toys, would have set a water-wheel in the river to
work an elevating pump, which would have thrown more water in half an
hour than four-and-twenty Chinamen could throw in a day with a dozen of
these gimcrack contrivances. Their camp was wonderfully clean: when I
passed through it, I found a great many of them at their toilet, getting
their heads shaved, or plaiting each other’s pigtails; but most of them
were at dinner, squatted on the rocks in groups of eight or ten round a
number of curious little black pots and dishes, from which they helped
themselves with their chopsticks. In the center was a large bowl of
rice. This is their staple article, and they devour it most voraciously.
Throwing back their heads, they hold a large cupful to their wide-open
mouths, and, with a quick motion of the chopsticks in the other hand,
they cause the rice to flow down their throats in a continuous stream.
I received several invitations to dinner, but declined the pleasure,
preferring to be a spectator. The rice looked well enough, and the rest
of their dishes were no doubt very clean, but they had a very dubious
appearance, and were far from suggesting the idea of being good to eat.
In the store I found the storekeeper lying asleep on a mat. He was a
sleek dirty-looking object, like a fat pig with the hair scalded off,
his head being all close shaved excepting the pigtail. His opium-pipe
lay in his hand, and the lamp still burned beside him, so I supposed he
was already in the seventh heaven. The store was like other stores in
the mines, inasmuch as it contained a higgledy-piggledy collection of
provisions and clothing, but everything was Chinese excepting the boots.
These are the only articles of barbarian costume which the Chinaman
adopts, and he always wears them of an enormous size, on a scale
commensurate with the ample capacity of his other garments.
The next place I visited was Wamba’s Bar, some miles lower down the
river; and from here I intended returning to Nevada, as the season was
far advanced, and fine weather could no longer be depended upon.
The very day, however, on which I was to start, the rain commenced, and
came down in such torrents that I postponed my departure. It continued
to rain heavily for several days, and I had no choice but to remain
where I was, as the river rose rapidly to such a height as to be
perfectly impassable. It was now about eighty yards wide, and rushed
past in a raging torrent, the waves rolling several feet high. Some of
the miners up above, trusting to a longer continuance of the dry season,
had not removed their flumes from the river, and these it was now
carrying down, all broken up into fragments, along with logs and whole
pine trees, which occasionally, as they got foul of other objects,
reared straight up out of the water. It was a grand sight; the river
seemed as if it had suddenly arisen to assert its independence, and take
vengeance for all the restraints which had been placed upon it, by
demolishing flumes, dams, and bridges, and carrying off everything
within its reach.
The house I was staying in was the only one in the neighborhood, and was
a sort of half store, half boarding-house. Several miners lived in it,
and there were, besides, two or three storm-stayed travelers like
myself. It was a small clapboard house, built on a rock immediately over
the river, but still so far above it that we anticipated no danger from
the flood. We were close to the mouth of a creek, however, which we one
night fully expected would send the house on a voyage of discovery down
the river. Some drift-logs up above had got jammed, and so altered the
course of the stream as to bring it sweeping past the corner of the
house, which merely rested on a number of posts. The waters rose to
within an inch or two of the floor; and as they carried logs and rocks
along with them, we feared that the posts would be carried away, when
the whole fabric would immediately slip off the rocks into the angry
river a few feet below. There was a small window at one end through
which we might have escaped, and this was taken out that no time might
be lost when the moment for clearing out should arrive, while axes also
were kept in readiness, to smash through the back of the house, which
rested on _terra firma_. It was an exceedingly dark night, very cold,
and raining cats and dogs, so that the prospect of having to jump out of
the window and sit on the rocks till morning was by no means pleasant to
contemplate; but the idea of being washed into the river was still less
agreeable, and no one ventured to sleep, as the water was already almost
up to the floor, and a very slight rise would have smashed up the whole
concern so quickly, that it was best to be on the alert. The house
fortunately stood it out bravely till daylight, when some of the party
put an end to the danger by going up the creek, and removing the
accumulation of logs which had turned the water from its proper channel.
After the rain ceased, we had to wait for two days till the river fell
sufficiently to allow of its being crossed with any degree of safety;
but on the third day, along with another man who was going to Nevada, I
made the passage in a small skiff--not without considerable difficulty,
however, for the river was still much swollen, and covered with logs and
driftwood. On landing on the other side, we struck straight up the face
of the mountain, and soon gained the high land, where we found a few
inches of snow fast disappearing before the still powerful rays of the
sun.
We arrived at Nevada after a day and a half of very muddy traveling, but
the weather was bright and clear, and seemed to be a renewal of the dry
season. It did not last long, however, for a heavy snowstorm soon set
in, and it continued snowing, raining, and freezing for about three
weeks,--the snow lying on the ground all the time, to the depth of three
or four feet. The continuance of such weather rendered the roads so
impracticable as to cut off all supplies from Marysville or Sacramento,
and accordingly prices of provisions of all kinds rose enormously. The
miners could not work with so much snow on the ground, and altogether
there was a prospect of hard times. Flour was exceedingly high even in
San Francisco, several capitalists having entered into a flour-monopoly
speculation, buying up every cargo as it arrived, and so keeping up the
price. In Nevada it was sold at a dollar a pound, and in other places
farther up in the mountains it was doled out, as long as the stock
lasted, at three or four times that price. In many parts the people were
reduced to the utmost distress from the scarcity of food, and the
impossibility of obtaining any fresh supplies. At Downieville, the few
men who had remained there were living on barley, a small stock of which
was fortunately kept there as mule-feed. Several men perished in the
snow in trying to make their escape from distant camps in the mountains;
two or three lost their lives near the ranch of my friend the Italian
hurdy-gurdy player, while carrying flour down to their camps on the
river; and in some places people saved themselves from starvation by
eating dogs and mules.
Men kept pouring into Nevada from all quarters, starved out of their own
camps, and all bearing the same tale of starvation and distress, and
glad to get to a place where food was to be had. The town, being a sort
of harbor of refuge for miners in remote diggings, became very full; and
as no work could be done in such weather, the population had nothing to
do but to amuse themselves the best way they could. A theatrical company
was performing nightly to crowded houses; the gambling saloons were kept
in full blast; and in fact, every day was like a Sunday, from the number
of men one saw idling about, playing cards, and gambling.
Although the severity of the weather interrupted mining operations for
the time, it was nevertheless a subject of rejoicing to the miners
generally, for many localities could only be worked when plenty of water
was running in the ravines, and it was not unusual for men to employ
themselves in the dry season in “throwing up” heaps of dirt, in
anticipation of having plenty of water in winter to wash it. This was
commonly done in flats and ravines where water could only be had
immediately after heavy rains. It was easy to distinguish a heap of
thrown-up dirt from a pile of “tailings,” or dirt already washed, and
property of this sort was quite sacred, the gold being not less safe
there--perhaps safer--than if already in the pocket of the owner. In
whatever place a man threw up a pile of dirt, he might leave it without
any concern for its safety, and remove to another part of the country,
being sure to find it intact when he returned to wash it, no matter how
long he might be absent.