5.2 | 1850s Immigration to California

"The cargo trade with San Francisco grew briskly, but more dramatic changes came when Chinese, also succumbing to gold fever, raced for California. . . In 1849, a total of 300 people went, followed by 450 in 1850 and 2,700 in 1851. Many returned with gold, showing that it really existed. Foreign and Chinese shipping merchants whipped up business by circulating placards, maps, and pamphlets, greatly exaggerating the availability of gold. The numbers peaked in 1852. [British] Governor Bonham announced that 30,000 Chinese had embarked from Hong Kong that year. . . ."

"Despite the fact that the number of passengers to California leveled off after 1852, the stream of people traveling to and fro across the Pacific . . . never ceased. . . . Even after the gold rush, Chinese continued sailing to the US West Coast to work on the railroads, as well as in lumbering, fisheries and agriculture, and a host of other occupations."

"The California legislature passed the Foreign Miners' Tax, a simple code that would compel thousands of miners from Latin America and China to leave the United States. The tax required all miners who were not US citizens to buy a license for the monthly fee of twenty dollars (about four hundred dollars in today’s currency); the tax collector would receive three dollars, and the rest would be split between the county and the state. Irish, English, Canadian, and German miners immediately protested, and the law was quickly rewritten to exempt any 'free white person' or any miner who could become an American citizen. . . .

"At the beginning of 1850, fifteen thousand Mexicans were mining in the southern Sierra Nevada. After the Foreign Miners' Tax was enacted, ten thousand left the gold fields, most to return to Mexico. The town of Columbia shrank from a lively center of ten thousand miners and shopkeepers to an abandoned camp of nine or ten men. . . . By 1860, four-fifths of the Latino population had been driven from the gold country."