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CHINESE GHOST TOWNS OF NORTHERN CALIFORNIAAbandoned Chinese building in Locke, California (Author picture)By Daniel A. MétrauxChinese Ghost Towns of Northern California is published by the Virginia Review of Asian Studies located at Staunton Virginia. ? Daniel A. Métraux (2021).Author: Daniel A. Métraux is Professor Emeritus and Adjunct Professor of Asian Studies at Mary Baldwin University in Virginia. Twice a Fulbright scholar in China, he has written extensively on Japanese and East Asian history, religion, and politics. His most recent book is The Wakamatsu Tea and Silk Colony Farm and the Creation of Japanese America (Lexington Books, 2019), Direct all comments the author at dmetraux@marybaldwin.edu or by mail at:413 Whitehall Ave. Staunton, VA 24401-1671 USADEDICATION: This work is dedicated to my very amiable friend Don Amos who while working for many years with California State Parks did much to recover the rich history of this marvelous state.CONTENTSIntroduction………. (4)The Lasting influence of the Gold Rush………. (7) The Strained Relationship between Chinese and Whites in California in the late 1800s………. (13)Chinese Communities and Agriculture……….. (16)The Chinese in Early Sacramento: The Start of an exceptionally large Chinatown (19)The Ghosts of Gold Mountain……….(21)The Ghosts of Chinese Camp………. (24)Coloma: Chinese Join the First Gold Rush………. (30)Chinese Miners of Fiddletown………. (36)The Chinese Presence in Bodie………. (43)The Chinese Towns of Walnut Grove and Locke………. (50)The Angel Island Immigration Station: America’s Cold Shoulder to the East………. (60)The Beautiful Chinese Temple in Oroville………. (66)Marysville, An Early Mecca for Chinese……….68Epilogue………. (75)Bibliography………. (77)IntroductionWhen one thinks of ethnic Chinese communities throughout North America, considerable groups of Chinese living together in large urban settings fill the imagination. Vibrant Chinatowns in New York, San Francisco, and Vancouver immediately come to mind. One does not consider today of myriad of Chinatowns in small rural towns, but during the late 1800s and early 1900s, there were more than thirty of small towns and cities throughout northern California with their own vivant Chinese communities. Today very few of these Chinatowns have survived in any form and many have become true ghost towns.Chinese immigrants who came to California throughout the Gold Rush decade of the 1850s established Chinatowns because they did not assimilate well into the local population when they first arrived. They did not understand or fit in well with the customs and languages of their new country. They felt more comfortable in a Chinatown setting where they could better relate to their own culture. Chinese markets supplied them with familiar kinds of foods imported from China and a local Taoist temple (Joss House) provided a place for them to worship in their own way. Indeed, the Chinese moved close to each other for mutual support and sheer survival.Tens of thousands of Chinese came to California in the 1850s and 1860s as gold miners and later as workers on the transcontinental railroad. By the 1870s many of them became agricultural workers while creating vast numbers of small-town Chinatowns to service them. When the Gold Rush petered out in the late 1850s, many Chinese stayed in these rural areas working on the railroads and later as the dominant agricultural work force in the state. However, the widespread mechanization of agriculture in California at the turn of the last century reduced the need for much of this labor. Younger better educated Chinese left to find better employment possibilities in larger cities. The result was a massive diaspora a century ago of ethnic Chinese from rural areas to large cities such as San Francisco, Sacramento Los Angeles, and Vancouver. This movement led to the creation of numerous empty Chinese ghost towns throughout northern California whose often empty buildings remain today in varying stages of decay.This booklet offers the reader an opportunity to learn about the many small rural Chinatowns that proliferated across northern California in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Since there were at least thirty of these rural Chinese settlements, I have chosen to write about ten of these settlements as representative samples of their great variety and legacies.Contacts East and WestWhile meeting so many Chinese in California during the 1850s and 1860s may have been a novel experience for so many Americans and Europeans, the United States, Great Britain, and several other European states had long-standing commercial relationships with China. There was great demand in the United States and Europe for such Chinese products as tea, silk, porcelain and furniture. Salem Massachusetts had long been the key American port for the China trade and was home to America’s first millionaires.A growing number of disputes between Chinese exporters and Western traders dominated the headlines throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. While the West craved Chinese goods, the Chinese had no real desire to buy Western products. The result was an acute balance of payments crisis in favor of the Chinese. The West sought to address this trade imbalance by illegally importing vast amounts of opium that quickly created an addiction problem for China. The British imported opium from India while the United States pushed in opium acquired from the Ottoman Empire. Chinese resistance to this smuggling led to the Opium War of 1839-1842 and China’s decline into weakness, poverty and corruption. The Gold RushThe California Gold Rush, which began in January 1848 in the Coloma Valley to the east of Sacramento, brought a torrent of eager prospectors from all over the world. There were white Americans from the East Coast, Germans, Irish and other Europeans, miners from Australia and South America, and tens of thousands of Chinese as well as a handful of Japanese. Many of these new Californians came with the idea of getting lucky, striking it rich, and returning home to enjoy a life of wealth, leisure, and splendor. The most important goal of Chinese miners was to acquaint enough money to buy their own piece of land in China. Only a very few of these prospectors realized this dream, but most did not. Many of the prospectors decided to become permanent residents of California. Later in the mid- to late-1860s, many more Chinese immigrated to California to work on the transcontinental railroad.Many of these early Chinese immigrants initially made their way to rural mining areas where they either looked for gold or found service work. When mining began to peter out in the late 1850s, as many as twenty thousand Chinese found jobs constructing the transcontinental railway from Sacramento to Promontory Point, Utah, but by 1869 that work was done. Many Chinese then found work in agriculture in the Central Valley and elsewhere. Several small Chinatowns formed first in several mining areas and later in agricultural zones to meet the many needs of Chinese miners and farm workers operating near each town center. These rural Chinatowns along with a brief Japanese settlement near Coloma thrived during the late 1800s and early 1900s, but the mechanization of Californian agriculture in the early years of the twentieth century coupled with the economic recession of 1893 forced many farm workers to move on to new livelihoods in larger cities. Their departure led to the gradual near to complete abandonment of many of these rural Chinatowns by the 1920s. Today a good number of these settlements have become virtual ghost towns—a cluster of buildings housing the spirits of the thousands of Chinese and later Japanese who a century or more ago made northern California a mecca of international life.Visiting Chinese Camp, A True Chinese Ghost TownOne day back in the spring of 2007, our daughter, Katie Métraux, then a historic preservationist working for California State Parks, took me to the largely deserted village of Chinese Camp, California. Located near Columbia and Jamestown, California, and a bit south of Yosemite National Park, it is the quintessential Chinese ghost town that served as the inspiration for this booklet. I Main Street at Chinese Camp (Author picture)walked down a nearly empty Main Street with its ruins of classical Chinese-style buildings like ones I had seen the year before in small villages in rural China. My subsequent visits to Chinese Camp led to exploration of other Chinese ghost towns across northern California. Since then I have visited Locke, the only authentic Chinese village in the United States, and its neighbor, Walnut Grove, Fiddletown with its marvelous Chinese store museum, Coloma with its Chinese stores, Bodie with its busy Chinese past, and Angel Island with its beautifully restored Immigration Station. I also soon found myself participating in the writing of the history of the Wakamatsu Tea & Silk Colony Farm near Coloma, the first Japanese settlement in North America (1869-1871).What amazed me about these experiences was the realization that there had been a proliferation of Chinese and even Japanese settlements across rural northern California during the second half of the nineteenth century, a fact that is little known today. These East Asian settlements were not confined to big cities like Los Angeles, Sacramento, and San Francisco. Many small villages and towns had their own Chinatowns where native-born Chinese lived side-by-side with white Californians. There were occasional bouts of violence between Chinese and white neighbors, but by and large, both communities lived peacefully together. Later waves of Japanese encountered racist attacks by Whites, but even the early Wakamatsu settlers were also greeted warmly in 1869 and 1870 by their white neighbors. Many of these rural East Asian communities survived for only a few decades in the late 1800s and early1900s. Most of the early settlers eventually died off or moved away by the early 1900s, leaving their buildings and memories behind. This short study consists of a series of essays on a few of these former Chinese communities. The hope is that the remnants and memories of these and other Asian communities across northern California will survive to remind us of a time when this region was a hub of international life and activity.The Lasting Influence of the Gold RushThe influx of Chinese to North America starting in the early 1850s was part of a much larger mid- to late-nineteenth century diaspora of Chinese to Southeast Asia, Australia, Hawaii, South America and elsewhere. Historian Peter C. Y. Leung writes:From 1840 to 1870, China suffered series of natural and political disasters that impoverished the country. The natural disasters included overpopulation, periodic floods and droughts, and resultant famine. The political disasters included losing the Opium War with England in 1842 and the Arrow War with England and France in 1856. Because of these two defeats, increasing areas of China were opened to Western trade. Opium smuggling became widespread. In 1851, the Taiping Rebellion against the Imperial government broke out.The decline and final collapse of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) caused many thousands of Chinese to emigrate overseas in search of a more stable life. The Taiping Rebellion, which raged between the early 1850s to the 1860s, is said to have taken the lives of over twenty-five million Chinese and to have destroyed much of the most productive agricultural land in central China. It was the world’s greatest calamity of the nineteenth century. Without any land or any prospects for the future, many young men were willing to leave their cherished homeland and families by going abroad where they might have a chance to gain a decent livelihood-- a desperate move in desperate times. Historian Iris Chang analyzes the motivations that drove so many Chinese to leave their native land for the alien landscape of California:The gold rush was born out of a 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 demeaning routine 0f 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. A vast majority of the Chinese who came to California in the mid to late 1800s emigrated from a small area in Guangdong Province in southern China. Most were from a four-county are often referred to as Sze Yup –a rural area near Guangzhou (Canton). The flood of Chinese sailing to California was impressive, but Southeast Asia was the destination of choice for most Chinese sojourners. Today almost every Southeast Asian country has a sizable ethnic Chinese population. Ethnic Chinese totally dominate Singapore and make up almost a third of the population of Malaysia. There are also many ethnic Chinese today in the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, Burma, and Thailand. The economic success of many Chinese throughout Southeast Asia has often roused the jealousy and anger of native populations.Tens of thousands of Chinese made their way to North America arriving in San Francisco and Victoria, British Columbia. The California Chinese immediately fanned out to the various mining sites including places like Coloma, Chinese Camp and Fiddletown. The result was a wide scattering of Chinese in rural areas in northern California.Table 1: Estimated population of Chinese in the United States 1850-1900 (About 80% lived in California after 1870)1850: 4,018 1860 34,933 1870: 63,199 1880 105,465 1890 107,458 1900: 89,863Source: others from around the world, the Chinese joined the California Gold Rush in hopes of finding quick wealth to take back home. There were only a very few Chinese in California in early 1848, but by 1850 there were already over four thousand. Soon their numbers began to grow exponentially, especially when many more Chinese came in the 1860s to work on the transcontinental railroad. There were over 20,000 Chinese in California by 1855 and many tens of thousands more in the years to come. There were close to 125,000 Chinese in California and elsewhere throughout the 1870s. Close to 92 percent of the Chinese in North America were young to middle-aged men.\Many Chinese migrant workers encountered considerable prejudice in North America, especially by whites who occupied the lower economic rungs of society and whose livelihood was threatened by hardworking Chinese who were willing and able to take menial jobs at low pay. The first few Chinese immigrants experienced little discrimination when they arrived in small numbers starting in the 1840s, but anti-Chinese feelings rose by the mid -1850s when a virtual flood of Chinese began arriving to partake in the gold rush. The large influx of Chinese in the 1850s and 1860s brought about many cases of violence by white gangs against Chinese. One of the worst assaults on Chinese occurred in late October, 1871 in Los Angeles when a mob of about 500 white and mestizo persons entered Chinatown and attacked, robbed, and murdered Chinese residents. Many Chinese were shot while others were brutally lynched. Many other anti-Chinese riots occurred throughout California and in other parts of the West as the Chinese population continued to grow.Much of the history of ethnic Chinese in the West during the late 1800s and early 1900s focuses on the brutality, discrimination, and other hardships they faced. Although this research is certainly accurate, it fails to give the whole picture. There were more than a few communities where Chinese were able to live peaceful settled lives, generally tolerated by and in some cases developing good relationships with their white neighbors. This work looks at several such villages in rural northern California where Caucasians and Chinese lived in relative peace for many decades in the late 1800s and early 1900s. At first, virtually all gold-seeking Chinese in California were engaged in placer mining. As comparative latecomers, Chinese often took over claims that had been abandoned by more impatient white miners. Some Chinese did indeed strike it rich, but most quite literally managed to just scrape by. Nevertheless, Chinese had come to California in such great numbers that there were few areas that did not have a Chinese community, however briefly.There was an abundance of Chinese camps throughout the Gold Country in northern California which continued to grow in the early 1850s even though Chinese immigrants often found life hard. Life in the United States was hardly ideal, but it may have been better than staying in China. There were only a few Chinese women, and of those many were prostitutes. To make matters worse, the state imposed a Foreign Miner’s Tax – mostly directed at the Chinese – at $3 or $4 per month. By 1877, there were over 63,000 Chinese immigrants in the United States, 77 percent of whom were in California. The tax totaled more than $5 million, almost one quarter of the state’s revenue.Because of the Foreign Miners’ Tax, many Chinese eventually abandoned mining for other pursuits including, for a while, railroading and agriculture—as noted below. The Chinese laundry was ubiquitous in towns throughout all of California. Some Chinese found employment through domestic service while many others in the Coloma area provided labor for area wineries.When the Gold Rush came to a gradual halt in the late 1850s, there was by then a large Chinese population scattered across rural areas in search of alternative work. Many Chinese worked for the Central Pacific railway during the late 1860s, constructing its track bed over the Sierra Nevada mountain range on to Promontory Point in Utah where in 1869 the Union Pacific moving from the East and the Central Pacific moving from the West finally met. When railway jobs declined after 1869, many Chinese turned to agricultural pursuits to make their living. They proved to be such skilled and hard workers that by the late 1870s up to ninety percent of farm workers in the central valleys of California were Chinese.Historian Iris Chang writes: These Chinese formed the backbone of western farm production. They sowed crops, plowed the soil, and ended up producing two-thirds of the vegetables in California. Thanks to Chinese sweat, fruit shipments soared – from nearly two million pounds in the early 1870s to twelve million a decade and a half later. As the Chinese poured into farm work, grain swiftly surpassed mining as the largest source of revenue for the state. By the 1870s, California had become the wheat capital of the United States.While Chinese participation in California agriculture grew, other Chinese were coming together across northern California in small Chinatowns in rural areas to service the needs of local farm workers and miners. They ran small stores, pharmacies, gaming halls, brothels, opium dens and other centers catering specifically to the surrounding Chinese farm population. These small Chinatowns were in such places as Chinese Camp, Coloma, Fiddletown, Walnut Grove, Rio Vista, Isleton, and Marysville and Locke. The need for massive Chinese farm labor began to decline by the late 1880s and early 1890s as California agriculture became increasingly mechanized. When farm jobs began to increasingly rapidly diminish in the early years of the last century, Chinese agricultural workers began leaving rural areas in greater and greater numbers. They headed to large cities such as Los Angeles, San Francisco and even Sacramento in search of new work. Many of the Chinese workers in the rural Chinatowns also closed shop and moved to the big cities. A few elderly Chinese remained in the old rural Chinatowns, but when they left or died, their old settlements in some cases became ghost towns while other settlements simply disappeared without a trace. The rural element of Chinese in California melted into urban centers, the largest of which was the Chinatown in San Francisco. Indeed, San Francisco was home to almost a quarter of all Chinese in California by the end of the nineteenth century.These Chinese ghost towns remain today as reminders that Chinese played an important role in the development of the state. Like many other immigrant groups, they formed their own communities that allowed them to slowly adapt themselves to a very foreign culture, but as their grandchildren and great-grandchildren became educated and better assimilated into American society, they moved away with the result that their older communities began to fade away. Another factor that has led to the declines and eventual abandonment of these communities is that Chinese immigration was greatly curtailed by the various Chinese exclusion acts that began in 1882. New waves of immigrants that might have replaced the original Chinese never came, so the original Chinese communities faded when the younger Chinese moved on. Chinese immigrants who have come since restrictions on Asian immigration were lifted in the mid-1960s have gone to larger metropolitan areas like New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. There is no indication of their returning to rural Chinatowns or their desire to do so.Nevertheless, these smaller communities serve as clear reminders that tens of thousands of Chinese came to the American West in the latter years of the nineteenth century and that while all of them had to work hard to survive, at least some were not forced to confront the violent reception of some of their peers.The Strained Relationship between Chinese and Whites in California in the late 1800sWhen news of the California Gold Rush reached Canton in 1848, many thousands of Chinese boarded boats to “Gum Shan,” or “Gold Mountain.”? Many of the Chinese made their way to the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains to such towns as Sonora, Coloma, Fiddletown, Columbia, Jamestown, and Chinese Camp where they staked their claims and built significant Chinese communities.? Most Chinese were young men looking for a quick strike?so that they could return to China, buy a plot of land, and start their own families.?? This was a man’s world, lonely, and very isolated, surrounded by an often hostile white population, but the dream of wealth and memories of the misery of life in China gave them incentives to stay.Unfortunately, many white Americans feared being overwhelmed by the influx of Asians and resented the fact that Chinese and other Asians would work hard for lower wages, thus threatening their own welfare. A severe nationwide depression in the mid-1870s made jobs hard to find for all. Special taxes and restrictive laws began to target only the Chinese. In 1882 Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Acts, legally suspending further immigration and denying them the basic rights of citizenship that were granted to other races or nationalities. Individual cruelties and mob massacres in "Chinatowns" across the United States illustrated the hatred that had infiltrated white America.Jean Pfaelzer, a professor of English and Asian Studies at the University of Delaware, has produced a book, Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans, where she carefully documents the efforts at “ethnic cleansing” against Chinese settlers in the West. Pfaelzer depicts in vivid detail how angry whites working together with malicious politicians, law officials and journalists wreaked a savage and violent war against often defenseless Chinese settlers. There was indeed a contagion of violence in the late 1800s and early 1900s against Chinese including major massacres in Los Angeles (1871), Rock Springs, Wyoming (1885) and Douglas Bar, Oregon (1885). Chinese were herded out of towns across California, although there were a few towns where relations with Chinese went well. The Sacramento Delta, a major population center for Chinese agricultural workers a century ago, was one of the few areas that escaped much of this violence. Professor Pfaelzer also describes how some Chinese fought back, often through the courts, to gain some security and civil rights.Economics played a key role in the vicious attacks on Chinese. During the early days of the Gold Rush, when gold was plentiful and miners were still relatively few, Chinese miners were left alone, especially since Chinese often mined areas already abandoned by white miners. This tolerance did not last long when gold became less plentiful in the late 1850s at a time when new immigrants, especially Germans and Irish, flooded into the region and became increasingly resentful of the non-white population, especially the Chinese.The Civil War also played a role in increasing tensions. The war caused a cessation of the flow of any manufactured goods from East to West and led to the growth of some manufacturing in California. The shortage of labor led to high wages in manufacturing, but the end of the war and the extension of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 led to a flood of immigrants and manufactured goods from the East. Prices declined as did the demand for labor. Lower wages in turn led to fury against Chinese workers who were willing to work harder for longer hours and lower pay. A national depression in the mid-1870s led to greater unemployment and calls for excluding future Chinese immigration. The 1870s also brought growing agitation against the use of drugs and the presence of brothels in Chinatowns across the West. Diana L. Ahmad, a historian at the University of Missouri-Rolla, in her book The Opium Debate and Chinese Exclusion Laws in the Nineteenth-Century American West demonstrates that today’s war on drugs and drug addiction is not the first in American history. An opium-smoking epidemic in the latter half of the nineteenth century helped to fuel outrage against Chinese immigrants and played a key role in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and other later legislation against the entry of Chinese into the United States. She notes that opium usage was denounced far and wide as a major social and public health problem, especially in the West. Opium addiction had become a major problem in China by the mid-1800s and opium dens were a common feature of Chinese enclaves throughout the United States.Although only a small minority of Chinese immigrants were involved in any way in the opium business, a common public image of Chinese was of a sleazy people deeply involved in the drug and prostitution trades. When a growing number of white Americans took up opium, some white Americans perceived the drug to be a genuine threat to the stability of American middle-class life. The fact remains that the smoking variety of opium, unlike its medical relative, found its way into the United States with the Chinese who arrived at the start of the California gold rush. It is also a fact that in addition to building restaurants, general stores and laundries, the Chinese also operated opium dens. Although initially employed as a pain reliever, smoking opium soon became a recreational drug, first among Chinese and then among many white Americans. Some physicians, journalists, religious and political leaders as well as many self-appointed monitors of morality expressed deep concern about the spread of the drug. They believed that smoking opium had real side effects such as insanity, sexual promiscuity, and non-productivity. Indeed, as Ahmad notes, these concerned Americans considered smoking-opium detrimental to everything they held dear. One of the ways to achieve their goal to remove opium was to eliminate the immigration of Chinese because many in this group believed the Chinese, who imported the narcotic, were responsible for seducing white Americans with it. Ahmad also depicts the negative image of prostitution in the Chinese communities of the West. A majority of the early Chinese immigrants were young men who lived in bachelor communities. Many of the Chinese women who came to the U.S. were prostitutes, in effect, sex slaves who had no escape from the drudgery of their lives. Brothels and opium dens were places where single Chinese men could find an escape from loneliness and everyday tensions. Many of these small Chinatowns possessed at least one opium den and brothel and one could find these in scattered communities of Chinese all over the West, even in isolated areas in Wyoming and in small towns in Montana. In the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in northern California, there were close to three thousand Chinese miners near the village of Sonora in the early and mid-1850s. When white Americans began to visit these brothels and dens, others denounced Chinese as a threat to the moral character of the nation. As one Nevada-based writer wrote his former Senator in 1901: “No civilized home can exist, when brought into contact with the degradation of the Orient.” The Chinese were a “festering sore. We have seen the youth of this country enticed into their dens of vice and ruined morally and physically.” The letter ended wishing the Senator “God-speed” in his efforts to “protect the American manhood from the threatened peril.” Despite these negative feelings against Chinese and other later Asian arrivals, there were also some communities where Chinese and Whites lived in proximity of each other without resorting to any real sustained attacks against each other. They grew to tolerate and in time to respect and help each other in times of need. There were other instances where economic necessity brought the two groups together and mandated cooperation. One saw examples of this phenomenon in the huge and incredibly rich Sacramento River Delta and in the foothills of the Sierras where Chinese farm labor and tenant farming became essential ingredients in the pre-World War II prosperity and growth of the entire population.Chinese Communities and AgricultureThe Sacramento River Delta has long been one of the richest farming areas in the United States. The region’s growth as a major agricultural area began in the 1850s and expanded rapidly in the 1860s and 1870s. Usage of the region’s fertile land required the building of massive levees – and in those days much of the work was done manually. The decline in mining and the completion of the first transcontinental railroad meant that there were many thousands of young Chinese looking for work. White landowners desperately needed Chinese labor to build the levees and to help farm the land. The Chinese had an excellent reputation for working hard for lower wages. It became common for white land developers to work closely with an English-speaking Chinese with a plan for a levee and to have the Chinese foreman then hire a certain number of Chinese to do the actual building. Interestingly, the Central Pacific Railroad Company’s tradition of Chinese labor encouraged other entrepreneurs to hire the seemingly tireless Chinese workers to work on other major construction projects including swampland reclamation and levee building which helped to convert the Sacramento River Delta into some of the richest farmland in the world.By the time much of the land had been reclaimed in the 1880s, many thousands of Chinese had become agricultural workers and / or tenant farmers. White farmers owned hundreds and even thousands of acres of land used to produce a wide range of agricultural goods ranging from tomatoes to asparagus, potatoes, wheat, and fruit. The farmers hired Chinese to work the land and soon became dependent on Chinese labor to make agriculture work. Some farmers leased significant less productive stretches of their land to Chinese tenant farmers who began growing great amounts of agricultural products and who in turn hired other Chinese and on rare occasions white Americans as farm laborers. There soon developed a complex network of mutual dependence. Chinese needed jobs and were willing to work hard while the White farmers could not survive without Chinese labor.The land leased by the Chinese tenant farmers was rarely if ever high-quality land. Their leased land included isolated tracts in the Delta which were out of reach of the mega-farmers, swampy areas which were too bothersome for the American farmers to deal with, and wooded land of the periphery of the Delta. Chinese leased land to grow Irish potatoes, onions, beans, and other vegetables. The tenant farmers could not become rich from all their travail, but the land provided them with food as well as enough income to survive. The white farmers, on the other hand, made some rent money for land which was not of much use to them. Historian Peter C.Y. Leung writes:American farmers and landowners in the Delta have been concerned with their land and crops. They realized that Chinese labor was needed on their ranches and farms. Therefore, they have traditionally been reasonably sympathetic to the Chinese. The contact between Chinese and Americans was most direct in the case of tenant farmers who lived on the American ranches, and Chinese merchants, labor contractors, and foremen, who acted as intermediaries between Americans and the Chinese workers. American farmers did not have direct contact with the Chinese laborers, since the latter did not speak English well and went from job to job, ranch to ranch. Their work was supervised by Chinese foremen and labor contractors.Chinese tenant farmers and their families lived on the ranches, however, so the opportunity for concern and communication was greater. Tenant farmers’ children and the American farmers’ children sometimes played together. Some ranch owners got to like the tenants’ children so well that they helped provide the tenants’ children with educational opportunities. Many offered the tenants “permanent” tenant’s rights.Life for the Chinese farm laborers and tenant farmers was certainly not too easy, but it was not too harsh either. [The town of] Locke’s residents had to work hard, but they could get by and except during the Depression, they could even save money if they did not gamble too much. Their style of living was reasonably healthy. Although most lacked families in the Delta, their fellow workers were usually congenial, and whites in the area maintained reasonably friendly relations. Finally, it was possible to advance from a farm laborer to a tenant farmer or even small businessman or landowner.Mechanization and assimilation, however, eventually brought an end to the huge Chinese presence in the Delta region. A century ago. large-scale farming required the presence of myriads of farm workers and small-scale tenant farming was feasible for farmers willing to live quite simple lives. Large scale mechani-zation of agriculture in the early 1900s, however, lessened the need for many farm workers and made small-scale farming untenable. The result was a rapidly accelerating decline in the number of Chinese involved in agriculture in the Delta and the development of thirty or more Chinese ghost towns across northern California.Chinese in Early Sacramento: The Start of a large ChinatownWhen aspiring Chinese gold miners arrived in California in the 1850s, the most popular landing place was San Francisco. Those who moved on to the rural gold mines often took a steamer as far inland as Sacramento and then made their way to places like Coloma, Chinese Camp and Fiddletown. According to the Chinese American Museum of Northern California in Marysville:Sacramento developed into a thriving river port during the gold rush as the entry point to California’s northern gold mines. Located upriver from San Francisco (Daifow or Big City), Sacramento’s Chinatown or Yee Fow (Second Port or City) was one of the first Chinatowns built in early California. The strategic location of Yee Fow enabled the community to grow quickly into a trade and commercial center for the early Chinese pioneers. Sacramento buttressed its position as an important supply and labor center when it was named as the western terminal point of the Transcontinental railroad. The many Chinese who helped build the railroad settled there which resulted in a large expansion of the original Chinatown. Yee Fow was soon a bustling, dynamic part of the state capitol. The Sacramento Chinatown was established downtown near the Sacramento River along I Street. Restaurants, general stores, laundries, hotels and opera houses found a home in Yee Fow. Later, as the railroad replaced river steamers, the meaning of the name Yee Fow changed from second port to that of being the second most important Chinatown in California after San Francisco. The combination of the above factors meant the Sacramento Chinese American community was often at the forefront of assimilation for all Chinese Americans. For far too long the narrative of the history of Chinese Americans has been written from a westward frontier perspective that marginalized the Chinese. This may have been understandable during a time when China itself was marginalized. But with China’s re-emergence on the world scene, China’s narrative has changed and that of the Chinese in America must, of necessity, also change.Although they were not recorded in the first official census of 1850, the special state census taken 1852 showed there were 814 Chinese (804 males and ten females) in Sacramento that year. The 1860 census indicates that over 600 of the 814 Chinese lived in the city proper. The Chinese population in the city of Sacramento increased to 1,371 in 1870 and reached a peak 1,781 in 1880. Sacramento’s Chinatown and the Future. Sacramento’s Chinatown was an important Chinatown often leading the effort to assimilate Chinese Americans into the majority society. Yee Fow had a different history than the more famous Chinatown in San Francisco. San Francisco was the center of the anti-Chinese movement which deeply influenced the treatment Chinese Americans received there. In San Francisco, Chinese Americans were forced to go to a segregated school system and live in a ghetto with strict boundaries. It was possible for a resident to live a lifetime in San Francisco’s Chinatown without going beyond its boundaries.Different Waves of Chinese Immigration in the 1850s and 1860s It is important to note that during the 1850s and 1860s there were two different waves of Chinese entering the United States and moving into California and surrounding areas in the West. The first wave came in the 1850s and consisted mainly of young men interested in mining for gold. Some of them eventually returned to China, but many stayed. The second wave came in the mid to late 1860s hoping to find good paying jobs on the construction of the transcontinental railway that culminated with great celebrations in May 1869.Stanford Professor Gordon Chang, author of The Ghosts of Gold Mountain, has written a superb in depth study of the twenty or more thousands of Chinese who constructed the railway from Sacramento over the towering High Sierra mountain rangeThe meeting of two huge locomotives on May 10, 1869 of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific Railways at Promontory Point in Utah is one of the most notable events in American history. Now for the first time the United States was connected by rail from coast to coast and the journey from New York to San Francisco, which before would have taken many grueling months, could now be comfortably completed in less than a week. Fortunately, for all those involved in the construction of the transcontinental railway, virtually all the construction was completed by a virtual army of over twenty thousand Chinese workers. Their hard work, reliable service and great ingenuity allowed them to complete the building of the railway from Sacramento to Promontory Point in slightly less than four years. They had to traverse over and through the High Sierra Mountains and through the harsh hot deserts of Nevada and Utah to reach their destination over a course of nearly 900 miles. Their story has almost totally disappeared from history, but author Gordon Chang, a professor of History and Asian Studies at Stanford University, has pieced together a copious history of the work of these Chinese in his recent book, The Ghosts of Gold Mountain.For five years from 1864 to May 1869, Chinese railroad workers constituted by far the largest single workforce in any American industry to that date, a figure not surpassed in numbers until the Industrial Revolution in the late nineteenth century. The Chinese army of workers represented about ninety percent of the laborers hired by the Central Pacific. They held virtually position available. They were engineers, laborers, foremen, contractors, masons, cooks, medical practitioners, carpenters, and teamsters. “Thousands more Chinese associated with them as friends and relatives, as part of the immense supply chain that provisioned them for years, and, away from the track in their off-time, as gamblers, opium smokers, prostitutes, and devout worshippers of the gods and spirits who watched over them in their perilous work.” Chang traces the origins of these Chinese to their distant rural villages located in the Pearl River delta near Guangzhou (Canton) in Guangdong Province in southeastern China. They lived in small villages in four counties (Taishan, Kaiping, Enping, and Xinhui) known collectively as the Siyi counties. Their ancestors had lived there peacefully in small farming communities for centuries, but their tranquil way of life was suddenly devastated by intense conflicts including the Opium War of 1839-1842 and the Taiping Rebellion of the 1850s and 1860s that killed perhaps as many as twenty-five million Chinese.Beyond the fact that there were as many as twenty thousand Chinese railway workers employed at various times in the late 1860s, we know little about them as individuals. The workers sent tens of thousands of letters back home to their families in China, but very few of these letters have survived. Chang fortunately found an advertisement written in Chinese in China urging young men to go to California to work on the railway. Apparently, many Chinese accepted the offer and made the arduous journey to the United States.The owners of the Pacific Central Railroad began searching for railway workers in 1864 and 1865. At first, they were reluctant to hire Chinese, but when they had a hard time finding other reliable persons and saw how hard and diligently the first few Chinese worked, increasing numbers of Chinese were soon employed. The white owners and managers would hire a Chinese foreman who spoke some English and would leave it up to him to hire the laborers. The owners rarely if ever kept records of their many employees. They simply gave the foremen enough money to pay a set number of workers. The amount of pay was sufficient to attract a large pool of laborers, though at one point the Chinese did go on strike to demand successfully for higher pay and shorter hours. Chang estimates that about a thousand workers died before the work was completed, but we will never know the exact number of deaths.It takes several trips deep into the High Sierras to fully appreciate the difficult task facing railway engineers and Chinese laborers as they worked to create a usable route through the Sierras. The mountains rise sharply and suddenly from the floor of the Central Valley and building any mode of transportation over the Sierras is a monumental challenge. The high altitudes of the Sierras – at times over nine thousand feet—make for a barren terrain and a vastly different climate than in nearby Sacramento and there are very few passes to ease travel. The Chinese had to bore many tunnels through hard rock and on the sides of the mountains. They also devised a system of sheds covering the tracks to keep them free of snow in the colder months. The engineering genius of the railway’s architects and the hard-demanding work performed mainly by Chinese workers brought about this miraculous event. Bad weather frequently slowed progress. Vast amounts of snowfall from October to April further compounded the difficulties facing the intrepid builders of the railway through the Sierras. Dangerous snowstorms could arrive at any time without warning. Once in June 2010 my daughter Katie and I left a sweltering Sacramento for a day of fishing at Silver Lake high in the Sierras near Lake Tahoe. When we reached an elevation of eight thousand feet, we found ourselves amidst a blinding snowstorm that took us several grueling hours to escape. When the Chinese worked in winter, they had to clear snowbanks as high as thirty feet. Many Chinese became sudden victims of sudden unexpected avalanches.Chang has written a brilliant study of the Chinese railway workers of the late 1860s. Drawing on fading family memories, government records, archaeological reports and contemporary newspaper accounts, Chang is able to reconstruct their difficult work and social organization that underlay it, with younger workers led and organized by older mainly Chinese foremen and labor brokers. We learn about the complex camp life of the workers, the horrific conditions of Chinese women who had to work as tireless sex slaves for the young male laborers, and the loneliness of the workers living in an alien culture far away from home. Chang also presents a sad picture of the racism the Chinese faced from many whites in California although a surprising number of influential whites showed deep appreciation and respect for the work of the railway workers. The Ghosts of Chinese Camp Unlike early Sacramento with its early anti-Chinese incidents of violence, many whites and Chinese managed to live side by side in a few small towns with a minimum of violence. Chinese Camp was one such place. As a scholar and teacher of East Asian history and culture, the very idea of a Chinese ghost town in California generated great excitement for me. It was thus with great anticipation that I spent many hours in May 2007 exploring the remains of “Chinese Camp" deep in the heart of Gold Rush country in northern California. A return visit in May 2010 permitted deeper insights into the lives of the thousands of Chinese who once sought their fortunes there. Any traveler today just passing by the town on one’s way to nearby Yosemite National Park would see nothing but a bunch of old decaying and deserted buildings – it is not a place of great beauty – but if you look at the old iron doors at the fronts of what a century or more ago used to be an assortment of Chinese businesses, it is possible to imagine what this place was like when the streets were humming with several thousand Chinese miners.According to the Encyclopedia of Forlorn PlacesChinese camp was settled during the 1849 gold rush. Many of the first residents of Chinese Camp were Chinese miners who had been evicted from nearby towns. Various sources suggest that the population of Chinese Camp was as high as 5,000. The census of 1870 counted 2,2290, making Chinese Camp the second largest town in Tuolumne County at that time, behind Sonora. The census of 1860 does not distinguish Chinese Camp, but the 1870 census indicates that 1968 whites were counted in Chinese Camp in 1860. In 1870 the white population of Chinese Camp was 1,540 and the Chinese population only 664. T’s clear that the population of Chinese Camp was substantial and mixed.Chinese Camp was one of the largest and most significant early Chinese settlements in California. It started as a placer-mining center settled by Chinese miners as early as 1849. There was extensive mining of the area by Chinese throughout the 1850s, and piles of soil and gravel turned over by the miners are still visible in every nearby gulch. The placer mines are credited with producing $2.5 million in gold.The idea that Chinese Camp is indeed a ghost town has inspired descriptions on local tourist internet sites. The following quote promotes Chinese Camp as a place where one can surely encounter the spiritual world:Northern California is home to several eerily beautiful ghost towns. However, few will give you the creeps as much as this abandoned town in Tuolumne County. Chinese Camp contains the remnants of an old mining town from California’s Gold Rush days. Today, the dilapidated structures look like they are a second always from crumbling into nothing. Although there is something oddly beautiful about this place, the town’s creepy atmosphere is bound to send a chill or two down your spine. In fact, some consider this place the most haunted ghost town in Northern California. There is only one way to find out for yourself whether that is true or not and you will want to see it for yourself.Ruins of abandoned Chinese stores dot Main Street in Chinese Camp California Today there is extraordinarily little life in Chinese Camp, at least life outside the supernatural realm! The Chinese buildings and many other older structures lie abandoned. Several newer dwellings on the outskirts of town house a few remaining residents, but there are no Chinese left here and one cannot even buy a dish of chow mein! The last surviving Chinese left in the 1920s, leaving behind one of the most significant Chinese ghost towns in the United States. The Beginnings of Chinese CampAt its start in the early 1850s, the streets of Chinese Camp were randomly settled with store tents, consisting mostly of pine boughs with canvas stretched over the top and dirt floors. The first substantial building was an adobe structure completed in 1851 which served as a store. A Catholic church, St. Xavier, first constructed in 1854, still stands today – in good shape, but clearly abandoned, sitting forlornly on a hill outside the village. The Chinese later built several distinctly Chinese buildings including three Joss houses, traditional places for worshipping a variety of indigenous Chinese deities. By 1859 Chinese Camp had settled into what contemporary accounts say was a “law-abiding and respectable community. At its peak in the mid-1850s perhaps as many as 5,000 Chinese lived in the village and its environs – a population at that time far greater than in Sacramento.The abandoned St. Xavier Catholic Church sits on the outskirts of Chinese Camp. (Author picture)The village continued to grow throughout the 1850s and due to its large Chinese population, it quickly became known by such names as Chinee, Chinese Diggins, and Chinese Camp. The only reminder of its very first name, Camp Washington, lies in the main road through town, Washington Street. The village’s location and size made Chinese Camp the center of transport-tation for a large area. Several stages and freight lines made regular daily stops there on their way to Sacramento and other points. Today a plaque on the tumble-down and long deserted Wells Fargo office honors a stagecoach driver who connected the village by coach to such points as Sacramento, Carson City, and Salt Lake City. Later a railway spur was built near the town and a station south of Chinese Camp served the community until it was shut down in the 1930s.The Original US Post Office built in 1854. Architecture is Chinese in styleThe Dynamics of Life in Chinese CampChinese camp boasted two distinct communities in the late 1800s. The white community flourished through this period with a selection of stores, saloons, hotels, and the like. The distinctly separate Chinese community had a variety of stores, places of worship, gambling halls, and bordellos. The two communities existed amicably side by side and both underwent a decline in the late 1800s and early 1900s as the Chinese population died out and whites and Chinese gradually moved away. Today the town which more than a century ago boasted several thousand inhabitants has less than 150 residents. Abandoned homes that dot the landscape testify to Chinese Camp’s evolution into a ghost town.Most of the Chinese who came to California and Chinese Camp were unskilled and uneducated laborers. Many found solace through the “Six Companies,” Chinese benevolent associations who helped Chinese survive in a very alien environment. Most large business transactions made by Chinese were done through the auspices of the “Six Companies” (Tong). The Companies often contracted for large bodies of workers to work at various construction sites. These Companies simply acted a clearing houses for all sorts of transactions among the Chinese, they could handle affairs for bewildered newcomers more satisfactorily through such associations than they could individually. Four of these companies were represented in Chinese Camp.Life could be rough for the Chinese in the early days and the danger was not always from gangs of whites. In 1856 Chinese Camp was the site of one of the earliest Tong wars in the gold fields when members of Tan Woo Tong faced off against Sam Yam Tong members. About one thousand men scuffled; fortunately, casualties were light due to the preferred choice of weapons-swords. When American lawmen finally intervened to halt the wanton bloodshed, there were four Chinese dead and a few more noticeably wounded. Oddly, there is little evidence of violence by whites against Chinese here. Indeed, Chinese and their white neighbors seemed to have lived lived peacefully and harmoniously with a minimum of friction for the better part of eight decades.When the gold mines petered out in the decade after the Gold Rush, many of the Chinese miners moved on, but a few brave Chinese hung on until the last two elderly survivors left by train to Chinatown in San Francisco in the late 1920s. They left behind a remarkably preserved ghost town and, one must presume, the ghosts of many lonely Chinese miners who died there, their dreams of returning to China with pockets full of gold permanently thwarted.One of the last Chinese living in Chinese camp was an old woman known as “Duck Mary.” She came as a “slave girl” in the 1860s and later became known for the band of ducks that she cared for and which followed her everywhere. She was in her 80s and survived on her own along with a few other very elderly Chinese. By the mid-1920s concerned members of the white community, worried that the Chinese were not getting the best of care, arranged to send them by train to San Francisco where there were more people to care for them. Eventually “Duck Mary” and her small coterie of compatriots boarded a nearby train and left Chinese Camp forever. Today anybody is free to walk the ancient streets of the old town. A few residents live on the outskirts of town, but most of the buildings stand empty in the blazing sun perhaps only occupied by the remaining Chinese ghosts. Main Street is an oddity – it must have been the heart of the Chinese community there, but all the old buildings including the old Wells Fargo office stand empty in a state of virtual collapse. Many decades have passed since anybody lived there. However, a stone and brick post office dating from 1854 is still in use and the church is still standing.Ironically, the village’s modern elementary school is built in the shape of an old Chinese pagoda with a gaily painted Chinese-style roof. It seems that the area’s largely white population enjoy this quaint reminder of the village’s lively past. Chinese Camp’s one tiny general store and saloon sells large blankets and Chinese Camp Elementary School in 2020 (Author picture)rugs festooned with Chinese looking tigers. The Chinese have all departed, but their memory lingers on.Coloma: Chinese Join the First Gold RushThe great California Gold Rush that began in 1848 is one of the major events in American history. It was the explosive spark that ignited the westward migration of millions of people that continues to this day. It also led to the creation of one of the first Chinese communities in California in Coloma in 1849. Yet, oddly, the spot where gold was first discovered, a place of great natural beauty, is today a quiet state park that is far off the beaten track. And, until quite recently, the very spot where gold was first spotted was marked by a mud-covered hard-to-read old sign ignored by many visitors.South Branch of the American River at Coloma (Author picture)The Discovery of GoldThere is no doubt that the 1848 discovery of gold in the Coloma Valley in California about 40 to 45 miles east of Sacramento triggered a massive migration that led to statehood only two years later. The story is well-known. John Sutter (1803-1880), an immigrant from Switzerland, owned a vast agricultural empire in the Sacramento Valley. Mexico still controlled California when Sutter first arrived. He served as a functionary in the Mexican administration until the American takeover in 1848. He formed a partnership with James W. Marshall (1810-1885) to enter the lucrative lumber business. They selected a picturesque spot on the South Fork of the American River in the Coloma Valley to construct a sawmill. They chose this site because the fast-flowing river could provide the power and a large strand of ponderosa pine trees could supply the lumber. As equal partners, Sutter supplied the capital, leaving the responsibility of construction and operation of the mill to Marshall.Marshall began construction of the mill in late 1847 with labor supplied by local Native Americans and soldiers from the U.S. Army Mormon Battalion stationed nearby. A low dam was built across part of the river to channel water through the mill to supply it with power. A tailrace then took the water back from the mill into the river. Unfortunately, the original tailrace was too shallow, forcing water in the canal to back up, thus depriving the mill the necessary power to work smoothly. Marshall had his Indian workers deepen the tailrace which they did in January 1848. When Marshall went out to inspect the watercourse on the morning of 24 January 1848, he discovered flakes of gold where the Indians had been digging. He tried to keep his discovery a secret, but the news spread like wildfire. The Gold Rush was on. A small sign until recently marked the exact spot where James Marshall found gold in January 1848. The original tailrace is in the background (Author picture). Hundreds of prospectors descended on the region and a small city suddenly grew in the wilderness. By July 1848, the population of Coloma had jumped to over 4,000, but a decade later most of the gold had been dug out and virtually all the miners had moved on. The inundation of prospectors forced Sutter and Marshall to give up on their land and sawmill by 1850. Marshall continued to farm and prospect the area around Coloma but died a poor man in 1885.Sutter’s Mill 1850Today the site of Marshall’s mill is commemorated by the Marshall Gold Discovery State Historic Park. It is a place of great natural beauty that gives broad hints of its Gold Rush appearance. Most of the original buildings were very simple structures that disappeared with the inevitable end of the initial gold rush in the 1850s, but enough of original Coloma survives to this day to give the visitor some idea of the area in the mid-nineteenth century. The sluice where Marshall discovered the gold still wanders through dense brush along the river. The tumble-down ruins of the old jail serve as a stark reminder that troublemakers could find themselves in a dark cold cell while a hangman’s noose awaited them just outside. Two Chinese-style buildings that were once small stores tell of the once great presence in of Chinese in early Coloma. Small structures that served as a post office or a blacksmith’s shop survive as well. A replica mill sits on a high bluff above the river.A Chinese PresenceWord spread everywhere about Marshall’s discovery, even as far away as China. Oddly, it was then in some respects much easier and faster for an immigrant from China to get to California than for a prospective miner from New York or even Chicago. The Chinese could board a steamship in Hong Kong and arrive in California in about a month while a New Yorker had to spend six months or more in a wagon train crossing the continent, taking a ship around South America, or making the deadly mosquito-infested trip through the jungle of what is now Panama. Ruins of the old prison at Coloma (Author picture)It took only a matter of months for the first Chinese to appear. Historian Peter C. Y. Leung writes:The discovery of gold at John Sutter’s sawmill in Coloma, California in 1848 brought thousands of gold seekers from all over the worlds to the Coloma Valley seeking wealth and fortune. Coloma was described in 1848 as a beautiful hollow… surrounded by lofty mountains. Within a period of six months, the green valley had been transformed into hundreds of tents whitening the plain.During the latter years of the Gold Rush era, Coloma had a large Chinese population. Coloma’s Chinatown encompassed the whole area west of the present Hwy 49, from the Chinese stores to beyond the end of the picnic area. As the valley’s placer mines petered out and were abandoned by other miners, Chinese miners took them over. Their patience and frugality allowed them to make a profit from these supposedly “exhausted” placers.Many non-Chinese miners resented the success of the Chinese, and in 1861 a riot occurred over the right to mine under an old hotel. A mob of drunken white miners rampaged through Coloma’s Chinatown, looting, and destroying buildings. The Chinese were chased away, many were beaten, and several were killed. Chinatown recovered from the vicious attack, but it was finally destroyed by fire in 1880. The Man Lee and Wah Hop store buildings are all that survive.Chinese in Coloma were often involved in a variety of tasks in addition to mining. Chinese often followed in the footsteps of more impatient white miners, often carefully and at times successfully reworking abandoned claims. White miners often hired Chinese workers to deliver bags of supplies between various mining camps that were scattered around the region. There is evidence that some Chinese stayed in Coloma even after the Gold Rush ended. There were 202 Chinese in Coloma in the 1870s, 157 of whom were still engaged in mining for gold.The relationship between Chinese and other miners was often strained. The Chinese brought with them their complex culture which was markedly different from anything the white minershad ever experienced. Their habits, clothing, hair grooming, and languages set them apart from the other miners. The Chinese found themselves often classified as “outsiders” and were at times treated with prejudice and occasional violence.There were several Chinese “camps” in the Coloma region often characterized by tents or flimsy wooden structures. The “camps” consisted almost entirely of men. There were only a small number of women, most of whom were prostitutes brought over as virtual sex slaves meant to satisfy the sexual desires of single Chinese men thousands of miles from their families and native land. The “camps” thrived only if there was mining. When the mining inevitably petered out, many of the Chinese wandered away to some other locales, probably never to return. But there was a small number who stayed on to work on local farms.The Marshall Gold Discovery State Historic Park today includes two restored buildings that once held the Man Lee and Wah Hop Chinese stores. The Man Lee Store contains an exhibit of different methods of gold mining in California as well as some artifacts from each method. The neighboring Wah Hop Store contains an exhibit of a typical Chinese store during the Gold Rush with authentic artifacts. Included or represented here are Chinese foodstuffs, herbal medicines, banking services, postal services, a religious shrine, and a social gathering place. Reflecting on the Beauty of Coloma What I love most about Coloma is its natural beauty. The South Branch of the American River winds its way through Coloma in a splendid natural setting. The river curves in serpentine form, alternatively rushing through large rock formations in the water or slowing down in suddenly wide spots. The foothills of the towering High Sierra mountain range quite literally begin on the eastern shore of the river. The land west of the river is flat and rolling, used mainly for farming. The eastern bank of the river looks up the steep sides of a chain of hills that are ablaze with flowers in the spring, but various shades of brown after a long dry summer. Since there are very few houses or other man-made structures visible along the banks of the river, one can genuinely enjoy the natural beauty of the area. I am an avid fisherman and I have spent many hours in the park fishing for trout and other game fish. The fish are smart and most avoid my tempting worms and other delectable treats, but in October 2019 I suddenly felt a huge tug on my line and after a lengthy struggle, I brought in a monster trout. It was more exhausted than I, but after having it pose for a picture, I sent it on its way down the river. The park is also immensely popular with kayakers and white-water rafting enthusiasts. The current is tricky, and I have often seen rafters topple into the water. The primitive simplicity of the park is also appealing. One would think that the very spot where Marshall found the gold that triggered the settling of California would merit a major monument, but that is hardly the case here. If one follows a meandering dirt path along the river away from the park’s center, there is a steep embankment looking down at the muddy sluice that Marshall built along the river. At one spot there is a tiny beat-up old sign informing the visitor that it was right here that gold was first found. When I revisited the site in October 2014, I beat a hasty retreat as my shoes began to sink in the mud.Chinese Miners of FiddletownThe drive to Fiddletown takes one through some stunningly beautiful country in the foothills of the Sierras in Amador County, 50 miles east of Sacramento. Founded around 1849, Fiddletown early on became a major mining center that boasted a large population of Chinese miners. Although most of the Chinese miners left once the mining of gold petered out, enough Chinese remained in the late 1890s to maintain a distinct tiny Chinatown here.This picturesque and sleepy town in Amador County, situated about six miles east of Highway 49 up Fiddletown Road from Plymouth, probably was founded around 1849. During the Gold Rush, Fiddletown, a sprawling collection of shacks and miners' tents, boasted the largest Chinese settlement in California outside of San Francisco. The name comes from a group of Missouri folks who arrived here in 1849; an elder in the group described the younger men as "always fiddling." Between 1872 and 1932 the town was known as "Oleta."Amador County had many Chinese—in 1860 census records tell us that there were 2719 Chinese in San Francisco and 2568 in Amador County. Census records for Fiddletown indicate 290 Chinese in 1860 (29% of the population), 363 in 1870 and 134 (45%) in 1880. There were also some Chinese residents in nearby Amador City. Fiddletown history indicates that while there was certainly some discrimination and fear of the Chinese in the White Community, the Chinese were very much part of the vital fabric of life in the town.Most of the early gold mining took place in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in such places as Amador County. By the mid-1850s many settlements sprang up in places that had been mainly wilderness before 1848. Fiddletown, today a small charming village in the foothills, was one of these towns. Fiddletown and almost every other town in Amador County had a definitive Chinese community. Even when gold mining diminished by the late 1850s, these Chinese communities lived on, albeit in shrunken form. Chinese stayed in these communities for another two generations by which time the original settlers had either died off or had moved to bigger cities such as Sacramento or San Francisco. During the late 19th century local newspapers focused on negative aspects of the discrimination against the Chinese. They often sensationalized reports of Chinese vice (opium use and prostitution) and other criminal operations. Chinese suffered extreme forms of riots, but many Chinese living in Amador towns led peaceful lives. They worked hard, kept order in their communities, and generally got along well with their white neighbors. The last Chinese resident of Fiddletown died in the mid-1960s, leaving behind several remarkable Chinese structures including the remains of a small general store that serviced the Chinese community in its prime. Inside the Chew Kee Store Museum in Fiddletown CA[]Today Fiddletown is a small community with a generally white population. There are no longer any Chinese here, but their presence is still felt in three impressive structures in the lower part of the village which once had a thriving Chinese community. There is the old Chew Kee Store, an incredibly well-preserved former Chinese pharmacy and store that is today a museum to honor the village’s Chinese heritage. Two recently restored brick buildings across the street once served as a store and the other as a community center and gambling hall for the local Chinese. These structures date back to the mid-1800s.The vibrant Chinese community in the 1860s to the 1880s featured numerous stores, groceries, herb store, restaurants, boarding houses, houses for gambling and prostitution, and a religious joss house. Food, herbs, porcelain ware, cooking utensils, clothing, and other products were imported directly from China. There were a variety of jobs to occupy the Chinese including merchants, boarding house operators, butchers, farmers, packers, washer men and women, clerks and so on. As was the case in almost every Chinese community in North America at the time, women were few – a few were wives of merchants and other workers while several others worked in the brothels (the 1860 census noted the presence of six prostitutes in Fiddletown).Chinese early on were targets for discrimination in mining areas, but those in Fiddletown were lucky to have a friend and advocate in the local constable, Stephen Davis. Davis is said to have been a gifted linguist who had a deep interest in China and its people. After his arrival in Fiddletown in 1851-1852, he learned several dialects of Chinese and acted as an interpreter for the community. He also made sure that the mining claims of the Chinese were accurately written. Sadly, Constable Davis died in 1868 due to a shooting accident. It was a great loss to the community -- his wife and child remained as highly revered persons in the Chinese community.As Fiddletown’s population dwindled after the 1870s, the percentage of Chinese grew, even though their overall numbers sagged. The Chinese farmed the land, did a variety of jobs in and around the town, and as the percentage of women increased, raised their families. There is every indication that though Chinese and Caucasians lived in different parts of town, they respected each other and did business in a respectful manner.There is strong evidence as the population shrank and many of the residents grew older that they went out of their way to care for each other. An older American woman, remembering her days at the turn of the last century, describes how her family liked and trusted the local Chinese and how the people in the town raised money so that an older Chinese woman could return to China before she died. Other writings indicate that younger Fiddletown children developed friendships with their Chinese peers. There is no record of any effort to drive out the Chinese or to seize their property—and little sign of any harmful animosity. The Chinese population petered out in the early 20th century as older Chinese returned to China and younger ones, now better educated, sought a better life in San Francisco and other large cities. Today the people of Fiddletown remain proud of their Chinese heritage and have worked hard to restore the old gambling / social hall and the general store. The Chew Kee store / Chinese pharmacy which supplied herbal remedies to area Chinese for several decades, is today a marvelous little museum open Saturdays during warmer months. It is an incredible window into rural California’s now fading Chinese past. National Park Service History of Chinese in FiddletownThe National Park Service provides an extremely useful narrative of the Chinese American community in Fiddletown with a focus on the three remaining structures used by Chinese in the town: In the early 1850s and 1860s, Fiddletown was the trading center for several rich placer mining areas in Amador County such as American Flat, American Hill, French Flat, and Loafer Flat. Besides local mining and trading operations, a steam-powered sawmill was built in 1853 to provide lumber from local forests.Chinese immigrants first came to Fiddletown to seek gold. Although it is said that Fiddletown had a Chinese American population of between 3,000 and 12,000 and that it once was second only to San Francisco's Chinatown, the U.S. Census records do not substantiate this. The Chinese American population dwindled due to the decrease in mining activity and racism, including enactment of the Chinese Exclusion Law of 1882. By 1900, only 11 Chinese Americans lived in Fiddletown.Evidence of Fiddletown's Chinese American community is represented by three historic buildings.1. The herb shop (Chew Kee Store) is a one-story, rectangular rammed-earth building, and facing east. It has wooden gables and a corrugated metal roof. Earlier photographs show a higher pitch to the roof, which was covered with wood shingles. The facade has two windows and a door, all with iron shutters. The windows are double hung, with 16 panes (some with original glass), wooden sills, and iron shutters on both sides and above. There are no other windows. The west side of the building has a door and several wooden additions. In back are a well and an outhouse.2. The gambling hall is a one-story, rectangular brick building, and facing west. It has wooden gables and a corrugated metal roof. The facade has only one door and a small window, both covered with iron shutters. There are no other doors or windows.3. The general store is a two-story, rectangular brick building, and facing west. It is painted white and has wooden gables and a corrugated metal roof. The facade has only one tall door on the ground floor and two windows on the second floor. There is a small door on the north side of the building, and a larger one on the east side. All doors and windows have iron shutters. The general store may also have served as a religious temple at one time. Although the general store and gambling hall are both vacant, the Chew Kee Store is currently a museum.The Chew Kee Store has a long, prestigious history. It was founded as an herb shop by the famous herb doctor, Fan-chung Yee, who came from China to care for Chinese miners around 1850. He had offices in Sacramento, Fiddletown, and Virginia City, Nevada, and was joined in his practice by his second son, T. Wah-hing. Both effected many famous cures and took care of the sick of all races and nationalities.About 1870, the herb shop was turned over to a man known only by his store name, Chew Kee, who lived in the store with his wife. At this time, the store sold groceries, herbs, and other supplies. Chew Kee ran the gambling hall across the street, which was a social center for Chinese residents.Around 1911, Chew Kee and his wife returned to China, leaving their extensive property holdings to their adopted son, Chow-you Fong (also known as Jimmie Chow). Jimmie Chow worked as a black smith, lumberjack, butcher, and carpenter. He died in 1965, the last Chinese American resident of Fiddletown. Today the Fiddletown Historical Society is engaged in an ambitious project to restore the three remaining buildings in the center of town that long ago constituted one of the liveliest small Chinatowns in northern California.The “Chew Kee” store was featured recently on the website of Atlas Obscura:MANKIND HAS ALWAYS COUNTED ON?a few creature comforts, even in the most rugged of conditions. Traditionally, these include?liquor, companionship, and remedies for what ails us. The first two have never presented much of a problem. But the last one is another story altogether.?The “Chew Kee” Store was one such attempt to provide the medicinal remedies so frequently pined for by fussy humans during the California?Gold Rush.Constructed using a traditional “rammed earth” technique, the now-worn down building is a quaint and striking example of old-world style architecture built largely from clay, gravel, and other commonly found natural materials compacted together through force alone.In its heyday, the medicinal shop mostly sold herbs and other holistic medicines to miners and frontiersmen who had little access to other types of medical treatment. It was founded by Dr. Yee Fong Cheung, a Chinese immigrant who traveled to America for the express purpose of serving Chinese laborers with the traditional Chinese medicine they were accustomed to.From the 1880’s to the early 1900’s the shop served a small but loyal community of Chinese immigrants in Fiddletown, California. The proprietor during that stretch was known only as “Chew Kee,” a nickname given by local Fiddletown residents. But by 1910, the Gold Rush fever had largely broken and subsided, and records show just four Chinese Americans remained in the town at that time.From 1922 to 1965, Chew Kee’s adopted son, Fong Chow Yow (aka Jimmy Chow”) continued to operate the store. Now primarily a historical site and tourist novelty, the store remains largely intact and is open for business on Saturdays. It serves as a pleasant and enduring reminder of the once-robust community of Chinese laborers and immigrants that occupied much of Fiddletown.Other Chinese Buildings in Fiddletown: The Chinese Gambling Hall and Chinese General Store:The Chinese Gambling Hall and the Chinese General Store are located within the Fiddletown National Register District and recorded as California Historical Landmark No. 35. The Chinese Gambling Hall, constructed in the late 1850s or early 1860s, is an extremely rare example of brick buildings built by and for Chinese in the California Mother Lode region. The Chinese General Store, although used by a Chinese merchant, appears to have been constructed by Euro-American designers or builders in the mid-to-late 1850s. Two-stories high and built of rock, the building was one of the early permanent structures in Fiddletown. The Chinese Presence in BodieThe Eastern Sierra contains some of the most beautiful scenery in the United States.? The rugged towering?eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada near the California-Nevada border and the high desert below the mountains possess a desolate beauty that draw visitors from around the world.? Famous sites include Yosemite National Park, splendid Mono Lake, and Bodie State Historical Park, the site of California’s best-preserved gold mining ghost town.I had long heard of Bodie from my daughter Katie, back then a historic preservationist and museum curator for the California state park service. We finally got a chance to visit on a cold snowy day in late May 2010.? It is not an easy place to reach except during the warm months of summer.? Bodie, at an elevation of 8,375 feet, receives between ten to twenty feet of snow each winter and is only accessible by snowmobiles and snowcats from October to April or even parts of May.?? We had no trouble getting there from Katie’s former home in the western foothills of the Sierra, but we encountered a near-blizzard on our return over the mountains even though Memorial Day was only days away.An Old House in Bodie (Photo Katie Métraux)Despite these difficulties, the trip to Bodie was very much worth it.? Many historians agree that Bodie is North America’s most extensive, best preserved mining camp.? According to one guide, “Bodie is absolutely unique.? No ghost town has as much remaining from its heyday, and no place is maintained like Bodie.? Now a state park, it is kept in a state of ‘arrested decay,’ which means that it is not being restored to its original condition but rather preserved in its present shape.” ?When the state purchased the town in 1962, it agreed to leave everything exactly as it was for posterity.? Thus, when shingles, a window or part of a roof needs replacement, they are identical to the original as found in 1962.? When Katie had to do an inventory of the loosely scattered contents of one abandoned house, she had to take careful photographs and replace every loose object exactly where she found it.? Several buildings leaning badly in one direction or another are in fact especially braced from within by carpenters hired by the state park service.During Bodie’s boom period in the late 1870s and early 1880s, the town boasted a population of over 10,000 people, making it the then third biggest city / town in California.?There was a significant Chinese population here as well. One of the first miners to work the area, W. S. Body (or Bodey) and his partner, E.S. Taylor, found gold in the area, but Body died in a snowstorm bringing supplies to his remote camp which in later years was named for him—though the spelling was changed.? Bodie had limited success in the 1860s and early 1870s, but a large strike of gold found in 1874 and an even larger one in 1878 brought thousands of eager prospectors to the site.Building a city for 10,000 prospectors in a truly short period was no easy task.? The Bodie region is cold, barren, and desolate.? Wood had to be brought from a forest over 30 miles away—a task made easier by the construction of a narrow-gauge railway from Bodie to the lumber site at Mono Mills in 1881.? Hundreds of houses as well as stores, churches, hotels, and other types of buildings sprang up in this wilderness—and it is said that Bodie’s mines and mills consumed something like 45,000 cords of wood each year.Bodie grew into a very boisterous western town with 65 saloons, seven breweries, and a busy red-light district.? A minister in 1881 called Bodie a “sea of sin, lashed by the tempests of lust and passion,” but other historians judge that life there was in general peaceful.? One story has a little girl, knowing that she and her parents would soon move to Bodie, saying in her prayers, “Goodbye God, I’m going to Bodie.”? What she really said was, “Good!? By God, I’m going to Bodie!”Bodie’s boom was short lived and by 1883 only a few hundred hearty-souls remained.? One of those remaining was Canadian Jim Cain, who after his arrival in 1875 made his initial fortune procuring and delivering the wood for the town and then investing in various profitable mines and leasing the new railroad.? When others left, Cain bought their properties as well as the town’s bank.? In 1890 Cain brought the new cyanide process to treat previously worthless tailings and later brought electricity to the town to power his plants where tailings were processed.? Cain’s operations kept the town profitable for the early decades of the twentieth century, but a fire in 1932 destroyed well over half of the now largely vacant town.? Cain moved to San Francisco where he died in 1939, but he hired watchmen to care for the town until the state purchased the area in 1962.According to one source, Cain was also quite a practical joker.? His bank had one of the few phones in town – and when he heard that a na?ve Chinese businessman was going to call his wholesaler requesting a shipment of sweet potatoes, he quietly hid 3 sweet potatoes in the phone’s battery box and called the wholesaler to play along.? When the Chinese man later made his call, the wholesaler assured the man that he could send the potatoes immediately by wire.? Cain then opened the box and the potatoes fell to the floor.? The stunned businessman then requested that his whole order be sent by wire. Although probably false—it is a good story.Fortunately, much of the town that survived the 1932 fire still survives today.? Most of the nearly 170 buildings were private residences made of wind-battered and sub-bleached wood?— a lovely contrast to the brown soil on which they stand.? Some of the buildings are in excellent shape—and looking inside one can see bathtubs, decayed beds, pots, and pans scattered here and there, and piles of old magazines.? Other buildings have fallen in roofs or just the shells of walls.? There are several public and commercial buildings as well including a Methodist church, hotel, store, firehouse, and a public meeting hall which houses the park’s main store and information center.? A wild and largely deserted cemetery on the outskirts of town is also well worth a visit—there is a large memorial pedestal to assassinated President Garfield.The authenticity of the site is enhanced by the lack of?any restaurants, vending machines, and concession stands – though the information center has a superb little bookstore.? One can walk freely through the town, though it is possible to enter only a tiny handful of the buildings—one must content oneself looking through windows of most buildings.? My favorite building is the old Methodist church which still maintains much of its old dignity.? There are tours of the town and the huge 1899 Standard Mill are given during the warmer months, but we were happier wandering around on our ownOur visit took three hours, but we did not have time to closely examine every building.? A thorough visit would take the whole day.? Bodie is a marvelous, wondrous place—a chance to have an authentic view of the Old West.Bodie’s Historic Chinese CommunityThree buildings remain from Bodie's historic Chinese American community. They are located on King Street, which was the center of the Chinese American community on the outskirts of town. One structure is a commercial building of fieldstone with a wood plank roof covered with tar paper. Half of the building appears to have had a gable roof, and the other half a hip roof.The other two buildings are made of wood, including board-and-batten walls. Their wooden roofs are also covered with tar paper. The larger of the two buildings is a simple rectangle with a gable roof. The smaller building is also rectangular with a gable roof, though it has an attached shed in back. All three buildings are badly deteriorated.South of the historic Chinese American community lie the ruins of the town of Bodie and nearby mine buildings. In Bodie there is a saloon once operated by a Chinese American, Sam Leon, when the town flourished. West of town at the north end of the main cemetery it is said that there was a Chinese American cemetery.W. S. Bodey and mining companions found gold north of Mono Lake in 1859. The Bodey (Body or Bodie) Mining District was organized the following year. In 1863, the Bodie Bluff Consolidated Mining Company, the first mining corporation, was formed. In 1878, the Bodie Mining Company made a phenomenally rich strike of gold and silver ore. Peak production was reached in 1879-80. Between 1879 and 1881, Bodie's population was between 10,000 and 13,000.Chinese miners came to Bodie early but were soon excluded from the mines and confined to service occupations. The 1880 Census shows several hundred Chinese Americans in Bodie. Among the men, there were laundrymen, cooks, kitchen helpers, laborers, peddlers, servants, storekeepers, wood haulers, teamsters, dish washers, a waiter, a druggist, a restaurant owner, a lodging house owner, and miners. Half the women were married, and the other half unmarried, but no occupations were listed. There were no children.As in many other mining communities in California, the Chinese in Mono County experienced racial discrimination. In 1881, the Bodie Railway and Lumber Company was formed to haul wood and lumber from the Mono Hills to Bodie. When Chinese Americans were hired for construction of this railroad, excited White miners met at the Miners Union Hall. Subsequently, a band of White men traveled the 21 miles to Mono Lake by foot, horse, and buggy to confront Chinese workers grading the railroad line. Word preceded their approach, and all Chinese Americans were put aboard the steamer?Rocket?and ferried out to Paoha Island in Mono Lake. There, the Chinese Americans set up housekeeping with all their worldly goods. The frustrated miners arrived at the deserted railroad camp, but there was no way to cross the water to the island. They soon straggled back to Bodie.In Bodie, on narrow King Street, Chinese Americans ran laundries, peddled vegetables (shipped in by express), supplied charcoal, and provided most of the wood used in the town. Bodie's Chinese American community had its own temple and recreational facilities. Newspaper accounts mention New Year celebrations, large funerals, and such individuals as Sam Chung and Sam Leon.Ella M. Cain in her 1956 book The Story of Bodie provides details of the daily life of Chinese at Bodie at the height of the town’s prosperity. Its Chinatown consisted of a main street which ran at a right angle to the town’s main street. This narrow street, not much wider than a small alley, was lined on each side by little wooden shacks with an occasional taller structure housing a store or other business. The largest was a “General Mercantile” business owned by the big Tong boss of Chinatown, Sing Wo. There were many opium dens along the street. Passersby could look into each of these dens where “men, and women too, were lying in bunks smoking opium, while others sat around a table playing faro, fan-tan, and other Chinese gambling games. The windows were dingy, and partially covered with little strips of red paper on which was Chinese writing.”Cain adds that the Chinese did little mining, but instead ran laundries, peddled vegetables and fruits and brought in and sold all the wood used in the town. “Every day large pack trains of burros came into town carrying in iron racks, on their sides, the nut pine wood that was brought from a great distance. They were herded by two or three ‘Chinks’ who carried long poles, and who kept up a continuous yelling, and perhaps swearing, in their native language. This singsong could be heard for half a mile away, and at times grew more emphatic, when a herder would pick up a rock and land it on the back of a donkey that had gotten out of line, or stopped to graze by the roadside.”The most impressive building in Chinatown was a Chinese Temple or Joss House. The altar featured a large bronze figure of Confucius surrounded by statues of lesser deities. When mining petered out and all Chinese had left town, a Jewish junk dealer gave a couple of neighborhood boys fifty cents to sell him the statue of Confucius which then sat atop a pile of other junk that the dealer hauled out of town.Ella Cain says that Chinese funerals attracted a lot of attention due to their oddity:The Chinese funerals were conducted with great ceremony and ancient tradition. Thousands of little red papers were scattered along the route of the funeral procession. The devil would have to pick up all these bits of paper before he could overtake and possess the deceased. The latter would by this time be well on his way to heaven. Quantities of food, including the traditional roast pork, were placed on the grave; and here let it be said that the Paiute Indians were not long in discovering this fact. Many a feast of roast pork and other foods was held in the Indian camps in the outskirts of town soon after a Chinese funeral. Years afterward, the bones of these Chinese were exhumed and shipped back to China; the Chinese belief being that the deceased, to attain the celestial regions permanently, must be buried in the soil of their homeland.Visiting Mono LakeWe left Bodie at closing time and drove about ten miles on a rutted dirt road to nearby Mono Lake.? Mono is by modern definitions quite a large lake, but it is the small remnant of a large inland sea which long ago covered much of the region. ?Its saltwater supports a large ecosystem of birds and plants—and its stunningly blue waters are beautiful to view both close and far away. I had first heard of the lake when reading Mark Twain’s early book,?Roughing It?(1872).? Twain rowed a boat across the lake and found it to be a “lifeless, treeless, hideous desert… the loneliest place on earth.”? It still retains much of its peaceful lonely beauty even today.? Sadly, the city of Los Angeles diverted much of its water supply in 1941 causing the lake to shrink, but after 1994 the state ordered the restoration of the water to the lake which in a few years hopefully will return Mono to most of its original size.The Chinese Towns of Walnut Grove and LockeThe legacy of the rich farmland of the Central Valley near Sacramento is that of the Chinese farm worker who built the levees and then farmed the land as laborers and tenant farmers. Historian Peter C. Y. Leung writes:The Chinese farm laborer is virtually extinct in today’s American labor market. Yet only a century ago Chinese labor was as much in demand in California agriculture as it was in mining, railroad construction, land reclamation, fisheries, and light industry. Despite the anti-Chinese movement and resultant exclusion laws, Chinese laborers played a crucial role in developing the Sacramento River Delta where they were employed in the construction of levees, in land reclamation, and in agriculture. These Chinese represent the last wave of Asian immigrants to arrive in the Delta, and their lives are an important segment of its history.This…[work] speaks to the harsh and Spartan life endured by many Chinese who made the Sacramento and San Joaquin Delta a major agricultural area in the 19th and 20th century. As an example, Wong Yow toiled in the Sacramento Delta and earned only $1 a day for an average70-hour workweek. Due to the completion of the railroad in 1869, many Chinese were forced to move to the Delta where levee construction work was attractive. There they drained ditches and built hundreds of miles of levees and reclaimed some 88,000 acres by the year 1880. When that work was finished, many stayed on as laborers and tenant farmers.Thousands of Chinese settled in the small communities of Courtland, Locke, Walnut Grove, Isleton, and Rio Vista. They continued to endure hard labor and discriminatory laws. Over the years, fires destroyed most of the Delta’s Chinatowns, but Locke remains active. Although many of Locke’s buildings remain empty, it has been designated a national historic landmark to keep North America’s last rural town built by those Chinese from passing unnoticed into oblivion.When the levees in the Central Valley were completed, Chinese levee builders stayed in the area to become farm laborers and tenant farmers. Since very few of them spoke much English and both Chinese and non-Chinese tended to stick to their own kind, the Chinese bonded together to form small Chinatowns throughout the Delta region. Most of these towns had mixed populations with small Chinatowns. Only Locke was a distinctly Chinese settlement.Walnut Grove and Locke are in effect twin towns built right next to each other on the shores of the Sacramento River about twenty miles south of Sacramento. Walnut Grove dates from 1851 when entrepreneur John W. Sharp constructed a steamer stop on the river. Since there was little if any gold mining in the region, there were few Chinese there in the 1850s, but all that changed by the late 1860s. By then white farmers were discovering the agricultural potential of the Sacramento River Delta region and many hundreds of Chinese laborers laid off from railway construction or leaving now defunct gold mines were looking for work. White farmers fully understood the excellent work habits of the Chinese and hired thousands of them to work building levees and farming the newly reclaimed land.Most of the Chinese farm workers generally boarded in barracks near their agricultural work sites, but as was the case across northern California, enterprising Chinese businessmen established a small Chinatown within the town of Walnut Grove. They rented land from local white owners and established businesses to serve the Chinese farm workers who often came there on their one day off each week. Businesses included dry goods and grocery stores, shoe stores, fish and meat markets, saloons, gambling halls, a temple, barbershops and baths, and other businesses.Sadly, much of the Walnut Creek Chinatown was destroyed in a massive fire in 1915. Some of the Chinese residents and businessmen from Walnut Grove moved to a site a mile away along the river and created a new town which became Locke. Other members of the Walnut Grove Community rebuilt the Chinese district in their town which prospered in the 1920s with wide open gambling, opium dens and brothels. The Chinese community, as was the case in most small Chinatowns throughout California, consisted primarily of bachelors or married men whose families were still in China.According to a local historian:Aided by the influx of Filipino labors during the 1920s, the three-block section [of Walnut Grove’s Chinatown] contained over sixty buildings and had nine gambling halls, six grocery stores, four restaurants, and three barbershops. Other businesses included fish, shoe, plumbing, laundry, and tailor shops, hardware, dry goods, and general merchandise stores, a Chinese school, temple, and benevolent society headquarters. In addition to the businesses, there were 28 houses used to board laborers who came into town to live during the winter season.The Walnut Grove Chinatown suffered another grievous fire in 1937 as well as privation due to the great depression of the 1930s. Business life slowed and many town residents and farm workers moved to larger urban areas. Today one can walk around the old Chinatown historical district, but I rarely encountered an ethnic Chinese person there during any of my many visits.Welcome to Locke road sign (Author picture)Locke, California is a fascinating place. It was founded in 1915 and rapidly became a vibrant and busy Chinese community. Today virtually all the Chinese are gone, but it remains a living monument to Chinese civilization in the United States. There is no doubt that Locke is unique. The entire town was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1971. “Its simplicity and charm maintain a fragile existence surrounded by the pressures of major metropolitan areas. Most of the younger generation has left for higher education and better opportunities. However, Locke is still the home to (a few) elderly Chinese-Americans, some of whom have resided in Locke since its founding.”A local website relates the background story:In 1915 a group of immigrants from the Zhongshan area of southern Chinabuilt their own town in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta of California, called Locke.? The only town in the United States built and inhabitedexclusively by Chinese, Locke soon grew to provide all the services neededby a population of farm laborers, mostly single men.? Main Street hadbrothels, gambling houses, stores and restaurants, cheap rental rooms andspeakeasies.? More than that, Locke provided a place of refuge for Chineseimmigrants in an unwelcoming world.? Men who were able to marry found that family life coexisted happily with the bawdy commerce on Main Street.?According to one town history:Eventually Locke grew into a bustling town. Between 19167 and 1920 restaurants, dry goods stores, hardware stores, hardware stores, grocery stores, brothels, a town hall and merchants association hall were built. Later a drug store, soda fountain, post office, tobacco shop, shoe repair bakery, a laundry, a theatre house, fish market, barbers, a dentist, a slaughter house, gas station and garage, more gaming halls, boarding houses, opium rooms, a warehouse, a flour mill operated by Hindu farm laborers, and a Baptist mission located in the town.Illegal alcohol was sold by businesses used as fronts during the Prohibition era (1920-1933). The houses of prostitution were owned, operated and staffed by whites. Although they catered to both White and Chinese. ‘Many false front businesses hid backstairs dealings. In fact it is rumored that at one time, virtually every two-storied building in town housed some illegal activity.’ The County Sheriff and District Attorney were gambling customers and the Chinese companies made certain that the lawmen never lost. The sheriff was considered sd s casual law officer. The busiest gambling period was from 1920-1933, but gambling continued until State closure in the 1950s. The gambling halls were large contributors to the Baptist mission which also received financial support from other “wages of sin.”Roving reporter Ron Gluckman wrote about life in Locke in more recent times from a more anthropological perspective: The three-block town is an anthropological treasure, the last independent enclave built by and exclusively for the Chinese. In the layers of dust on Locke's decaying streets, one can mine the memories of the first Chinese immigrants, who came searching for Gum Shan, the Golden Mountain. When the gold mines closed, they laid the ties for railroads that spanned the continent.Main Street in Locke (Author picture)During the "Driving Out," when Chinese were forced into railroad cars in Seattle and Tacoma, massacred in Los Angeles and Wyoming, they found shelter in the farmlands of California's Central Valley. The flooded Delta marshlands needed reclaiming. Here was work too dirty for the whites, so the Chinese were once again welcome.Chinese villages dotted the Delta. In fact, this is the only area in North America that can claim a continuous Chinese presence for over 125 years. They built the levees that made this the most productive agricultural land in America. Here, they were safe from the racial violence, left alone to sow asparagus and pears and potatoes, backbreaking work for $1 a day. Pitiful pay, perhaps, but enough to lure thousands more from China.Locke became a settled Chinese community quite late when compared to other locales introduced in this work. There were Chinese in nearby Walnut Grove from the late 1800s, but in 1907, the Southern Pacific Railway established a packing shed along the Sacramento River a short walk north of Walnut Grove which attracted many Chinese workers. A Chinese merchant, Chan Tin San, leased land across the road from the shed from the heirs of a deceased Anglo merchant, George Locke and built a store and saloon. It came to pass that while the Chinese owned the houses, but not the land on which the houses are built—a situation that continues to this day. Other enterprising Chinese, realizing the needs of a semi-migrant labor force, quickly built a boarding house, a gambling hall, and other stores and social centers. These businesses soon served as a mecca for other Chinese and before long a thoroughly Chinese community.Why did so many Chinese congregate in Locke? Chinese American historian Sucheng Chan provides an answer:The Delta was one of the few places in rural California where [Chinese women settled in appreciable numbers and] Chinese families were established. Though their children had to enroll in segregated schools, and the social hierarchy and racial division of labor were rigid – with old stock Americans and immigrants from Great Britain and Germany owning the best land, leasing tracts out to Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, and Italian tenants, who in turn hired newer and darker-skinned immigrants to work for them—Chinese in the delta, especially those living in Locke felt comfortable in the area. The deep attachment that Locke’s inhabitants have to their village is best expressed by Bing Fai Chow, who said, ‘In the past, the whites would attack you with stones when you walked through some of their towns. We never dared to walk on the streets alone – except in Locke. This was our place.’It is important to note that Locke served not only as a refuge from White violence, but also from other Chinese groups as well. During the 1920s and 1930s Locke gained a reputation as a place with a wild vitality with its speakeasies, brothels as well as many stores, restaurants, and boarding houses. Most of the residents were single men who worked in agriculture. Many other Chinese workers who lived nearby came to relax, shop or gamble one or more times a month. Most of the businesses were run by Chinese for Chinese – the only white-run businesses ironically were the brothels and speakeasies. But there seemed to be a live and let live attitude by both Whites and Chinese. Later in the 1920s and 1930s Locke also became a place where Chinese families could find a refuge. It is estimated that there were 30-40 families living in Locke during the Depression era. As noted earlier, there were more Chinese women in the Delta and when they married, they often preferred to live in an all-Chinese village. Chinese business made it easier to shop and there was a Chinese school in Locke for the teaching of Chinese language and culture (the school is now a museum). Chinese and other Asians could attend an integrated school with Whites in neighboring Walnut Grove – which in the long run allowed Chinese to get a good education, to attend college and build lives for themselves away from menting on this, author James Motlow, who lived in Locke in the 1970s, notes:While it might seem strange to think of a small town with three gambling halls, five whorehouses, and several speakeasies as an ideal place to raise children, for them it was….[T]he Chinese are a practical people, and were well aware of the needs of a town full of single men. And to Chinese people – Cantonese at least – gambling is not a vice: it is a recreation. Few of Locke’s residents ever referred to gambling with any kind of moral overtone: regret, yes, from those who lost some money, but moral objections, hardly ever. The gambling houses also served social functions in town. They were meeting places where men could read Chinese newspapers, play dominoes, fan-tan, or chess, enjoy a cup of tea, or relax by playing Chinese musical instruments. They went there to get their mail and share the latest news from home. And when local farmers came to find workers, the gambling houses served as labor hiring halls as well.Locke TodayToday the town of Locke sits astride the Sacramento River much as it did in decades past. The old buildings line the two main streets looking much as they did in old photographs. The only thing that is different is the almost total lack of Chinese. I met a Chinese American gentleman who owns a local bookstore and I have eaten at a decent Chinese restaurant which also serves as a social gathering place for the town. Locke certainly is not a ghost town—other immigrants including many Latinos have moved in and most of the buildings seem occupied. The old Chinese school is now a locally run museum and the State Park service has taken over an old boarding house making it into a fascinating museum. Many tourists from nearby San Francisco, Oakland or Sacramento come each weekend to walk the two main streets, shop in specialty boutiques, eat the local food and tour the town’s museums. But Locke too is a relic – a reminder of what once was a thriving center of Chinese culture in North America.Time has really taken its toll. Locke's mostly aged Chinese residents numbered less than a dozen in 2020, and they are slowly dying out. Locke's newer generations of Chinese went away to college and never returned except to visit the old folks. I talked to some of the craftspeople who have bought up little boutiques on the town’s main street, catering to the 10,000 or more curious tourists like me who annually visit the quaint settlement. Locke Boarding House and Historic DistrictOnce known as the Jack Ross Boardinghouse, the Locke Boarding House was constructed in 1909, prior to the formal development of the town of Locke. Chinese men working on the construction of the Southern Pacific Railroad boarded in the small establishment which was located near the Southern Pacific Railroad shipping warehouse. The Kuramoto family operated the boarding house from 1921 until they were interned during World War II in 1942. The family did not return to resume operation of the Boarding House after the war. In 2008 it became the Locke Boarding House, a unit of the state park system. Today, the boarding house is operated in partnership with the Locke Foundation as a museum that provides visitors a glimpse into the past.Locke Boarding HouseLocke Boarding House is an essential part of the Locke Historic District, a Chinese American Community established in 1915 and designated as a National Historic Landmark in 1990.? More than fifty remaining commercial and residential buildings constitute the village of Locke, the largest and most intact surviving example of an historic rural Chinese American community in the United States and the only remaining example in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Other interesting sites include a beautifully reconstructed Chinese school across from the Boarding House and, further down on Main Street, a social club / gambling hall. Both the school and the gambling joint as well as the Boarding House are open free to the public. The Angel Island Immigration Station: America’s Cold Shoulder to the East San Francisco’s harbor is one of the most majestic in the world.? Visitors to the city admire the Golden Gate Bridge in the distance and wait on long lines to tour Alcatraz Island with its notorious prison, but often they ignore the harbor’s centerpiece—Angel Island.? This mountainous island with an area of 640 acres is by far the largest in San Francisco Bay.? It is a wild tree-covered place that offers almost instant fresh air relief from the city only minutes away by ferry. Angel Island offers rigorous paths for hiking and bicycling, historic old military installations for the history buff and, most interesting of all, the recently restored Angel Island Immigration Station, the veritable Ellis Island of the West.? Ellis Island served as the great entrance way for several million European immigrants a century ago and most Americans with European origins harbor some Ellis Island experience.? Most of these stories have happy outcomes, but for every smile emanating from Ellis Island, there is probably a corresponding tear for every memory of Angel Island.An early view of the Angel Island Immigration Station Ellis Island has been open as a National Monument since 1990 and is visited by large crowds every day.? It is a fascinating place that is well worth visiting, but the Immigration Station on Angel Island is also very worthy.?? Ably managed by the California State Park Service, the station was completely restored before it was opened to the public on 15 February 2009.?? I had a deeply personal reason to visit the site – my daughter Katie Métraux, then a historic preservationist for the State Park service, was a part of the team that restored the site.? Katie personally beautifully designed some of the exhibits in the barracks that housed detainees. The Angel Island Immigration Station, which was in full operation between 1910 to 1940, was the main entry point into the United States for people, most of them Chinese, Japanese, Russians, or other Asians, arriving from the Pacific routes.? It is estimated that more than a million immigrants were processed at the Station.? Most of these immigrants were allowed to enter the United States immediately – their paperwork was forwarded to San Francisco and they were allowed to enter immediately, but the many Chinese and Japanese who tried to enter were routinely incarcerated on the island until a decision could be reached concerning their eligibility to enter “Gold Mountain” (Gaam Saan)–a common Chinese nickname for the United States. Many of them were detained for days, week, months or even years.The main building at the immigration station What makes a visit to the Angel Island installation so fascinating, however, is the fact that so many Asians were detained here. The barracks remain a sad testimony to their suffering and frustration.? The simple fact is that they were not at all welcome to the United States – or Canada farther north.? The Chinese exclusion laws, first passed in 1882 and updated periodically until 1943, were enacted to keep Chinese immigrants out of the United States. During the twentieth century, several other Asian ethnic groups were added as well to the “excluded” list. According to one source, “In enforcing these laws, immigration officials detained newly arrived Chinese people while they determined their eligibility to enter the United States. According to some estimates, 75 to 80 percent of the arrivals were admitted to the United States after some form of detention. Most detention periods ranged from few days or a couple of weeks to six months; a few lasted for nearly two years. Regardless of the length of time, detainees had little, if any, contact with friends or relatives on the mainland. For this reason, the immigration station on Angel Island was known among Immigration Service officials as the ‘Guardian of the Western Gate.’” The recently restored barracks reflect the misery of the Chinese (and later Japanese and other Asians) detained here.?? One can readily see that it was a grim existence – there was little room to store one’s goods, one had to sleep on hard cots layered in three levels, and one was not allowed outside except for supervised outings in small fenced off areas.? The food was grim and there was little to do except to sit and worry.? The city of San Francisco sat only a short distance from the island, but infinitely far for many Chinese.?The Chinese held at Angel Island resented their long confinements, particularly because they knew that immigrants from other countries were processed and released within negligibly short periods. Disgruntled feelings were fueled by the enforced idleness and unsatisfactory conditions at the station…. The detainee’s major complaint, especially during the early years, as the quality of food. Responding to the harsh conditions of their detentions, and to the anxiety they suffered over the uncertainty of their futures, many of the detainees wrote poetry that spoke of their despair.? The writing depicts a painful picture of the solitude and isolation these lonely young men faced as they desperately tried to enter North America.?? Hundreds of poems were carved into the walls of the detention barracks, and many of them survive to this day. Chinese immigrants, like their European counterparts, came to the United States in search of new lives, prosperity, and Gam Saan, or the Gold Mountain. Instead, they were greeted with a detention center, interrogations, and uncertainty. Their poems speak of their frustration with their condition, their deep depression and loneliness, and their passionate love for their homeland:Originally, I had intended to come to America last year. Lack of money delayed me until early autumn. It was on the day that the Weaver Maiden met the Cowherd That I took passage on the President Lincoln. I ate wind and tasted waves for more than twenty days. Fortunately, I arrived safely on the American continent. I thought I could land in a few days. How was I to know I would become a prisoner suffering in the wooden building? The barbarians’ abuse is really difficult to take. When my family’s circumstances stir my emotions a double stream of tears flow. I only wish I can land in San Francisco soon, Thus sparing me this additional sorrow here. My belly is so full of discontent it is really difficult to relax. I can only worry silently to myself. At times I gaze at the cloud- and fog-enshrouded mountain-front. It only deepens my sadness. America has power, but not justice. In prison, we were victimized as if we were guilty. Given no opportunity to explain, it was really brutal. I bow my head in reflection, but there is nothing I can do.Half way up the hill on Island, in the building upstairs, The imprisoned one has been separated from his people summer to autumn. Three times I dreamed of returning to the native village. My intestines are agitated in its nine turns by the false Westerner. I have run into hard times and am uselessly depressed. There are many obstacles in life but who will commiserate with me. I will toss all the miseries of this jail to the flowing current.Imprisoned in the wooden building day after day, My freedom withheld; how can I bear to talk about it? I look to see who is happy, but they only sit quietly. I am anxious and depressed and cannot fall asleep. The days are long and the bottle constantly empty; my sad mood, even so, is not dispelled. Nights are long and the pillow cold; who can pity my loneliness? After experiencing such loneliness and sorrow, Why not just return home and learn to plow the fields?Sad Conditions on Angel Island: 1922 Commentary by Mrs. Jew (Age 33)In a big hall with about 20 beds my son slept on the top bunk, I on the bottom. There were many Japanese. They arrived and left on the launch within 24 hours. But us, we were confined inside so long. I kept thinking in my heart, “What a worthless trip coming here! Confined all the time. It’s just like being in jail!” There were all types of women living there. There were prostitutes, bad women too, who stayed on the other end of the room. They did not come over to our side. There were some women there who had been confined there for two or three years. They could see that my son who was fourteen was a big boy. “Come over here, come on over and I’ll give you a present” they would urge him. I went with him to the bathroom, wherever he went, I followed. I did not dare let him go anywhere alone.There were not many children in the women’s quarters. There was a white woman who took us for a walk on the hills [of Angel Island] weekly. I went twice on these walks. If you wanted to knit, you could, but you used what you brought along. Some of the ladies who had been there a long time finished a lot of knitting projects. If you did not have anything, you did not do anything. That is why in just two weeks, I was so disgusted and bored at just sitting around. There was not anything special about it. Day in, day out, the same thing. Every person had to be patient and tell herself, “I’m just being delayed, it doesn’t matter.” I never even bathed, I kept thinking each day that I would be ready to leave and as each day went by, I just waited. I did not eat much nor move around much, so I never perspired. I had no clothes to wash. Even if I had clothes to wash, I could not do it. There was no place to hang our laundry. And there was no place for you to write letters. There was no table, not even a chair, just a bed. I kept thinking, “Had I known it was like this, I never would have wanted to come!”Another detainee sadly remarked that it was the lucky ones who were released from confinement and allowed to proceed to San Francisco. Unlucky ones were put back on a boat and forced to return to China—Sadly, at least a few of these people committed suicide rather than returning home in shame.The Angel Island Immigration Station is being refurbished and should be visited by all those interested in Chinese and Japanese immigration in the early days of the twentieth century. Chinese poetry is still on the walls, testifying to the ordeals faced by immigrants coming to this supposed Promised Land a century or more ago.The Beautiful Chinese Temple in Oroville The small city of Oroville is the site of an exquisite Chinese temple that is listed on the National Historic Register as one of the great Chinese treasures in North America. Oroville received some of the first Chinese immigrants at the start of the Gold Rush in 1849. Nobody knows the exact count, but it is estimated that at the heart of the Gold Rush, as many as ten thousand Chinese came to the area, making Oroville briefly the most highly settled town by Chinese north of Sacra-mento. At first virtually all the Chinese in Oroville were young men but later, after the Gold Rush, several Chinese families settled in the region.The Chinese population declined a bit by the end of the Gold Rush in the late 1850s and early 1860s, but many Chinese remained. Oroville served as an important hub of a rich agricultural region where many Chinese worked as farm laborers as they did in the Delta region. The mechanization of Californian agriculture combined with a long economic recession at the turn of the last century and a devastating flood in 1907 encouraged many local Chinese to depart for larger cities such as San Francisco or to return to China. A few Chinese remained in Oroville through the 1930s, but as was the case in so many northern California towns, while the town remains vibrant to this day, the number of Chinese there continued to decline.The Chinese community constructed a wooden temple in the early 1850s in the heart of Oroville to serve the many Chinese still arriving there. The original wooden temple and a wooden replacement were both consumed by fire, but a third structure and furnishings, funded by the? HYPERLINK "" \o "Tongzhi Emperor" Tongzhi Emperor?and Empress of China,?was built of?red brick?acquired from?Palermo, California?and was completed in September 1863. This is the same structure that exists on the site today.The main temple from the outsideAccording to a local brochure, “The main temple is unique in that it serves many eastern religions as “The Temple of Many deities (Liet Sheng Kong). As the area prospered, separate temples for Confucianism and Buddhism were added. In 1968, Tapestry Hall was built to display the extensive collection of embroidered tapestries, parade parasols, and other objects of beauty. A priceless collection of Chinese and American costumes is arranged to contrast the two cultures representing the decades from 1850 to 1930. In 2008, the Fong Lee Company Building was built to display artifacts from the medicinal herb sales and gold purchasing shop of the Chan family.”Unfortunately, when I was planning to visit Oroville and its temple in May of 2020, travel in the region was forbidden and the temple was closed due to the Pandemic of 2020 and horrible nearby fires.Marysville, An Early Mecca for ChineseMarysville, the county seat of Yuba County, 40 miles northeast of Sacra-mento, was one of the first Chinese settlements at the height of the Gold Rush in the early and mid-1850s. Yuba County was barely settled before gold was discovered in the area before 1850, but the region quickly became one of the most productive gold mining areas in northern California. As the depot for the Northern mines, it quickly became an important center of business and commerce for the region. At the height of the Gold Rush, it was one of the largest cities in California, only slightly behind San Francisco. Marysville was also the site of one of the earliest and most enduring Chinatowns in northern California.As was the case for other Gold Rush settlements covered in this booklet, Marysville began to attract many Chinese miners from the very outset of the gold mining era. Marysville’s Chinatown started soon after the arrival of the first Chinese as early as 1849 and 1850. Some Chinese who decided not to go to the mines instead began establishing businesses in Marysville to equip those Chinese who were moving on to the mining region with mining implements and food products such as tea, rice, dried vegetables and salt-preserved items that were not available in white-run establishments. Historians Brian and Lawrence Tom provide a very concise history of Marysville’s Chinatown:Marysville’s Chinatown was one of the first established in California’s Gold Country and is the last surviving one today. It was one of the oldest in America and was ideally located, offering merchandising services to mining camps to the north and east. It was regularly supplied with goods and materials by riverboats via the Sacramento and Feather Rivers. It was also one of the few Chinatowns in Gold Country that was not subject to violence against the Chinese during the anti-Chinese movement. During the Gold Rush, Marysville’s Chinatown was a particularly important town for the Chinese. It was the gateway to the northeastern mines in California and a supply point for the miners….The Chinese in the early days of the Gold Rush were not familiar with Western products, so they mainly frequented Chinese businesses. Many of the Chinese did not understand the customs, religions, or language of the new country, and they felt more comfortable interacting with their own countrymen.Some [Chinese] felt that they were here for only a short time, so they did not feel a need to assimilate with the general population. They kept to themselves and formed their own town within a town. This was the beginning of the Chinatown in Marysville. Here the Chinese could get the food and other products they were familiar with. They could speak the same language and shared dreams and hopes, the hardship and the adventure. It created the illusion that Chinatown was really China….As the Chinese started arriving in America, it became clear that the environment was completely different from what they were accustomed to in China. Without guidance from family or village elders in a new land, the Chinese organized tongs – family, clan, or district associations – for support and protection of its members.These various organizations played a critical role in Marysville’s Chinatown history through their help to members in making their uneasy adjustment to life in what was often a hostile environment. These tongs served as an important meeting and networking arena and even from time to time helped new arrivals settle disputes among members. They also facilitated the sending of money and letters to China.By the 1870s, Marysville Chinatown had already established a few tongs, including the Suey Sing Tong, the Hop Sing Tong, and the Gee Kong Tong (Chinese Masonic Lodge). The two most active and long lived were the Suey Sing Tong (which folded in 2015) and the Hop Sing Tong which remains active to this day. In more recent years surviving tongs function as social clubs that carry on old traditions. Although neighboring Chinatowns in such places as Red Bluff and Redding bore the brunt of anti-Chinese riots that included killing and burning by white people mobs, there were no such disturbances in Marysville. Indeed, refugees fleeing from these disturbances in other towns were often offered a very haven in Marysville.The Chinese population in and around Marysville continued to grow through the 1870s. There were close to 50 Chinese businesses in the town by 1880, but as was the case in other Chinatowns introduced in this booklet, the Chinese population began a slow but steady decline. By the early 1900s, the Chinese population had declined to 483 (out of a total population of 3,497).The Chinese community in Marysville played a minor but distinctive role in the Chinese revolutions of the twentieth century. Dr. Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925), who became the first president of the Republic of China in 1912, was living in exile before his revolution. Dr. Sun traveled to several Chinese communities outside of China seeking support and funds for his political and revolutionary party, the Kuomintang (Nationalist Party). Dr. Sun was an honored guest of the leading Chinese notables in Marysville in the early 1900s. There was an active Kuomintang headquarters in Marysville until the KMT was driven out of China and on to Taiwan in 1949. The KMT building became a youth center for children after 1949The Beautiful Bok Kai Temple of MarysvilleTaoism is one of the ancient philosophies of China which along with Confucianism and Legalism has dominated Chinese thinking for over two thousand years. Taoism is both a philosophy of life as well as a major folk religion of China. The word “Tao” (Dao) literally means “way,” but can also be interpreted as road, path, or doctrine. There is a natural flow or order to the universe. One must become one with this natural order. There is an emphasis on living quietly and simply. To seek power, wealth or fame goes against this order and can only lead to misery. The following passages taken from the main book of Taoism, the Tao Te Ching, outline some of the doctrine’s major teachings:By not adoring the worthy, people will not fall into dispute. By not valuing the hard to get objects, people will not become robbers. By not seeing the desires of lust, one’s heart will not be confused. Therefore, the governing of the saint is to empty one’s mind, substantiate one’s virtue, weaken one’s worldly ambition and strengthen one’s essence. He lets the people to be innocent of worldly knowledge and desire and keeps the clever ones from making trouble with their wits. Acts naturally without desire, then everything will be accomplished in its natural order.I have Three Treasures that I hold and guard. The first is Kindness. The second is Simplicity. The third is HumblenessPeople would then enjoy the simple food, simple clothing, and be contented with a simple life. And they shall live happily with the traditional customs. Neighbors of the nation’s overlook one another in the near distance. The barks of dogs and crowing of cocks can be heard. Yet people are so contented that they enjoy their life without ever visiting each other.Philosophic Taoism has remained through the ages of Chinese history a subject of study and meditation for the scholarly class of China, but over the years Taoism evolved into a popular religion that has great appeal for the “common man” in Chinese society. Asian Studies scholar Thomas Welty writes:Later Taoists gave a religious turn to the mystical aspects of the original doctrine. Many important Chinese gods, such as the gods of rain, fire medicine and agriculture and the kitchen gods, arose from the Taoist school. The impersonal and infinite force beneath nature became transformed into individual, finite human souls that, after death, became powerful spirits. The popular Taoism of later times increasingly filled the need for the magic that people often turn to when other resources fail them. The Chinese peasant sought the help of unseen powers. The Chinese peasant sought the help of unseen powers because he lived on a narrow economic margin, and hard work and skill were not always enough for survival. Therefore, the average man began to associate the Taoists with the world of spirits who must be placated and appeased. The Taoists were called upon more and more to select lucky days for weddings and funerals, to choose sites for housing, and in general to regulate those human activities peculiarly related to the world of spirits.Today the key cultural building in Marysville is the Taoist Bok Kai temple. It is a center for worship, celebration, and festivals. The temple is dedicated to Bok Kai, the water god, or the God of the Dark North. It is built after the Bok Kai temple found near Guangzhou (Canton) not far from the home villages of the Chinese who came to Marysville. It is said that some of the deity Bok Kai’s powers are to oversee irrigational waterways and rain. He also has the power to control fire, summon the rain, and regulate waterflow. He is also a preventer of floods and fire, two common occurrences in early Marysville. Many of Marysville’s Chinese pioneers in the 1850s and 1860s were miners or railway workers. They brought their religion and other cultural traditions with them and in 1854 constructed a crude Bok kai temple to party to the spiritual need of the Chinese. They constructed the current Bok Kai temple in 1869 and have since made numerous additions and repairs. The building is constructed in a traditional Chinese style and is still used to this day. According to Lawrence and Brian Tom, it is the only known temple honoring Bok Kai as the central deity in America. It is also the only temple in the U.S. that still celebrates the Yee Yuet Yee festival on the second day of the second month on the traditional lunar calendar. The date varies from year to year, but invariably occurs in February or March. The festival is also known as “Bomb Day” – ‘the name derives from the firing of large firecrackers or bombs that launch good fortune rings into the air with participants scrambling for them. It is a holiday honoring Bok Kai.” Many participants also visit the interior of the temple. The festival brings many ethnic Chinese back to Marysville for the day every year.Exterior of the Bok Kai Temple in MarysvilleThe Bok Kai temple has been in continuous operation since 1869 and is one of the oldest Taoist temples in California still serving the community with an official to assist in the religious services. The interior is richly decorated with artwork depicting various Taoist narratives as well as statues representing Bok Kai as well as several other deities. One of the most popular of these deities is Quan Ying, the Goddess of Mercy, Compassion and Kindness. Quan Ying is tradition-ally a Buddhist deity and as is the case here, the only Buddhist deity in this Taoist temple. Another popular deity is Yuk Fung, the Secretary of State God. He is thought to govern both heaven and earth and is commonly regarded as the supreme god of law, order, justice, and creation. His responsibilities include keeping everything in harmony and regulating peace and war. He is seen as the great organizer of all that occurs in the universe and guides human affairs to avoid confusion on earth.The Bok Kai Temple was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1975 and was made a California Historical Landmark in 1976.Moo Lung, the Dancing DragonOne of the most popular aspects of early Bomb Day parades in Marysville was the presence of Moo Lung, a ceremonial “Dancing Dragon” brought to California from China in 1878. At that time Marysville had a substantial Chinese population with enough money to order a ceremonial dragon crafted by artisans in China. The intricate, detailed dragon head is made up of paper mache, silk, hand-blown glass, and kingfisher feathers. Initially it was over 150 feet long, but wear and tear over the years reduced the length. Today only the head still exists and is brought out for special occasions as a glorious memory of the long Chinese cultural tradition in Marysville.Marysville as a Chinatown TodayLawrence and Brian Tim correctly note that most Chinatowns across America are almost all gone, given the assimilation of the current generations into the greater communities. “Achieving the American Dream led to the demise of Chinatowns. As the Chinese assimilated into areas once forbidden to them, Chinatowns lost their inhabitants….With the exception of the largest cities in California such as San Francisco, Los Angeles and Oakland – where there are many recent and older immigrants arriving and housing available for the elders –Chinatowns are becoming a thing of the past in California.”As was with many of the other Chinatowns covered in this booklet, the Chinese population of Marysville declined throughout the twentieth century. One factor was the education of the grandchildren of the first generation of settlers. Many left to attend colleges and universities elsewhere and sought jobs and greater assimilation in larger urban areas such as the San Francisco-Oakland and Los Angeles urban areas. The young left Marysville and the older folk gradually died. Some of the older buildings in Chinatown have survive, but others have been cleared for urban renewal. Today there are only two Chinese-owned businesses left in Chinatown. ‘’Marysville’s Chinatown still survives because the descendants of the first pioneers remain and keep their traditions alive with the Bok Kai Festival. They understand that if their Chinatown disappears, the last link to the beginning of Chinese history in America will be lost forever.” The town has an active temple that is still used for worship and two museums dedicated to the history of its Chinese heritage.EPILOGUEThe Chinese are long gone from such towns as Fiddletown, Angel Island, Oroville, and Coloma, but their ghosts and historical footprints remain. They left behind ruins, some now carefully restored, which tell many tales. The visitor to Chinese Camp will see nothing but the ruined hulks of Chinese buildings, but if he should venture to Locke, one will encounter a faithfully reconstructed boarding house, school, and gambling den. Marysville has an active temple and a Chinese heritage museum. The old Chinese store and pharmacy at Fiddletown are both rich and authentic. Much remains, but much more needs to be done to preserve this fascinating immigrant past. There are many buildings in Locke that are in an advanced stage of decay. The Chinese ruins in Chinese Camp would make a fascinating state park or national historical district. But the restoration of Angel Island, Fiddletown, and Coloma represent a healthy start in a drive to preserve the rich elements of the past.More needs to be done to publicize these rich settlements of the past before they disappear into oblivion. Historians and interested students of California history are aware of the urban presence of Chinese and Japanese, but much more attention should be given to the now-abandoned small Chinatowns and Japan towns that once dotted the landscape.This brief work only offers a few superficial hints about the vast spread of the many small rural Chinatowns that dotted the landscape across northern California before the turn of the last century. Hopefully, this small minor work will open the eyes to those interested in this field to develop more scholarly and comprehensive works concerning the material contained in these pages. It is also important to remember that there were other international settlements in California. There were the Japanese at the Wakamatsu Tea & Silk Colony Farm near Coloma and the Russians at Fort Ross among others including several more Chinese settlements not mentioned in this text. So much more research needs to be done in this field.Lawrence and Brian Tom very eloquently summarized the Chinese American experience in only a few words:A people with a vision cannot be defeated. Besieged by American federal and state governments that enacted discriminatory laws, harassed by a significant portion of the American population who were racist, Chinese Americans did not surrender. They understood that being the first to cross the long and dangerous divide between two civilizations was not for the faint of heart. Whatever adversity they encountered only made them more determined. When the Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed in 1943, they knew that a major battle had been won. When the Immigration Act of 1965 was enacted treating all nations equally, victory in another major battle had been achieved. In 1940, Chinese Americans were a lonely and insignificant minority of 70,000. Today they are the largest Asian ethnic group in America with a population of 3,600,000.BibliographyAhmad, Diana. The Opium Debate and Chinese Exclusion Laws in the Nineteenth Century American West. Reno and Las Vegas: University of Nevada Press, 2007.Beilharz, Alan. “Discover Coloma: A Teacher’s Guide.” Gold Discovery Park Association. Cain, Ella M. The Story of Bodie. San Francisco: Fearon Press, 1956.Chan, Sucheng. “Introduction” in Jeff Gillenkirk and James Motlow, Bitter Melon: Inside America’s Last Rural Chinese Town. Berkeley: Heyday Books, 2006Chang, Gordon H. Ghosts of Gold Mountain. The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2019.Chang, Iris. The Chinese in America: A Narrative History. New York: Viking, 2003.Daniels, Roger. Asian America: Chinese and Japanese in the United States since 1850. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988.Him, Mark Lai et al, Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910-1940. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1980.Lee, Erika. The Making of Asian America: A History. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015.Leung, Peter C. Y. “A Glimpse of Chinese Gold Miners in California ” in 150 Years of the Chinese Presence in California, Edited by the Sacramento Chinese Culture Foundation and the Asian-American Studies Program at the University of California, Davis (Sacramento: Sacramento Chinese Culture Foundation, 2001),Leung, Peter C. Y, “One Day, One Dollar—Delta Heritage” in 150 Years of the Chinese Presence in California, Edited by the Sacramento Chinese Culture Foundation and the Asian-American Studies Program at the University of California, Davis Sacramento: Sacramento Chinese Culture Foundation, 2001Leung, Peter C. Y. One Day, One Dollar: The Chinese Farming Experience in the Sacramento River Delta., California. Taipei: The Liberal Arts Press, 1993. Métraux, Daniel A. The Wakamatsu Tea and Silk Colony Farm and the Creation of Japanese America. Lanham MD: Lexington Books, 2019.Pfaezler, Jean. Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans. New York: Random House, 2007.Sederquist, Betty. Coloma: Images of America. Charleston SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2010.Takaki, Ronald. Strangers from a Distant Shore: A History of Asian America. New York: Back Bay Books, 1998.Tom, Lawrence and Brian. Marysvile, California: Gold Country’s Last Chinatown. Charleston SC: The History Press, 2020.___, Marysville’s Chinatown: Images of America. Charleston SC: Arcadia Press, 2008.Zorbas, Elaine. Fiddletown from Gold Rush to Rediscovery. Altedana CA: Mythos Press, 1997. ................
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