Unidentified Chinese Man Photograph by Issac Wallace Baker
News that gold was discovered in California arrived in China in October of 1848. At the time there was political turmoil and widespread poverty precipitated by floods, drought, famine, banditry and the Tai Ping Rebellion, but men of the southern provinces near the Pearl River delta were accustomed to leaving home for work in other Southeast Asian countries. Did you know that the Chinese, like the Cousin Jacks from Cornwall, England and the Sonorans of Mexico had considerable experience as miners? Kuangdon, or Guangdon, where most of the Chinese in the American West came from, was in southern China on the South China Sea and its capital, Canton, was the only port designated for foreign trade. By 1848 at least 50,000 had experienced mining gold in Borneo, Malaya and Sarawak, and silver in Burma and Vietnam.
Most of the Chinese men headed to California were poor peasants, therefore their passage was fronted by a Family or District Association. At first, they were welcomed but resentment against the Spanish-speaking and Chinese, especially from Irish and German miners, created a rickety definition of who was considered a foreigner.
In 1850, alarmed by the success of Sonorans, Chileans and Chinese, all of whom had some prior mining experience, the State legislature passed a Foreign Miners Tax of $20/month. The additional expense was successful in forcing most of the Spanish speaking miners, who concentrated in the southern mines (San Joaquin River watershed) to depart. The Sonorans, who often had considerable experience brought their families, but disliked the atmosphere of hatred and violence. At this time Chinese miners were earning approximately $6 a day making the tax impossible to collect. In 1851 there were an estimated 2,700 Chinese in California but by the end of 1952 there were 21,100.
In Governor Bigler’s 1852 inaugural address he reinstated the Foreign Miners Tax at the rate of $3 a month. In the following year it increased to $4 a month and in 1855 it was upped again to $6 a month, then reduced again to $4 where it remained until 1870. While there were many foreigners in the mines (including the White men who took land from the indigenous people) it was the Chinese who paid most of the Foreign Miners Tax.
In the early 1850s the Chinese were entrepreneurial, working in very small teams using easily transported rockers. With gold rapidly disappearing from the placer bars and banks it made more sense for most miners to form “Companies” and undertake a more industrial approach, like river mining. Typically, the Chinese bought existing river mining claims from White miners who considered them “worked out.” River mining consists of diverting a water course by using dams and flumes and then mining and sluicing the native stream bed. This, of course, required more manpower and larger mining camps, also with larger undertakings there is the need for efficient and well-stocked suppliers. For Chinese miners this meant a supply train that stretched all the way back to China for familiar food and tools. Chinese general merchandise stores soon appeared in mountain mining camps, often with links to Family and District Associations (more on his later).
Mining camps typically consisted of ten to thirty men who owed allegiance and money to one of the Family or District Associations. Scotch artist J. D. Borthwick found a Chinese mining camp with 150 people at Mississippi Bar on the North Yuba. The camp seemed to be self-sufficient and even had its own store. (Borthwick’s classic, 3 Years in California, provides precise descriptions and fabulous illustrations from this era).
CHINESE STORES
Among the overseas Chinese were merchants, some of whom spoke English learned in Christian schools in China. Merchants in small mining settlements provided Chinese miners with familiar foods, dry goods and services such as news, advice, discussion, prepared meals, gambling, herbal preparations, opium smoking and prostitution. Depending on the size of the community served there were also occasional cultural events like Chinese theatre, provided by traveling troupes, and holiday celebrations. Purchases made at the store were packed by mule to remote claims on the North Yuba, Middle Yuba, Deer Creek, South Yuba, Bear River, Greenhorn Creek, the North Fork of the American and many other locations. One such packer was Ling Hing, based in the town of Washington.
After the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 there were thousands of Chinese laborers with experience in blasting, drilling and trestle construction skills that were directly applicable to mining, damming, ditch construction and road building looking for work. The Chinese merchants began to intensify their efforts to provide labor gangs for projects that benefitted the greater community. They functioned both as a boundary and a threshold between the Chinese and American communities – in China the small store owner had no such prestige. After years of residency Chinese merchants became important members of mountain settlements and larger cities with Chinatowns and even formed partnerships with White entrepreneurs.
Little information is available for the earliest Chinese merchants because they are probably buried in some, as yet, untranslated letters or business records in China. Below are a few sketches of notable Chinese merchants who had stores in our watershed mostly after 1880:
According to the International Chinese Business Directory of the World for 1913 Sue Kee, Yet Hing and Yet Wo (or Yet Wah) ran general merchandise stores in North Bloomfield. Wendell Kallenberger, who moved there in 1928 said that Sue Kee had mining claims and he ran a store near the China Gardens. At one time he also ran a store in Moores Flat and was described as “sort of a tycoon” and “affluent in a moderate sense.”
The Suey Chung Store in Washington, located on the South Yuba River, was run by Fong Chow and his wife, Lonnie Tom. Fong Chow arrived just before the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. Their daughter, Alice Fong Yu (b.1905) became the first Chinese American schoolteacher in the state of California, a political activist and a founder of the Square and Circle Club of San Francisco, a well-respected philanthropic organization. As an elementary school student in Washington she was teased by schoolmates, but her parents advised her to ignore the “barbarians” and study hard.
Wong Lung Moon was a scholar and teacher in China who moved to California in 1881 at the age of 33. His father, Wong Fung Kwei, was assassinated for participating in the overthrow of the Ching Dynasty. In California he joined his older brother who was a partner in a general merchandise store in Nevada City. The store was called Chung Kee and he was partner in it for fifteen years. Mr. Moon became an interpreter for the Chinese in the Nevada County Superior Court and in 1894 he married, Ellen Hall Moon of North San Juan.
Wong Lung Moon
Photographer unknown
Photographer unknown
Ellen Moon was the daughter of Hall Mow and Chan Lin-Yow who had a general merchandise store in North San Juan for over 30 years, beginning in the early 1870s. Dr. Hall Mow, an herbalist, was asked to come to California to serve the Chinese miners who were distrustful of Western medicine. He became a respected member of the community, on March 16, 1878 The San Juan Times wrote: “We have in our town a China Doctor – his name is Hall Mow. He is an intelligent man. We have known him to perform some wonderful cures of chronic cases that baffled the skill of some of the best physicians of the state.”
Hall Mow
Photographer unknown
Chan Lin-Mow
Photographer unknown
Their business was so successful that they had to hire employees to help with cooking and gardening. According to their great-granddaughter Jean Moon Liu, they sold a variety of items “from grains to dynamite.” In 1900 the home and business were burned to the ground and the animals were poisoned by the envious Hueng San faction. Chan Lin-Yow became so depressed that within a few years she took her own life. In 1905 Hall Mow returned to China where he remarried.
In 1904 Wong Lung Moon, Ellen Moon, their son Frances and their daughter Vesta May moved to North San Juan and continued operating the store known as Tai Yang. They visited China in 1914 and 1917. When they returned, they moved to Richmond, California in 1919 and in 1921 they moved to Vallejo to join their good friends the Fong family who once owned the Suey Chung store in Washington. The Moon’s were the last Chinese family to live in North San Juan.
Interior of Tai Yang store in North San Juan
Photographer unknown
Prior to immigrating to America in 1852, Yee Ah Tye learned to speak English in Hong Kong. This language ability set him apart from his fellow immigrants. While he was in San Francisco he was befriended by three Christian missionaries who deeded him a wooden shack on Pine Street to be used as a Chinese church or place of religious worship. He then donated this shack to his benevolent association to assist others from their home province. The association upgraded the building to create what would become Kong Chow Temple, a place of asylum for newly arrived immigrants who lacked shelter and needed help assimilating to a hostile environment. The Temple was at this location until 1969 when it was sold by the association. Subsequently the Temple was redesigned and moved a few blocks away where it stands to this day. Yee Ah Tye, according to his descendants, stipulated that the Temple was never to be sold.
Chinese and White miners sluicing in Auburn Ravine (1852)
Photograph by Joseph Starkweather
Photograph by Joseph Starkweather
Yee Ah Ty also lived in Sacramento for a while, then in 1860 he moved to LaPorte in the Sierra Nevada at 4,980’ elevation, where winters bring a lot of snow. LaPorte is in the extreme northeastern portion of the Yuba River watershed, near Slate Creek, a tributary of the North Yuba. Typically, most of the gold mines here were gravel mines, both hydraulic and drift.
In 1860, La Porte's population was about 1,000 and men outnumbered women about four to one. Of the 136 La Porte Chinese, 100 of them were placer miners. Yee Ah Tye became a partner, then later the president, of the Hop Sing & Company merchandise store, which also contracted Chinese laborers. Yee Ah Tye was one of the first Chinese to engage in hydraulic mining and was seen as a mediator as hostility toward the Chinese increased. United States surveyor Charles W. Hendel was a co-owner of the Hop Sing Placer Mine. This partnership may have created a buffer for the Chinese during these hard times.
Yee lived thirty-four years in La Porte as a successful merchant, running the Hop Sing and Company store and representing the Chinese community in the area. He had three wives and four children, three of whom were girls. Unlike most other Chinese fathers at the time, he invested in the education of his daughters – he even bought a piano for his youngest daughter, Bessie, who became an accomplished pianist. Yee Ah Tye retained his traditional diet and way of dressing but he adopted American business practices and he admired the Judicial System. He, as a leader in the Hop Sing Association, provided a four-bed hospital with a nurse to serve elderly Chinese who otherwise would have been abandoned. At that time there were 67 Chinese men in LaPorte between the ages of 40 and 60.
Yee Ah Tye died in 1896 and on his death bed he asked that his bones be buried in America rather than shipped back to his ancestral homeland which was customary at the time. His great-great granddaughter, Lani Ah Tye Farkas, sees this as the beginning of a new breed of citizen known as the Chinese American. She wrote an informative book on her interesting family called Bury My Bones In America, which I highly recommend.
19th century Chinese immigration
Photographer unknown
BENEVOLENT ASSOCIATIONS
When new Chinese immigrants arrived, they needed some form of recourse and means of protection in this strange land. In San Francisco there were thugs who beat and robbed new arrivals with impunity. To remedy this situation several wealthy Chinese merchants set up benevolent societies for newly arriving Chinese immigrants. Benevolent societies, in addition to protection, offered employment arrangements, some legal services, letters of recommendation and small loans. Members, of course, had to pay dues. Practically everyone, for their own protection, belonged to one of these clan and district-based organizations. There was a dark side too; the associations could be very competitive and exhibit resentments and hostility nurtured generations ago.
In the early 1850s practically all the Chinese who came to California were mining for gold. Among them were merchants who served as a link with China as well as a link to the larger White population. From the beginning the merchant has been a pivotal figure. Eventually miners who were extended credit for their passage paid it off and they formed their own companies specializing in river-mining. In coastal areas they fished, in the mountains they built a railroad and then started chopping wood and working as millhands. Meanwhile, as settlements grew so did their Chinatowns where there were more people engaged in teaching, medicine, business and other professions. In urban areas they also ran restaurants and operated laundries while still others rolled cigars and manufactured shoes.
Ah Gin, a Grass Valley merchant and farmer with his family
Photographer unknown
There is confusion and contradiction in the historic record about the political and benevolent organizations of the Chinese in 19th century California based on a combination of assumptions, over-simplification, dramatizations and bewilderment. I don’t want to add to the confusion so I’m providing the rudimentary descriptions that follow based on information provided by the Chinese Historical Society of America (see Chin, et al). According to them, “The basic form of social control in a Chinese community is the family unit.” Overseas Chinese working in America were removed from their families, but Family and District Associations provided structure, cohesion and an extra-legal mechanism in lieu of no legal representation in American courts. For those Chinese working in remote locations social and economic opportunities were usually centered around a merchandise store operated by one of their number. District Associations elevated the merchants to community-wide leaders of the Chinese community.
Chinese woodchoppers for the Central Pacific Railroad
Photographer unknown
Differences between businesses and groups were handled at the District level and only when differences involve others outside of the districts do the Six Companies become involved. The Chinese Historical Society of America compares Family Associations to municipal courts, District Associations to the state supreme court and the Six Companies to the federal supreme court. The Six Companies is an organization that was originally created in the early 1850s for protection and to arbitrate disagreements within the Chinese community. They were businessmen who, by common consent, were empowered to speak for all California Chinese in affairs which affected the majority. They were recognized as the official board of arbitration and the official representatives of the Imperial Manchu government before the establishment of the first Chinese Counsel General in San Francisco in 1880. In 1901 the Six Companies officially organized as the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association. They also kept a census, created Chinese language schools, provided medical services and hospitalization and legal resistance to all anti-Chinese legislation.
TWO TYPICAL COMMODITIES PROVIDED BY THE CHINESE STORE
Merchants made traditional foods available to overseas Chinese workers, especially those foods that were dried, pickled or salted. Whenever possible those foods were supplemented by freshly grown vegetables and locally raised chickens and pigs. Traditional cuisine is an expression of cultural identity. Immigrants bring the food of their countries with them wherever they go and cooking familiar food was a way of preserving their culture when they moved to new places. Traditional foods are symbols of ethnic pride and a means of coping with homesickness. Chinese restaurants were commonplace even in remote mining camps.
Here is a list of the food sold to Chinese workers on a Central Pacific Railroad construction job, about 1870: Dried oysters, dried cuttlefish, dried fish, sweet rice crackers, dried bamboo sprouts, salted cabbage, Chinese sugar, four kinds of dried fruits, five kinds of desiccated vegetables, vermicelli, dried sea-weed, Chinese bacon cut up into salt cutlets, dried abalone, peanut oil, dried mushrooms, tea and rice. Other foods included dry turnips, tamarind, kumquat, dried duck, dried shrimp, sausage, bean curd, salt eggs, dried bird’s nests, minced fins, ginger and arrowroot. Meanwhile White miners ate a monotonous diet of bread, bacon, butter, beans, beef and dried fruit. The diet of Chinese placer miners varied slightly because of the generally availability of inexpensive beef which they embraced with enthusiasm; the average Chinese miners ate a pound of meat a day. Combine this with vitamin-rich vegetables and you have a superior diet which provided the strength to work hard and better overall health. There were “China Gardens” located near any concentration of Chinese miners. Among the fresh vegetables consumed were cabbage, potatoes, beans, onions, squash, carrots, beets, turnips, tomatoes, melons and cucumbers.
The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley houses the records of the Kwong Tai Wo Company for the years 1871 to 1883. This company was based in Marysville, where the Yuba River joins the Feather River in the Sacramento Valley, at the head of steamboat navigation. They sold both wholesale and retail, but the only ledgers translated are records for the sales of ceramics and opium. They probably supplied the Chinese merchants located in Chinatowns and mining camps in the mountains. As an aside, one transaction recorded in 1881, involved the sale of five non-Chinese plates (probably made in England) described as fan dié, or “barbarian plates.”
The most expensive item carried by the Kwong Tai Wo Company was opium. Both opium and alcohol were used by Whites and Chinese and it was legal to possess opium until the Harrison Narcotic Act of 1914. White people also consumed an array of patent medicines, like “bitters” and “tonics”, that contained alcohol and opiates. I always liked the judgement-free archaeological category of artifacts called “indulgences.” Opium suitable for smoking was manufactured in China and sold in copper alloy boxes containing 5 2/3 ounces or 250cc – it had the consistency of molasses. In San Francisco in 1871, a can of # 1 grade sold for $9. The top selling variety in Yuba-Bear country was called “Source of Beauty.” Like most indulgences it was pleasurable but could become addictive. I’ve recorded trash deposits in hundreds of 19th century mining sites, where evidence of alcohol, patent medicines and opium use is obvious, and I marvel at the amount of work accomplished, despite indulging.
Opium Tin (Source of Beauty) found at a hydraulic mine
It’s easy to become fascinated with lists of exotic foods, indulgences and distinctive tools that the Chinese miners used and neglect the more important network of trade and available manpower that was prevalent in the gold mining regions of California in the 19th century. Historical archaeologists Mary Praetzellis and Adrian Praetzellis point out that Chinese communities have flourished for centuries throughout the world under the leadership of merchants skilled in creating overlapping business contacts and obligations. This practice is known as guanxi. “Chinese merchants developed long-lasting webs of reciprocity and trust based initially on kinship, locality, and personal recommendation, and reinforced through gifts, formal events, and favors. These merchants served as labor brokers and suppliers, moving workers and consumer goods where needed.”
Clearly this produced a two-tiered system of well-off merchants and indebted workers. In areas with greater populations and large Chinatowns this system was strong and evident. However, in remote regions there was still another version. The small merchants in remote towns like Washington, LaPorte, Scales, Goodyears Bar, Downieville, You Bet, Alleghany, Indian Valley and French Corral, all within the Yuba-Bear watershed, offered Chinese provisions, dry goods and social activities including news, gambling, indulgences and prepared food. Often, they spoke or learned English and became an interface between the isolated Chinese workers and the larger White community. The merchants and jobbers were the link between jobs and workers. Their reputations for reliability made this connection possible. This worked for monumental tasks like the building of the Central Pacific Railroad and on the local level, like when Fong Chow of the Suey Chung store in Washington was asked to assemble a crew to build a road between the towns of Washington and Maybert on the South Yuba River.
Chinese workers on the Central Pacific Railroad
Photographer unknown
Realistically, there were merchants who were trusted and there were others who cheated and gouged the powerless laborers. The same thing happens today with carpenters, landscapers, artists, agricultural workers and others who sub-contract, regardless of nationality. A few years ago, I met a Chinese student who informed me that there is a whole genre of Chinese TV shows with themes loosely based on this era in California.
River mining never entirely went away until the early 20th century, but many Chinese men turned to independent mining or to working on large crews as contract laborers on railroads or as ditch diggers and road builders. Arrangements for large work crews were often made by local merchants or through Associations in Chinatowns in larger towns.
Hydraulic mines depended on a cheap labor force to operate and many Chinese workers were employed. By November of 1872 the North Bloomfield Company had 450 Chinese on its payroll, unlike many white mining companies, the Company showed no bias in its hiring practices. In 1874 the Milton Company employed 400 Chinese on its ditch and in 1876 the Blue Tent hydraulic mine employed 750 Chinese and 250 Whites.
Some Chinese bought their own claims or leased them from White claim holders. In 1869 the Wa Yen Company, with Yong Yen as its proprietor, purchased the Piute claim at Moore's Flat in the Middle Yuba watershed for $2,000. Initially the company's work force consisted of about twenty-five men and by 1876 the hydraulic mine was the highest producer in the Moore's Flat district. About this time the company began serious investment by driving a bedrock tunnel using hand drills. By 1878 the claim employed forty men and by 1880 employed about fifty Chinese and ran two monitors. Early in 1881 the Company constructed new flumes and under-currents in the canyon below their claims boosting annual production to $50,000.
HOSTILITY
By the early 1870s, the anticipated boom that the transcontinental railroad promised had turned into a bust when manufactured goods from the east coast flooded California. Thousands of laborers from various backgrounds, but predominantly Irish, faced an economy in decline and fierce competition for jobs. The Chinese, once welcomed for their work ethic and valuable contribution to the work force, were now blamed for lowering wages, employment opportunities, and working conditions of all laborers. To exacerbate conditions the mines of the Comstock were in decline. In response White workers formed groups like the Anti-Coolie League and the Supreme Order of Caucasians, with some 64 chapters statewide.
Harper's Weekly June 12,1869
Denis Kearney and H.L Knight of the American Working Men’s Party held fiery rallies about boycotting the Chinese and even condoned violence. Kearney described the Chinese as a race of “cheap working slaves” who undercut American living standards and thus should be banished from America’s shores. “California must be all American or all Chinese. We are resolved that it shall be American and are prepared to make it so.” Mines that retained Chinese workers were harassed and some of the flumes owned by the North Bloomfield Company, who employed them, were burned. Ultimately, they too were forced to comply by firing the Chinese or face more boycotts, property damage and violence from these hateful groups.
Long-held racial, cultural, and religious prejudices were unleashed on the Chinese. Inclined to maintain the customs, rituals, beliefs, and lifestyle of their homeland, the Chinese were accused of being unable or unwilling to assimilate into American society. Public sentiment and organized labor began to advocate for restrictions on the activities of Chinese and changes in the immigration laws. Politicians eventually passed over 600 ordinances and laws against Asians throughout the United States, ranging from local ordinances intent on petty harassment, to extremely mean-spirited state laws. Anti-Chinese sentiment escalated into violence, whereby Chinese residents and laborers were forcibly evicted from towns and work camps. In some cases, the Chinese were attacked and killed. In reading newspapers of this era, I was shocked by the level of hate and violence toward the Chinese. Even admired citizens like A. A. Sargent, who in 1878, introduced what would later become the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, giving women the right to vote and prominent nurseryman, Felix Gilet of Nevada City, as well as Truckee’s patriarch, Charles F. McGlashen, actively promoted the Chinese Exclusion Act of May 10, 1882. This was the only American immigration legislation that was designed to outlaw a specific race and ethnic group. Laborers were barred, but it exempted merchants, diplomats, travelers and students. The law was pursed vigorously and racial violence against the Chinese continued. No matter what progress may have been claimed for technology, and in the social arena, this was a truly dark time. It was not until 1943, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt was motivated by China's war efforts against Japan in World War II, that the Chinese Exclusion Act was finally repealed. Unfortunately, only nine years after that, in 1942, Roosevelt signed another law that forcefully interred Japanese Americans in remote armed camps.
Poster, self explanatory and inflammatory
When the Chinese Exclusion Act was due to expire in 1892, it was revived for another ten years by the Geary Act. This Act went one step further and barred Chinese from testifying in court. It also required all Chinese to carry resident passports, with the harsh penalty of deportation if they were found without them. The Geary Act was renewed indefinitely in 1902.
By the waning years of the 19th century the Chinese mining population consisted of aging bachelors who worked as long as they were able. Census takers on the North Yuba in 1890 described mining operations as follows: “... there were about 100 Chinese employed in river mining on the North Yuba River, which flows by the town of Downieville, scattered, in about a dozen companies, 10 miles each way from town. The average time worked each year is 120 days, in 1889 probably 150, and the aggregate product between $35,000 and $45,000 annually. The aggregate amount of capital invested by the Chinese in their operations is not more than $25,000.”
Chinese miners at the Hidden Treasure Mine, a drift mine leased from White owners (circa 1895)
Photographer unknown
Most Chinese Americans wanted their children to take advantage of educational opportunities, become professionals and prosper, which many did – but that’s another story. I don’t feel that I have to end this glimpse of 19th century Chinese history by citing a long list of contributions that the Chinese made to the nation, and especially to California culture. They are both obvious and subtle but are indelible aspects of California history. By the way, do you know anyone who can’t use chopsticks?
Ah Chung Quan, a gold miner (1904)
Photographer unknown
A Partial Bibliography
Ah Tye Farkas, Lani. Bury My Bones in America. Nevada City (1998)
Anonymous. International Chinese Business Directory of the World (1913)
Barth, Guther. Bitter Strength: A History of the Chinese in the United States, 1850-1870. Cambridge, Mass. (1964)
Borthwick, J. D. 3 Years in California. San Francisco (1948)
Chin, Thomas W. with H. Mark Lai and Phillip P. Choy. A History of the Chinese in California: A Syllabus. The Chinese Historical Society of America. San Francisco (1966)
Conlin, Joseph R. Bacon, Beans and Galantines: Food and Foodways on the Western Mining Frontier. Reno (1986).
Eleventh Census of the United States. Mineral Industries (1890)
Haney, Jessie, ed. Speeches of Dennis Kearney, Labor Champion:1878. New York (1923).
Liu, Jean Moon Gold Mountain, Gold Nuggets, Gold Dust: Gold Coins. Self-published (1988)
Nordoff,Charles California for Health, Pleasure and Residence. New York (1873)
Praetzellis, Mary and Adrian Praetzellis. Archaeological and Historical Studies of the LJ56 Block. Sacramento, California: An Early Chinese Community. Sonoma State University (1982)
Praetzellis, Mary and Adrian Praetzellis. Archaeological and Historical Studies of the LJ56 Block. Sacramento, California: An Early Chinese Community. Sonoma State University (1982)
Rohe, Randall. Chinese Hydraulic Mining in the Far West. Mining History Association Annual (1992)
Sando, Ruth Ann & David L. Felton. Inventory Records of Ceramics and Opium from a Nineteenth Century Chinese Store in California. From Hidden Heritage: Historical Archaeology of the Overseas Chinese..Amityville, New York (1993)
Soo, Annie. The Life and Career of Minnie Fong Lee. From Chinese America: History and Perspectives. Chinese Historical Society of America. San Francisco (1991).
Spier, Robert F. G. Food Habits of Nineteenth-Century California Chinese. California Historical Society Quarterly. San Francisco (1958)
Zhu, Liping, No Need to Rush: The Chinese, Placer Mining and the Western Environment, from Montana: The Magazine of Western History (1999)
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