Chinese Immigration (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II CALIFORNIA FOR AMERICANS " The feeling against the colored races rose to a pitch of exasperation .... The mines becoming more thickly populated, the Americans, relying on their numerical strength, commenced acts of hostility and aggression on any placer inhabited by colored people if it were worth appropriating; .... Ejectments constantly occurred and, driven from the placers, thousands left the country while others penetrated farther into the hill ranges. These conflicts were often serious in their results; retaliations were made and where might was right, retributions upon unoffending individuals often took place, which were nigh producing a war of race against race."?Wtlltam Shaw, Golden Dreams, (1851-2). /'Chinese rank with the most successful foreigners in the mines. . . . . It is asserted that as a class they are hirelings sent from China by wealthy men to work on low wages, that the gold which they obtain -1 is carried out of the country .... It is, however, equally true that very few miners of any class settle in the state and all the gold acquired by I those who do not is taken or sent out of it. Many Americans, Mex1- I cans and Europeans dig gold here under contracts w1th other parties at home, who furnish capital and these miners receive a return for their labor, very little better than the wages of ordinary laborers. The justice of the discrimination is not therefore clearly perceptible even if the right of the state to impose restrictions .... is conceded."?Capron, History of California, (1854). In the spring of 1849, streams of adventurous men set out for the gold fields of California; from the middle and south-west across the Plains; from Honolulu, Sydney and Hong Kong; from New York and New Orleans and South Ame...