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Sadly, as Girls of the Golden West shows, it would not be its last. Two of them, a Frenchman and a Chilean who were unable to understand a word of the charges against them, were hanged by a drunken mob. Meanwhile, five foreigners were accused of stealing gold in a nearby camp. He and his party were successfully prospecting in the foothills, when posters appeared warning “foreigners” to leave the mines. The travails of a Californio schoolteacher named Antonio Coronel were typical. Officials disavowed it, but the damage had been done. In fact, Smith’s decree was not only illegal but factually wrong-non-citizens were considered guests and were legally allowed to mine on public lands. On the Fourth of July, there was another anti-Latino outburst on the Sacramento River, after which 1,000 victims, mostly Chileans, poured into San Francisco, many headed for home. That spring, vigilantes at Sutter’s Mill drove away large numbers of Mexicans, Chileans, and Peruvians. Smith’s declaration provided legal cover. All 300 Americans present supported the declaration.Īnti-Latino sentiments had already begun to run high in the mines, in part because many Mexicans and Chileans had far greater mining expertise than their white counterparts. Smith, who was headed to Monterey to command the army, issued an illegal declaration stating that any non-citizen who dug for gold on public land would be considered a trespasser. A mass meeting was called, after which Gen. A rumor spread that “foreign plunderers” from South and Central America had removed $4 million in gold from California, leaving little for “true citizens” like themselves. The first official attempt to exclude Latinos from the gold fields took place in January 1849 in Panama, where 300 Americans found themselves stranded on their way to El Dorado. Many white American miners shared the jingoist sentiments that had become widespread after the recently concluded Mexican-American War, and they were outraged that “foreigners,” mainly Latinos but also French, Chinese and other non-citizens, were taking gold that they thought was rightfully theirs. (Credit: Private Collection / Peter Newark American Pictures / Bridgeman Images) And even when they were not fully believed, they served to justify self-interested actions.Ī circa 1849 image of Chinese immigrants working in the gold fields. But when the gold got scarcer, such prejudices grew stronger. In the early days of the Gold Rush, many white American miners worked without incident next to Mexicans, blacks, and others. But these stereotypes did not necessarily run very deep. Ethnic and racial stereotypes were so commonplace they did not raise an eyebrow: Mexicans were seen as lazy and violent, Chinese clannish and mendacious, blacks intellectually inferior, Jews grasping and averse to physical labor, Irish thuggish and drunken, French sexually depraved, and so on. As gold became scarcer and the competition more cutthroat, racism and nativism became increasingly common.Įven before explicit bigotry emerged, the gold fields were hardly a melting pot. In December 1848, when President Polk confirmed that there really was gold in California, and the world, including 80,000 Yankees, rushed in, the situation began to take a darker turn. But this Rousseauian phase of the Gold Rush was soon replaced by a more Hobbesian version.
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Surface gold was relatively plentiful, the diggings were not too crowded, and life in the mining camps was mostly peaceful. Only about 4,000 Yankees made it to distant California that year, joining 1,300 Californios (Spanish-speaking residents of California), some Mexicans from the northern states, smaller numbers of Chileans and Peruvians, and a scattering of others. This is because, initially, the Gold Rush was really the Gold Trickle. Miners panning for gold during the California Gold Rush (Credit: Bridgeman Images)Īctually, relations between the various national and ethnic groups in California were largely peaceful during the first year after gold was discovered in January 1848.