In search of Chinese Camp
Immigrants labored in California during 19th-century Gold Rush
Four aging horses dragged us through the manzanita and boulders, the stagecoach swerving dangerously with each bump and wiggle. The children shrieked with excitement as we threaded our way through Columbia State Historic Park, a mining camp from the days of the Gold Rush about a2 ½-hour drive from Oakland, California.
Suddenly a bearded white man in a red bandanna jumped out from the trees. He waved an old-timey pistol at us, and at the sight of the gun, we all froze.
“Gimme yer gold!” he drawled.
“Will he shoot us?” whispered my 5-year-old daughter.
Packed into that sweaty stagecoach, we were three couples — Chinese, Japanese, Filipino and Korean Americans — with six children, taking our first post-pandemic road trip into the mountains. We had rented a house nearby to bathe in Pinecrest Lake and dip our toes in the Tuolumne River, to barbecue fish and prepare elaborate Filipino breakfasts for each other. I had a side interest: to find traces of Asian American history in this part of the Sierra Nevada foothills.
I was inspired by the story of Tie Sing, a Chinese American backwoods chef who worked for the U.S. Geological Survey. Hired to cook for a 1915 lobbying trip for conservationists, industrialists and senators to Yosemite, he created meals apparently so impressive that he helped convert the group to the cause of nature recreation, leading to the formation of the National Park System.
While few know Sing’s story, even fewer are aware of the span of 1849-82, when thousands of Chinese immigrants descended upon the area to find their fortunes on the legendary “Gold Mountain.” I wanted our children to feel the Chinese roots of this area and perhaps put the hardships of the last year into historical context. Once we’d settled in, we decided to visit Columbia and then a tiny dot on the map called Chinese Camp, an old mining town.
The day after our stagecoach encounter, we tried to find Chinese Camp, just a few miles away.
Sucheng Chan, a retired historian and the author of more than 15 books on Asian American history, notes that this region, called the Southern Mines, was home to almost half of the Chinese in California in 1860, before the establishment of San Francisco’s Chinatown.
The town was a stagecoach stop that housed more than 5,000 residents and was an important center of early Chinese American life, helping to link small Chinatowns as well as multicultural mining towns scattered throughout the Sierra Nevada foothills. Chinese immigrants came seeking gold like so many others in the early years of the Gold Rush and established claims along the sparkling streams that curled through the mountains.
They were almost immediately attacked. Vigilante pogroms matured into a series of punitive local, then state, laws intended to keep Chinese settlers out of lucrative gold mining and restrict them to cooking, laundering, vegetable farming and construction. Still, they excelled, building roads through the mountains in record time and supplying provisions and comfort to the European and American migrants who were still allowed to hunt for gold. But once the Chinese workers’ abundant and grueling labor had built the railroads and laid important groundwork for California agriculture, the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed in 1882, barring their immigration into the country.
The town today has shrunk to almost nothing. A store and tavern on the main corner might have supplied some history lessons, but the fake Chinese script decorating its facade reeked of expired stereotypes, so we decided to keep moving. A lone plaque marks the town as California Historic Landmark #423 and the beginning of what was once a picturesque block of buildings.
“I was born in California in the 1970s, and I never went camping or on national parks tours, so when I drove through this very old town called Chinese Camp, it made no sense to me,” said Yenyen Chan (no relation to Sucheng), a ranger with the National Park Service in nearby Yosemite and an expert on early Chinese American history in the area.
Chan is credited with bringing the story of Sing to a larger audience, helping to lead an annual pilgrimage to the top of Sing Peak, the remote Yosemite mountain named for him. She reminds visitors that the well-maintained roads that bring them to sites like the Wawona Hotel were built mostly by Chinese workers, often by hand.
Like the rest of the country, California is now grappling with its complicated history, which includes the conscription and genocide of Native American, Mexican and Asian residents. The state parks system has launched a Reexamining Our Past Initiative, which has removed a memorial at a Northern California redwood forest that was dedicated to Madison Grant, a conservationist and racial purity theorist.
The elaborate way in which Columbia celebrated its version of the Gold Rush story contrasted sharply with the neglect of Chinese Camp. In addition to the bandit reenactment that greeted our wagon, our crew had a great time on Columbia’s main street, being serenaded by street performers and taking part in candle-making and panning for gold. While the kids clapped along with the banjo, those of them who could read wandered into a mini museum honoring the Native Sons of the Golden West, a San Franciscobased group founded in 1849 by Gen. Albert Maver Winn, a militia leader from Virginia.
The Native Sons, with chapters throughout the state, is a historic preservation group founded in 1875 with a particular focus on the Gold Rush. Today, its website doesn’t mention its early lobbying to restrict Chinese immigration or its World War II-era lawsuit to bar Japanese Americans from voting, but it doesn’t need to. Anti-Asian sentiment is inseparable from Gold Rush lore.
“Ideas of white superiority bracketed the image of white expansion, ‘free development’ and industrial inevitability in California and the West,” Jean Pfaelzer, a professor of Asian Studies at Delaware University, wrote in “Driven Out,” a 2007 book about the anti-Chinese riots that took place across this region.
I hope one day to subject my children to a visit to a restored Chinese Camp so they can see a Chinese laundryor a mining claim. They can learn how their forebears built a rural Asian American life as California began.