Few issues were more volatile in late-nineteenth-century California than Chinese immigration and labor. Most “white” Californians—and “white” was a conveniently flexible term for those who embraced it—deeply resented Chinese immigrants for their perceived cultural difference and economic threat to “white” workers. The first groups of Chinese miners arrived from across the Pacific Ocean in 1849. Some Chinese miners labored as “contracted” workers, individuals who paid off their transportation costs through a certain term of manual labor. But by the early 1850s, most Chinese immigrants arrived and worked under their own free will—either for wages from a mining company or in small groups of their fellow countrymen. White racial animosity encouraged them to avoid American and European miners, so they often worked the claims already rejected by other groups.

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