American History

When James Marshall found gold in the American River, he unknowingly initiated a set of events that dramatically transformed California and the United States. The paper compares various and different relations between white miners and the African Americans, Indians, and Chinese in the mining camps. The second paper looks at various and different relations between the white miners, the Europeans and Latin Americans in the mining camps. They look at the various roles played by gender in both situations.

The movement of millions of Anglo Americans, black Americans, European Immigrants, Mexican immigrants, and Chinese into the American West, rearranged the social and physical landscape and altered forever the regions history. The number of Chinese immigrants was hard to compute and the vast majority of the 105,465 Chinese in the United States as a whole lived in the West.  In 1880, there were 75,132 Chinese in California alone, Chinese migration was at the mercy of unique forces and the Congress in 1882, passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which virtually ended legal Chinese immigration. Chinese American population declined while American borders remained open to Europeans. This portrays the levels of racism that engulfed the relationship between the white miners and the Chinese
A worse situation applied for Africans since slavery and laws banning the settlement of free blacks in states and territories such as Oregon and Kansas, restricted black migration to the West before the Civil War. Almost 3000 blacks had migrated to California by 1850, but they failed in their attempt to claim their rights as American citizens. Anti-black legislation in the 1850s relegated them to second class citizenship, and many left to seek a better life in Canada. It was only in Texas where black slaves worked in the fields of the eastern part of the state, where there was a substantial black population before 1865.

The Indians had no better relations with the Americans. This is clearly evident in scrutiny of the immigrants trails to the mines. Indians killed 362 whites on the trail, whites killed 426 Indians. Other migrants died at the hands of white outlaws, who disguised as Indians, they were also responsible for atrocities which were blamed on Indians such torturing children. Despite all these atrocities executed on the Chinese, Africans and the Indians they all mixed together with European immigrants on the roads to the California mines.

The Indians, Chinese, and African Americans had a difficult time in relating with the white miners at the camp. Racism was of the highest degree which created a sour relation among the races. There was also a gender bias which had a role to play in determining the relation of these groups of immigrants.

Racism
It was often that Californian resentments against slavery as unfair competition with free labor were played out in campaigns against the experienced Mexicans who had deployed slaves to increase their work force. In 1852, there were about two thousand Africans Americans in California. Slavery was outlawed in the state but some of these Africans came with their masters to work in the mines whereas the others were free blacks or escaped slaves who hoped to earn enough to pay for the families freedom back in the south. The Californian Military Governor John Mason determined that only foreigners that attempted to work in the mines would be treated as trespassers. In reality all the miners were trespassers since none had the legal right to possess or work on land. This law provided the basis for a foreign miners tax that demanded 20 dollars per person per month. This generated high resistance among these foreigners and the tax was reduced to three to four dollars per month per person.

In the year 1848, there were said to be only 3 Chinese in California, but a year later they were 700. The number increased to 10,000 in 1852, and to begin with did not face any opposition from the Americans as they did all the work the Americans refused to do for little money. The Americans later feared being driven out by the Chinese who might be used to lower the wages. They therefore decided to expel the Chinese from the diggings in many camps and where they were allowed to stay they were forced to work on separate, exhausted soil that allowed a very little return. The Chinese were also not allowed to testify in the California Courts and they organized their own district unions which handled disputes and took responsibility for the care of the sick and burial of the dead. This leads us to the conclusion that the factor responsible for disunion between the Chinese and the American miners was the Chinese wage labor which seemed to contradict the California ideology of free labor.

Gender Roles in the Relationship
Men were the decision makers. Migrating to the West was purely mens decisions such that three quarters of the women in a certain sample had opposed the decision to move citing the necessity of leaving parents or family members who they would most likely not see again. Migration was very difficult for women unless they could work as schoolteachers, prostitutes or domestic servants.
The broad net that drew people into California had a fine mesh it filtered out women and children, who together were about five per cent of the Gold Rush Migrants. Those women who entered the net, however, sometimes regretted it. This is the Paradise of men, I wonder if a paradise of poor women will ever be discovered. Martha Hitchcock wrote back home in 1851.

The migrants were thus predominantly male, and the greed, violence and occasioned deaths were very much prevalent as most men preferred to go physical when diplomacy failed. Nevertheless the first black to reach the camp mines was a woman, Clara Brown, who had purchased her own freedom from slavery she persuaded a group of gold prospectors departing for the west to hire her as a cook. Once in Colorado she started a series of laundries, and with the process she outfitted 34 of her relatives for a trip to Denver after the Civil War. Afterwards, she sponsored other blacks
The almost complete absence of women made the Anglo miners feminize Chinese and French men. This situation made them to make fortune in laundry and in cooking as often as they made in mining gold.

Conclusion
The lack of a controlling governmental democratic framework in the mines provided a perfect breeding ground for nativism and racism. The discrimination was initially based on some foreigners economic superiority, which was later intertwined with greed, opportunism and mutual hatred.

The relationship between the white miners, African Americans, and Chinese in the mining camps can be summarized by a note in the 1858, The San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin which reported a rare instance of authorities hanging a member of the Indian tribe for the multiple numbers of Chinese at California. White men are not usually hanged for killing Chinamen the article noted.

PART II
Introduction
By the beginning of 1849, word of the Gold Rush had spread around the world, and an overwhelming number of Gold-seekers and merchants began to arrive from virtually every continent. The largest group of the forty-niners in 1849 was Americans, arriving by the tens of thousands. They came from Latin America, particularly from the Mexican mining districts. The first immigrants from Europe had a longer distance to travel and they therefore began arriving in late 1849. They were mostly from France, Germany, Italy, and Britain who arrived from seafaring, coastal regions. The northern immigrants in the westward flowing stream tended to be northern Europeans and Canadians. Large numbers of Norwegians, Swedes, Germans, Irish, and Canadians migrated west and formed their own communities.

This paper will look at the relations that existed among these arrivals and the white miners at the mining camps. It will consider the role of gender and how it affected or influenced this relationship.

When the gold rush began in 1848 there were no federal regulations governing mining rights, and disputes about claim jumping- beginning work on a previously claimed site, were frequent and they could sometimes turn out to be violent. This led to creation of regulations so as to clarify when a mining site could be considered abandoned and available for a new claim. Miners however, had to be constantly vigilant to protect their claims as they had not established a permanent property right.

In 1850 when the easily accessible gold had been collected, and attention turned to extraction of gold from more difficult locations, the new California state Legislature passed a foreign miners tax of twenty dollars per month, and American prospectors began organized attacks on Latin Americans. These huge numbers of newcomers were also driving Native Americans out of their traditional hunting, fishing and food-gathering areas. In order to protect their homes and livelihood, some Native Americans responded by attacking these miners. This provoked counter attacks on native villages. The Native Americans, out-gunned, were often slaughtered. Those who escaped massacres were many times unable to survive without access to their food-gathering areas, and they starved to death.

Gender Roles
Women who came had roles such as single entrepreneurs, married women, poor and wealthy women, and prostitutes. Some came with their husbands, men sent for their wives at home and others came for the adventure and the economic opportunities. Many women were widowed long before arriving California, others widowed due to mining accidents, disease, or mining disputes of their husbands.
The physical and embodied nature of racial discrimination that defined the dynamics of class relations in the mining camps was made clear in conflicts surrounding sexuality. It became a sphere in which the dynamics of class tensions, ethnic and national relations defined by racisms were played out. Male workers expressed their loss of autonomy in terms of their loss of control of the masculine honor whose manhood was expressed by independence, physical strength, bravery and sexual freedom.
Miners viewed class domination by North American bosses as a form of sexual domination and exploitation which was propelled by racism. Male workers lost their dignity in their inability to guard or control womens sexual virtue. Miners were conscious of their own exploitation and the tales of North American bosses raping Chilean women confirmed this assertion.

June Nashs study of Bolivian tin miners reveals how women, community solidarity and the work itself created a revolutionary labor force that had a profound effect on the nation. Probably half the women in these mining camps were prostitutes. Alcohol, isolation, and struggles over access to gold were the main reasons for the increase in violence and homicide. There was less predictability in gender roles, being rather more flexible than in homes of most migrants. The society was dominated by men and they had to perform traditionally feminine domestic tasks or pay women entrepreneurs, good money in order to do so. This may have given married women more power and options. It was not until the end of easy riches and the arrival of significant numbers of white women in the 1850s that signaled the end of gold rush society. Newly arrived middle-class women curtailed gambling, drinking, prostitution, and much of the openness in gender roles that had characterized the region.

Conclusion
It would be very rational for us to conclude that white discrimination which was embodied on foreign miners in form of heavy taxes and other injustices, kept most Latin Americans and partly the Europeans out of the choice diggings. It did not work to profit them, as their income would barely meet the huge expenditures on food, shelter and entertainment which came in form of drinking and prostitutes.
The number of women in these camps was far much lower than that of men. The almost complete absence of women made relations among the men complicated. This had significant effect on gender roles as men performed traditionally feminine roles. Men went to the extent of fighting for women and this minimized further the chances of good relations between the various races. Lawlessness thrived and most men who had gone to seek for better opportunities and lifestyles met their deaths instead.