A tiny fellow with a scarred cheek and eager eyes’John John’ the Chinese laundry man, was the laughingstock of Weaverville, California. For months during he had been washing the Anglo miners’ clothes and never had charged even a penny for his services.

The Anglos thought he was stupid, and intentionally took advantage of him. But a year later, according to prospector John Hoffman, who followed gold and silver trails through the Sierras for nearly three decades, one of the white miners came across John John wearing fine clothes in Sacramento. The Chinese laundry man had washed enough gold dust out of pants cuffs and shirttails to set himself up for life!

John John (the name was one commonly given to Chinese by whites during the California Gold Rush) may have been the same entrepreneur who contracted for a number of his countrymen to work on a construction project near Coulterville, in the Sierra foothills. Taking advantage of his employer’s discriminatory ‘All Chinamen look alike’ he hired 10 men but listed 18 on the payroll.

John John kept his employees so busy, his Anglo overseers never noticed the manpower shortage. The Chinese entrepreneur pocketed the extra earnings, then he charged each of the 10 laborers a fee equal to half their wages for the privilege of working for him!

James Marshall had discovered gold at Sutter’s mill on the South Fork of the American River in January 1848, and the big rush to California had begun in 1849. In 1852, at least 20,000 people (all but a handful were men) arrived in the so-called Golden Mountains from southern China, and in the Gold Rush years that followed, the Chinese kept on coming. With few exceptions the immigrant Chinese formed tightly knit communities–Chinatowns–within the larger communities in which they settled. Every Chinatown included at least one boardinghouse, where both domestic and mine laborers lived. The rooms in some of these establishments were so small they could accommodate only a cot and a hook for hanging a few items of clothing. Residents ate at a communal table, but each Chinatown usually had at least one restaurant as well, a laundry that catered largely to the Anglo community, a few cramped little stores that sold everything from dried squid to kerosene, and perhaps a small brothel.

But the center of the Chinatown was the joss house, or temple. Some, like the ones in Oroville and Weaverville, Calif., were quite elaborate and remain in existence as tourist attractions today. But most of them were ordinary wood, stone or brick structures. The late Dr. Maxwell Lee, a Chico, Calif., physician, told me that many Chinese believed the rude exteriors disguised the value of the joss house’s artifacts but added’I do not believe that the immigrant [Chinese] population included many Chinese architects.’

Inside the joss house, even those in isolated communities like Fiddletown and San Andreas in California’s Sierras foothills, worshippers burned incense before elegantly carved ivory and jade figurines. Paper lanterns cast a flickering glow across hand-painted porcelain pots and statuettes of bronze and gold. Brass gongs announced the comings and goings of the faithful. Not only did the joss house provide a center of culture and a place of devotion and repose, it was a link between the New World and the Old. ‘To go inside’ Lee noted’was to return home, to be in China again.’

Women were in great demand in the mining areas, and the Chinese were among the first to cater to the rough miners’ needs. Chinese overseers–tong bosses-warred over the few available dance-hall girls and prostitutes. A hurdy-gurdy entertainer called ‘Chinese Mary’ instigated a number of fights and at least one killing. After being kidnapped by one tong from another, she was transported to Wellington, Nev. There one of the dray men double-crossed his employers, abducted her and sold her to a Chinese merchant in Aurora for $220 and a silver watch and chain.

The merchant married her, but Mary didn’t take to domestic life and ran off. In 1876 she provoked several riots in Placer County and, the same year in Columbus, Nev., she was the object of a fight among nine separate men, each of whom claimed her. Most Chinese camp followers, however, were more docile and performed according to their tong bosses’ wishes.

Even so rare a commodity as a woman on the frontier didn’t guarantee financial stability. Frank Whitfield, a mining engineer who later retired and became a Plumas County rancher, told of a Chinese brothel keeper who, dissatisfied with the profits he was making from his establishment, enlisted the services of a huge immigrant Swede to drag tired miners to the little building he’d set up on the edge of Chinatown. ‘The Swede drank a lot’ Whitfield recalled’but he was as strong as an ox, and on more than one occasion threw a complaining miner over his shoulder, staggered across town and delivered him to the brothel.’

Not having money was no excuse for not taking a woman to one of the brothel’s little rooms. The brothel keeper took gold, silver, belt buckles, tools-even boots–in payment. According to Whitfield, the brothel keeper’s cousin ran a secondhand store in which he sold the items taken in trade very cheaply.

Even more ingenious were the suppliers of women who ran a little Chinese laundry in a mining camp near Oroville. Like many Chinese in the area, they were slender and stoop-shouldered from bending over hot irons day after day. Facially, they looked very much alike and often were mistaken for each other.

‘Charlie One’ who was slightly older and spoke some English, handled all their business transactions. Occasionally, for the insistent and hard-up miners, he would sneak a woman into the camp from an Oroville brothel. ‘Charlie Two’ spoke no English–in fact he hardly spoke at all. He worked hard in the laundry and in the little garden that the two Chinese maintained. He was known to be swift-footed; some of the miners claimed that Charlie Two could run down a jackrabbit in an open field.

One day a trio of miners, returning from their diggings on the South Fork of the Feather River with several bottles of rotgut, decided to entertain themselves and their companions by forcing Charlie One and Charlie Two to dance for them. They dragged the two frightened Chinese men out of the little laundry building and forced them to hop around a little, but the performance didn’t satisfy the miners.

They insisted that the dancers take off their cotton pants. When the two Chinese objected, the miners grabbed them and stripped them. Much to their astonishment, they found out that Charlie Two was a woman! She wiggled out of their grasp and she and Charlie One took off for the mountains, totally naked and very scared. The miners gave chase but quickly were outdistanced. No one in the mining camp ever found out what happened to the two Chinese, but odds are that the two set up a laundry-brothel somewhere else in northern California.

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