Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans
by Jean Pfaelzer, Random House, New York, 2007, $27.95.
The discovery of gold in California in January 1848 attracted hordes of prospectors, entrepreneurs and workers, but not all found themselves welcome. Immigrants from China were subjected to incessant Anglo-American violence. As early as 1849, a mob of white miners in Mariposa County declared that any “Chinaman” seeking gold in the area must “leave on twenty-four hours notice, otherwise the miners will inflict such punishment as they deem proper.” Deadly purges became the norm throughout the 19th-century West, reaching their peak with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
Author Jean Pfaelzer has unearthed a vast trove of documentation to chronicle what amounted to nearly a century of ethnic cleansing against a people who resisted more strenuously than is generally believed. While persecution was most prevalent in California and the Pacific Northwest, workers on the Central Pacific Railroad who tried to settle down farther inland were equally subject to the depredations of anti-Chinese “conventions” and “clubs.” Driven Out tells a n interesting but grim story that just might leave some readers feeling a mite less proud of the legacy of the “Golden West.”
Originally published in the June 2008 issue of Wild West. To subscribe, click here.
