Chinese Miners in the Tuolumne Foothills
Near Groveland, California
Chinese miners who came to the Tuolumne County foothills in the eighteen fifties arrived into a legal structure designed against them. California's Foreign Miners' Tax of eighteen fifty-two charged three dollars a month, later raised, directed almost entirely at Chinese workers, whose payments through this levy contributed heavily to state and local revenue. A California Supreme Court ruling in eighteen fifty-four barred Chinese people from testifying against white defendants in court, which meant that violence against Chinese miners carried essentially no legal consequence for the perpetrators.
Despite this, thousands of Chinese workers settled in the gulches and creek beds of Tuolumne County, working the tailings and reworked claims that American miners had abandoned as unprofitable. Chinese settlements developed in the foothills throughout the county, including the substantial community at Chinese Camp roughly seventeen miles to the west of Groveland, one of the earliest and largest Chinese communities in California's gold country. The workers who survived the discrimination and the violence did not only mine gold.
Many of them built the roads that opened the mountains to tourism. Chinese workers are said to have helped build the Big Oak Flat Road that passes through Groveland today in the early eighteen seventies, some perhaps coming from the railroad crews, now cutting the route that would carry visitors to Yosemite. The road outlasted the discrimination.
It outlasted nearly every law that shaped the lives of those who built it.
