The Foreign Miners' Tax

The town of Sonora, California, is named for the Mexican state of Sonora. That is not a coincidence. The men who founded this camp were miners from Sonora, Mexico, who had arrived in California in eighteen forty-eight and early eighteen forty-nine, often months before the overland emigrant wave, and who had brought with them the placer mining techniques that many American miners did not yet know.

For that, California taxed them out.

The state legislature passed the first Foreign Miners' Tax in eighteen fifty. It required any miner who was not a U.S. citizen to pay twenty dollars per month for the right to work their claim. In eighteen fifty, twenty dollars was roughly two weeks' wages for a laborer. The tax was not designed to be paid. It was designed to expel. Armed tax collectors moved through the camps. Vigilante gangs moved with them or ahead of them. The Mexican and Chilean mining communities in the southern Mother Lode were systematically driven from their claims, often by violence, and the most productive claims were handed, by default, to white American miners who paid nothing.

A second version of the tax, passed in eighteen fifty-two, was aimed at the Chinese miners who by then constituted a significant fraction of the Mother Lode workforce. That version set a three-dollar monthly rate. It had the same purpose.

The California town of Sonora retains the name the Mexican miners gave it. The Tuolumne County Museum on Washington Street has exhibits on the Gold Rush. What most of those exhibits do not linger on is how the rush was organized, legally and violently, to transfer wealth from non-white hands to white ones. The Foreign Miners' Tax was not a revenue measure. It was a racial exclusion policy with an economic mechanism. The legislature knew that when they passed it, and passed it anyway.

The scars of that policy are not visible from the highway. The names of the men who were driven off their claims are not on any marker. Their absence from the Gold Country is one of the more consequential facts in California history.