The Foreign Miners in the American Gold Rush

The Foreign Miners in the American Gold Rush

One Saturday night, a mob of masked men, who numbered forty to sixty, approached a small house. Arriving at the house, they dragged two slumbering men from their bunks and hustled them from the house, without even allowing them to put on their clothes, and started to kick and beat them. One of the invaders drew his pistol and shot at one of the victims. The bullet pierced the body of the man and inflicted a terrible wound. Both men who were attacked that night died. This event occurred in Rico, a camp in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado on May 13, 1882. The two Chinese miners that inhabited the village were kicked, cuffed, and dragged over the ground by the hair of their heads, clubbed with pistols and sticks by white men who wanted to run the Chinese out of town. Six Chinamen who resided next door were treated in much the same manner as their friends were that night. Mongolians of the village were thrown into the icy water half-naked.

This was nothing new in the west, since the non-traditional miners, especially Chinese miners, were the victims of American racial prejudice from the beginning of the Gold Rush. When the Gold Rush struck the American continent, waves of people came to the west. One might think that only white people participated, but there were lots of miners who came from various places around the world. Their life and experiences were not widely known, whereas those of the white miners were pretty well known. Non-traditional miners certainly had much harder experiences than the white miners did. Many of them were discriminated against, abused and even killed. Looking into the life and experiences of the non-traditional miners, the American Gold Rush period w...

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