Chinese Field Hands Crucial to John Muir’s Fortune
Without their cheap labor in the fields, he never would have amassed his wealth.
Almost entirely men, the Chinese began coming to California during the gold rush, largely from the Pearl River Delta and neighboring areas of Kwangtung Province. This was a region of meager natural resources and swelling population beset by the Opium Wars, the T’aip’ing Rebellion, and clan warfare. Add to those human catastrophes the lure of gold, and Chinese left for California by the thousands. They paid their own passage, laying down cash if they could, going into debt if they couldn’t. By 1860 the Chinese had become the largest foreign-born group in California, making up some 10 percent of the state’s population.
Not that they were welcome. Miners and settlers saw the Chinese as alien competitors who took the easy gold and good jobs that should have been theirs. As they saw it, the Chinese were a loathsome menace as worthy of slurs as Native Californians and Blacks. Something had to be done, white folks demanded, and soon it was.
First came the Foreign Miners’ Tax, then waves of vigilante and mob violence, some of it under color of law, all aimed at driving the Chinese off their claims and out of the mining districts. California’s legislature championed bills to prevent immigration from China, and local communities passed anti-Chinese ordinances ranging from cutting their queues to banning them from the streets after dark.
As a nationwide depression in the 1870s, anti-Chinese agitation grew more extreme. California’s Ku Klux Klan unleashed upon the Chinese the same violence that its Southern sibling focused on African Americans. The western Klan enjoyed an advantage their southern siblings lacked: active government and political support. Understanding that the situation of the Chinese in the state mirrored that of Blacks in the South and wanting to keep them in their lowly place, California became the sole free state to reject ratification of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.
The violence was still ramping up as the transcontinental railroad was completed. Most of the 10,000 Chinese who had laid the tracks from Sacramento to Promontory Point came back to California to look for work, joining the continuing wave of new immigrants from China. The Chinese labor force was swelling just as the state’s industrializing fruit farms sought a reliable seasonal supply of cheap workers. Orchards and vineyards represented significant upfront investment in land, trees and vines, irrigation, and reclamation; years passed before those costs began to pay off. Cheap labor kept orchardists in business until revenues rose, and afterward it assured that the operations earned the profits their owners expected.
Facing growing discrimination and legally banned from more and more lines of work, many Chinese signed on with the fruit farms because discrimination and legislation left little else open to them. Chinese workers were paid less than Euro-Americans: $22 a month in the summer and $30 in the winter, without board, while whites earned $30 summers and $40 to $50 winters, plus meals. Typically they worked in gangs of six to ten men under a “China boss” who moved his crew around as needed, could speak serviceable English, and negotiated the contracts between workers and growers.
Just as Muir was getting into the intensive-orchard business, the movement against Chinese workers took yet another nasty turn, both close to home and at the national level. In May 1882, a mob in Martinez, just down the road from Muir’s farm, set upon Chinese cannery workers, badly injuring several by throwing them out of an attic window, and 64 stalwart citizens formed the anti-Chinese Liberty League No. 1 of Contra Costa County. That same month, President Chester A. Arthur signed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which prohibited the immigration of Chinese laborers into the United States and prevented Chinese already in the country from becoming citizens. The law remains the first and only U. S. immigration statute ever to target a specific ethnicity or nationality.
Paradoxically, the exclusionary law benefited the Chinese already working California’s farms and vineyards. Realizing that now they were difficult to replace, Chinese field workers — once lauded as docile as well as cheap — evidenced a fierce savvy in bargaining for better wages and working conditions, even organizing strikes to better their lot.
Like his peers in intensive agriculture, Muir depended on Chinese labor. He regularly supervised from 15 to 40 farmhands at a time, depending on seasonal needs. The workers who performed jobs from planting to pruning to harvesting in Muir’s orchards were lodged in five small houses along Franklin Creek. They settled into these temporary quarters often and long enough that they planted and cultivated a vegetable garden to supplement their meals.
Chinese farmhands were a fixture on the farm for decades, yet never is it recorded that Muir called any of them by name. He saw the Chinese as alien, other, even dangerous. “Don’t let the children get too familiar with that Chinaman,” he cautioned wife Louie in a letter when he was away, “and keep them in sight.”
Muir reflected the attitudes of his time, no worse and certainly no better. Support of the Chinese and opposition to the Chinese Exclusion Act came primarily from businessmen who wanted to keep wage rates low and from Protestant missionaries who longed for a rich harvest of heathen souls. Principled advocacy for the Chinese on the basis of human or constitutional rights was practically nonexistent. Had Muir wanted to do better than his peers toward the Chinese, he had no examples to learn from and no desire to be a pioneer.
Nor did Muir want to help the Chinese become Americans, an outcome he saw as impossible. In an unfinished note to himself he wrote:
Some of the best people in the world are Chinese, and we must not hate them. But we should not flock too closely with the Chinese, for they are birds with feathers so unlike our own they seem to have been hatched on some other planet. America can make Americans out of almost any people, but the Chinese though —
Muir turned cheap labor from the irretrievably alien Chinese, a growing market for California fruit, and the transcontinental railroad to his profit. Ever hard-nosed and single-minded, Muir cleared on average close to $150,000 in contemporary dollars, all deposited in interest-bearing accounts at several banks. By the time Muir died, the principal accumulated over the years swelled to more than $4.4 million. Add in the real estate he owned, and his estate exceeded $6.5 million.
Muir, who had arrived in Martinez with little but boxes of books, modest savings from magazine writing, his many backcountry notebooks, and a few well-worn clothes, had made himself and his family a comfortable fortune on the backs of Chinese field hands.
Up next: John Muir’s home land, and what it means for our world.