In 1856, the people of Mariposa County gave the Chinese ten days’ notice to vacate the area: “Any failing to comply shall be subjected to thirty-nine lashes, and moved by force of arms.” In El Dorado County, white miners torched Chinese tents and mining equipment and turned back stagecoaches filled with Chinese passengers. As one scholar of the period has written, the ruling “opened the way for almost every sort of discrimination against the Chinese. Assault, robbery, and murder, to say nothing of lesser crimes … so long as no white person was available to witness in their behalf.” This was the era that coined the term “a Chinaman’s chance”—meaning not much of a chance at all.

Legalized persecution turned the Chinese into gold rush scavengers. Rather than compete directly with whites, Chinese prospectors picked over abandoned claims. From now on, most of those who succeeded would do so through a combination of patient toil and a frugal lifestyle, though more than a few resorted to ingenuity. One smart and determined man named Ah Sam bought a log cabin from six miners for twenty-five dollars. Past experience had told him that he might make a killing by washing the gold dust from the dirt floor. He left with $3,000 worth of gold dust, a nice return on his investment. (Chang 44-45)