Alexander Saxton The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the anti-Chinese movement in California, University of California Press: Los Angeles, CA, 1971 (1975), 293 pp., 1880s, 1870s, 1860s, 1850s
[p. 3] 1. The Labor Force In California
The Chinese
The census of 1870 showed just under fifty thousand Chinese in California. Their number had increased at an accelerating pace since before the Civil War and would continue to rise till after 1880; but the rate of increase was less rapid than that for the population as a whole. In 1860 Chinese had represented slightly more than 9 percent of all Californians; ten years later the proportion had dropped to 8.6 percent and in 1880 to 7.5 percent;.
Distribution throughout the state was uneven and shifted with changing occupational patterns. Most Chinese immigrants were laborers. The majority reaching California in the early fifties had joined the rush to the foothills. There thay had found themselves in competition with white miners, who frequently resolved their own differences sufficiently to join in evicting Chinese from the camps. Already, however, the golden days were passing; by the end of the decade, as surface deposits were stripped away, most white miners went hunting richer territory elsewhere or drifted into other pursuits. The Chinese then returned to work out low-yield diggings and comb over abandoned tailings. Thus, the census of 1860 for California found more than two-thirds of all Chinese in the mining regions of the Sierra Nevada and Trinity Alps.
[p. 4] But even under Chinese methods of extraction, the placers were finally giving out, and through the sixties a large number of Chinese moved into heavy construction. The Central Pacific Railroad provided the transition for this shift. From 1866 through 1869, the railroad kept some 10,000 Chinese at work boring the Sierra tunnel and driving the line east across the deserts of Nevada and Utah. One result-aside from the golden spike at Promontory-was the assembly of an army of experienced Chinese construction workers. Afterward some stayed with the railroad, which, upon completion of the transcontinental link, began pushing its lines out to the northern and southern extremities of the state. Others moved into agriculture. California ranchers, having come through their pastoral stage, were now demanding enormous supplies of labor for clearing, diking, ditching, draining, irrigating, and harvesting the new crops.
As most of this activity centered in the great valleys, a corresponding shift of Chinese population occurred. By 1870 the mining districts had lost half their Chinese residents of ten years earlier, while the valley counties were showing a rapid increase. In Sacramento, for example, the number of Chinese tripled in the twenty-year period from 1860 to 1880; in San Joaquin their number rose from 139 to almost 2,000; in Santa Clara from 22 to 2,695; in Yolo from 6 to over 600.
While these movements in the interior were under way, a second and more important concentration of Chinese population was developing at San Francisco. Here, until 1860, the resident community had comprised little more than 8 percent of Chinese in the state. By 1870, this percentage had risen to 26 and climbedf through the seventies to just under 30 percent . . .