One summer day in the 1850s, a traveler in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California came upon an interesting sight. In the harsh landscape of tumbled brown rocks he saw “long files of Chinamen working alone.” They wore blue cotton shirts, wide-legged trousers, wooden shoes, and broad-brimmed straw hats. Their jet-black hair was cut short, except in the back, where each man wore a long braid called a queue. 

       The men were busy sifting sand from the beds of mountain streams, rocking it back and forth in shallow pans as the water ran out. Like many other people in California in those years, the Chinese miners were panning for gold. 

       Gold had been discovered in 1848 along the American River in California, on the property of a man named John Sutter. Although Sutter tried to keep the discovery a secret, words of the fabulous find soon reached San Francisco, and hundreds of people deserted the city to set off for the American River. The news spread to the rest of the United States, and to other parts of the world as well. By January of 1849, 60 ships and thousands of overland travelers were heading for California. The California Gold Rush had begun.

       More than 70,000 hopeful adventurers embarked for California in 1849 alone. Among these “Forty-Niners” were 325 men from China. More Chinese came the next year, and the next. Like the prospectors who came from the eastern United States and elsewhere, the Chinese hoped to find gold—but all of them found a new world and a new way of life, with challenges, fears, and opportunities that they had not expected.