HI: As you say the were highly discriminated against, and forced off of any claim that was fairly good.
In California they finally hit back, heheh.
It seems that as usual they were only allowed to work claims that no-one else wanted. A group were working on just such a claim. in a communal effort. Each month at clean up time they sent a small bag of gold via the local Wells Fargo stage to the banks in Sacramento.
The other miners naturally kept a close eye upon this. As the production increased monthly, the Chinese were sending bigger bags of gold down to Sacramento. This was making the America miners uncomfortable, why should they have such a good claim. There was considerable grumbling and some of the rougher elements commenced to hassle the hard working Chinese in their camps. The Chinese never complained, just kept on working, and the shipments grew in size.
The size of the shipments finally grew so large that the greedy American miners tried to buy their claims, but the Chinese refused to sell, claiming that the properties were too poor. so the Americans commenced to physically abuse the Chinese and their families to force them to sell..
Finally the Chinese could no longer stand the abuse and agreed to sell the claims. Since the Claims were extensive, being supposedly useless ground, the overall price was high. The American miners decided to pool their capital in order to buy the Chinese claims. The Chinese kept insisting that the properties were every poor, but the miners knew better, having seen those bags of gold steadily increasing in size and amount each month as work progressed.
Finally the agreed amount of money etc was exchanged for the titles of the properties and the Chinese moved out overnight.
The miners then set up a lottery system according to the amount of money each had put into the pool. After things had cleared up, they started to work the claims and found that the Chinese had not lied, they were almost worthless .
Investigation showed that Chinese did indeed send a bag of gold each month to Sacramento, but it was never banked, just sent back to them, so they had just added the next months production to the previous amount until it had apparently reached a very high showing for a monthly production, when in fact, it was the result of months of hard work.
Vengeance is mine saith the LORD, but the Chinese had their on rules hehehee.
p.s. The Chinese were fanatical gamblers, so eventually one or more, ended up with large amounts of money which they hid, so look carefully around the old camps.
Till Eulenspiegle de la Mancha
