Conclusions
The large-scale corporate realities of Hydraulic Mining were far different from the narrative sold to Forty Niners of individual wealth. Places like Dutch Flat and Sulfur Bank Mine stand out as examples of long-term environmental damage done in the name of profit. While the exploitation of Chinese labor was clearly unjust, it worked for corporations and provided a model for practices of labor exploitation of minority groups in the western US for the twentieth century.
In the narrative of Chinese immigrant laborers, the history of exclusion and exploitation has lessons for us today in the way immigrants who are “othered” are treated as expendable. Chinese men were pushed out of Gold Country until they were needed to do the “dirty work" then the same population were scapegoated for stealing the jobs white men didn’t want to do. The Chinese Exclusion Act was passed as the only example of a federal law to exclude a specific nationality. This exclusion of the population which was willing to do low paid jobs led to their replacement with a succession of other nationalities who faced (and continue to face) the threat of violence or deportation in place of a living wage and safe working conditions.
Industrial extraction of resources from the landscape using exploited labor has costs that last for generations. As art historian Jennifer Raab explains, the historical memory of the California Gold Rush was reimagined in the visual record as a moment of “social mobility, free enterprise, and self-determination.” Historians have created a narrative that side steps environmental destruction and racist labor exploitation while valorizing the white miner “as the personification of American democracy.”62 This myth of rugged individual white men has skewed our perception of US history. But when we widen our focus to include nonwhite immigrants and the broader landscape, the story becomes one of exploitation rather than heroic conquest.
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