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Unlike most Chinese immigrants of his time, Gin Lin found respect and a mountain of gold
The last thing Chinese were generally despised, discriminated against and performing dangerous, backbreaking work for 60 to 75 cents a day in the American West, Gin Lin stood out in the crowd. He not only gained the respect of the business and civic leaders of southern Oregon but also became wealthy beyond most men's wildest dreams.
Fast clipper ships carried the news of the 1848 gold strike at Sutter's Mill across the Pacific. Peasants toiling in China's rice paddies heard that gold had been discovered in California almost as soon as factory workers in Boston and New York did. Soon the Chinese were calling America's West Coast Gum Shan, or the "Mountain of Gold." By February 1849, the first of the Far Eastern gold-seekers had landed in San Francisco. Hordes would follow
Like thousands of his countrymen, Gin Lin fled crushing poverty, war, overcrowding, disease and civil unrest in his homeland to seek his fortune in the gold fields of America.
Living conditions in mid- 19th-century China were almost unbearable, particularly in Kwangtung (Canton) province. For thousands of years the fertile delta of the Pearl River in southeast China had been the country's rice basket, but farms that once flourished had been subdivided and parceled out to generations of descendants, leaving plots too small to support a family. Squalor and filth along the teeming waterfronts caused typhoid, malaria, cholera and plague to run rampant. Social unrest and civil war added to the misery The Taiping Rebellion, which lasted from 1851 to 1864, claimed more than 20 million lives.
Young men who could only hope to make 10 cents a day in China, if they could find employment, jumped at the chance to earn 60 to 75 cents a day as miners or railroad workers in the New World. Not even the dangers of a Pacific voyage or the uncertainties of living in a foreign land could deter them.
Unlike most European emigrants, who came to America seeking freedom and hoping to build a new life, the Chinese came as temporary residents intent upon improving their economic plight and returning to China. Known as sojourners, they were strangers in a strange land. About half the men were married, but very few brought their wives. They sent much of their earnings home. Only 5 percent of the Chinese who came to America in the mid-1800s were women, most of those having been orphaned or sold by their families.
Ill-clad and unprepared for cold weather, some of the early sojourners froze to death. Their standard wardrobe consisted of loose-fitting light-blue denim pants, blue tuniclike shirts, white stockings, skull caps and cloth shoes with paper soles. Many wore the large conical straw, or "coolie," hats that provided some protection from sun and rain as well as storage space. Later arrivals added coats and boots to their attire. The queue, or long pigtail, which hung down the middle of the back from an otherwise shaven head, was not a fashion statement but considered a necessity. Manchu dictators forbid returning workers to re-enter China without them.
The main staple of the Oriental diet was rice supplemented by a few fresh vegetables and dried fruit when available. Because they boiled their water to make tea, the Chinese often avoided the diseases that swept through the mining camps.
The clannish ways and strange customs of the sojourners caused the white population to mistrust and resent them. One Chinese practice the whites found especially disgusting was that of exhuming their dead so the bones could be transported back to China. Father Francis Xavier Blanchet, an early resident of the gold-rush town of Jacksonville, Ore., wrote: "Whenever a child of the deceased leaves for China to visit or on business, they dig up the body, scrape the bones, and carefully transplant them in China so that their souls will go to Paradise."
Violence was commonplace in the mining camps, and the sojourners were often blamed for anything that went wrong. Since nonwhites were not allowed to testify against whites until 1862, and often did not get fair treatment in the courts even after that time, Chinese were frequently beaten, robbed and even killed with impunity. In some mining camps, shootings were almost a nightly occurrence.
Following the gold rush north, the first Chinese began trickling into southern Oregon shortly after the 1852 strikes were made on Jackson Creek, where the rowdy town of Jacksonville mushroomed almost overnight. More strikes quickly followed in the Siskiyou Mountains, as well as along the Applegate and Rogue rivers and their tributaries. By 1870 there were between 2,500 and 4,000 Chinese miners in southern Oregon.
The sojourners were welcomed to Jackson County with a $2-per-month head tax in 1857, and it was doubled in 1858. In addition, the state adopted a law in 1862 that directed every Negro, Chinaman, Kanaka (Hawaiian), and Mulatto" living in Oregon to pay an annual $5 poll tax. As if that were not enough, any Chinese engaged in any kind of trading was charged a $50-per-month fee. An article that appeared in the September 1, 1866, issue of The Oregon Sentinel, Jacksonville's Republican newspaper, expressed the resentment and open hostility directed toward the Chinese: We hope that during the present legislative session, the very important question of taxing the Chinese miners will not be overlooked.... It seems an unwise policy to allow a race of brutish heathens who have nothing in common with us, to exhaust our mineral lands without paying a heavy tax for their occupation. These people bring nothing with them to our shores, they add nothing to the permanent wealth of this country and so strong is their attachment to their own country, they will not let their filthy carcasses lie in our soil. Could this people be taxed as to exclude them entirely, it would be a blessing."
Those whites who put aside their prejudices long enough to get to know the Chinese found them, on the whole, to be peaceable, respectful, friendly dependable, generous and very hard-working. Celebration of the Chinese New Year was always observed with fireworks and candy that the sojourners happily shared with their non-Oriental neighbors. Although the mining camps and "shanty towns" in Oregon were filthy, Chinese miners practiced better personal hygiene than most of their white counterparts, taking daily baths with soap and warm water and changing their clothes before dinner.
Some may have drifted in from California on their own, but most sojourners arrived in Oregon under contract to a Chinese boss who farmed them out to work for white mine owners. The mine owner paid the boss in a lump sum and he, in turn, deducted any amount the worker still owed on his transportation across the ocean. All purchases of food and supplies were also made through the Chinese boss.
Gin Lin was such a boss. His arrival in southern Oregon went unnoticed and unrecorded, but it was soon apparent that he was different from most of his countrymen. Elmira McKee Thurman, an earlyday Oregon resident, remembered him as dark, heavy-set and rather youthful looking. Instead of the usual queue, he sported a full head of bushy hair.
Oregon did not allow Chinese to stake mining claims or own mining property yet by 1864 Gin Lin managed to buy mining property from John Wilson near the settlement of Buncom at the confluence of Sterling Creek and the Little Applegate River for $900.
White men were frequently eager to sell what they considered "played out" mines to Chinese. "The white man's philosophy was to get as much gold as he could and then move on," says Marjorie Edens of the Southern Oregon Historical Society. The industrious Chinese seemed happy to take over "played out" mines, and when they moved on to richer diggings, the claims they left behind were truly worthless.
Soon many of the laborers Gin had formerly contracted out to other mine owners were working for him on the Little Applegate River. He treated his men with honesty and fairness, even helping some of them purchase their own claims. He made sure the claims were legally recorded by Jacksonville attorney Charles Wesley Kahler and that the proper taxes were paid.
Gin's crew worked hard for him. Rich veins of gold were uncovered at his mining operation, and the Gin Lin Mining Company began to play an important role in southern Oregon's economy.
Gin continued to work his Little Applegate mine through the 1870s until the deposits waned. In 1881, he purchased more claims in the Palmer Creek and Flumet Flat area farther up the Applegate River.
As Gin Lin's wealth grew, so did his status among Jacksonville's citizenry. The sight of him driving a handsome buggy pulled by a high-stepping horse around town became a familiar one. He became friends with several of the area's most prominent business leaders, including pioneer photographer Peter Britt, who took several photographs of him; banker C.C. Beekman; attorney Wes Kahler; and cabinetmaker David Linn.
David Linn's son, Fletcher, described the Chinese miner in his book Memories: "Gin Lin was a large, robust character, not at all like the 'Coolie' or laboring Chinese who constituted the laboring force in his operations; and on one of his visits to 'China Town,' he came across the street to meet father, and introduced himself as 'Gin Lin alle same Dave Linn's cousin,' and he and father became quite good friends."
Gold deposits found along the Applegate River and its tributaries were soon depleted; new mining methods had to be developed to excavate the yellow metal buried in ancient streambeds along the hillsides. Hydraulic mining was the answer, and Gin Lin was the innovator of this type of mining in southern Oregon. He had the equipment he needed hauled in by pack train from Crescent City Calif, and set his Chinese crew to digging water ditches.
Hydraulic mining used pressurized water to loosen the packed gravel of the slopes. The success of hydraulic mining depended upon a reliable source of water. In order to divert water from the larger streams to the mining operations, the Chinese used picks and mattocks to dig hundreds of miles of ditches through the dense brush and rocky slopes of the upper Applegate Valley Many of these ditches can still be seen.
Water from the ditch flowed into a large wooden structure called a"headbox" From the headbox it was diverted into a penstock made of riveted steel pipes that lined a trench leading downslope. The abrupt drop in elevation increased the water pressure. The penstock pipe delivered the water to a large nozzle the miners called a "giant." Water blasted from it into the exposed hillsides. Loosened material was washed through a series of sluice boxes, or wooden troughs, which separated the gold-bearing silt from the gravel. Worthless gravel and cobbles were cast aside into tailing piles.
Fletcher Linn told about visiting Gin Lin's hydraulic mining operation: "When I was home from college for a brief visit on Christmas in 1887, father suggested that I join him on a Sunday trip to visit Gin, as he had often asked father to do. We hitched a horse to the light buggy, and started very early as the mine was ten or twelve miles from Jacksonville, over the hills into the Applegate Valley When we arrived, the operation was closed down for a 'clean-up'; so we missed seeing the operation, but 'Gin' surely entertained us in showing us some of the results of his week or ten days run. I had seen several other hydraulic operations, but never one to equal this one of 'Gins.' The work done, and earth removed by those huge Hydraulic Giants, was really amazing. The 'clean up' was the largest of its kind that I ever saw; and the Chinese workers were carrying out the gold in small buckets full, under the protection of a couple of armed guards pacing the upper ledge or rim of the mine. All 'Gin' would say as he glanced at the buckets and then to father, was 'Putty good, Cousin, Putty good.' We had a fine visit with 'Gin' and a mighty interesting day"
As a result of his mining activities in the Applegate Valley Gin Lin deposited between $1 million and $2 million worth of gold dust and nuggets in the Beekman Bank in Jacksonville. He became a familiar face in town.
Gin Lin went to great lengths to keep good relations with the white people of the community even employing several white men in his mines. He was known to shut down operations periodically through the summer months so farmers could use the water from his ditches to irrigate. It is also said that when an Indian burial was exposed, he ordered that the area be left undisturbed.
It is known that Gin Lin had at least four different wives while in southern Oregon. He made several return trips to China, each time bringing back a delicately featured, almond-eyed beauty dressed in fine silks and brocades and younger than her predecessor. He would then simply sell his former spouse to one of his men. Gin Wye, born in Jacksonville, was the son of Gin Lin's youngest and last wife, Gen Shen.
When the gold grew scarce in southern Oregon as in other parts of the West, most of the Chinese went to work on the railroads. They provided the railroad bosses with a reliable yet inexpensive source of labor.
Of the several thousand sojourners residing in southern Oregon during the height of the gold-mining era, only a handful remained by the turn of the century The 1900 census counted a mere 43 Chinese residents in Jackson County
No one is exactly certain of Gin Lin's fate, but he disappeared from southern Oregon in the late 1800s. He may have left because of racism or simply because he had made enough money and wanted to return to his homeland, or, as Marjorie Edens says, "all of the above." One story says that he sold his Oregon holdings, withdrew his money from the Jacksonville bank (hiding it on his person) and sailed in 1894 for China, where he was robbed and fatally beaten as he stepped off the ship onto the wharf at Canton. Another version of the story says he lived in China three years with his wife and son before his death in 1897.
Although Gin Lin's fate may never be known, his legend lives on in southern Oregon. Today the U.S. Forest Service maintains the Gin Lin Trail above the Applegate River where visitors can take a self-guided tour of Gin Lin's Palmer Creek operation. Part of his story is etched on the moss-covered tailing piles, the overgrown water ditches and the hydraulic cuts in the "mountain of gold" that made him rich.
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