Mark Twain in Virginia City

A big hunk of silver ore

Boomtowns of the west held quite a fascination for American readers, and Virginia City, home of the Comstock Lode, was first among them. In February 1863, 20 years before the mines were played out, Samuel Clemens, a reporter on the local newspaper Territorial Enterprise, first used his famous pen name: Mark Twain. In Shaketown, Wo Sam and his cousin are sent to Virginia City after the boom is well over. Economic development defined patterns of settlement for the earliest Chinese immigrants. Before the Chinese Exclusion Act, immigrants followed work in the western states: because mining and railway construction dominated the west, Chinese immigrants settled mostly in California and states west of the Rockies. The earliest immigrants were able to bring their wives and family members from China prior to the Exclusion Acts (at the time, the Chinese population in the United States was about 110,000). As railway construction and mining declined and anti-Chinese sentiment increased, the Chinese fled into small import-export businesses, service businesses and small manufacturing in such cities as San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle. Others moved into abandoned towns and took over mining claims, such as those in Shaketown's Virginia City, forming their own tightly knit, well-functioning societies. In spite of the distance, a number of Chinese businesses (especially gambling) were controlled by San Francisco tongs.

Who is the Enemy?

A run on the Stock Exchange

  The Panic of 1873 was a severe worldwide financial depression caused by a fall in demand for silver (Germany's decision to abandon silver as the basis for monetary worth set off the panic). The plummeting value of silver was one of the reasons for closing the Comstock Lode in Virgina City in Shaketown. Economic fears on the west coast caused racial tensions in San Francisco to boil over into full-blown race riots focusing on Chinese Americans, who were thought to be stealing jobs from whites. The Consolidated Chinese Benevolent Association (known as The Six Companies) evolved out of labor recruiting organizations that brought immigrants from different areas of Guangdong since the gold rush; the organization attempted to quell the violence. The heads of the Six Companies were leading Chinese merchants; they sought to represent the Chinese community in front of the business community as a whole and San Francisco city government. The organization proved powerless to stop the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and further restrictive immigration laws such as the Geary Act, which required all Chinese residents of the United States to carry a "US Resident Card", a sort of internal passport. Failure to carry the permit at all times was punishable by deportation back to China or a year of hard labor. In addition, Chinese were not allowed to bear witness in court (which is why Wo Sam couldn't testify for Cayley). From 1882 on, Chinese Americans were confined to segregated ghettos and suffered the worst forms of racial oppression.