He practices English, becomes literate. He writes and reads whatever he can—dispatches from the Midwest and East Coast, letters other miners send to loved ones. Even after a long day of labor, he studies. He loses the accent—might his skin even lighten a little? He insists upon a new name. Isaac Snider, Isaac Snider; he repeats it like a prayer.
No longer does he have to pay that foreigner’s tax of three dollars a month to dig. He slips in step with the region’s Jews, many of them only a few years removed from their own migrations—from Poland, from Prussia. Perhaps the blessing of the gold makes passing possible. Perhaps there is a quiet understanding, a solidarity, an invitation to hide among other outsiders.
With the help of his adoptive community, he goes on, hiring subcontractors to dig in places others believe tapped out. He offers a third of anything they strike. “Just one third?” they sometimes demand. But Snider taps his temple and points out, using reason to delight a Silicon Valley intellectual property lawyer, that the idea to dig in this unlikely place had been his.
Snider is hardly the only person discovering that the rush is not just a loner’s game. Solo panners are taking up in groups to mine with Long Toms. Enterprise flourishes. American corporations germinate. Wells Fargo, Levi Strauss. Few call this new force greed. No, we say ambition.
In June 1859, Snider rests in the back of a general store with two Mormons who have taken a liking to his scrappy doggedness. They are reviewing an idea of his with skepticism. Consider them his investors, him their entrepreneur. The notion: to build a dam on the Yuba River—the same waters that once saved him. He swears there is gold beneath those rapids, worth extracting. Privately, he knows he won’t just turn that gold into money; he’ll consume some of it, and its blessing and power will let him into the main corridor of American history.
It takes five men over a month to pile up the rocks for the dam. It is physically risky, and each worker fears he is forfeiting easier gains. But when the month closes and the dam is finished, the cry goes up, one that rhymes with Sam Brannan’s original call, the one that knocked down the first domino: “Gold! Gold! Gold in the Yuba River!”
Isaac Snider’s ambition is not, however, to be some great figure in history. He only wishes to possess the singular identity of an uncolonized man. As the rush abates, like the last days of a war, he finds that he has built himself a network of allies. He marries the young niece of a local Bavarian immigrant. Adah. Adah Eckman. He meets her in her uncle’s dry-goods store. On the night of their wedding, she notices something—a central flaw in his claim to be Jewish. She says nothing at the sight of his foreskin. As though she knew all along? As though the gold’s power occludes her vision.
Snider begins editing a newspaper—the ultimate hiding place, for who would suspect a professional writer of English to be an outsider? Make use of all you took. Write yourself into America.
It is after covering one particular event that Snider’s identity is strained. The locals have never spared much love for the Chinese laborers living on the edge of town, praying in that Bok-Kai temple, wearing their hair in pigtails, working endless hours for astonishingly low pay. By the late 1860s, a new restlessness grows. California is settled. People live not in lean-tos but in houses; the currency is coin, not gold dust. Some bristle at the prospect that the Chinese might actually stick around. People say such things about Snider’s community, too—there’s talk of a Jewish tax, more than once.
One evening, a group of drunken white men comes upon one such Chinese fellow stepping out of the Bok-Kai temple. The whites believe they recognize the man: the proprietor of an opium den in San Francisco, since shut down by vice laws. A man who cheated countless smokers out of gold as they lay half-comatose in his sinners’ palace. These white men are the same sort who, decades earlier, took it upon themselves to form committees of vigilance, to prosecute Snider when he was still brown. They are the same sort who developed a protocol for lynching disruptive blacks and Mexicans and Chileans and Native Americans. They are the same sort who will, in another few decades, form a mob in Oregon to murder more than thirty Chinese miners; the same sort who will, soon after that, chase throngs of Sikhs from Washington. These white men beat the Chinese man and hang him from a tree overlooking the Yuba. Later, it’s revealed that he was no opium supplier, but the owner of a small laundry.
It is Snider’s unhappy job to write up the incident in the local paper: brutality, obviously brutality! But his colleagues say it would be folly to pretend the mob did not circle some fair point, that now that American jobs are scarcer, it is time for these coolies to go home, to take with them their pigtails and opium and work ethic. And so Snider, sick with himself but afraid of reminding people of the darkness of his skin, condemns the Chinese as much as he does the assailants. The best gesture he can offer, at the end of his editorial, is a plea to end the rhetoric of ridding the whole nation of the Chinese, for . . . How costly would this effort be? Let foreigners sink quietly into our new society.