The Dark Purpose Behind a Town Constable’s Journal

Why did a local official, at the turn of the twentieth century, maintain a ledger tracking Chinese residents?
An image of an Asian man in a ledger book.
Photograph album of Chinese men and women in Sierra County, 1890-1930, Vault 184, California Historical Society

The town of Downieville, California, situated at a fork of the Yuba River, about seventy-five miles northeast of Sacramento, began as one of the gold rush’s earliest mining camps. It quickly became a hub for miners in the region—a place where they could restock their provisions and find amusement away from the diggings. Gambling saloons, restaurants, hotels, and even a small theatre all occupied a single street, wedged between a steep mountain slope and the river. Like many parts of California during the latter half of the nineteenth century, the Downieville area became home to a population of Chinese immigrants. As the number of Chinese people on the Pacific coast increased, so did white Americans’ loathing for the “heathen race.” The Chinese Exclusion Act, passed in 1882, banned the immigration of Chinese laborers, and dozens of communities across the western United States expelled their Chinese residents. Yet Downieville’s Chinese quarter persisted, in spite of the turbulence. In August, while researching a book I am writing about Chinese exclusion, I visited the California Historical Society in San Francisco and encountered for the first time a small red ledger, dating back to the turn of the twentieth century, that recorded the names and faces of Downieville’s Chinese residents. Accounts of the lives of Chinese people who experienced the cruelties of this era are rare, so I was immediately drawn to the volume, but I also found myself stricken as I began paging through it.

The ledger, which measures roughly eight inches long and five inches wide, belonged to John T. Mason, a constable in Downieville. The date on the first page is April 8, 1890, though some of the ledger’s notations seem to have been recorded earlier. Ephemera consume the first few pages: instructions for treating varicose veins, notes about a letter sent to a detective bureau in Cincinnati, a mailing address in Seattle for “Mrs. H. Libby,” a list of legal summonses served between 1889 and 1890. But the book’s real purpose starts to reveal itself on page 4, with a lengthy index of names and a note at the top that reads, “Chinese Photographed by DD Beatty at Downieville Feb 20th, 1894.” What follows is a collection of a hundred and seventy-six photographs of Chinese residents of Downieville and the surrounding area, pasted two to a page, accompanied by notations for each subject’s name, age, height, occupation, place of residence, and select physical characteristics: “little finger of right hand crooked,” “mole under right ear,” “pockmarked.”

The weathered pages furnish the thinnest slivers of the lives led by Chinese people in nineteenth-century California. Multiple generations are represented in the document. Yup Gee, age fifty-six, a resident of the mining town of Alleghany, is identified as the mother of “Ah Moon”; roughly thirty pages later, we meet Quok Moon, a twenty-two-year-old miner who was born in the same town. Census records point to them being mother and son. The youngest subject, a round-cheeked teen-ager named Eva Yee Chung, was born on the other side of the country, in New York City. The last few photographs, taken several decades after the others, show their subjects dressed mostly in elegant Western attire, perhaps indicating a certain degree of affluence. Quong Dong Bing, age twenty-six, is in a suit and tie, his hair neatly combed back; Tong Ka Jou, age twenty-three, wears a polka-dot bow tie.

Mason’s handwritten addenda to the entries, seemingly added over many years, reveal a grim attention to the movement of Chinese people in his jurisdiction. On page 27, for example, we meet Ung Gook, otherwise known as “China Susie”—a petite, fifty-five-year-old housekeeper with hoop earrings and a brocade pinned to her blouse. Scrawled at the bottom of the entry is an abrupt epilogue: “Gone to China for good 1900.” Nung Owen, a sixty-two-year-old man with a widow’s peak and a defiant expression, “went to China Sep 1906” and was “told never to come back.” The photographer caught Jung Chung, a genial-looking sixty-three-year-old miner, in what appears to be the beginnings of a wry smile: he is listed as “gone to China to never return,” in December of 1894. In total, the ledger records that eleven of the Chinese residents of the Downieville area returned to their country of origin.

Even more foreboding is the tally of twenty-one people who are marked as dead. Yung Jung, a fifty-eight-year-old miner, who was nearly six feet tall, “froze to death on Lost Creek” in February of 1895. Wong Sang, a sixty-one-year-old miner with a stubble on his chin and mournful eyes, was “killed” in 1905. For most of the dead, there is no explanation: Jo Jung, miner, age sixty-seven; Lock Yan, miner, age sixty-three; Chin Foo, cook, age sixty-five. The entry for Wong Fun, a fifty-two-year-old miner, contains only the frightening observation, “Burned.”

Archivists at the California Historical Society are unsure about how long the ledger has been in their collection, or how it was acquired. Marie Silva, a manuscripts archivist, discovered it in one of the society’s basement vaults in 2011. Immediately upon examining it, she sensed the weight of the images. “It just felt extremely significant to me,” she told me. “I think it was seeing all of these photographs of all of the people and then realizing this might be the only surviving record of these people.” She guessed that the document had a surveillance purpose during the era of Chinese exclusion, but also felt moved by the ways the pictures conveyed a sense of the personalities of the people depicted. While cataloguing the album, she took the unusual step of typing in the name of every person listed, in case someone might one day come looking for traces of an ancestor. The historical society recently made a digitized version of the ledger available online and, beginning on January 28th, will display it publicly for the first time, as part of an exhibition on exclusion-era photographs.

Much about the document has remained mysterious. Who was DD Beatty, and why did he take these photographs? What was John T. Mason doing, maintaining the ledger for so many years? I started to find some answers in old issues of the Mountain Messenger, Downieville’s local newspaper, and other historical records. I learned that Mason was a longtime resident of Downieville, whose family had crossed the Great Plains from Missouri during the gold rush. He was made constable in Downieville in 1884, and later became a deputy sheriff and the justice of the peace. A book published in 1930 about Mason’s adventures in mining country describes a thriving Chinatown in Downieville, and characterized Mason as being “friendly with the Celestials,” adding that he “could handle the chop-sticks to perfection.”

But any purported friendliness between law enforcement and the Chinese residents of California contradicts the realities of the period. In 1892, Congress passed the Geary Act––named after its sponsor, Representative Thomas J. Geary, a California Democrat––re-authorizing the Chinese Exclusion Act. The bill, which extended the ban on the immigration of Chinese laborers for another ten years, imposed additional punitive measures on the Chinese, including requiring them to obtain certificates of residence that established their right to be in the country. Anyone found without such a certificate was subject to immediate arrest.

Lawmakers subsequently added a requirement that the certificates be accompanied by photographs. “You can not make a verbal description of a Chinaman such as you can make of a white man, and have it definite,” Geary said, on the floor of the House, explaining the need for the new requirement. “All Chinamen look alike, all dress alike, all have the same kind of eyes, all are beardless, all wear their hair in the same manner. Now, you sit down and write out a description of a Chinaman, give his height, weight, the color of his skin and the shape of his eyes, and after you have done it, what have you got? You have a description that will fit any other Chinaman you happen to run up against.”

An alliance of Chinese mutual-aid associations, known as the Six Companies, pledged to resist the registration requirement, calling it “an insult that has not been inflicted upon the subjects of any other nation.” The groups took their fight all the way to the Supreme Court—and lost. The Mountain Messenger cheered the Court’s decision and provided readers with regular updates on the requirements being imposed on the Chinese. “They must furnish with their registration papers two unmounted photographs of the face of the applicant, an inch and a half from the base of the hair to the point of the chin,” an article on January 6, 1894, said. “These photographs must be paid for by these heathens.”

Mason’s son-in-law, a photographer named Decatur Dudley Beatty, arrived in Downieville with his wife, Lillian, on February 17, 1894, a few months after the enactment of the photography requirement. The couple had travelled by stagecoach from Grass Valley, in Nevada County, where Beatty had a studio. For over a week, Downieville was crowded with Chinese people from across the county who had come to have their pictures taken; Beatty photographed more than a hundred and fifty of them before he departed on February 28th. (The album’s index suggests that Beatty returned in late April to Downieville to take additional photographs.) The registration of the Chinese was conducted at the end of March by Thomas P. Ford, a deputy internal revenue collector. “The Chinese see that the authorities mean business and are all most anxious to register,” the Mountain Messenger reported.

But even if federal lawmakers were preoccupied with regulating the presence of Chinese people, Mason’s maintenance of the book is still anomalous. Local officials like him were not required to track the Chinese as he so avidly did. Erika Lee, a professor at the University of Minnesota who included two pages from the ledger in her book “America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States,” theorizes that the journal might be an early example of local law enforcement taking liberties to surveil immigrants—a troubling phenomenon that persists to this day. In a phone conversation last week, she told me, “This is a form of racial control and terror.”

Still, there is something undeniably moving about the assemblage of images and annotations. The people whom history has confined to the margins are often hidden from our view. By 1890, more than a hundred thousand Chinese were living in the United States, but newspaper articles, letters, diaries, and other historical archives from the nineteenth century are almost entirely devoid of Chinese voices. This is a recurring issue with the source material of American history: power and social status tend to determine whose narratives persist. In this way, the ledger—a record of the oppressed, authored by the powerful—is both magnetic and frustrating. As I have returned to it, I have found myself lingering over individual photographs. I have wondered about each person’s journey to America, their aspirations in this hostile land, the suffering they endured, and what ultimately became of them. From this document we have learned their names, but their stories are still untold.