Bodie Chinese Contract Labor
Bodie Township- Stand Mill.
Rock blasting was very dangerous and the mining companies hired “Contract Chinese Labor”. The Chinese laborers were under the “ticket system.” They owed the “Chinese ticket money” to the contract Chinese “Ton” who had funded their passage from China to America. They owed this debt to one of their own Countrymen. Once in America, where and how they labored to pay their “passage debt” was up to them. There was no returning to China until this debt was paid in full. This debt also accumulated interest. They had no skills, spoke a foreign tongue, and in America gathered in the areas where other Chinese lived to find employment. It was easiest and safer to stay within “Chinatown” because the language was similar. The meager wages they earned came from employment from a more “established countryman.”
It was Servitude. Boiling hot water for laundry, and long hours of doing laundry, butchering chickens, and planting and harvesting vegetable gardens was physically menial work. This type of manual labor took no technical skill, no language communication and was physically strenuous in an indoor tiny, confined space, or outdoors in the harsh, cold weather.
By 1880, the Census indicates about 350 Chinese living in Bodie. As a “labor pool that were fed, housed and worked together.”
The Chinese Contract laborers were all-nameless. Individually, they were just called “Johns,” and invisible to the rest of the Euro-American mine workers. Thus, if a “contract laborer” was killed in a blasting explosion- it went unnoticed, no Newspaper Death Notice. If a body was recovered, no family to notify or funeral expenses to pay-out.
The death and burial of a Chinese worker was about the customs and traditions of the Chinese ancestors. (Customs dictated that Chinese burials would later be exhumed and their bones returned to China for reinterment with their ancestors in the ancestral family grave.)
In Bodie, the Chinese were buried indigent, nameless and in unmarked temporary graves. Forgotten and nameless, their remains were never exhumed, or returned to China. Their Bodie “temporary interment” became their permeant grave.
The Exclusion Act of 1882, or Geary Act was a Immigration Federal Law that “excluded Chinese from owning property, working for a local, state or federal municipality”. The Bodie Miners’ Union and the Workingman’s Party prohibited the Chinese from joining any Union or working for any of the Mining Companies.
Excluded from being buried in a “Private Corporation Cemetery,” because they could not own property. Thus, the “1882 Exclusion Act” made the indigent “Public Cemetery” the only available place of interment of a Chinese worker who was killed or died in Bodie.
Bodie’s Chinatown was the only place an “Unmarried Female” could fit into the town and find work doing laundry, hosting in the gambling saloons, and find living quarters. The “Redlight District” was next to Chinatown for a reason. The “Non-Wage Earners,” serving the miners were living closest to the mine for convenience.
It was unfavorable location also, because of the loud and constant noise from all the various mining activity. The Stamp Mills were in operation seven days a week, dusk to dawn crushing ore. The stench of raw sewage and foul odors of horse manure added to the dislike of living in the filthy “Chinatown.” Having “a reputation” of living in the “downward status” location by the slaughterhouse, also created a “class of lower status” for the Chinese and the “women.”