Statement by local merchants, Alta California, August 1850: "The most widespread sympathy exists in favor of the Mexican, who in ninety-nine cases out of the hundred, is a friend and excellent customer, and we are sorry to observe that some of our own contemporaries in the most savage and unseemly manner have attempted to fling obloquy [insults] and disgrace upon so-called 'greasers'Shame! Shame! To spit on a man because he was born under a warmer sun than shone upon our birth. The Mexican is of the utmost service in the Southern Mines." (Peterson) 

Chilean and Mexican miners willingly shared their mining knowledge with less experienced miners. W. Kelly, An Excursion to California with a Stroll through the Diggings: "Americans resortedin the first instance, to the Chileans and Mexicans for instruction and information which they gave them with cheerful alacrity; but as soon as Jonathan [the American] got an inkling of the system, with the peculiar bad taste and ungenerous feeling, he organized a crusade against those obliging strangers." (Peterson) 

Josiah Royce, California: "The life of a Spanish American in the mines in the early days, if frequently profitable, was apt to be a little disagreeable. It serves him right, of course. He had no business, as an alien, to come to the land that God had given us. And if he was a native Californian, a born 'greaser,' then so much the worse for him. He was so much the more our born foe; we hated his whole degenerate, thieving, landowning, lazy, and discontented race. Some of them were now even bandits; most of them by this time were, with our help, more or less drunkards; and it was not our fault if they were not all rascals! So they deserve no better." (Peterson) 

Part II, Resource #2-16 

Page 62

[LESSONS]• [FIRST PAGE]• [PREVIOUS PAGE]• [TOP]• [NEXT PAGE]