ndred and sixty dollars for passage, thousands were packed into ships for the voyage to the Golden Mountain, as they called California. Lying on their sides in eighteen inches of space, mortality ran as high as twenty five percent on some ships (Chugg 1).
             To these impoverished Chinese immigrants, enduring the horrible conditions was a small price to pay to reach America. These immigrants wanted to escape the poverty and conflict of their own land and flee to the United States in order to work for a few years, return to China wealthy, and live a life of luxury. Unfortunately, these aspirations for wealth and return to homeland China rarely came true.
             While some of these Chinese immigrants toiled as panhandlers in search of the wealth they hoped to find at the Golden Mountain, other Chinese immigrants found jobs in low-paid labor. They worked in wool mills, garment and shoe factories, mines, and land development. Regardless of occupation, the number of Chinese immigrants grew steadily in number: in 1851 there were 2,716; the following year there were more than 20,000(Joselit 101). In fact, the Chinese represented twenty percent of California's labor
             force by 1870, even though they constituted only 0.002 per cent of the entire American population( Morrow 29). Although these large numbers of Chinese immigrants were tolerated through the years of economic prosperity and labor shortages, the first downturn in the economy showed a whole new face of America to the Chinese immigrants. The Depression of 1876 turned many Americans against the Chinese immigrants. By this time the Gold Rush had died, and many Americans came home to find that the Chinese immigrants who were willing to work for lower wages had taken their old jobs.
             The end of the Gold Rush and the Depression of 1876 caused many of the Chinese immigrants to turn to working on the railroads. Many Chinese workers were employed to work on the Southern Pacific r...