Vicente Pérez Rosales was born in 1807 in Santiago, Chile. As a young man he stuidied in France and worked odd jobs (including as a distiller, a cooper, and a tobacco and cattle smuggler) before sailing to California for the gold rush. In 1878 he published a memoir based on his California travels that was later released in an edited version as Recuerdos del pasado (1882). Upon returning to his homeland, Rosales was sent to Europe to promote immigration to Chile, and he later served his country as a member of the Chilean senate. He died in 1886. The following excerpt is from the original diary of his travels.

—Under the Fifth Sun, Latino Literature from California

FEBRUARY 18, 1849
It is four o'clock. The opening called the Golden Gate is in sight. We are entering it now. It is an emotional experience. How beautiful and how impressive this coast is. All its hills are covered with trees, and you can see cattle on the slopes.

We are at last in California. The bay of San Francisco is without doubt the greatest in the whole Pacific Ocean, and the loveliest in the world next to Rio de Janeiro. Its entrance, the Golden Gate, is like a throat two miles wide and three leagues long, adorned with cliffs and small silands that do not interfere with either entering or leaving. The tides alternate with mathematical regularity. [...]

A boat headed for us. To understand how we felt as we waited for it, you would have to have been there to see our strained expressions.

Our very souls were quivering with hope and fear. We thought the boat had come from shore, but it was only the captain of the ship Anamakin, wanting news from Chile. Believe it or not, this gentleman's arrival was upsetting to us. We had all run up to him with the same question in mind, no matter how differently we would have put it. The vitally important question was this: "Is there gold here as they say?" But, strange to say, we all backed away toward the other rail before we could hear the answer. We wanted to prolong the uncertainty; no matter how painful, it was better than disappointment. We turned quickly enough, though, when one of the questioners, unable to contain himself, ran toward us yelling, "It is all true! There is a lot of gold!" As you can imagine, these words were enough to draw our souls back into our bodies. Once the wave of emotion passed, we gathered in a happy circle. [...]

[After two months of mining, Pérez Rosales returns to San Francisco.]

How different San Francisco was from what it had been when I left it to go into the interior. Instead of an "Afaucanian" village with foundations marked off here and there on which buildings were to rise, now those buildings were finished and others were under rapid construction. The tents, huts, and windbreaks of old were now lined up beside streets in the suburbs. But by the look of things, all these suburbs too would soon be built over and become part of a beautiful town. Building lots were already being laid out and measured in feet there, and prices had gone out of sight!

What a mistake we had made in not acquiring land in the towns at prices that would almost have made them gifts. It was depressing to me now to see how much they had increased in value in so short a time! Here I want to say something, without meaning to offend anyone: the men who made fortunes in California were gentlemen who lacked the hardihood to go prospecting for gold all out, scorning hunger, weariness, and danger. It was those who acquired valuable building sites either just by taking them or buying them at low prices; or those men who happened, withoutmeaning to do so, to bring merchandise into the area to sell. Such men found themselves wealthy overnight.

The bay was full of ships, all of them abandoned. Their passengers and crews had swelled the town's population to thirty thousand souls; and, whether permanent residents or transients, their activity was so great that the city seemed to change and expand as if by enchantment. Long piers, supported on redwood piles, were being constructed or were being further extended at the end of every street that ran down to the beach. These carried the street out over the tidal flat and provided roadways and foundations for additional buildings. At one place a lack of ready materials for piers had been solved by piling boxes and sacks of earth across the muddy beach; at other locations, so as not to lose time, piers had been improvised by grounding ships side by side at the ends of streets and laying beams up to them; and there, too, shops and offices were built.

One of the first to transform his ship into a home ashore was a young Chilean, Wenceslao Urbistondo. He had taken advantage of an unusuallly high tide to beach his deserted and useless bark at the end of the last street to the north of town; then he had laid his masts and spars to form a bridge across the mud so he could get back and forth.

The sidewalks along the streets were made with with bales of jerky, because it was the cheapest and most readily available material. The bales were pushed down into the mud along the front of the buildings so one could get around without sinking into the mud up to the knees.

Business was at the mercy of the shifting tides in that city. Sometimes the high water invaded everything, reducing the value of the highest quality merchandise; at other times it left everything high and dry. The most provident merchant was not safe from the ruinous effects an unexpected high or low tide might produce. One man might get rich with no idea how it happened. Another would be ruined despite precautions of the most meticulous sort. I remember, for example, that because there was a shortage of housing in San Francisco, they asked that prefabricated houses be brought from Chile. When those arrived, houses were so plentiful in San Francisco that those who had ordered the houses had to pay to get them landed and then had to pay someone to accept them. I am witness and victim of what I am describing.

Nobody, however, was discouraged. Even the lowest-priced items could be given scarcity value by arranging for convenient fires. We saw such fires break out all over town day after day, posing the danger of a general conflagration.

In this theater, where the most uproarious international fair that memory records was in process, no actor played the role his lot would have assigned him in his native country. Masters were transformed into servants; a lawyer might be a freight agent; a doctor, a stevedore; sailors found themselves digging excavations; and philosophers, having abandoned the realm of the abstract, were working with the most concrete materials. I have seen, without surprise and with the just pride of a Chilean, a soft and effeminate dandy from Santiago, with the same gold vest chain he wore at dances in our capital city still hanging from the buttonhole of a sweaty wool shirt, standing in water up to his waist and carrying the baggage of tarred and brawny sailor with a smile on his face; and then, after having got paid for that job, offering his services to some other oaf.

The most ostentatious signs had been hung everywhere. A wooden barracks bore the name "Hotel Frémont." One man had a sign that said "So-and-So, Physician and Surgeon" painted on the flap of his tent, though he had never been more than a grave digger. An insurance salesman from Valparaiso had a hut taht bore two signs: "So-and-so, Attorney at Law" and "So-and-so and Company, General Insurance Brokers." An arbor made of poles called itself "French Hotel"; it belonged to an old Santiago barber. This sort of thing was done by Chileans of prominent families—few of which were not represented by family members in California. [...]

It is not surprising that lawsuits and appeals [were] often decided with pistol or dagger. The relations between Chileans and Americans were anything but cordial. When General Persifer Smith sent a decree from Panamá to the effect that, after that date, no foreigner was to be allowed to exploit gold mines in California, that decree brought to a head all the hostility shown to peaceful and defenseless Chileans.

Merchants and traders were alarmed by this, and the authorities proposed to the aliens that they become full United States citizens; they were to be charged only ten dollars, a small sum for such an imposing title. But this safe-conduct was only halfway effective: it worked only where it was accepted. In other places it was treated as a joke. A little later on, the provisional government in San José made a ruling that an alien could work the mines on payment of twenty dollars a month in advance. A receipt would serve as sufficient authorization for the right to work. But how many clashes there were that arose from that agreement between collectors and contributors.

The ill will of the Yankee rabble against the sons of other nations, and especially Chileans, was rising by that time. They offered a simple and conclusive argument: Chileans were descended from Spaniards; Spaniards were of Moorish ancestry; therefore a Chilean was at the best something like a Hottentot, or, to put it more gently, something like the humbled but dangerous Californio. They could not stomach the fearlessness of the Chilean, who might be submissive in his own country but did not behave that way abroad. A Chilean would face up to a loaded pistol at his chest if he had his hand on the haft of his knife. For his part, the Chilean detested the Yankee and constantly referred to him as a coward. This mutual bad feeling explains the bloody hostilities and atrocities we witnessed every day in this land of gold and hope.

It was not long in San Francisco until an organized group of bandits appeared, called the Hounds. They were vagrants, gamblers, or drunks, drawn together in a fellowship of crime; and they had as their motto, "We can get away with it." Fear and hatred spread in advance of their appearance, and they deliberately generated these feelings by their provocations. Everywhere they went, they established their control by quarrelsomeness and violence.

They did not always "get away with it," though. One morning when they were passing by a little point of land to the north of town where a sort of Little Chile had sprung up, separated from the center of the city, these vicious Hounds decided to give it a savage going over. Because in California time is money, these merciless ruffians in large numbers charged the Chileans there with pistols and clubs. You can imagine the shouting and uproar this brutal and unprovoked attack brought on. The Chileans rallied and counterattacked by hurling stones. One respectable Chilean gentleman, not being able to escape through the front of his tent because it was jammed with a threatening band of Hounds, brought one of them down with a pistol shot as he came toward him and then, slashing with his dagger the cloth of his tent, managed to escape through that improvised exit and join his friends in safety.

Brannan, ex-Mormon owner of the unforgettable Daice-maynana, informed by some Chileans of what was happening in Little Chile, climbed up on top of his house in just indignation and shouted in a loud voice for the people to come. Then in a short but forceful speech he declared it was time to make an example of those whoh had perpetrated such an unheard-of atrocities against the sons of a friendly country, a country that had day after day supplied the city of San Francisco with its best flour, as well as the most skillful arms in the world when it came to making adobe bricks! "I propose," he said, "that to take care of this once and for all, the Chileans of good will, led by citizens of the United States, go at once to the scene and arrest these disturbers of the peace!" A general "Hurrah!" was raised, and the almost instantaneous appearance of the defenders of order at [that] point put an end to the savagery that could have brought on the most terrible consequences.

Eighteen of the bandits were dragged from hideouts by force and were incarcerated on board the flagship of the Yankee American squadron, and with this, peace returned to the new Babylon.

Three days later, while I was busily preparing to go and rejoin our company, I read with alarm in a San Francisco paper this ominous news: "North American blood shed by infamous Chileans in the placers! Citizens, be on your guard!"

By the following day the report had taken on unimaginable proportions, and by evening, it was being said not only that the Chileans had been expelled violently from the banks of the San Joaquín River, but that the same band of vigilantes, seeking vengeance and plunder, was moving in upon the Chileans working the tributaries of the American River!

You can imagine my state of mind in such a fearful situation. What should I do? An acquaintance gave me a very exaggerated account of the most savage atrocities that had just been inflicted on Chileans near Sutter's mill. I confess my sin of credulity. I should have known better than to believe him. I knew the distance between Sutter's mill and San Francisco, and that it was impossible for news to have covered that distance so quickly even if it flew in. It was the fact that my brothers were in the midst of the situation then that nearly drove me crazy. My brothers, my poor brothers all alone there, and I without the means to join them in their hour of peril. Without thinking, with nothing but my weapons, with no hope except for revenge, I paid two hundred pesos for passage by boat to the beaches of Sacramento. Without listening to the voice of prudence—or not wishing to listen to it—I dedicated myself to a violent destiny.

Where was I going? What was I going to do? I had no idea. The one thing I remember is that anything seemed more feasible, anything far easier, than to return to Chile without my brothers.

We pressed on day and night without rest. We arrived at Sacramento. I jumped into the water without waiting for the ship to land, and with my heart full of anguish, I ran all the way to the residence of Señor Gillespie.

Imagine my surprise. God had not abandoned me. My brothers had arrived in Sacramento the day before. They were destitute, having been robbed of all they had; but they were safe. They had agreed with Gillespie that they should join me in San Francisco as soon as possible. To meet them, to see them, count them, and feel my anxieties drain away was all a great experience. You would have had to have been in my position to know what it was like. Desperation, hate, and the desire for vengeance, all had given my sick body a strength and vigor that, in this moment of great happiness, I could feel ebbing away.

Once we were together again, recounting our experiences to one another in a makeshift tent made of sarapes, our good spirits returned.

We could see all that had happened to us had been only an ugly and ridiculous nightmare. We were all safe and sound; no one was missing. What more could we want? The Yankees had not needed much force to drive us Chileans from Sutter's mill.

True, they robbed us of everything we had; but in California that did not amount to much.

Our friends were all gone, so on that same night we organized ourselves into a committee to decide what we should do from then on. No one thought we should go back to Chile. Instead, we were unanimous in feeling we should make an effort to reverse our luck, trying various plans of operation until we found one that succeeded.

Mining was not the only occupation California offered at that time to men willing to work. If prospecting was closed to foreigners, commerce was eminently within reach.