This text is part of:
[252]
the Five Companies.
Left to their own choice, they show no preference for city life, and give up garbage, reek, and squalor for a lodging on the hill-side, in the midst of wild sage, with the ocean breezes on their roofs.
They are not alone.
With them are many women and children.
Living on the coast, away from white capital and white employment, they are said to make a homely livelihood for their wives and families by catching and drying fish.
A colony of Asiatics, who seek neither work nor favour from the white capitalist, but go out boldly into nature, taking their chances in the primary and heroic, rather than the secondary and parasitical, struggle for existence, raises our curiosity.
Unlike the Mexican labourers, whom they are driving out of California and Nevada, here are people who can live without the Whites!
A trail leads off from Monterey to this Asiatic village, going by way of Fray Junipero's Cross and Don Rivera's Castle; but this trail is a mere Indian line, not made for horses, still less for wheels.
We have to trudge on foot.
A walk of two miles from the old Mexican jetty brings us to a pile of rocks, on turning which we are in China-close to
1875.
Tufts University provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.