Chinese Laborers Killed During the Joaquin Panic

In February 1853, amid intense fear of Joaquín Murrieta’s band, Chinese laborers near Jacksonville were killed or mortally wounded during a burst of frontier violence. The New York Daily Herald reported that “three Chinamen were killed” and that another was found “mortally wounded” near Jackson Creek. The surviving newspaper evidence is fragmentary and does not fully clarify who committed each killing, but it preserves one of the earliest documented deadly attacks on Chinese immigrants in Gold Rush California.