February 11, 1853 – Jacksonville, California: A Mob Lynched a Chinese Servant (Murrieta and his Gang Blamed)

In February 1853, near Jacksonville during the California Gold Rush, a vigilante mob lynched a Chinese servant and another Chinese laborer. The violence was sparked by a local teenager’s claim that the two Chinese men were members of Joaquín Murrieta’s gang. In the panic following a recent Murrieta robbery, armed citizens targeted Chinese laborers. Newspapers reported that “three Chinamen were killed” during the frenzy. The mob’s lynching of the Chinese servant (without trial or evidence) illustrates how “justice” could be distorted by racial animus of the times. This early lynching set a precedent for anti-Chinese violence, cloaked in the frontier vigilantism of the time yet fundamentally motivated by Sinophobic resentment of Chinese miners in the camps.