October 10, 1856 – Happy Camp, California: Sparsely Documented Murder of Unnamed Chinese Man

In October 1856, near Happy Camp in Klamath (or Siskiyou) County, another Chinese man fell victim to mob violence in an incident as thinly recorded as the Bear Valley case earlier in 1856. Newspaper records indicate that a small mob of white men murdered an unnamed Chinese man, perhaps in retaliation for an alleged crime or simply out of racial prejudice. The man was probably a miner or laborer. The lynching at Happy Camp, a by now unsurprising manifestation of the systematic terror directed against Chinese immigrants during the Gold Rush, was notable for its lack of contemporary documentation. It garnered a few sentences in the white press. The lynching of a "Chinaman" had become normalized and ceased to be considered newsworthy. Still, the incident is a vivid reminder of the prevalence of violence during the Gold Rush era. Even in isolated mountain communities like Happy Camp, racist violence was not uncommon. These violent lynchings contributed to an atmosphere of fear in Chinese camps and reinforced the message that Chinese immigrants were outsiders who could be eliminated with impunity. By documenting cases like the Happy Camp murder, modern scholarship begins to uncover the full extent of the extralegal violence that targeted Chinese across the American West.