Much about the document has remained mysterious. Who was DD Beatty, and why did he take these photographs? What was John T. Mason doing, maintaining the ledger for so many years? I started to find some answers in old issues of the Mountain Messenger, Downieville’s local newspaper, and other historical records. I learned that Mason was a longtime resident of Downieville, whose family had crossed the Great Plains from Missouri during the gold rush. He was made constable in Downieville in 1884, and later became a deputy sheriff and the justice of the peace. A book published in 1930 about Mason’s adventures in mining country describes a thriving Chinatown in Downieville, and characterized Mason as being “friendly with the Celestials,” adding that he “could handle the chop-sticks to perfection.”
But any purported friendliness between law enforcement and the Chinese residents of California contradicts the realities of the period. In 1892, Congress passed the Geary Act––named after its sponsor, Representative Thomas J. Geary, a California Democrat––re-authorizing the Chinese Exclusion Act. The bill, which extended the ban on the immigration of Chinese laborers for another ten years, imposed additional punitive measures on the Chinese, including requiring them to obtain certificates of residence that established their right to be in the country. Anyone found without such a certificate was subject to immediate arrest.
Lawmakers subsequently added a requirement that the certificates be accompanied by photographs. “You can not make a verbal description of a Chinaman such as you can make of a white man, and have it definite,” Geary said, on the floor of the House, explaining the need for the new requirement. “All Chinamen look alike, all dress alike, all have the same kind of eyes, all are beardless, all wear their hair in the same manner. Now, you sit down and write out a description of a Chinaman, give his height, weight, the color of his skin and the shape of his eyes, and after you have done it, what have you got? You have a description that will fit any other Chinaman you happen to run up against.”
An alliance of Chinese mutual-aid associations, known as the Six Companies, pledged to resist the registration requirement, calling it “an insult that has not been inflicted upon the subjects of any other nation.” The groups took their fight all the way to the Supreme Court—and lost. The Mountain Messenger cheered the Court’s decision and provided readers with regular updates on the requirements being imposed on the Chinese. “They must furnish with their registration papers two unmounted photographs of the face of the applicant, an inch and a half from the base of the hair to the point of the chin,” an article on January 6, 1894, said. “These photographs must be paid for by these heathens.”
Mason’s son-in-law, a photographer named Decatur Dudley Beatty, arrived in Downieville with his wife, Lillian, on February 17, 1894, a few months after the enactment of the photography requirement. The couple had travelled by stagecoach from Grass Valley, in Nevada County, where Beatty had a studio. For over a week, Downieville was crowded with Chinese people from across the county who had come to have their pictures taken; Beatty photographed more than a hundred and fifty of them before he departed on February 28th. (The album’s index suggests that Beatty returned in late April to Downieville to take additional photographs.) The registration of the Chinese was conducted at the end of March by Thomas P. Ford, a deputy internal revenue collector. “The Chinese see that the authorities mean business and are all most anxious to register,” the Mountain Messenger reported.
But even if federal lawmakers were preoccupied with regulating the presence of Chinese people, Mason’s maintenance of the book is still anomalous. Local officials like him were not required to track the Chinese as he so avidly did. Erika Lee, a professor at the University of Minnesota who included two pages from the ledger in her book “America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States,” theorizes that the journal might be an early example of local law enforcement taking liberties to surveil immigrants—a troubling phenomenon that persists to this day. In a phone conversation last week, she told me, “This is a form of racial control and terror.”
