John Ah Sue. Manuscript Document Signed, in English and Chinese and by Notary Public, Lake County, Calif. March 10, 1880. 2pp.+ docketing note on verso.
Matthew Lynch of Butte County agrees to lease to Ah Hem, Lem Y.U., and Ah Sue, 17 acres of land near Westwood (east of the future town of Oroville) to grow potatoes and to supply horses and plows to cultivate the land. The Chinese were to pay Lynch $140 in gold coins and to give him 1/3 of the potatoes already planted.
Lynch was an Irish-born small farmer. Both he and Ah Sue, a 60 year-old Chinese immigrant, lived in the township of Ophir, a wintering spot for early Gold Rush miners who later left the local mines to be worked by thousands of Chinese paid near-starvation wages. The town of Oroville eventually grew up adjacent to Ophir Chinatown.
Lynch’s agreement with the Chinese came at a time when Butte County was wracked by anti-Chinese hysteria, an echo of the Kearny mania in San Francisco. Just three years before, four Chinese were brutally murdered at Chico, some 20 miles north of Orovile, the crime linked to a “reign of terror” against Chinese workers instituted by an KKK-like “Order of Caucasians”. In the 1879 election, a measure opposing Chinese immigration passed by a vote of 3330 to 66.