The gold diggers were an updated version of squatters: they lived in squalid tents, wearing their hair long and donning scraggly beards. The majority of white men who swarmed into California became “poverty-stricken dupes.” They were no different, in this way, from southern poor whites, “so basely duped, so adroitly swindled, and so damnably outraged.” For Helper, economies dependent on one source of wealth created extreme class conditions. California mining was worshipped in the same way that cotton and slavery had become the false deities of the South.28
