How is Sacramento described when Fong See arrives in the book, On Gold Mountain?

In the early 1870s, when Fong See arrives in Sacramento, California in search of his father, the city had marshes, peat bogs and silty waterways that were the Sacramento delta. Many of these watery areas were reclaimed by the Chinese because “animals couldn’t do the work, since their hooves sank in the mud; whites wouldn’t do the work because it was too hard and unhealthy. Toiling in water up to their waists, Chinese laborers built miles of levees, ditches, dikes, canals and irrigation channels” (31). This opened up nearly 500 million acres of former swampy land. The land soon hosted a variety of fruits and vegetables. The populated city area had saloons, hotels, and theater houses with opera and plays, merchants, peddlers, con men, and barrels of goods arriving and departing. Chinatown in Sacramento was both pleasing, with the scents of ginger and incense, and foul, laundries dumped their filthy water and the railroad dumped its oily debris into the lake. It hosted gambling and opium dens, restaurants and a familiar way of life for Chinese immigrants. With an average population of 80% men—and most of the 20% of women prostitutes taken from China or other places—it was often a rowdy and lawless town.