He was an immigrant, like all those forty-niners who crossed Death Valley or rode the Pacific or braved the Great Basin, tempted by the Californian promise. In later years, as he assimilated, the Bombayan would claim he crossed the United States from St. Louis. By then his English was passably American and he had changed his name—Isaac Snider, a moniker to mask his origins.

Watch him, as I watched him, climbing aboard an East India ship bound for China. His lanky body wedged among the wares that came from ravagings. “Colonization of India was primarily economic,” a professor lectured in college, which made the whole thing sound like the Brits had merely pickpocketed a few wallets. But in the gold digger, see the emasculation of colonization. The only way out is as an export. Through the porthole, his motherland shrinks.

In China, he trades labor for a ride to Hong Kong, and then for a foot of space aboard one of the vessels carrying migrants to California—Gold Mountain, the Chinese call it. Even the foul smells of pork and men relieving themselves and the queasiness of the voyage are preferable to shouldering tea onto a company ship.

In California, he barters his way to a pan of his own; the most basic technology suffices when gold runs free and clear in streams. Those early rush days are marked more by chaos than by calculation. There is no point in musing about geology, trying to figure out what caused the earth to bubble up such a product. The gold digger follows rumors, the gossip, if you will. He sleeps near other laborers, often Chinese, occasionally Mexican. Transient tent cities bordering the goldfields. Waking up with the dawn to the yellow landscape. More than once he thinks California is burning, burning, but that is just what light looks like when skies are clear.

When the easiest of plunders of a given deposit have been shaken clear of quartz sand and water and dried in the sun, then the metal is yours—not to be plucked from your arms by a leering Company man. He presses the nuggets and dust to his skin. It warms him as the sun falls.

He is surviving, a solo man among solo men, until that day, recorded in Ramesh Uncle’s German travelogue, when the whites capture him. But he escapes.

I picture it like this: The gold digger, hunched on the ground, sustaining the beating, says a very rapid, old prayer. He places two golden nuggets in his mouth and swallows, thinking wildly that in these nuggets lie the very blessing and promise of America. He prays that this blessing be given him. He feels the nuggets melt in his mouth, like ghee on one’s tongue. Warm and sweet and full of hope. Briefly, he wonders if he’s gone mad: Did he just drink away wealth? But then something calms him, and says to wait, wait for the blessing.

A blessing—some blessing—comes: the whites cannot find any gold on him, only his empty poke and useless sheath knife. He runs; a few of them, drunk, follow, shooting as he races through woods as dark as a grave. He trips over the leg of a corpse that an animal has tugged from the dirt. And then he’s struck. A bullet tears through his flank. All goes black. When he looks up, he is not in the woods but on the banks of the Yuba River, where it meets the Feather.

He thinks of the holy Ganges, how auspicious it is to die near its banks. He edges to the river and begins to whisper prayers into it, all of his past selves floating downstream. He dips one hand in the water and a shudder runs through his body. A sacred river. The world-splitting pain halts, as quickly as it began. He lifts himself to his feet, presses his hand to the spot where the bullet ripped through him, and finds closed, healthy flesh.

He weeps, and as tears fall, the whole river turns the color of gold, like the water lifting Midas’s curse. I see all this as clearly as the shape of my own hands above the keyboard as I type. The Bombayan, Isaac Snider, was saved, was preserved in history, was let into America by pure Californian gold.

He camps that night near Marysville and is kept awake by the drunken hoots of other gold diggers pushing through clacking saloon doors, wasting gains on games of monte and drink. In the morning, the call goes up: a gulch nearby, full of riches. Instead of following the line of sunburnt men scurrying out of town, the gold digger looks up at the sky. Rain is bulging in the air. It seems obvious. Instead of going to the north side of the gulch, he treks to a flat bank just south. When the rain strikes, the Bombayan is the only miner working that territory. There is the precious metal, washing toward him.

On he goes like this, beginning to make sharp calculations, returning to places where the top of the gold has been skimmed off, but digging deeper—sometimes banding with Mexican laborers. They dig until that sight: a veiny pattern of gold in the bedrock. The immigrant work ethic couples with luck. Now he does not chase blindly but instead plots the habits of the gold—how it appears, where it might show itself next.

He practices English, becomes literate. He writes and reads whatever he can—dispatches from the Midwest and East Coast, letters other miners send to loved ones. Even after a long day of labor, he studies. He loses the accent—might his skin even lighten a little? He insists upon a new name. Isaac Snider, Isaac Snider; he repeats it like a prayer.

No longer does he have to pay that foreigner’s tax of three dollars a month to dig. He slips in step with the region’s Jews, many of them only a few years removed from their own migrations—from Poland, from Prussia. Perhaps the blessing of the gold makes passing possible. Perhaps there is a quiet understanding, a solidarity, an invitation to hide among other outsiders.

With the help of his adoptive community, he goes on, hiring subcontractors to dig in places others believe tapped out. He offers a third of anything they strike. “Just one third?” they sometimes demand. But Snider taps his temple and points out, using reason to delight a Silicon Valley intellectual property lawyer, that the idea to dig in this unlikely place had been his.

Snider is hardly the only person discovering that the rush is not just a loner’s game. Solo panners are taking up in groups to mine with Long Toms. Enterprise flourishes. American corporations germinate. Wells Fargo, Levi Strauss. Few call this new force greed. No, we say ambition.

In June 1859, Snider rests in the back of a general store with two Mormons who have taken a liking to his scrappy doggedness. They are reviewing an idea of his with skepticism. Consider them his investors, him their entrepreneur. The notion: to build a dam on the Yuba River—the same waters that once saved him. He swears there is gold beneath those rapids, worth extracting. Privately, he knows he won’t just turn that gold into money; he’ll consume some of it, and its blessing and power will let him into the main corridor of American history.

It takes five men over a month to pile up the rocks for the dam. It is physically risky, and each worker fears he is forfeiting easier gains. But when the month closes and the dam is finished, the cry goes up, one that rhymes with Sam Brannan’s original call, the one that knocked down the first domino: “Gold! Gold! Gold in the Yuba River!”

Isaac Snider’s ambition is not, however, to be some great figure in history. He only wishes to possess the singular identity of an uncolonized man. As the rush abates, like the last days of a war, he finds that he has built himself a network of allies. He marries the young niece of a local Bavarian immigrant. Adah. Adah Eckman. He meets her in her uncle’s dry-goods store. On the night of their wedding, she notices something—a central flaw in his claim to be Jewish. She says nothing at the sight of his foreskin. As though she knew all along? As though the gold’s power occludes her vision.

Snider begins editing a newspaper—the ultimate hiding place, for who would suspect a professional writer of English to be an outsider? Make use of all you took. Write yourself into America.

It is after covering one particular event that Snider’s identity is strained. The locals have never spared much love for the Chinese laborers living on the edge of town, praying in that Bok-Kai temple, wearing their hair in pigtails, working endless hours for astonishingly low pay. By the late 1860s, a new restlessness grows. California is settled. People live not in lean-tos but in houses; the currency is coin, not gold dust. Some bristle at the prospect that the Chinese might actually stick around. People say such things about Snider’s community, too—there’s talk of a Jewish tax, more than once.

One evening, a group of drunken white men comes upon one such Chinese fellow stepping out of the Bok-Kai temple. The whites believe they recognize the man: the proprietor of an opium den in San Francisco, since shut down by vice laws. A man who cheated countless smokers out of gold as they lay half-comatose in his sinners’ palace. These white men are the same sort who, decades earlier, took it upon themselves to form committees of vigilance, to prosecute Snider when he was still brown. They are the same sort who developed a protocol for lynching disruptive blacks and Mexicans and Chileans and Native Americans. They are the same sort who will, in another few decades, form a mob in Oregon to murder more than thirty Chinese miners; the same sort who will, soon after that, chase throngs of Sikhs from Washington. These white men beat the Chinese man and hang him from a tree overlooking the Yuba. Later, it’s revealed that he was no opium supplier, but the owner of a small laundry.

It is Snider’s unhappy job to write up the incident in the local paper: brutality, obviously brutality! But his colleagues say it would be folly to pretend the mob did not circle some fair point, that now that American jobs are scarcer, it is time for these coolies to go home, to take with them their pigtails and opium and work ethic. And so Snider, sick with himself but afraid of reminding people of the darkness of his skin, condemns the Chinese as much as he does the assailants. The best gesture he can offer, at the end of his editorial, is a plea to end the rhetoric of ridding the whole nation of the Chinese, for… How costly would this effort be? Let foreigners sink quietly into our new society.

Cresting into the 1870s, Snider has watched the Indian struggles from afar. American papers report on it occasionally, with indifference, but he risks it, writing in the Gold Star: As Americans have given up the castes of nobility, Lord, Duke, and aristocracy, in favor of Democratic ideals, so their Revolutionary brethren wish to cast off unearned hierarchies, across the seas…. Ah, who would read such musings of an old man, these vain gestures of the mind? But it means something to a dislocated young man in Berkeley. I experience a twitch of recognition, the shudder of time folding in on itself, a shiver, an intuition. Time, perhaps the truest magic, full of the unprovable.

The Bombayan is aging. Soon he will die, as will his secret. When he boarded that East India Company ship some thirty years earlier, he had hoped to cheat history, to eschew his fate as a colonized man. Now, on the other side of the planet, as he rubs his eyes in the dim newspaper office and steps into the lowering yellow light of a Marysville evening, he sees that he did not manage to cheat history, which is inescapable. No, he raced right into it with all the force of someone swimming upstream. History let him live in its hot, complex swirl for a few decades. And soon it will close in on him, as it takes us all. He shuts the newspaper door and walks to town, where, against all odds, and at all costs, he has made himself a home.