In August, wagon drivers in San Francisco established a political association and elected one of their members, James Grant, to a seat on the city council. In 1853, pressured by steadily growing numbers of workers’ organizations, the California State legislature passed the first protective labor law, limiting legal hours of work to ten in a day.

Historian Lucille Eaves, writing more than a half century later, puzzled over these actions: “There are evidences of such early trade-union activity in San Francisco that one is tempted to believe that the craftsmen met each other on the way to California and agreed to unite.” Alternative answers to Eaves’s whimsical conspiracy theory are not hard to find. Scarcity of labor, a violent culture, and traditions of working-class organizing carried from elsewhere by the immigrant population help us to understand how collective worker activities occurred from the outset.