In my novel Joy that Long Endures, the feisty character of Xiang Ju—Fragrant
Chrysanthemum—comes to live at the unlikely location of South Pass City,
Wyoming Territory. As improbable as Ju’s story might sound, there are at least
two historical instances of a Chinese woman deep in the mountains of the West
in the final quarter of the nineteenth century.
At the completion of the transcontinental
railroad with the meeting of the rails at Promontory, Utah, in May of 1869,
there were thousands of Chinese in the state of California and in the U.S. Territories.
It had long been the practice of the Central Pacific to import Chinese
laborers, and as the Union Pacific took over mining the coal seams located on
the land grants it acquired at completion of required sections of track, it too
began employing Chinese men in large numbers. In 1875 ninety-nine Scandinavian
miners and the remaining British, Welsh, and Cornish miners who remained after a
strike in 1871, went out on strike when the company lowered the price paid for
digging a bushel of coal from five cents to four.
In days, mining resumed with fifty
Rock Springs men who hadn’t been fired during the unrest as well as Chinese numbering
around 150, brought in on U.P. freight trains that were delivering supplies to
build company houses. In addition the U.P. was employing Chinese on its
sections, maintaining the track itself.
As well as a resource for fueling
its steam engines, the Union Pacific’s board of directors quickly realized the
company could make money not only on selling the coal but also had a lucrative monopoly
on shipping all Western coal, their own and that of the independent mines.
Typically these early coal mining
towns were heavily populated by foreign born bachelors. Records regarding the
Chinese in the West are sparse enough for males, but the documented presence of
Chinese women east of California is almost nonexistent.
The Chinese had started arriving in
the ports of California in the 1850s, soon after the discovery of gold at
Sutter’s Mill and concurrent with increased misery for the peasants from
natural disasters and civil turmoil in their crowded home country. Despite
official Chinese penalties including beheading for leaving, twenty thousand
arrived in 1852. They came on the “credit ticket” system: paying for their
passage with their labor in America. Conditions aboard many of the sailing
ships were horrendous, with some carrying double the legal number of men packed
below, thirsty, hungry, and often in danger of drowning. Taken advantage of by
brokers selling rancid meat, exposed to disease and in danger of shipwreck,
conditions for Chinese immigrants improved with the introduction of steamships
only by the length of the voyage. There were instances of captains treating
their passengers with kindness, although the editor of the Oregonian newspaper marveled at the arrival of 270 Chinese he
described as “healthy” and “robust.”
Chinese men came of their own
accord. On the other hand, a girl had the gold paid for her placed in her palm
to satisfy the requirement that she agreed to the transaction, but it was
immediately given over to the person selling her. Significant numbers of
Chinese girls, sold by families facing famine at home or abducted by
unscrupulous brokers, arrived to service the sex trade. The best and prettiest
were auctioned as wives or concubines, with the rest falling somewhere on a
descending order of prostitution from brothels to the notorious crib shacks.
Jeunes Filles
Chinoises (Young Chinese Girls), China [c1901] R Parison
[RESTORED] www.flickr.com/photos/31778725@N08/ (CC
BY 2.0)
Slavery was nearly universal in
China. Even the poor kept slaves. But besides the societal acceptance of the
practice, the girl—whose families, in selling what usually was the youngest
daughter, may have thought she was to become a wife or house servant in America—were
under an obligation of honor to repay the debt of whoever bought her.
But that often became an
increasing, ultimately unpayable burden. A woman named Wong Ah Sing related a
common tale: A girl purchased at ten years old for $20 in China might sell for
$40 to a private buyer, then for $120 at twelve years old, and if marketed to
the rural areas of lots of gold but few women, going for as much as $750. If
she objected, she could have her face disfigured or be sold to the cribs where
she would be subjected to the attentions of an ever-changing torrent of men who
paid as little as two bits each.
There was the rare instance of a
Chinese woman appearing in the mining camps east of California. In 1872 a
Chinese woman who would come to be known as Polly Bemis arrived in Idaho,
probably transported there at great expense. Purchased by a Chinese merchant,
Polly was won in a poker game by Charlie Bemis, who later married her. It has
been surmised she became his bride in order to avoid any chance of her
deportation.
In 1885 Rock Springs, Wyoming Territory,
there was reportedly a Chinese woman, Mrs. Soo Qui, wife of the “boss
Chinaman.” It was said she was the lone Chinese woman in the camp in the month
of August, compared to three hundred and thirty-one Chinese men and a hundred
and fifty white men.
The character of Xiang Ju in my
novel, like Polly Bemis, survives being sold away from her home in China to
live in early Dakota (Wyoming) Territory. Ju is representative of all women in the late
nineteenth century who had to rely on their own inner strength to overcome
difficult circumstances and thrive in what would later become the “Equality
State.”
For further reading:
The Poker Bride: The
First Chinese in the Wild West, by Christopher Corbett
Booms & Busts on
Bitter Creek: A History of Rock Springs, Wyoming, by Robert B. Rhode
The Chinese in
America: A Narrative History, by Iris Chang
The Chinese Massacre
at Rock Springs, Wyoming Territory, September 2, 1885, by Isaac H. Bromley
