A piece of history that deserves to be known- I always thought the Rock Springs massacre in Wyoming was the biggest attack on Chinese in America re: casualties, but the one in Hells Canyon on the Oregon side of the border potentially surpasses that (~34 vs ~25, but it varies depending on which account you read). I picked this up from Book Bin in Corvallis last March, and started reading it this past week in anticipation of a roadtrip from the mid-Willamette Valley to my hometown in eastern Idaho, during which we pass relatively close to the exit for Hells Canyon in Wallowa County, OR via I-84.

What I found most fascinating was Nokes' investigative tack, as he first heard of this in the 1990s and was shocked that there could be a century-long cover up by a small town community. As a fourth generation Chinese American, I'm not as surprised by the blatant racism and/or disregard of personhood towards my ancestors. I've also found it an incredibly curious thing that at one point the west (including the currently-very-homogenous intermountain states of Idaho and Wyoming) had sizable populations of Chinese living and working, but between legal barriers and active campaigns by their white neighbors to drive them out, many either returned to China or were killed. A review of the treatment of Chinese laborers in America from 1880s is worth a review by people of today as there are extensive parallels to 1) the way we discuss migrant labor and continue to Otherize people who do jobs for cheap that most citizens won't and 2) attempts by the current administration to create immigration bans based on nationality for populist concerns instead of actual, verifiable evidence.

I deeply appreciate the dogged effort Nokes went into to find all the information he could on this incident, and to probe into why knowledge was buried (or intentionally forgotten) for so long. The western United States is full of ghosts of people who look like me; let us strive to remember their presence and not repeat the past. ( )

A good example of a non-fiction read based on local history. Nokes was a newspaper reported for the Oregonian. Here he investigates an incident in 1889 in the Snake River Canyon of Oregon. More than 30 Chinese miners were brutally murdered. At that time in the US, Chinese lives were considered of so little value that their names were not even recorded and the perpetrators were never brought to justice.
What I found most disturbing in this book was the continued cover-up of the incident, which continued well into this century. Otherwise upstanding citizens were willing to lie and hide evidence in order to protect the "good name" of their community. Scary. ( )

In 1887, more than thirty Chinese miners (exact number unknown) were murdered and perhaps tortured over a period of three days by a gang of local toughs and rustlers in the Hell's Canyon (Snake River Canyon) of Oregon. None of the murderers was held accountable by federal, state or local authorities, although three gang members were tried and acquitted. The crime and subsequent trial was covered up for over a hundred years. At least one of the murderers was noted by history as a well respected pioneer citizen in the area.

Another ended up in prison for stealing horses.

This was a time when the theft of a horse was considered more important than the murder of the Chinese miners. Chinese miners tended to not speak English and remained isolated with other Chinese speakers. They were considered with deep suspicion and thought to be less than human by the white population. Only eleven of the thirty massacred men were identified. Their remains were buried here and there. Some skeletons were known to be unburied along the river banks 50 years after their deaths and were even used as grisly trophies.

These men often left deep poverty in China. In exchange for their ocean passage, they became bonded servants to Chinese labor companies who contracted them out for physical labor, including mining and railroad building in the American West. While many returned to China, others never earned enough money either to support their families in China or to pay their return passage and stayed in Western "Chinatowns" until their deaths. The mortality rate of Chinese workers was high.

I found this to be a very interesting chapter of Western history as well as a murder investigation. It also became a detective story as the author ferreted out the remaining long-hidden documents about this tragic incident. The book also helps place the Chinese laborers in the larger picture of their long-neglected role in the American West and the blatant racism they encountered. ( )

The Snake River divides the northeast corner of Oregon from Idaho and carved Hell’s Canyon, the deepest canyon in North America. In 1887, Chinese immigrants followed a trail of gold dust into the canyon to Dead Line Creek, a stream flowing over a large gravel bar to the Snake River. There, while mining for gold, as many as 34 of them were shot, axed, and beaten to death by a gang of horse-thieving outlaws from nearby Wallowa County.

This mass slaughter – undetected until bodies started floating into Lewiston, Idaho – went virtually uninvestigated and unavenged for over a century, until newspaperman Gregory Nokes covered a story about trial documents “discovered” in an unused safe in the county courthouse in Enterprise, Oregon. Nokes turned amateur historian, spending over ten years wringing every clue and theory out of the scant evidence he could dig up. The result is Massacred for Gold: The Chinese in Hells Canyon.

The book covers the history of this long-forgotten incident, describing the varied contemporaneous accounts, the lackluster investigation, the escape of the three main culprits, and the halfhearted trial and foreseeable acquittal of three others. But he goes beyond the dry facts to question why no one at the time showed great concern for the victims – never bothering to learn or record more than eleven names of the people killed – and why even now the story tends to be hushed up and the victims forgotten without any lasting monument.

Nokes’s personal involvement and first person narration may be a little off-putting for those looking for a straight-forward historical account. But his approach is an effective way of presenting his opinions and highlighting questions raised by the skimpy facts without muddying the story. The reader knows what the evidence is, and what Nokes argues the evidence shows, and can make his own conclusions.

While Massacred for Gold has regional ties, Nokes puts the tragedy in national context. Any reader interested in the experience of 19th Century Chinese immigrants or the development of the American West will find this story fascinating.

Also posted on Rose City Reader. ( )

Great research on tragic incident during the 1880s