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Overview
“Once the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill launched our ‘national madness,’ the population of California exploded. Tens of thousands of Chinese, lured by tales of a ‘golden mountain,’ took passage across the Pacific. Among this massive influx were many young concubines who were expected to serve in the brothels sprouting up near the goldfields. One of them adopted the name of Polly Bemis, after an Idaho saloonkeeper, Charlie Bemis, won her in a poker game and married her. For decades the couple lived on an isolated, self-sufficient farm near the Salmon River in central Idaho. After her husband’s death, Polly came down to a nearby town and gradually spoke of her experiences. Journalist Christopher Corbett movingly recounts Polly’s story, integrating Polly’s personal history into the broader picture of the history of the mass immigration of Chinese. As both a personal and social history, this is an admirable book.” —Booklist
“A gorgeously written and brilliantly researched saga of America during the mad flush of its biggest Gold Rush. Christopher Corbett’s genius is to anchor his larger story of Chinese immigration around a poor concubine named Polly. A tremendous achievement.” —Douglas Brinkley
“Uses Bemis’s story as a platform for a larger discussion about the hardships of the Chinese experience in the American West.” —The Washington Post
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780802197924 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Grove/Atlantic, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| Sales rank: | 769,463 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
CELESTIALS AND SOJOURNERS
Although some one hundred thousand coolies sailed to the California coast in the three decades following the Gold Rush of 1849, most were illiterates whose horizons and American experiences were limited, and they left little in the way of writings published in China.
— LAND WITHOUT GHOSTS
(EDITED BY R. DAVID ARKUSH AND LEO O. LEE)
Swallows and magpies, flying in glee:
Greetings for New Year.
Daddy has gone to Gold Mountain To earn money.
He will earn gold and silver,
Ten thousand taels.
When he returns.
We will buy a lot of land.
— NINETEENTH-CENTURY CANTONESERHYME
(TRANSLATED BY MARLON K. HOM IN SONGS OF GOLD MOUNTAIN)
The story of Polly Bemis in the American West is a story about gold. Gold was the reason she left China. If there had not been a Gold Rush in California in the mid-nineteenth century, thousands of Chinese peasants would have had no reason to brave the Pacific crossing, and girls like Polly Bemis in poor villages in China might have never been sold by their starving families to supply the burgeoning sex slave trade in the American West. Polly Bemis was eventually sold for gold, too. But first her story was the story of the Gold Rush and the "Chinamen," who left their villages and families and everything that was important to them with the dream of finding wealth on Gum Sam, or "Golden Mountain," as they called California.
Before he ate his breakfast on the morning of January 24, 1848, James Wilson Marshall was inspecting the site where he was building a sawmill on the American River in California, about forty-five miles from what is today Sacramento. His partner in this venture was John A. Sutter, a Swiss entrepreneur who had settled there a decade earlier when the area was part of Mexico. Marshall, a millwright from New Jersey, noticed something shiny in the millrace, the channel for conducting water at a mill. He stooped down to pick up a tiny nugget that he said later was about half the size of a pea. And then he picked up another such nugget. He was not sure what these fragments were, but he had his suspicions. Years later, Marshall wrote an account of that day for Century magazine. It was a reminiscence of an event that would launch one of the greatest migrations in human history — the California Gold Rush.
"It was a clear, cold morning; I shall never forget that morning," Marshall recalled. "As I was taking my usual walk along the race, after shutting off the water, my eye was caught by a glimpse of something shining in the bottom of the ditch. There was about a foot of water running there. I reached my hand down and picked it up; it made my heart thump for I felt certain it was gold. The piece was about half the size and shape of a pea. Then I saw another piece in the water. After taking it out, I sat down and began to think right hard. I thought it was gold, and yet it did not seem to be of the right color; all the gold coin I had seen was a reddish tinge; this looked more like brass.
"When I returned to our cabin for breakfast, I showed the two pieces to my men. They were all a good deal excited, and had they not thought that the gold only existed in small quantities they would have abandoned everything and left me to finish the job alone. However, to satisfy them, I told them that as soon as we had the mill finished we would devote a week or two to gold hunting and see what we could make of it."
The gold discovered at Sutter's Mill was only the first bit of pay dirt, as it was then called. Gold mining that started in this California riverbed would sweep through Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Montana, Wyoming, the Dakotas, and the Pacific Northwest, and eventually even to the Klondike in Alaska. From Denver to Deadwood and points in between Americans (and foreigners aplenty) went looking for gold. The total value of the gold produced in California alone in the first decade of the rush was nearly $600 million, according to the mining historian William S. Greever.
Neither Marshall nor Sutter, who had founded an outpost that he called New Helvetia (Helvetia is Latin for Switzerland), would profit from the find. The fame of having begotten the Gold Rush followed Marshall around for the rest of his life, but he would be best known as a public drunkard. Sutter, who one historian noted had lived like a medieval baron on his vast estates before gold was discovered, lost everything. His employees ran off to look for gold and squatters seized his lands. He spent the rest of his life seeking recompense from the federal government and died in a hotel room in Washington, D.C., still waiting for that to happen.
But some others got rich. When news that gold had been discovered in California spread across the country and around the globe, "the world rushed in," as J. S. Holliday, a distinguished historian of the Gold Rush, would say. Men came from Ireland, Australia, Peru, Chile, France, Mexico, and China. They sailed around Cape Horn (a journey that could take half a year from the East Coast). They crossed the Isthmus of Panama on foot (a quicker route but a more dangerous one), and some even walked across America. They risked typhus, cholera, dysentery, scurvy, drowning, and Indian attack to reach the goldfields.
San Francisco, still a mere village, was almost evacuated, the early history The Annals of San Francisco reported, noting that the town seemed as if it had been struck by a plague:
All business and work, except the most urgent, was forced to be stopped. Seamen deserted from their ships in the bay and soldiers from their barracks. Gold was the irresistible magnet that drew human souls to the place where it lay. ... Avarice and the overwhelming desire to be suddenly rich ... led to a general migration.
The world had never seen anything quite like the California Gold Rush. Nor had the world seen such men. "It was a driving, vigorous, restless population in those days. It was a curious population," recalled Mark Twain in Roughing It. "It was the only population of the kind that the world has ever seen gathered together, and it is not likely that the world will ever see its like again." It was also, Twain remembered, a world that was almost entirely made up of young men, "the very pick and choice of the world's glorious ones. No women, no children, no gray and stooping veterans, — none but erect, bright-eyed, quick-moving, strong-handed young giants — the strangest population, the finest population, the most gallant host that ever trooped down the startled solitudes of an unpeopled land."
Most of them did not strike it rich. Many died trying. Others simply died. And many a would-be gold miner in "the days of '49," as the old folk song put it, simply went home defeated. (Word of the gold strike reached the East so slowly in 1848 that the first great wave of miners — the true pioneers by California standards — did not reach the gold fields until 1849.) Greever noted that gold mining was secretive work and miners tended to hold their cards close to their vests. If a miner was doing well, why attract attention to a rich claim? And if he was not, there was always the matter of pride. Twain, who was an eyewitness to the fabled Comstock Lode mining boom in Nevada, took all that into account when he later mused: "And where are they now? Scattered to the ends of the earth — or prematurely aged and decrepit — or shot or stabbed in street affrays — or dead of disappointed hopes and broken hearts — all gone, or nearly all — victims devoted upon the altar of the golden calf — the noblest holocaust that ever wafted its sacrificial incense heavenward. It is pitiful to think upon."
James Wilson Marshall's morning stroll along the millrace would change everything. "The California gold rush made America a more restless nation — changed the people's sense of their future, their expectations and their values," noted Holliday. "Suddenly there was a place to go where everyone could expect to make money, quickly; where life would be freer, where one could escape the constraints and conventions and the plodding sameness of life in the eastern states."
When Marshall made his discovery, there were only a few thousand people living on the Pacific Slope. California was not a state yet; it had only recently been part of Mexico. Within two years there would be 100,000 new arrivals on the West Coast, most of them digging for gold or providing some service that gold seekers needed. By 1860, the population of California — rocketed into statehood in 1850 because of gold — would approach 400,000. Little more than a decade later, when Polly Bemis was smuggled into the port of San Francisco, probably in a padded crate, the population was nearing 600,000. And San Francisco, which had been a sleepy village at the time of James Wilson Marshall's discovery, was a city — one of the ten largest in the United States.
Word of the discovery of gold in the California hills in the winter of 1848 had the same impact among the peasants of the densely populated Pearl River delta in southern China as it did in Boston's Back Bay or along the rocky coast of Maine or in the rolling Berkshire foothills of western Massachusetts. New England sent some of the first pioneers, but the world did, indeed, rush in, and part of that world was from China. By the end of 1852, an estimated 25,000 Chinese immigrants were living in California. Horace Greeley's star reporter, Bayard Taylor, jostling on the crowded waterfront of early Gold Rush San Francisco, could not help commenting on the mysterious "Chinamen," with their long queues, their mysterious eyes, and the almost immediate popularity of their strange cuisine — much favored by pioneers of all nations, for it was tasty and, at one dollar a plate, a fine bargain in a world where few bargains were to be had. Of all the Argonauts — as the Gold Rush pioneers were called, in reference to the adventurers of Greek mythology who joined Jason in his search for the Golden Fleece — no one was more exotic on the Pacific Slope than the Chinese.
The news of gold on the American River was said to have reached Hong Kong before it reached Boston (the sailing time across the Pacific Ocean was considerably faster than travel to the East Coast, and there were long- established trade routes in those waters). California was a far country in those days, and there was no telegraph line linking it with the East. The transcontinental railroad was twenty years in the future. Even the swift couriers of the Pony Express had not yet crossed the country. Word drifted back East slowly. Major newspapers did not begin noting the gold strike until late summer, and even then many accounts were based on letters that residents of California had sent home.
But the first word of gold in California reached Hong Kong as early as the spring of 1848, according to the historian S. W. Kung. The Chinese appear to have heard about the gold strike before President James Polk — Polk did not address Congress on the subject of gold in California until December, nearly a year after the discovery — and they wasted no time in responding. First hundreds, soon thousands, and then tens of thousands of Chinese peasants would sail for California. The lure of gold and the hope of riches were enough to send them across the ocean into an unknown world.
"Before long, China sent forward her thousands of thrifty wandering children, feeble, indeed, both in body and mind, but persevering, and from their union into laboring companies, capable of great feats," noted The Annals of San Francisco (with no small tinge of racism) in 1855.
The rush to California attracted an enormous number of risk takers. Peasants in the Pearl River delta saw California as a place of wealth and opportunity, Marlon K. Hom, a historian of Chinese immigration and translator of Cantonese poetry written by early immigrants, points out. For a peasant from the Pearl River delta, the trip to "Golden Mountain" was largely a financial undertaking, a risky chance to ensure his family's economic future.
Each ship coming from California to China, especially in the early boom days of the Gold Rush, when lucky strikes were more common, brought the kind of news that sent thousands of Chinese peasants to the Pacific Slope. The early Chinese immigrants were often successful; the historian Corrine Hoexter recalls that in the winter of 1850–1851, the sloop Race Horse brought several Chinese miners home to Hong Kong with fortunes of $3,000 and $4,000 each.
"The glamour of gold outweighed the dangers in the first few years. ... As they showed the gold dust to friends and relatives at homecoming banquets, reports of the fabulous 'Gum Shan,' the "'Mountain of Gold,' across the water spread like flames through dry underbrush," Hoexter notes. Every ship leaving Canton carried more and more peasants headed for the gold fields. The Custom House in San Francisco recorded 2,716 Chinese immigrants in 1851. One year later, that figure leaped to 20,000. By the time Polly Bemis arrived in the country, more than twenty years later, there were more than 100,000 Chinese on the Pacific Slope.
Virtually all these Chinese immigrants to the United States came from the Pearl River delta — Kwangtung (Guangdong) province, near Hong Kong, Canton, and Macau — which had first had relations with foreigners and which boasted open ports. Subtropical Kwangtung province was then the most populous and one of the poorest parts of China, plagued by years of famine, floods, drought, war, and civil unrest. The land was crowded with far more peasants than it could support, so it was natural that Kwangtung would send an army of laborers across the ocean. There was also something of a tradition of immigration in this part of southern, coastal China. Immigrants from the Pearl River delta — the so-called "overseas Chinese" — had for decades traveled to parts of Southeast Asia to work in mines or on plantations. Chroniclers of the period often report that the Chinese officially discouraged immigration, noting that the penalty for leaving China was beheading, but the punishment appears to have been little invoked, for it in no way impeded the rush to Golden Mountain or elsewhere.
With the exception of a small but dominant merchant class, the Chinese who came to the United States were peasants. They were nearly all male. They spoke dialects of Cantonese and rarely any English. They were frequently illiterate. They wore their hair in a queue down the back. This long braid, reaching past the waist of the wearer, was a sign of obeisance to the emperor and would not be discontinued until the early twentieth century. They came from small rural villages and were accustomed to doing backbreaking labor, scratching at the earth in China as they would do as miners in faraway California. They were ideal travelers into the mid- nineteenth-century American West, where there was often a great demand for cheap labor. They were traveling into a world they thought barbaric, remote, and violent. And coming as they did from the warm coastal countryside of southern China, they would arrive in a world — a place of dense forests, mountains, and bleak deserts — that bore no resemblance to the land they left behind.
The trip to Golden Mountain from a village in the Pearl River delta first involved traveling by junk or raft to Hong Kong. From there passage was arranged to California. The travelers, however poor and uneducated, were free men who often were married and were making this journey in hopes of improving their lives at home in China, notes the historian Shih-Shan Henry Tsai. Many were traveling on the "credit ticket" system — travel now, pay later. Mining in California was at first the chief draw, although railroad construction would replace it in the 1860s. Thousands of Chinese would eventually become restaurant workers, laundrymen, and domestic servants, jobs that would not have typically been done by men in China.
Crossing the Pacific was difficult and dangerous. Numerous accounts attested to the hazards of sea travel. Voyages were often made in old, battered hulks pressed into service for the Gold Rush. "Foreign shipmasters and Chinese entrepreneurs who chartered such vessels conspired to pack as many passengers as possible. Passengers in steerage were bundled together shoulder to shoulder and head to toe in poorly ventilated holds. Water was scarce, and the food prepared in ships' galleys was poor. Fatalities were frequent," the historian Jack Chen has pointed out. Under sail, if the weather and the winds did not cooperate, it could take as long as eighty or even 100 days to make the crossing — twice what good sailing time would have been. But with the introduction of the steamship in the 1860s, the passage from China was reduced to a matter of four or five weeks.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Poker Bride"
by .
Copyright © 2010 Christopher Corbett.
Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Preface,
One CELESTIALS AND SOJOURNERS,
Two CHINATOWN,
Three SOLD,
Four COMING INTO THE TERRITORY,
Five THE END OF THE ROAD ... WARRENS,
Six SOILED DOVES,
Seven FOND OF PLAYING CARDS,
Eight THE SHOOTING AFFRAY IN WARRENS,
Nine SAVING POLLY,
Ten LAST DAYS ON THE RIVER,
Epilogue THE CARAVAN OF THE DEAD: GHOSTS OF THE ORO FINO,
Acknowledgments,
Bibliography,
What People are Saying About This
Christopher Corbett has brought home a tale delicate and sad and not a little bit heroic, and in doing so he has rescued from oblivion an extraordinary chapter of the immigrant experience in America. With The Poker Bride and his earlier reconsideration of the Pony Express, Orphans Preferred, Corbett has established himself as a fresh and thoughtful voice in the historical realm of the American West.”—David Simon, author of Homicide: A Life on the Killing Streets and producer of The Wire
“In The Poker Bride, Christopher Corbett delves deep into the soul of the real old west, using the story of one Chinese ‘sojourner’—a young woman named Polly—as the thread to link a thousand pearls of fact and lore and whatever you call those fragments of story that lie somewhere in between. All I can say is, Twain would be proud.”—Erik Larson, author of The Devil in the White City
“There is no alkali dust in these pages. The Poker Bride is a gorgeously written and brilliantly researched saga of America during the mad flush of its biggest Gold Rush. Christopher Corbett’s genius is to anchor his larger story of Chinese immigration around a poor concubine named Polly. A tremendous achievement.”—Douglas Brinkley, author of The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast
“In Corbett’s expert hands, the extraordinary story of Polly Bemis, the unlettered Chinese concubine lost in a poker game, acquires tragic grandeur without losing any of its comical unpredictability.”—Christoph Irmscher, author of The Poetics of Natural History, Longfellow Redux and Public Poet, Private Man
“Utilizing his skills as a literary detective to piece together this saga of boom times during the Gold Rush, Christopher Corbett introduces us to one of the more beguiling characters to emerge from the Wild West. He tells the story of Polly Bemis—the poker bride—with panache, sensitivity, and wondrous detail.”—Wil Haygood, author of In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis, Jr.
“The Poker Bride offers a compelling look at a largely invisible—and mostly unremembered—population of the mid-19th century American West: Chinese laborers and prostitutes. In chronicling the life of one Chinese girl who was sold into slavery, brought to Idaho, and ceded to a man during a poker game, author Christopher Corbett weaves a fascinating tale about the underbelly of the Wild West.”—Laura Wexler, author of Fire in a Canebrake
“On July 8, 1872, a young Chinese concubine arrived by horse in Idaho gold country, where a white gambler soon won her in a poker game. and so begins Christopher Corbett's amazing tale of the Chinese in the making of the American West—a slice of largely forgotten history that is by turns funny, chilling, and poignant.”—Jill Jonnes, author of Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World
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