Touching Our Past -- On The Trail Laid By Their Chinese Forebearers In The `Gold Mountain' Of America

IDAHO CITY, Idaho - We climbed through pine forest, clambering over mounds of smooth river-worn granite boulders and stones that 19th-century Chinese miners had cleared by hand - rock by rock - from nearby streambeds so they could sift through the finer silt for gold.

The younger among us helped the more frail up a steep hill made slippery by pine needles, through dusty underbrush, and over the rock mounds that were waist high or higher.

There was no trail through this isolated, rugged terrain outside Idaho City. But the ranger knew the way to what, about 120 years ago, had been a Chinese field camp.

Here, in the 1870s, Chinese who had fled poverty and upheaval in their Asian homeland, had come to buy and work mining claims that whites considered no longer profitable.

There were no buildings. But scattered on the ground around us was evidence of their daily lives: a rubber sole of a miner's boot; a lead can, its hand-soldered, folded-over seams marking it as Chinese, handmade. A collapsed tea tin; broken pieces of porcelain rice bowls; a dusty shovel; a piece of metal roof, with its hole for a chimney.

The ghosts of our ancesters seemed to swirl around us.

In my mind's eye were fleeting visions of this first generation of Chinese immigrants - my predecessors - to "Gold Mountain," the Chinese name for America. In one scene, chopsticks quickly moved rice from porcelain bowl to a miner's hungry mouth. In another, an

exhausted miner rested after a long day of building ditches in the relentless sun, sifting through gravel while standing in cold stream run-off water into the night.

We stooped to touch the rusted pieces of metal and pieces of pottery - gently, with respect. No one said much; we were intent as our eyes combed the ground.

Touching our history

Most of our group of 37 were on this inaugural "Chinese Heritage Tour of the American West" to connect with our roots.

Now, here in this isolated pine forest, in this culmination of the five-day journey from Seattle, we were literally touching history - our history.

Dale Hom said a chill ran up his spine.: "I think we are the largest gathering of Chinese here ever since then."

"That blew me away. We were the NEXT ones," Serena Woo said later. "It was like a time warp."

For Woo, that moment crystalized thoughts and feelings that had been building in many of our minds since the trip began.

"I felt a combination of anger for being cheated out of this history (until now); a sense of pride for what was accomplished under great hardship and discrimination, and a great deal of sadness for what they had to go through," she said.

Emotions, pride, reclaimed history - themes of the sojourn that took us over hundreds of miles in Washington, Oregon and Idaho, exploring the legacy of the 19th-century Chinese pioneers instrumental in developing the American West.

A journey of hope

Southern China, in the early 1800s, was a place of turmoil and poverty.

News of the discovery of gold in California rang in their ears. Beginning in the 1840s, thousands left their homes seeking a fortune in America. Later, thousands more succumed to the blandishments of recruiters who talked about fortunes in America in order to coax cheap labor to the Western frontier.

In America, the Chinese mined gold and provided goods and services in mining camps. They worked in fish canneries and built the railroads.

By 1880, more than 300,000 Chinese had come to the U.S., many of them young men; by 1882 when the Chinese Exclusion Act barred more from coming, more than half had returned to China. But others came, often skirting immigration laws.

Our August bus tour, co-sponsored by Seattle's Wing Luke Asian Museum and the U.S. Forest Service, took us to museums, archaeological sites and archives, with discussions and lectures along the way.

Who We Were

Two-thirds of us on the tour were of Chinese ancestry; three were of other Asian-American background; the rest were European Americans.

We spanned the generations, from ages 18 to 79. Older travelers, including descendants of early Seattle Chinese pioneers, helped put the history in a context for the younger ones.

Others were part of the Asian-American movement in the 1970s that ultimately ensured that Seattle's own Chinese historical legacy didn't disappear in a blaze of urban "renewal" and that its pioneers' stories have been documented for posterity.

During the long bus rides from site to site - up to three hours at a stretch - we watched films touching on Chinese American history on the bus VCRs. And, as we got to know each other, almost everyone discovered a connection - relatives, friends, memories.

There were Clifford Goon, a retired pharmacist, and Bing Lum, a retired Boeing woodworker-toolmaker, for example. Goon's grandfather, Goon Dip, a labor contractor and store owner, was one of the Seattle Chinese community's leaders of the early 1900s. Lum, as a young man, had worked for Goon Dip in the Alaska fish canneries.

Most of the non-Chinese among us were history buffs. Many of us of Chinese ancestry wanted to fill missing gaps in our own history.

As Wing Luke Museum director Ron Chew told us at the orientation dinner, "History is what gets recorded." In the case of the early Chinese pioneers, what's recorded is spotty, and some of that is not true.

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 not only stopped immigration of Chinese laborers; it prevented wives from joining their husbands in America. After the men died, much of their history here died with them.

Chew said: "We're going back in time, to recapture pieces of our history . . . so we can leave it for the next generation."

Kam Wah Chung & Co

The Kam Wah Chung & Co. Museum, in John Day (pop. 1,836), in east-central Oregon, may be the best preserved and contain the most vivid relics of life as a Chinese immigrant in the U.S. West of the late 1800s.

The site, once on the village outskirts, now is in a city park, within yards of a swimming pool and swingset, looking out to the dry, brown hills that once yielded the gold that put this town on the map.

Built as a military trading post, the structure's windows are covered by steel shutters outside and wooden ones inside.

Ing "Doc" Hay, a herbal doctor, and Lung On, a businessman, opened the Kam Wah Chung in 1887 during the area's gold rush. At the time, there were about 1,000 Chinese in the area. By 1900, that number had dropped to about 100, and by 1940 fewer than 20.

But building was the social and religious headquarters for the Chinese community in Eastern Oregon. (Kam Wah Chung can be translated in several ways, including "the golden flower of prosperity").

Today, the pioneers' worldly goods remain as they left them: the wood stove where Doc Hay prepared (boiled) many of his medications; the shrines where he burned incense every day; the bunk beds and mail-order catalogues and mining tools; the pharmacy stocked with more than 500 different herbs and medications (rattlesnake to chicken gizzards, tiger's bone to bear paws) in rows of carefully labeled cardboard boxes and metal bins, and bottles and tins; the shelves of tinned and boxed goods, from canned marshmallows and mousetraps to 95 bottles of 1913 liquors and Owyhee peanut-butter kisses.

After Hay's death in 1952 (at age 89), the building was given to the city as a museum and sealed to prevent vandalism.

It remained untouched until the late '60s. The darkness, the even temperatures of the old stone building and the dry cold of Eastern Oregon had preserved most of its contents. After restoration, it was opened in 1977 as a museum.

Two Oregon college professors who wrote its history say the Kam Wah Chung is "probably the most extensive collection of traditional Chinese herbs in the Western hemisphere."

A personal connection

Carolyn Micnhimer, who presides over the museum, was pleased to met one of our group members, Helen Kay - whose grandfather, Bob Wah, lived with and assisted his cousin, Doc Hay, after Lung On died in 1940.

In the 1940s, when she was 10 or 12, Kay and her brother had spent three or four summers with her grandfather and Doc Hay. She hadn't been inside since.

Doc Hay had developed enough of a reputation to attract non-Chinese patients, too. Chinese medicine already was using molds akin to penicillin. Doc Hay, who diagnosed by listening to the pulse, was said to have cured many people during a deadly influenza epidemic.

He did an especially brisk business in blood poisoning and women's problems. It is said he could diagnose not only if a woman was pregnant, but could determine the fetus' sex.

After Doc Hay's death, $23,000 in uncashed checks from patients were found under his bed.

Lung On, who spoke fluent English, was a sort of troubleshooter for Chinese as far away as Nevada and Idaho who sought his help in interpreting English and resolving immigration problems.

His mercantile store was the first in the area to install a telephone and electricity; he invested in mines and property, obtained one of the area's first liquor licenses, and started the region's first automobile dealership. He also was known as a ladies' man and gambler.

Memories and cures

Kay, a pharmacist who, with her husband, owns Beacon Hill's Hall-O'Leary Pharmacy (and is Wing Luke board co-president) recalled that though Doc Hay was frail and partly blind, he intimidated her.

She remembered how dark the Kam Wah Chung was, and the incense that Doc Hay burned at the several shrines inside every day.

"My grandfather and my mom would tell me of his miraculous cures. I remember sometimes my grandfather would read letters or ask me to read letters, from people seeking medicines. He knew a little, and he learned more from Doc Hay. He'd make up the medicines and send the packets away by mail.

"As a child I didn't understand the significance of Chinese history here. I have a different attitude now, respect for the people who came before us . . ."

For most, the Kam Wah Chung was the highlight of the tour. For Bing Lum, it was the main reason he'd come.

He remembered the discrimination and hardships he had endured immigrating here in 1929. Ever since he'd heard about the Kam Wah Chung he wanted to make the pilgrimage - to see, he said, the evidence of how two Chinese entrepreneurs made it in a white society.

Granite Chinese Walls

Less intimate and personal, but with its own striking message, was the "Granite Chinese Walls," a placer-mine near the northeast Oregon town of Sumpter. It was "worked" by Chinese from the late 1860s to the early 1900s.

On the way, our bus pulled to the roadside on a hill overlooking the valley. Below us looked like a jumbled heap of rocks - 60 acres of rocks, we'd be told later.

It wasn't until our guide, Guy Marden, forest archaeologist for Wallowa Whitman National Forest, led us down into "the walls," that we understood what went on here.

As with the camp site we'd later see near Idaho City, these rocks had been moved by Chinese miners and stacked in walls, some higher than five feet - all by hand.

From the late 1860s until about the turn of the century, Chinese worked the mines using hydraulic hoses to loosen the gravel from the slopes and wash the earth through a series of sluice boxes or wooden troughs - or just panning to sort out the gold.

It's one of the largest and least disturbed mining sites of its kind.

As we followed Marden over the ankle-turning rocks, sweating and swatting away bugs, we imagined what it would be like to be moving rocks in that sun with no trees for shade, and digging 100 mile-long ditches to channel water.

Everything from coins to wok fragments have been recovered.

The Razing of Boise's Chinatown

Ken Swanson's story was disturbing: In the late 1960s and early 1970s, historic buildings of Boise's Chinatown were ordered torn down under an urban-renewal plan.

The town's "powers that be," said Swanson, administrative director at the Idaho Historical Museum in Boise, let their friends in to pick up whatever they wanted. (Items from that marauding still turn up in Idaho antique shops.)

The museum staff was given only enough time to shovel stuff into garbage bags before the debris was cleared away, he said. Now, 20 years later, the museum has a grant to go through what they recovered.

Spread before us on long tables were some of the artifacts - Chinese clothing, pottery, purses, a "lice comb" and Polly Bemis's little tennis shoes. (Bemis - her given name was Lalu Nathoy - was an Idaho pioneer woman whose story was made popular in the Hollywood motion picture, "Thousand Pieces of Gold." Her feet had been bound as a youngster to stunt their growth, a custom typical at the time among upper-class Chinese who regarded small feet as more feminine).

Heated discussion ensued over the fine-toothed comb. Maxine Chan, diversity trainer for Western Washington University, said she'd seen many combs like it when she grew up in Hong Kong and that it was simply a woman's comb, not particularly a lice comb. Swanson promised to correct the identification.

The Ah Fong Collection

The Ah Fong Collection at the Idaho Historical Library and State Archives includes items recovered from the urban renewal rubble. Photos, correspondence, some 300 books, and other artifacts document Chinese life in Idaho.

Ah Fong was an herbal doctor who was awarded an M.D. degree in 1903 after fighting for it all the way to the Idaho Supreme Court.

Archivist Tomas Jaehn said that, with the widespread destruction in China during the Cultural Revolution, some of the ancient medical books he left may be the only ones of their kind..

We pored over photos of Chinese selling vegetables and playing music in the early mining camps; of Polly Bemis on her Salmon River ranch, and of her immigration and census records; of turn-of-the-century Chinese New Year's parades in Boise.

Sharing insights

Our final morning, before flying home from Boise, we gathered for breakfast and to discuss the tour.

For many, the high point was getting to know each other.

"I grew up at Stevens Pass," said Mary Ann Mowrer, of Gig Harbor. "I remember hearing that the Chinese worked on the railroad. My only contact with Chinese was in Chinese restaurants."

She said she and her husband, Mike, a school teacher, found just getting to know Chinese people was a great learning experiece.

Tom Cook, our bus driver, said he had grown up in the South, had been exposed to a lot of racist attitudes, and had known no Asian Americans. But on this trip he developed an interest he will pursue.

Serena Woo, a Los Angeles early-childhood educator, said the trip had linked her to generations past.

She said that at the Kam Wah Chung in John Day, she came to understand the "bachelor society" she had seen, but never really understood, as a child in the 1950s.

"My father worked with our family village people; he had an immigration and bookeeping office, and we had a family association in the back for people from our village.

"They were sojourners, men from the bachelor society - I saw them sitting around, talking, playing cards, I thought they were just idle. They were just there. It wasn't until John Day, I saw the bunkbeds, the kitchen, almost the same as the back of my father's office. It tied it together for me, as a common experience: I had a connection with those miners.

"And the comments about perseverence, hard work, thriftiness, working together in a group, family ties - those traits are very prevalent among Chinese people today. It's a continuation of their values.

"Their values are our values."