Snake River Massacre: Between Two Worlds (Video Transcript)

Snake River Massacre: Between Two Worlds (Video Transcript)

In 1887, a rancher out looking for his stray cattle on the Snake River between Idaho and Oregon, came upon a gruesome scene. The remains of human beings washed up in a Creek. They were so picked over by buzzards and coyotes that neither their features nor their race could be identified.

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Some of the bodies were found, one was found headless. Others were found with axe wounds. This horrible, horrible crime was committed there. And the savagery of the crime would indicate that it was more than just a robbery.

Years later, the true story came out. A gang of white men, ranchers and school boys, had set upon ten Chinese miners. Shot and beat them death, then dumped their mutilated bodies into the river. Four Chinese arrived at the camp the next day and we’re promptly murdered. The killers then travel by boat down river to another camp. By nightfall, 31 Chinese were dead.

The leader of this group, Bruce Evans, was said to have told the others in the gang, let’s do our country a favor and get rid of these China men. And let’s do our favor for ourselves and get their gold.

Local residents rallied around the suspects. Only three were tried and a jury freed them all. The Snake River massacre was not an isolated incident. In 1882, the US pasted the Exclusion Act to stop Chinese laborers from entering the country and deprive those here of citizenship. That law ushered in the most violent decade in Chinese, American history.

The spread of anti-Chinese feeling was like a disease going through the white population. They became the scapegoats. They became the solution, if we could get rid of them, then our fortune would be better.

The Chinese were foreign, did not belong here at all. This old idea was given new life by the law. In Tacoma, Washington, 600 Chinese were expelled and their houses burned to the ground. The Chinese of Juneau, Alaska, were loaded onto boats and set adrift. In Rock Springs, Wyoming, 28 were killed, the risk driven out.

Wyoming, Idaho, Oregon, Washington, California. The Chinese were lynched, Chinatown was burned, Chinese were run out.

The last of the great fires was San Jose. When arsonists turned its Chinatown to rubble. A 17-year-old named Young Soong Quong packed up and fled. Like thousands of other Chinese across the West, he made his way to the one place that seemed safe. Where the sights and sounds were reminders of home. Dai Fow, big city, San Francisco’s Chinatown.

In order to get any pictures at all, I had to hide in doorways. I waited for the sun to filter through the shadows, or for some picturesque group or character to appear.

In 1895, a German photographer named Arnold Genthe, wandered into San Francisco’s Chinatown. But for him, we would have almost no visual record of this world. Tong Yun Gai, the Chinese street, headquarters of Chinese America.

The sidewalks were crowded with peddlers, cobblers, and fortune tellers servicing the migrant laborers who converged here when their work was done. Fish cutters from the Alaska canneries, fruit pickers from the San Joaquin valley throng the herbal stores and rice shops, temples and gabling halls.

Turn of the century San Francisco Chinatown, for a Chinese, was the center of their world in America.

You will hear the shouts of vendors selling their wares. There was also people speaking all different kinds of dialects. Taishan, Hakka, Canton City dialect.

Six blocks long and two wide, Chinatown was a country within a country filled with temptation for an ambitious young man hungry for life. Young had worked as a house boy, got a taste there of American ways. And now, the ways of Dai Fow.

My grandfather loved living in San Francisco Chinatown because he liked going out with his friends. There were restaurants, and his favorite, favorite activity was going to the opera. And there were three opera houses, three opera houses to choose from.

But it was an insular world this young man was in, cut off by the exclusion law from American civic life. The law had barred Chinese laborers, the first time the US excluded immigrants based on nationality or race. Those already here could stay, but could not become citizens.

Essentially, Chinese were declared permanent aliens.

It had meant that they could never participate in the elections, that politicians would never have to pay any attention to them. And I think also it had a symbolic significance in that it read them permanently out of the American political community.

The story of the exclusion years is of a people in between countries, often unsure as to which they belonged. It’s about families kept apart, lives shaped and misshaped by Chinese custom as well as US law. To become American, the Chinese would have to wage a long campaign. Not just in public, but inside their home.

In the early days, homes were few in this society of men. They slept in boarding houses and gathered at the store run by their clan. Wongs at the Wong store, Lees at the Lees’.

Bachelors they were called, though half were mar