The Poker Bride: The First Chinese in the Wild West |  | Author: Christopher Corbett
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
Category: Book
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Rating:  25 reviews
Sales Rank: 237160
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 240
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Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 9.5 x 6.9 x 1.2
ISBN: 0802119093
Dewey Decimal Number: 973.04951
EAN: 9780802119094
ASIN: 0802119093
Publication Date: February 2, 2010
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Product Description
When gold rush fever gripped the globe in 1849, thousands of Chinese immigrants came through San Francisco on their way to seek their fortunes. They were called sojourners, for they never intended to stay. In The Poker Bride, Christopher Corbett uses a little-known legend from Idaho lore as a lens into this Chinese experience. Before 1849, the Chinese in the United States were little more than curiosities. But as word spread of the discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill in California, they soon became a regular sight in the American West. In San Francisco, a labyrinthine Chinatown soon sprang up, a clamorous city within a city full of exotic foods and strange smells, where Chinese women were smuggled into the country, and where the laws were made by "hatchet men." At this time, Polly, a young Chinese concubine, was brought by her owner by steamboat and pack train to a remote mining camp in the highlands of Idaho. There he lost her in a poker game, having wagered his last ounce of gold dust. Polly found her way with her new owner to an isolated ranch on the banks of the Salmon River in central Idaho. As the gold rush receded, it took with it the Chinese miners--or their bones, which were disinterred and shipped back to their homeland in accordance with Chinese custom. But it left behind Polly, who would make headlines when she emerged from the Idaho hills nearly half a century later to visit a modern city and tell her story. Peppered with characters such as Mark Twain and the legendary newswoman Cissy Patterson, The Poker Bride vividly reconstructs a lost period of history when the first Chinese sojourners flooded into the country, and left only glimmering traces of their presence scattered across the American West.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 25
 A Saga of America April 12, 2010
Amos Lassen (Little Rock, Arkansas)
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
Corbett, Christopher. "The Poker Bride: The First Chinese in the West", Atlantic Monthly Press, 2010.
A Saga of America
Amos Lassen
Here is an aspect of the old West that many of us know nothing about. We know that there were Chinese there during the gold rush but we do not know about the Chinese women who came over to work as concubines. One of these was Polly Bemis who was won in a poker game by Charlie Bemis and he married her. This kind of marriage was unheard of at the time and Charlie and Polly lived isolated lives in central Idaho. After her husband's death, Polly came to town and told of her experiences. Here is her story as well as the larger story of Chinese mass immigration and a picture of life in California and the Pacific Northwest.
In the nineteenth century it was taboo for a white man to marry an Asian woman but here is that story. This is one of the most curious of stories and at first, we learn that Americans welcomed the Chinese and thought them to be "exotic curiosities". But as more and more came here, public sentiment went against them. The Chinese were accused of stealing American jobs and they were portrayed in the press as "thieving, shifty, and untrustworthy". There was a "Chinese Must Go" campaign in the 1880's and all was not good.
This is quite a story and we get to learn about an unheard chapter in our history. This is a look at an invisible chapter in American history and it is a wonderful and vivid reconstruction of a lost period. Corbett's narrative is intriguing and he has done his research well--he gives us an extensive bibliography. We get not only the story of the poker bride but also the story of the gold rush. It's a happy story but not all of the Chinese were as happy as Polly. There is a great deal to be learned here and Corbett's writing style makes that leaning effortless.
We Need to Take Heed April 19, 2010
Atheen M. Wilson (Mpls, MN United States)
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
The Poker Bride is a somewhat loosely based book on the life and times of Polly Bemis, a Chinese girl who arrived in Idaho during the gold rush years of the mid-19th century and lived there until her death during the first half of the 20th century. What the book really is, however, is a short history of Chinese immigration to the American West during this same period. What most people remember, if anything, about this period is the great contribution of the Chinese to the building of the transcontinental railway. That at least is my case. So far as I was aware, the huge influx of labor from Asia had been the product of the demand for it on the railroad. What I had not known was the potency of the call of the gold fields starting with the Sutter's Mill discovery in 1848.
Although I found the narrative thread of the book a little convoluted and at times a little repetitive, I think Mr. Corbett's book is a remarkable compendium of information. His selection of a quotation from G. K. Chesterton--one of my favorite authors and author of one of my favorite poems--is very apt here, and explains the problem exactly. "I will not say that this story is true: because, as you will soon see, it is all truth and no story. It has no explanation and no conclusion; it is, like most of the other things we encounter in life, a fragment of something else which would be intensely exciting if it were not too large to be seen....(The Secret of the Train)." To a certain extent it is the author's responsibility to pull the story out of the morass of information so it can be viewed critically by the reader; admittedly however, doing so would have pulled it from context and skewed the meaning of the actual events. I applaud the author for not giving in to the "story" but remaining true to the "history." This has to have been difficult for him, since he obviously has a story telling predilection.
There appear to be three--probably more--threads to The Poker Bride. First and foremost there is the story of the Bride herself. While there is no doubt she existed--contemporaries who knew her had been interviewed, photos exist of her, and some paperwork exists for her--there is little beyond the sketchily known events of her later life and what she said of her earlier life that goes beyond her mere existence in history. Essentially she is part reality and part myth, and the reader is allowed to decide what to believe. More than anything it is the author who, by creating an historical backdrop for Polly, gives her simple bare bones existence a significance beyond the simple documentation.
The second thread of The Poker Bride is what actually does this. Mr. Corbett has drawn as much data as possible to the recreation of the Chinese experience in the American West. By gleaning information from Western newspapers, personal accounts, and oral history drawn from those who had participated in the events, the author has given as much of an account of the Chinese immigration to pre-statehood California, Oregon, Washington, Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming as is probably possible. As he notes in the context of the work, very few of these immigrants were literate, so records of their adventures are few to absent. Furthermore, few of the literate in this country were interested in recording the unvarnished experiences of these foreigners with the people they encountered here, the notable exceptions being Mark Twain and Bret Harte. Additionally most of the Chinese who came here to work or to mine for gold returned home, if at all possible, taking whatever stories regarding their experiences here with them. Some of these stories appear to have been collected from China either from the returning sojourners themselves for from those who had known them. (It would appear to be a popular topic for MA and PhD dissertations for ethnically Chinese students, which shows the value of checking university libraries for these sources of information!)
The third thread of the book is the female--in this case mostly the Chinese female--experience in the American West. I hold as quite apt the author's description of the environment and the times of the Gold Rush years as "bachelor" societies. The rigor, the risks, and the lifestyle of the Gold Rush years had the tendency to winnow the overall society--that is the rest of the entire world--in favor of the young, healthy male. This incredible state of social imbalance had a very expectable outcome.
If one could imagine putting all males from the age of 15 to 30 in a particular quarter of any large city without any supervision whatsoever, no law other than their own, and one overreaching goal of becoming wealthy, one might get a pretty good idea of what life in the old West during the Gold Rush years was like. The demands and interests of this segment of society, combined with the willingness and ability to pay whatever was necessary to acquire it, will also give one a very clear idea of the types of "black market" activity that would arise to supply it and the great difficulty and cost that would be required to suppress it--let alone the level of graft and corruption that would arise from doing so. In many ways, it is the same system of supply and demand that makes the attempt to suppress drugs, their use and sale, an almost hopeless endeavor.
In any case like this demand creates a market, and suppliers arise. Any attempt to suppress the market also increases the stress of demand, thereby increasing the price of the item in demand. This in turn makes the risks inherent with supplying it that much more worthwhile to undertake, and means an even greater effort to undertake supply will be made. Any attempts to prevent it will increase the violence associated with protecting it--both from those who wish to suppress it and from those who wish to take it over from those already controlling it. This whole scenario--minus the violence, perhaps--can be found in any textbook on economics, which illustrates it with simple graphs called "supply and demand curves."
The lucrative benefits to those in recognized positions of influence for turning a blind eye to the activity will also increase and ensure that at least some will succumb. By virtue of the great fortunes to be made by this avenue with virtually no investment or effort, society's official law enforcement will start to crumble. Those who have become involved in the graft begin to ensure that only those who will cooperate are able to obtain office. Efforts by a jaded society to change this situation will be met with threats and violence against "clean" candidates, making it difficult to change anything.
Meanwhile society, unable to do anything at all to prevent the victimization of individuals hurt by the illicit activity, responds by making the victims the cause of their own dilemma. People begin to label these individuals as "hopeless," "debauched," "morally unfit," "strange outsiders" or simply stupid and therefore amusing. All of which were applied to the Chinese who were victimized by the society of the "Old West."
The fact that the "peculiar institution" in the American South was defended as a social necessity is another case in point. Slaves were considered "better off" being enslaved, since they were seen as incapable of taking care of themselves. To estimate how difficult it would have been to change the lives of the Chinese immigrants in the West, one simply has to remember that it took a war lasting about 4 and a half years and more lives lost than in all other wars in which the US partook thereafter combined to eliminate slavery---not to improve the overall condition, which is an on-going thing--from the country. And there were those--in fact there are still those--who considered the price to have been "too high."
That the situation of the Chinese sex slave in the American West was miserable, hopeless and short is less the point, here, than is the life of women in any society and particularly in third world societies. Would the lives of any of these girls--and they could be anywhere from 2 to 16 for the most part--have been any different had they remained in China? I doubt it. Overpopulation and famine dictated a certain cold heartedness with respect to children, especially young children who could not contribute anything but their appetite to the family's situation. In a land where hard physical labor was the norm, males are usually valued more highly than females. In times of shortage, then, it will usually be the female children that are killed, abandoned or sold to provide extra shares of whatever there is for the rest of the family. Anything more generous and humane would be an irresponsible use of resources; that is the grim reality of these families. Hence, as the author notes in The Poker Bride, the Chinese of the time believed that girls and women had no souls, like animals they were disposable. That, more than anyting, was probably the secret of their quiet acceptance of their fates. If you believe yourself unworthy of anything more, or if you simply expect nothing more, you accept life as it happens to you. It certainly enhances survival. Those that didn't accept it tended to commit suicide, and the author documents a number of cases in point.
I think Mr. Corbett's description of the plight of the poor Chinese in the American West holds a far greater significance than one might believe on the surface of the overall story. The point of the book is that it was surprising to find an elderly Chinese female alive and thriving in late 19th and early 20th century America. The likelihood that she would have survived her teens and 20ies under the circumstances of her arrival in the country made it highly unlikely that she would. More importantly, the First World's attitude toward "human rights" in the Third World needs to be refocused. If one had wanted to change the lives of any of the Chinese girls of the Gold Rush years, one would have had to attend to the social issues of the country from which they were shipped. In fact the treatment of women is key to the problems of most Third World countries. It has become well known that birthrate declines as the education and improvement in lifestyle of women increases. And it is a high birthrate that creates the surplus of labor that leads to sale of females for the benefit of their families during times of famine. Wherever labor is in greater supply than demand, as it so often is in the Third World, wages remain lower than the costs of raising a large family; but if you must have family to look after you in old age, you need to have lots of children so that at least some survive to take care of you. Governments that keep the wealth of a country in the hands of a very few beggar the population, drive higher birth rates, and cause events like the immigrations of the Gold Rush years.
The Poker Bride might well be noted as a cautionary tale to us all. As the world's population continues to rise, as food supplies and transportation costs escalate the modern world could--and in fact actually does--see a similar migration of people from areas of high population density to that of lower density. The potential for an improved level of life brings thousands to this country, creating black market structures that extort money from those who want to move here, bribe officials to look the other way, and enure the resident population to the unremedial plight of the immigrants. There is little different about the situation now than that in the Gold Rush era. The Chinese have managed by a change in their government, in the design of their economy, and in their control over their population growth to keep their own workers home; but countries where changes have not met the needs of the general population, migrations--legal and illegal--are still seen. The situation of these migrants continues to be regarded with the same ambivalence by the native born citizen of the country, and their vulnerability to abuse by those who seek to gain at their expense continues to be a problem.
In short, Mr. Corbett's tale of The Poker Bride is an old one and unfortunately an ongoing one. We need to take heed.
Ten stars Wonderful well written book April 14, 2010
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
My family has been in the mother lode area of California since the 1800 gold rush when a woman in the family ran a bakery and a brothel. And because Jackson CA in the mother lode has a Chinese graveyard, this books title caught my attention from the get go.
Very well written and researched. Charlie and Polly Bemis are two people I would have loved to know. Reading of their journey from San Francisco up to Idaho and the people and places they encountered reminded me of visiting many of the same places. The author does an excellent job of describing how the Chinese were treated when they arrived in San Francisco and how they were treated in the gold country. Something the many small towns here in the Sierras are honest about when you visit their small town museums.
Reading in the book and especially chapter 10 of Charles Shepp and Peter Klinkhammer who lived near Charlie and Polly, and helped them out, and spent the holiday with them, and would care for Polly after Charlie died, was one of my favorite chapters, as it shows how people here help each other out. Loved reading of how Polly was such a great fisherman, and how she grew a big vegetable garden and orchard which she would harvest and preserve also reminded me of how we live today. Love reading the no nonsense diaries these folks kept, which noted the weather, what they ate, how the bears ate all the berries or the horses got into the orchard, again reminded me of how they lived and the connection to how many live today. The book notes that without the help of Charles and Peter, Polly wouldn't have been able to remain on the ranch after Charlie died. And that the men were not looking for new neighbors, which is why they agreed to care for Polly and get the land after her death. Gotta love these folks.
Loved reading of Polly visiting the outside world for the first time and how when she first heard a radio she wanted to run away because she thought it was a ghost speaking. Although she was overjoyed when the men strung a phone line to her home so they could stay in touch with her, since the river could be harsh and prevent easy access to her place. Or how happy a person she was and how she loved being asked to hold babies, or getting to ride in a car, rain etc. Things many people today simply take for granted.
On page 183, we read that she fell ill in 1933, at the age of eighty-one she was taken on horseback over narrow and winding trails to the War Eagle Mine where they had arranged to have an ambulance waiting for her. And that she showed herself very grateful for all that was done for her. Thus she wrote out of the area on a horse, just as she had ridden in. She would die on November 6, a Monday, with a brief notation that it was a warm and cloudy day and she would be buried at 10 am the next morning. Peter has always planned on getting her a simple headstone. He died in 1970 at the age of eighty-nine and the heirs to his estate carried out his wishes and she has a simple head stone that notes her name and September 11, 1853-November 6, 1933. In 1987 her remains were moved back to the ranch she had shared with Charlie on the banks of the Salmon River.
As a homeschooling family this is a book we will use as part of our school studies. And highly recommend to anyone who wants an honest story about the history of the gold rush and how the Chinese were treated.
FASCINATING, SOMETIMES TRAGIC, AND TRUE April 22, 2010
Gail Cooke (TX, USA)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
History is vivified when seen through the eyes of an individual, thus it is with Christopher Corbett's story of Polly Bemis, a Chinese concubine sold by her starving parents IN 1872 then smuggled to San Francisco. Next, she was brought by her owner to an Idaho mining camp where he lost her to Charlie Bemis in a poker game.
She lived with Charlie for almost half a century on an isolated ranch in the canyon of the Salmon River, "known as the `River Of No Return." She nursed him back to health after he was almost fatally wounded, and he later did an amazing thing - Charlie married her. There is a picture of Polly in the book wearing her 1894 wedding dress. She's a small woman with her hair pulled back in a neat bun; the hand touching her skirt appears strong.
In 1923 she will come down from the mountain on horseback and be taken by car to Orangeville, the Idaho County seat. This was an amazing journey for Polly as she had never ridden in a car. "She had never heard a radio or seen a train, an airplane, a motion picture, or electric lights. Her arrival was also amazing for the populace, receiving banner newspaper headlines and being likened to Rip Van Winkle.
Polly was one of the more fortunate of the hordes of Chinese who came to California, to what they called "Golden Mountain" to search for gold. As Corbett points out the California Gold Rush was a time of madness, violence, and rabid discrimination against the Chinese. Although they worked for very low wages it was claimed that they took jobs from Americans - there were "Chinese Must Go" campaigns, and frequent brutalities inflicted upon them.
Of course, crossing the Pacific to reach our shores was travail within itself. "Steerage on the China run was damp, dark, poorly ventilated, and filthy." One ship, the Libertad, carried 560 passengers although its limit was 297, and lost 100 men on that voyage. Writers described the passage from China as a "floating hell."
A former editor and reporter with the Associated Press Corbett has researched extensively and enriched THE POKER BRIDE with details describing this little known portion of our history. It is, of course, Polly's story but it is also the immigrants' story - fascinating, often tragic, and true.
Highly recommended.
- Gail Cooke
The Gold Rush Immigration from China March 26, 2010
R. Hardy (Columbus, Mississippi USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The discovery of gold in California in 1848 transformed America. Some of the transformations, like the impetus to populate the empty western lands and the increase in individual fortunes, were good, at least for some. The ecological effects were often disastrous. The social effects, besides the population shift, were most significant for the interaction of Chinese immigrants with American citizens, and these were often disastrous as well. In _The Poker Bride: The First Chinese in the West_ (Atlantic Monthly Press), Christopher Corbett has told the story, as much as it can be known, of one Chinese girl who came to California and was indeed won in a poker game. There is not much that can be said about Polly Bemis for certain, but Corbett's book (similar to his previous book _Orphans Preferred_, about the Pony Express) is not only about the specific case but also about the larger picture and the folklore and traditions that were made around it. Polly's story is relatively happy-ever-after; for most of her fellow Chinese, however, the land of the "Golden Mountain" proved to be one of violence and exploitation.
The news about the gold rush came to Hong Kong before it reached Boston and Washington. The result was that tens of thousands of Chinese came to seek their fortunes in the gold fields, and old, battered ships that were good for nothing else were pressed into transporting them. The Chinese came for the express purpose of making money; expecting to return with a relative fortune, the Chinese simply worked hard and kept to themselves without an attempt to learn the culture of the new land. They were easy targets for exploitation, especially the women who came and almost always became prostitutes. It's a grim story, made a little lighter by the specific tale of the main character in Corbett's work. Polly Bemis didn't leave many traces; one of the lessons in this book is that the history of these Chinese in America was always written by others, since the Chinese themselves were almost universally illiterate. Probably (and according to what she supposedly said of her own background) she was one of the girls who was a financial resource to her family when they sold her into concubinage. She arrived by boat in San Francisco and then by horseback up to the mining camp of Warrens, Idaho, in 1872. It was not the cribs for her; she was to be the concubine of a wealthy Chinese master, although she may have traded hands before coming to him. She was indeed won in a poker game, or so the story goes. Her master, an enthusiastic gambler, lost one round of gold dust stakes after another, and finally had only one possession to put up, his 18-year-old Chinese slave girl. The winner was Charlie Bemis, a Connecticut Yankee who was there for the remnants of the gold rush, keeping a saloon and gambling house. He wasn't cut out for the hard work of mining, and was by most accounts an idler, but he could keep a good saloon. One account by a man who knew him said, "He was absolutely square and entirely fearless. While there is no record of his having shot a man, his fearless personality, coupled with his skill at shooting, enabled him to maintain order without getting into trouble." It might not have been remarkable that Polly was won at a gambling table; far more remarkable is that she and Bemis settled into a long-term relationship and that the American married the Chinese. He may have done so to give her legal backing to avoid deportation back to China, but it seems to have been a supportive relationship. Polly was a good cook, gardener, and catcher of fish. When Charlie was shot in the face by a brawler, he was not expected to live, but she nursed him back to some degree of health. They lived together for fifty years. Only after his death did Polly make some visits outside their remote camp on the Salmon River, and she was feted as a Rip Van Winkle figure who was astonished by the metropolis of her county seat, Grangeville, and by automobiles and a picture show.
It's a happy story, one that only serves as a contrast to all the rest of the book. Polly was lucky; she started out as a concubine, and she did not have to descend to the more usual depths or to die of venereal disease and malnutrition. Her story can easily be seen in a romantic light (although it may be that those who wrote about her initially tended to stress the happiness of her particular case). As Corbett tells it, it is still a fine story, but he hasn't let readers forget that as far as the Chinese experience of the time went, Polly Bemis's happy fate was sadly an anomaly.
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