They almost vanished without a trace, the fortune-seeking Chinese who came to the American West by the tens of thousands during the Gold Rush that began in 1849. In the end, they all went back to China, even the dead. Bone collectors gathered their remains from crude cemeteries and brought them back to the old country.

But their stories remained and Baltimore author Christopher Corbett found them and has woven them together into a fascinating new book “Poker Bride.”

 The title comes from his central character, Polly Bemis, a woman snatched from her village in rural China, brought to America and sold to a wealthy Chinese merchant who lost her in a poker game to a New Englander who took her off to a remote ranch in Idaho.

Corbett peels back the romantic, racist sterotypes about “Chinamen” and tells what life was really like for Chinese “soujourners.” The men who came as miners had to scratch what they could from the white men’s played-out mines.  The women mostly wound up sex slaves, penned like cattle at auction when they first arrived and eventually coming to occupy  the lowest echelon of the gritty world of Gold Rush era prostitution. When their numbers rose they went from harmless freaks to threats to be stamped out, by law or violence.

Seeing all this chronicled by Corbett in photos, diaries and newspaper clippings makes the whole thing seem joltingly real and recent.  

FERN SHEN: How did you come to be writing about Chinese concubines and gold miners in the Old West, how did you hear about Polly Bemis?

CHRIS CORBETT: When I was writing “Orphans Preferred: The Twisted Truth and Lasting Legend of the Pony Express” (Random House/Broadway Books) I spent a lot of time in Nevada. There are cemeteries there in old mining towns of gold rush era folks who came from everywhere in the world. I asked someone about the Chinese – who were a significant factor in the old days – and was told me that “bone collectors” had taken them back to China. I did not realize the Chinese repatriated their dead. So I found the Chinese, so to speak, before I found Polly Bemis, the Poker Bride. I heard about her while I was doing some journalism in Idaho. She seemed an interesting way to put a face on an experience that we don’t know a lot about.

Tell the basic outlines of the Polly Bemis story as you heard it…..

First off, you will hear the story about the poker game. The story that Charlie Bemis, a Connecticut Yankee gambler won her in a poker game. And that’s appealing. But if you poke around you will find that she really lived and a lot of folks knew her and loved her and she was a popular person. When she came down out of the Salmon River country in the early 1920s it was like Rip Van Winkle had come to town. The newspapers went wild.

Did it seem like a tall tale that might not stand up to a historian’s scrutiny? The fact that it was so romanticized is interesting in itself (I think) and says a lot about Americans’ double-edged mythology about Asians, that they are either alluring or abominable but in either case, not quite human.

Actually – there were so many real people in Idaho who had known her at the end of her life in the 1920s and 1930s that this was not a problem. A lot of the “legends” associated with her early days are hard to sort out. BUT that does not mean that she was not a real Chinese immigrant on the frontier. And yes – you are correct – a lot of this mythologizing is what Bernard DeVoto, a great Western historian, calls “the borderland of fable.” It’s where fact and fancy get mixed up. And I suppose it says a lot about us as a people and about memory and about the American West.

 Why did you decide to tell the larger story of the Chinese experience in the West, has not much been written about it? What was missing from the books out there on the subject?

I was mostly interest in Polly. But how could I talk about Polly without saying to the average reader – this is what it was like in those days. This is what happened because of the Gold Rush. Polly is a small but powerful part of the Chinese immigrant experience. To tell her story you must talk about gold. About the days of the gold rush. It’s a story about greed and romance. Gambling and opium smoking. And a great deal of violence. I do not believe that our history of the West has been completely explored.

When you think about it, there really are no Asian faces in our Old West iconography: it’s basically Cowboys-and-Indians and maybe a few white prostitutes-with-a-heart-of-gold here and there. Maybe Hop Sing from “Bonanza.” Your book attempts to widen the picture. What aspects of the Asian experience in America will readers of Poker Bride find really eye opening, do you think?

The memory of the Chinese is ever-present in the American West. The ghosts of the long ago “Chinamen” haunt the West. I am very aware of that having written this story. I would hope that an Asian reader – a contemporary reader – might become more interested in the experience of early Asian (Chinese) immigrants in the West. Polly was a survivor. She puts a human face on this experience. She is real. She is not a character on Bonanza. She’s not a character in a novel. And she lived until 1933. Readers might be interested that despite the cliché – a la Bonanza – most wealthy people had a Chinese houseboy – almost never boys but men. They were cooks, cleaners, and gardeners. Some of these old guys worked for families for half a century. Also, the representations of the Chinese in the television program “Deadwood” are not inaccurate. There was a Chinese underworld in the Old West, too.

Do we know much about Polly’s life in China? Her Chinese name? Her village?

We do NOT know her name. You will read speculation about it, but I don’t think that is accurate. We do not know much about her origins.
She told an interviewer in great detail that her family sold her during a famine because they were starving. Shocking as that is – it was not uncommon. She was young, unblemished and attractive. She was, horrifying as it may seem now, a thing of value – like a racehorse. Most early Chinese immigrants came from the Pearl River Delta on the southern coast of China near what is now Hong Kong and Canton. They were Cantonese speakers.

What was life in the American west like for those the women brought here as prostitutes, those “soiled doves” or “100 men’s wives” as they were known?

It was often short and brutal. A lot of popular – television and films – representations of that world are wildly inaccurate. Being in a brothel in the 19th century American West was not a good way to live to a ripe old age. Polly was not in a brothel near as can be figured. She got lucky. She would have died if she had been in “the cribs” – as they called them. These were cubicles where girls had sex with multiple partners for as little as 50 cents or a dollar at a time. Things were bad enough if you were a white prostitute. But most of these Chinese girls would have been unable to speak any English. The trauma of this speaks for itself.

How was Polly’s life typical (or atypical) of the experience most Chinese sex workers had when they came here?

She never wound up in a brothel or a crib. That’s the big difference. And we know a lot about her.

Reading the Polly Bemis story I thought ‘Whoa, great plot for a movie, Ang Lee should direct it! Bbut who should play Polly? Just so long as it’s not Lucy Liu!’ And then I find out that a movie WAS made, “Thousand Pieces of Gold,” with Rosalind Chao as Polly and Chris Cooper as Charlie. What do you think of it?

I did not read the novel nor see the movie as I wanted to avoid having fiction too heavily influence my image of the story. I think Robert Altman’s “McCabe and Mrs. Miller” is a better illustration of that world. The television series “Deadwood” was pretty accurate in its depiction of the Chinese. There was a Chinese underworld.

In the West it’s still possible to hear people use that term “Chinaman,” I have found. I’ve been to a Chinese cemetery in Waldo, Oregon and it was truly spooky. Even though the remains had been repatriated to China years ago, there was something really haunting about that place. Did you get a feel for some of this researching the book?

Yes. Very much so. Westerners are most likely to use that term than Easterners. But we must remember that they have a weird memory of the Chinese. Easterners met the Chinese later and in smaller numbers. I am surprised at the casual use of the expression “Chinaman” even today.
One of the spookiest places for me was Pierce City, Idaho where there was a celebrated lynching of five “Chinamen” after an old Scot who was a trader was murdered. It would appear that they had nothing to do with his murder but vigilante justice was quick and brutal in these places. No real law as we know it.

I have visited the Bemis Ranch on the Salmon River, as part of a family raft trip. Is it accessible by land and have you been there?

It’s most easily reached via the river and I have been there.
The Shepp Ranch across the river remains in operation as does the Bemis Ranch, which is under private ownership. There is no road into most of these places. Trails. But nothing like a road. I imagine one could walk there but it would be a good long walk.

Polly probably saved Charlie Bemis’ live nursing him back to health after he was shot. Tell that story, it’s pretty good. Was Bemis good to Polly?

 When she was an old lady – and that’s when she was interviewed – Polly seemed mildly annoyed at Bemis and his antics. But I do not have any evidence that he was abusive or cruel. I think the accounts of Polly saving Charlie’s life are probably true. And then they did – in fact – get married. THAT was unheard of. White men did not marry Chinese women. Charlie was a fabled deadbeat. He was a gambler. People who knew him always remarked on that. But they seemed to be happy best as we can figure. They were together a long time.

Talk about white hostility to Chinese in the Old West and why it peaked with massacres and the Chinese Exclusion Act. The phrases in that English-Chinese phrase book  you fouund spoke volumes: “I cannot trust you…. I have made an apology but he still wants to strike me…. He cheated me out of my wages…He assaulted me without provocation.”

The Chinese were at first curiosities – a la Chang & Eng – the Siamese twins (they were actually Chinese). People thought them odd. They would pay to see them. Or pay to see a “Chinaman” use chopsticks or an abacus. But when they came in larger numbers the nativists and racists began to beat the drum – “the Chinese Must Go.” Simply put, there were never significant numbers of Chinese in this country so that anyone might feel imperiled. It was simply racism. They were subject to terrible violence. And they were marginalized and discriminated against in large and small ways. We had federal laws against. That’s pretty severe.

What was most eye-opening to you as you researched this story?

What was most eye-opening was that the Chinese of old are all gone. And we have only their ghostly memory in the Old West. That’s it. There were thousands and thousands of Chinese in the rural West 150 or so years ago. You could drive a long way now and not find a single Chinese person. I often thought about that.

Did this project cause you to reflect on the similar experience of international sex workers today?

That was not my focus but you would have to be a little dense to not make some connection. Most of the things that led to Polly winding up in an Idaho gold mining camp are still in existence today. You can buy girls in Asia. I think people know that. It’s shocking but it is still true.

– Corbett will be speaking at the downtown central branch of the EnochPratt Library on Wednesday at 6:30 pm.