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East Meets West
Discovery why some of Montana's history was written in Chinese.

By George Everett

In a distant corner of Mount Moriah cemetery in Butte, Montana, stand several narrow rows of simple headstones with fading Chinese characters. They mark the graves of Asians buried here since the cemetery was established in 1877.

One grave stands out. It belongs to a man who was born in 1886 and died on September 23, 1952. Nestled against the headstone are two sets of chopsticks and a small orange. A plastic plant in a willow holder has been knocked over by the wind that rustles the yellowing leaves in the nearby cottonwoods. His grave is remarkable because it is still remembered and honored among others long forgotten.

These lonely gravesites are just one reminder of the Chinese communities that once thrived in the American West. By the end of the nineteenth century approximately a quarter million Chinese arrived on America's Pacific Coast to start new lives, many of them paying about $50 for passage across the Pacific. Not all were seeking their fortune. Some were escaping the terrible conditions of nineteenth-century China—poverty, famine, warfare. The Taiping Rebellion alone, which lasted from 1850 to 1864, took an estimated 20 million lives.

Nestled against the headstone are two sets of chopsticks and a small orange.

The life the Chinese immigrants found was not always pleasant. They were often treated with hostility because many did not speak English. They dressed differently from Americans, practiced a different religion and ate different food. One California petition to Congress to deport all the Chinese from San Francisco declared that they were undesirable because "they eat rice, fish, and vegetables and that otherwise their diet differs from that of the white man." Chinese railroad workers became objects of ridicule because they drank hot tea rather than unboiled ground water—sparing them from the dysentery that afflicted the other workers. The prejudice against the Chinese included acts of violence as well as discriminatory taxes and legislation, which climaxed in 1882 with the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, prohibiting Chinese immigration into the United States.

In the meantime, many Chinese found work building railroads. "A large part of our forces are Chinese, and they prove nearly equal to white men, in the amount of labor they perform, and are far more reliable," wrote E.B. Crocker, brother of the Central Pacific Railroad's Charles Crocker. During the push to build the transcontinental railroad, the Central Pacific hired at least 13,000 Chinese workers.

Other Chinese, like people from all over the world, were drawn to America by the lure of gold. Stories circulated in China about nuggets as big as apples lying on the ground for the taking, and Chinese called California Gum San (Gold Mountain). In 1870 there were 17,000 Chinese miners in the United States. Of the 6,700 miners in Montana, more than 1,400 were Chinese.

After the gold rush waned and the railroads were completed, many Chinese stayed in America. Some became tailors, gardeners and herbal doctors. Others opened small businesses such as laundries and restaurants. Chinatowns flourished in many cities and towns: famous ones like San Francisco's and smaller ones in towns like Tucson, Arizona; Ogden, Utah; Walla Walla, Washington; and John Day, Oregon.

Today in southwest Montana—as in many communities throughout the West—only traces remain of the hundreds of thousands of Asian immigrants who worked and lived here. For instance, outside the Montana city of Butte, at the intersection of I-15 and I-90, recent excavation work for a travel plaza uncovered evidence of Chinese occupation. Further research revealed that about 100 Chinese miners once lived on this spot in the tiny town of Rocker. Reportedly they tried unsuccessfully to have the town recognized by the name of Foo Chow. The travel plaza on the site now contains a small informational display at its entrance about the area's early Chinese residents.

Montana's largest Chinese community was in Butte, a city that enjoyed great prosperity for a few decades as a copper-mining metropolis with a population that reached 100,000 in 1917. It was a city of extremes. On one end were the fabulously wealthy Copper Kings; on the other were the miners who struggled to make a living below ground. It was a rowdy town of bars and brothels, with people from all over the world converging on it to seek their fortunes.

Between 1870 and 1910, Butte's Chinese population varied between 1,265 and 2,532. That was still just a small fraction of Butte's total population, but the city's Chinatown was jammed with dozens of businesses: gambling houses, noodle parlors and shops selling Chinese and Japanese dry goods, foods and herbs. Shop-keepers stocked their stores with goods imported from China that came by boat to Port Townsend, Washington, or Victoria, British Columbia, and then were shipped to Butte by stage and later by train.

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George Everett lives in Butte, Montana, and has written more than 50 articles for regional and national magazines, including Wild West, British Heritage, Condé Nast Traveler and Montana Magazine.