20 Brutal Truths About Chinese Women in the Wild West

PART 2:

 Louis Alley in Chinatown. The word for those pens was barracan word for hut. It is the same word used in the African slave trade. That is not a coincidence. The women were stripped for inspection and sold to the highest bidder. A woman purchased in China for $90 could fetch $850 at auction, sometimes 2,000. The most attractive were taken as concubines by wealthy men.

 The rest went to the brothel. The auction block looked the same because it was the same. Different ocean, different decade, same transaction. Number 17. Before a woman left the auction block, she was forced to sign a contract. It was written in English. She could not read it. The terms bound her to four to 6 years of prostitution [music] to repay her passage.

That sounds like it has an end. It did not. Any day she was too sick to work added time. Any day she refused, a customer added time. Pregnancy added time. The contracts survive in California archives. They are written in formal legal language. The women signed with a mark. A 4-year sentence with no days off and no appeal. Is not a contract.

 It is a life behind a locked door measured in seasons. Number 16. The lowest tier was called the cribs. Small wooden rooms, some no bigger than 4 ft x 6 ft, with a barred window facing the street and a door that locked from the outside. A thin mattress on the floor, a basin of water, nothing [music] else. The women inside served whoever paid day and night, 7 days a week.

 A brothel owner could make roughly $2,500 a year on each woman in the cribs. That was five times the income of a Chinese cook or laundry worker. The [music] profit was enormous. The cost was a human life. In 1877, the California legislature heard testimony that these women were treated worse than dogs. That when they fell sick, they were sometimes turned out into the street.

That corpses were found on the pavement where their owners had left them after dark. The average working life in the cribs was about 5 years. Not a career. A sentence. 5 years and then a body left on the curb before dawn. Today, the alley where those cribs stood is paved over.

 Tourists walk across it on their way to dim sum and never look down. The answer to the question I asked at the start is still coming and it may not be who you expect. The woman at the top of this list may not be famous at all. She may have no name left to speak. Hold that thought. Number 15. Behind the auction and the cribs stood the machine, the Hip Y Tong.

 It began importing women in 1852 and continued for more than 20 years. By documented estimates, the hip ye trafficked roughly $6,000 women and cleared $200,000 in profit. They were not the only tong in the business, but they were the most systematic. Here is the detail that matters. [music] 25% of the buyer fees reportedly went to white San Francisco policemen.

 That testimony is in the California legislature record. The law did not fail these women. The law [music] was paid to look the other way. Number 14. Every tong had salaried soldiers. They were called buhaoi. They fought over territory, over gambling profits, over opium dens, and over [music] women. A tong war could start because a rival faction refused to pay the full price for a woman [music] it had purchased.

 In 1909 in New York, a woman named Bo Kung called Sweet Flower was murdered in her [music] own home. She had been bought in San Francisco for $3,000 by a [music] hip sing member named Lohei Tong. When police discovered the illegal arrangement, she was placed in Donaldina [music] Cameron’s mission home. A man from the rival An Leong Tong married her and took her to New York.

 The original buyer demanded his $3,000 back. When the money was refused, Bo was found dead. She was 21 years old. Her killing triggered a full-scale Tong war across New York’s Chinatown that lasted [music] over a year. These were not abstract turf battles. They were [music] property disputes. The property was a human being.

And when the receipt was dishonored, the property [music] was destroyed. Number 13. On March 3rd, 1875, Congressman Horus Page of California signed his name to the first restrictive federal immigration law in United States history. The Page Act. It was written to bar women imported for lewd and immoral purposes.

 On paper, it sounded like a rescue. In practice, it became a wall. Any Chinese woman who tried to enter the country was pulled aside at the port, interrogated for hours, and subjected to invasive physical examinations. Her face was compared against photographic identification files maintained by a growing surveillance industry. American consulate officials in Hong Kong were given the power to approve or deny passage before a ship even sailed.

Those officials were later accused of corruption and extortion. Poems scratched into the wooden walls at Angel Island by detained immigrants described the medical exams as barbarous [music] and humiliating. Many women simply stopped trying. The number of Chinese women entering the United States dropped by 2/3 within [music] 7 years.

The law that was supposed to protect them became [music] the door that slammed shut on the ones still free enough to walk [music] through it. And the ones already trapped inside had one fewer way out. Number 12. 7 years later, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 finished the job. It banned Chinese laborers outright.

 [music] And because a married woman took her husband’s legal status, a laborer’s wife could not enter either. A merchant’s wife could apply in theory, but proving merchant status required documentation most families did not have. Meanwhile, misogynation laws in most western states made it illegal for a Chinese man to marry a white woman.

 Idaho banned interracial marriage. California banned it. Nevada banned it. So the men could not bring their wives from China, could not marry locally, could not build families. The Chinese population in America from 1860 to [music] 1910 was more than 90% male. That is not a natural pattern. That is what legislation looks like when it [music] is designed to erase a people without ever saying so out loud.

The gender imbalance that was already catastrophic became permanent. And that imbalance fed the demand for the very trafficking the earlier law claimed to prevent. The exclusion act was not repealed until 1943, 61 years later. The legislation did not solve the problem. It made the problem the only option left.

Number 11. Her name was Quac Xi. She traveled to America to join her husband, a Chinese merchant with legal status. She arrived at Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco Bay. The station sat on a rocky island surrounded by cold water and fog. Inside, the wooden barracks were divided by race. Chinese detainees were kept separate from everyone [music] else.

 The room smelled of salt and mildew and crowded bodies. Quacshi’s detention lasted nearly 600 days. She was not charged with a crime. She was not accused of any wrongdoing beyond being a Chinese woman trying to enter the country. Inspectors interrogated her for hours, cross-checking her answers against testimony from relatives and fellow villagers.

 Which direction does your family’s house face? How many steps from the door to the well? One wrong answer and the door stayed closed. Nearly 600 days in a cell on an island waiting for a country to decide whether she was allowed to be someone’s wife. Let that number sit for a moment. Then remember that her story only survived because it was the longest detention on record.

Thousands of other women were held for weeks or months in those same barracks and left no trace at all. We are halfway through this list and the women we have met so far were almost without exception powerless, trapped in systems built to use them and throw them away. That is about to change because the frontier also produced Chinese women who refused to disappear quietly.

Number 10, Deadwood, Dakota Territory, 1877. The town that claimed Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane also held the largest Chinatown of any city east of San Francisco. Of the 11 restaurants in Deadwood, seven were Chinese. Fee Lee Wong ran the Winged Sway Emporium, selling imported silk and porcelain to Chinese and white customers alike.

 And among the earliest Chinese residents was a mysterious woman named [music] Di. Old-timers later called her the most beautiful woman in Deadwood. She was young and she was wealthy. She owned three well-furnished houses on Main Street. Outside the Chinese community, nobody knew how she made her living. An unmarried Chinese woman who was not a prostitute and not a servant was almost unheard of on the mining frontier.

Nobody could explain how she had come to own property in a boom town full of men with guns. Late one night, she opened her door to a visitor. She was found murdered. The killing was vicious. No photograph of her survives. No one was ever convicted. The case remains open to this day. The name China Doll was given to her decades later by white residents.

 She never chose it. Today, Deadwood holds a parade each August and crowns a girl as that year’s China doll. The real woman behind the name was killed in 1877, and the town that celebrates her memory never found her killer. Number nine. In the mining camps of Nevada and California in the 1870s, a woman known only as Chinese Mary made enough noise to fill a police bladder.

She was a herygie entertainer. She was kidnapped by one tong and transported to Wellington, Nevada. In 1876, she provoked several riots in Platter County. In Columbus, Nevada, nine separate men each claimed ownership of her in public. Nine men fighting over one woman like she was a deed to a mine. She was not a person to them.

 She was a receipt. But a woman who makes nine dangerous men act like fools in public is not entirely without power, even if the record never calls it that. Keep the question I asked at the beginning in your mind because we are about to meet a woman who might just be the answer. Number eight, at arrived in San Francisco from Canton in 1849.

Her husbands had died during the Pacific crossing. She became the captain’s mistress, arrived with gold in hand, and rented a small room on an alley off Clay Street. Within months, the line of men waiting outside her door stretched an entire city block. She was one of the first Chinese women in San Francisco, and she knew exactly what that scarcity was worth.

 In 1849, she took clients to court for paying her with brass filings instead of gold dust. She won. By 1850, she had [music] hired two women and become a madam. She seduced the city’s brothel inspector, a man named John Clark, to keep her houses open. When Clark beat her for telling someone she was his mistress, she took him to court, too.

 She was arrested repeatedly under anti-prostitution laws that white madams almost never faced. over 10 documented court appearances. Atoy was not free in any simple sense, but she bent the American legal system to her purpose in the 1850s in ways most Chinese immigrants of any gender would not dare for another 50 years. Number seven, 920 Sacramento Street, San Francisco.

 The accidental mission home for girls. In 1874, five Presbyterian women founded a mission in the heart of Chinatown dedicated to rescuing Chinese women from the sex trade. 21 years later, in 1895, a 25-year-old woman from New Zealand named Donald Dena Cameron walked through the front door to teach sewing. On her first day, the superintendent Margaret Colulbertson told her that Tong members had left sticks of dynamite on the front porch that morning.

 Did she want to reconsider? Cameron stayed. [music] When Colulbertson’s health failed, Cameron became superintendent. Within a few years, she was leading midnight raids into brothel and gambling dens, dashing through alleys and across rooftops, accompanied by policemen carrying axes and sledgehammers. She pried open locked doors.

 She climbed through windows. A tough Chinatown squad officer named Jack Manion became her most reliable ally. The tongs called her Fon Quay, the white devil. The women she pulled out of those rooms called her Lomo, beloved mother. One day, riding a ferry to Oakland with eight rescued women, a tourist overheard one of them say, [music] “It is my turn to sit next to mama.

” Over 39 years, Cameron and the mission rescued between 2,000 [music] and 3,000 women. The 1906 earthquake destroyed the building. Cameron marched every one of them across the bay to safety, and they rebuilt on [music] the same spot. The architect who designed the new building was Julia Morgan, who would later design Hurst Castle.

 The war was not won until 1935 when a federal case smashed a major trafficking ring and [music] sent its leaders to prison. Cameron was not perfect. She imposed Christianity and Western expectations on every woman she saved. The rescue [music] came with conditions. But the women kept coming back. They named their children after her.

Cameron [music] died in PaloAlto in 1968 at the age of 98. The brick building at 920 Sacramento Street [music] still stands today. That building is a 5-minute walk from the alley where the Barracun once stood, one street for selling women, one street for saving them. The distance between the two is less than most people walk to get their morning coffee.

Number six, 1935, San Francisco federal court. A woman named Jung Guaying took the witness stand. She and three other Chinese women testified against the people who had enslaved them. Yung had been brought to America under false promises. She was told she would find work and a husband. Instead, [music] her papers were taken the moment she arrived.

She was told she was now the property of four women and would work as a prostitute in Chinatown. She described her experience to immigration officials on March 7th, 1934. The details were plain and brutal. That was not the 1850s. That was the 1930s. 80 years after the Hip Yi Tong started the pipeline, women were still being trafficked through the same port to the same neighborhoods by the same methods.

In January and February of 1935, San Francisco police and immigration agents arrested the ring leaders. Bail was set at $2,2500. The four women testified. [music] They won convictions. Ring leaders went to federal prison. Others were deported. [music] The trial only happened because four women decided they would rather face the court [music] system of a country that had spent decades trying to exclude them than stay silent [music] one more day.

We are in the top five now. And the question I planted at the beginning is getting closer. Which Chinese woman held the most power in the Wild West? Stay with me. Number five, the woman known as China Mary of Tombstone, Arizona. Born Singh, also called Acham. She arrived in Tombstone in late 1879 [music] when the Chinese population numbered 11.

 The town already had over a 100 saloons, 14 gambling halls, and a livery stable called the OK Corral. Within 18 months, the Chinese population had grown to over 250, and China Mary stood at the center of all of it. She wore fine silk robes and brilliant jade jewelry. She ran a general store in Hoptown, the Chinese Quarter, which occupied one square block on the edge of town, honeycombed with alleys and tunnels.

 She ran gambling halls behind the store. She acted as employment agent, money lender, translator, mediator, and private law enforcement for the entire Chinese community. All payments for Chinese labor went through her, not to the worker, to Mary. White residents said nothing in Hoptown happened without her say so. She had her own enforcers, and they were much feared by the white population.

 She once found a cowboy with a broken leg, took him to Mary Tax boarding [music] house, and paid his medical bill out of her own pocket. No sick or hungry person was turned away from her door. When she died of a heart attack in 1906, most of Tombstone attended her funeral. Now, here is where the story [music] cracks.

 The first book to mention China Mary of Tombstone was published in 1942, 36 years after her death. Much of what has been written about her since traces back to one or two sources retold and embellished each time. Researchers at the Tombstone Times investigated and found that no documentation of a woman called China Mary who ran Chinatown exists at the Chinese California Historical Society or anywhere comparable.

 Her funeral notice, a few tax records, and some sandborn insurance maps are what survive. The legend is enormous. The paper trail is thin. She may be exactly what they say. She may also be three or four different women collapsed into one name by white writers who [music] could not tell Chinese women apart. That question has never been settled.

 Remember [music] this. The same split between legend and record is waiting for us at number two. Number four. A un a different woman, a different state, the same borrowed name. She arrived in America as a young woman around 1863, traveling from southern China through San Francisco and then on through Denver.

 She was at Bare River City, Wyoming territory in 1868, and she witnessed the Bare River riot with her own eyes. She saw men dragged from buildings and lynched in the street. She moved to Park City, Utah, opened a store with her husband, and built a life. After he died, she moved to Evston, Wyoming. She spoke fluent English. She ran a general store.

 She ran gambling halls. Some accounts say she provided Chinese prostitutes to minors who came looking. She was shrewd and she was generous and she was tough. She charged tourists 10 cents to take her photograph and she collected every dime. In a WPA interview decades later, she was described as unusually beautiful, cheerful, and entirely self-made.

A street in Evston still carries her name, China Mary. She lived until 1939. She is documented in interviews, census records, and photographs. and almost no one outside of Wyoming has ever heard of her. Number three, Mary Bong. She left home in Jong Sean County, China as a young woman.

 Arrived in Sitka, Alaska in 1895 via Vancouver. She may have been the first Chinese woman in the territory. She chose her own husband on the spot, took over his bakery and restaurant, learned the Tlingit language so she could speak with the indigenous women around her. She helped them deliver their babies. She learned their silver folk art.

After her husband, Abong died in 1902, she lost the businesses for reasons that were never fully explained. She supported herself and her two daughters by doing housework. Then she remarried to a man named Fred Johnson and became a gold miner. She shoveled rock and handled explosives alongside men. She once broke her finger so badly the bone stuck straight out.

 She said it herself and kept working. She told her story to a newspaper man in 1935. She lived until 1958. Three women, three different lives, three different states. And every single one of them was called China Mary by the white communities around them because those communities either could not or would not learn their real names.

Au Mary Bong Sing Choi. Their actual names were different. Their stories were different. But the frontier filed them under the same label as if one Chinese woman was interchangeable with any other. That erasure is itself one of the brutal truths on this list. Number two, Polly Beimis. The most famous Chinese woman in Idaho, possibly the most famous in the entire Pacific Northwest.

 [music] Born in 1853 in northern China, her feet were bound in the traditional custom. Her family sold her for two bags of sea during a time of famine. She was smuggled to Portland, Oregon, and sold for $2,500. She arrived in the mining town of Warren, Idaho on July 8th, 1872 at the age of 18. She met a saloon owner named Charlie Beis.

 In 1890, a sore loser in a poker game shot Charlie in the face. Polly nursed him back to health. They married on August 13th, 1894. The real reason for the marriage was not romance alone. Polly had been smuggled into the country illegally. Charlie knew it. They both knew that marriage was the only way for her to establish legal residency.

 The Giri Act of 1892 required all Chinese immigrants to carry governmentissued identification. Without proof of status, she could be arrested and deported at any time. They moved to a remote claim on the Salmon River and lived there for decades. [music] She was 4′ 5 in tall. She kept a pet cougar. She grew apples on the homestead.

 In 2023, a lost variety of apple was rediscovered on her old ranch and named [music] the Polybeimis apple. She died in 1933 at the age of 80. Her cabin is on the National Register of Historic [music] Places. That is the legend. Now, here is what the record actually says. The story most people know goes like this. Polly was a prostitute.

 A man named Hong King was her Chinese owner. Charlie Beimis won her in a poker game. Historian Priscilla Wagars [music] spent years tracking every document she could find. Her conclusion was plain. Not one of those three statements is true. The poker game story has no contemporary source. Even the name Lu Nathoy used [music] in the novel and the 1991 film Thousand Pieces of Gold may be wrong.

Wagers found little evidence she was ever called Lu [music] in her own lifetime. The romantic version, the enslaved woman rescued by a card game and a good white man, appears to have been constructed almost entirely after her death by people who never knew her. Polybe did not see another Chinese woman until a trip [music] to Boise in 1924.

That is 52 years of solitude. 52 years as the only Chinese woman in a landscape of mountains and river and silence. And the story [music] the world chose to tell about her was not the one about her endurance or her courage. It was the one about a poker hand that probably never happened because a self-determined woman who simply chose her own life was a harder story for white audiences to accept than a damsel one in a card game.

Number one. Number one is not a single woman. It is the women for whom no name survives at all. The women who died in the cribs on St. Louis alley and were carried out to the curb in the dark. The women whose bodies were found by policemen at dawn and written down only as Chinese female unknown.

 The women who were bought in Guang Dong, shipped across the Pacific, auctioned in a holding pin, worked for four or five or six years, and were [music] dead before they turned 30. They were not famous. They were not rescued. They had no court appearances, no cabins on the Salmon River, no apple trees named after them. They had no legend to debunk because nobody ever wrote one.

 The 1870 census counted [music] roughly 1,400 of them in San Francisco alone. Most of their real names were never [music] written down in any American document. The names that appear in the ledgers are English guesses or inventory labels. They were not recorded as people. [music] They were recorded as a category. Today in the United States, there are more than 5 million people of Chinese [music] descent.

 The community they inherited was built on a foundation most of them will never see. And yet, their labor built Chinatown. Their presence [music] kept the businesses running that fed the mining camps. The money rung from their bodies paid for the opium dens, the gambling halls, and the Tong soldiers who guarded [music] them.

 It paid the white policemen who turned their backs. It funded the very system that kept them enslaved. Without these women, the economic engine of Chinese America in the 19th century does not function. They were the foundation and the foundation was buried and paved over and forgotten. Now, let me answer the question I asked you at the start.

Who was the most powerful Chinese woman in the Wild West? And why do we know the story of Polybeus but not the name of the nameless woman in the crib? Think about what made Polybe. She married a white man. She moved to a remote cabin where she outlived everyone who might have challenged her story. She became legible to white America.

 A redemption narrative with a cabin and a river and a happy ending. The others did not become legible. They died young in places that were torn down, speaking a language the recordkeepers did not bother to learn. The women who survived and stayed in Chinatown left almost nothing behind because Chinatown burned in 1906. and what the fire did not take.

[music] The demolition crews finished. Wears asked the harder question about Polybe. Was her story unusual because she was extraordinary or because she was lucky. Was she rescued by Charlie Beimis or did she rescue herself? The poker game narrative was imposed on her after the fact. A self-determined Chinese woman who simply chose her own path was a harder story for white audiences than a damsel won in a card game.

 So the storytellers gave them the card game and the real woman disappeared [music] behind it. It was not Polybeus whose story deserves the top of this list. It was not China Mary of Tombstone whose legend may rest on a handful of sources and a name imposed by strangers. It may have been a toy who used the American courts as a weapon before the Civil War had even started.

It may have been Donaldina Cameron’s army of survivors who rebuilt their lives inside a brick building that still stands at 920 Sacramento Street. But the honest answer is this. We do not get to know because the record was not kept for them. The most powerful Chinese woman on this list may be someone whose name was never written down in English.

Someone who survived the crossing, survived the auction, survived the cribs, and walked out the other side into a quiet life that [music] no historian ever recorded. The frontier did not hand out its legends [music] to the women who earned them. It handed them to the ones the storytellers chose. And the storytellers were almost never Chinese and almost never women.

 Who built the false version? Start with the dime novelists who turned every Chinese woman on the frontier into either a helpless victim or an exotic curiosity. Never a person with a plan. Then the writers who came later. CL Sonicsen in 1942 who first put China Mary of Tombstone into print. Ben Treywick in 1989 and [music] again in 1992 who repeated and expanded the legend using a photograph whose subject has never been positively identified.

Then the filmmakers. The 1991 movie Thousand Pieces of Gold gave Polybeis the name Lu Nathoy and the Poker Game and audiences took both as fact. For a hundred years, Hollywood populated frontier towns with white women, white outlaws, and white sheriffs. The Chinese Quarter was erased from the frame entirely. Deadwood had the largest Chinatown east of San Francisco.

 Hundreds of Chinese live there. You will not find the Chinatown in a single mainstream western film ever made. And finally, the census takers, the men who walked the streets of San Francisco in 1870 and wrote prostitute next to the name of every Chinese woman they encountered, whether they knew it to be true or not. and the generations of historians who repeated those numbers for 150 years without stopping to ask who had been holding the pen.

 The real story was harder and stranger and more human than anything the legend makers allowed. They simplified it because a simple story sells. These women deserved better. Somewhere beneath the streets of San Francisco, under concrete poured over alleys that no longer carry names, there are bones that belong to women who crossed an ocean and never crossed back.

No one alive can tell you who they were, but they were here. And the country they helped build with their suffering is still standing on top of them. Which of these women do you want to hear more about? Tell me below. And if you want the truth behind another frontier story, the movies got wrong, the next one is already waiting for you.