The Chinese Must Go
Page 15
other Chinese who came to plead their case “to quietly withdraw, if they
can do so, until the pres ent period of excitement passed away.” If the Chinese
insisted on remaining in the territory, Squire promised to protect them.15 With
assurances from both Chinese and U.S. officials, Gow deci ded to remain in
Tacoma past November 1.
The deadline came and went. At first it seemed there would be no reper-
cussions for Gow, Sue, and the other Chinese in Tacoma. But then, on the
third day of November at 9:30 a.m., a short blast of whistles sounded across
the city. Chinese residents could only watch as several hundred white men,
armed with pistols and clubs, marched en masse from the foundry. There
was no residential segregation in Tacoma, so the vigilantes had to crisscross
town to round up Chinese. They started at a laundry on the southern extremity
of C Street, then proceeded to houses in downtown, “Chinatown,” and fi-
nally “old town.” Some Chinese opened their doors to the marauders, while
others futilely locked their homes. The vigilantes entered in both cases,
ordering frightened Chinese to pack up and leave town by 1 p.m. or face un-
spoken consequences.16
After working diligently to establish his right to stay in Tacoma, one can
only imagine Gow’s thoughts when he saw “a large mob of white men in
the street both in front and back of [his] store.” Gow’s pastor, Barnabas
McLafferty, rushed to the store and was disturbed by what he found: white
men grabbing items off the shelves and passing them out the door while Gow
watched, unable to stop them.17 Even in the face of an armed mob, Gow
continued to try to talk his way out of expulsion. A little after noon, he went
to the store across from his, owned by a white man named H. O. Ball, and
asked for help. Together, Ball and Gow found the mayor of Tacoma, Jacob
Weisbach, and begged him to stop the vigilantes. Gow later testified, “[The
2ND
Chinese- Occupied Buildings
Tacoma
in Tacoma (1885). This
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location of buildings where
Commencemen
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4TH
Although contemporaries
described the Chinese
Chinatown
S. 5th
residences along Commence-
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the map shows little sign of
Chinese residential
6TH
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aker
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Jefferson Avenue
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0
100
VIO LENCE
Pacific Ave nue (1876). During the Tacoma expulsion in 1885, unknown arsonists
destroyed the Chinese residences in the foreground. Contemporaries described these
buildings along Commencement Bay as Tacoma’s “Chinatown.” Courtesy of the
Washington State Historical Society Cecil Cavanaugh Collection, 1979.1.101.
Mayor] told me the crowd would not hurt me. That I will be safe, but the
Chinese must go.” Gow’s per sis tent advocacy could do nothing to protect
the larger Chinese community in Tacoma, but it did garner an individual
reprieve. The mayor offered a handwritten note urging the vigilantes to give
Gow, a prominent and wealthy merchant, additional time to pack his goods.18
Like Gow, Sue did not leave Tacoma without protest. The mob came to
Sue’s waterfront house by boat. “They invaded my house,” he remembered,
“took a great many of my goods and carried them into the boat. They also
put me out of the house.” Still Sue did not leave. He called on his acquain-
tance, the sheriff, to petition for an additional forty- eight hours to pack his
remaining goods. He too was granted leniency, leaving with a note of tem-
porary reprieve.19
While Gow and Sue fought for local protection, other Chinese merchants
sought federal aid. Ten Sin Yee Lee telegraphed Governor Squire from Ta-
coma: “Mob driving Chinese out of town. Will you not protect us?” From
nearby Puyallup, Goon Gau echoed the message: “ People driving Chinamen
from Tacoma. Why sheriff no protect[?] Answer.” All they got was a brief
THE BANISHED
101
and guarded response. “Tele gram received,” replied Squire, “I have tele-
graphed facts to government in Washington.” Nobody came to their aid.20
Chinese workers, lacking the social and economic capital that Gow and
Sue enjoyed, faced immediate expulsion. Lum May, another Chinese mer-
chant, was permitted to stay temporarily, but his wife was driven out with
Chinese laborers on November 3. Standing in his store across the street, May
watched helplessly as the mob approached his home. “Where the doors were
locked,” remembered May, “they broke forcibly into the houses, smashing
in doors and breaking in win dows. Some of the crowd were armed with pis-
tols, some with clubs. They acted in [a] rude boisterous and threatening
manner, dragging and kicking the Chinese out of their houses. My wife re-
fused to go, and some of the white persons dragged her out of the house.”
May’s wife was one of hundreds of Chinese who were driven out of town, as
promised, at 1 p.m. on November 3.21
The Chinese merchants could only watch. “The wind was billowing a gale.<
br />
It was raining hard,” recalled Sue, “Some of the Chinese lost their trunks,
some their blankets. Many were crying. . . . The Chinese people were driven
out like a herd of cattle.”22 Tak Nam, a merchant who had failed to win re-
prieve, also likened the Chinese to defenseless animals. Some vigilantes
held clubs and poles, testified Tak, “and they used these to drive us like so
many hogs.” They were “scared sheep” chased by “dragons,” reported Tacoma
and Portland merchants to the Chinese consulate, “afraid of losing their
lives.” With their destination unknown, many feared they were marching
to their deaths. In the end, two workers died after falling ill during a forced
eight- mile trek to a train station in Lake View.23
Gow refused to watch the expulsion of his employees and kinsmen without
knowing what had become of them. That eve ning, he hired a carriage to make
the journey to Lake View. He tried to buy bread in Tacoma to bring to the
expelled, but white storekeepers refused to sell him any. He arrived at 9 p.m.
with foodstuffs he scrounged from his own supplies. There, he saw fifty or
sixty armed white men guarding several hundred Chinese.24 The vigilantes
had found shelter for most of the Chinese workers in the railroad station,
at a nearby house, and in open sheds that lacked flooring. A few remained
out in the rain. The Chinese were allowed to build fires, but many were
already hopelessly wet and cold. With the help of his note from the mayor,
Gow dropped off the provisions without harassment and headed back for
102
VIO LENCE
Tacoma. That night, half of the banished Chinese boarded the first avail-
able train to Portland, a freight that arrived at the station at 3 a.m., while
others took a passenger train at 7:30 the next morning. The seventy- seven
Chinese who could afford to pay their fare rode 150 miles to Portland, but
those who could not were sent off the train after eight miles and forced to
walk along the tracks to the nearest town, or wait in the wilderness to be
rescued. “The suffering was beyond description,” reported Portland mer-
chants to the Chinese consulate. “Their cries could be heard miles away.”25
The merchants’ reprieve, it turned out, was short- lived. At 9 p.m. on the
night of the expulsion, thirty men came to Sue’s residence. “Four or five
of them pulled their pistols out of their pockets,” Sue testified, “and said
[‘]you are a son of a bitch. You must get out of the house.’ ” He pleaded for
the forty- eight hours the sheriff had promised him, but the crowd ignored
his appeals. Frightened for his life, Sue fled Tacoma and hid about a mile
from town at an Indian agency. Under constant threat, Gow survived a few
more days in Tacoma. When he arrived back at his store after visiting Lake
View, the vigilantes demanded his keys and locked him in the building.
Enduring six days of house arrest while he packed his goods, Gow fi nally
managed to flee Tacoma when unknown arsonists set Chinatown ablaze.
Despite the extra time to pack, Gow later declared a loss of more than thir-
teen thousand dollars and Sue claimed more than fifteen thousand.26
By November 7, two months after the Squak Valley massacre, there were
no Chinese left in Tacoma. And yet, the merchants’ many acts of re sis tance
had made a mark. Their extensive connections to the local white commu-
nity bought them a little time, but it was their links on the regional and in-
ternational scales that made the largest impact. In desperate appeals to the
governor and reports of suffering to the Chinese consulate, they transformed
the expulsion at Tacoma from a local skirmish into an international inci-
dent. When China demanded answers, the U.S. government set Governor
Squire on a mission to investigate the need for redress. In response, Squire
collected affidavits from six Chinese merchant- contractors who had formerly
called Tacoma home. Inadvertently, he produced an unparalleled collection
of Chinese narratives of racial vio lence.
THE BANISHED
103
“We Ask You to Secure Protection for Us”
If anyone could fend off an expulsion in Washington Territory, it was Chin
Gee Hee of Seattle. When the vio lence erupted, Chin had wealth, power,
and connections that dwarfed those of the Chinese in Tacoma. He regu-
larly fielded deferential letters from leading white ladies and businessmen
and counted himself among the acquaintances of prominent lawyers, judges,
and the governor. But it had not always been that way. Chin came from a
family of petty merchants in southwestern China, found domestic work for
meager wages in California, and then traveled north to work as a cook at
the Port Gamble Lumber Mill in Washington Territory. Along the way, he
encountered white Protestant missionaries who introduced him to Christian
scripture along with the En glish language and American customs. Once he
had saved some money, Chin chose to send for his wife from China instead
of returning to his homeland. In 1873, he moved with her to Seattle, where
he bought a position as ju nior partner in the Wa Chong Com pany, the same
firm that Deputy Collector of Customs Arthur Blake would later link to mi-
grant smuggling. While his business partner, Chun Ching Hock, focused
on trade, Chin Gee Hee saw the profit in contracting. For those who wanted
Chinese workers, Chin was the man to know.27
Chin was one of the first Chinese merchants in Seattle, and with his help,
a Chinese community grew up around him. By 1880, census takers counted
two hundred Chinese in Seattle, twenty- nine of whom lived in Chin’s
boarding house. By the fall of 1885, there were (depending on the season)
four hundred to eight hundred Chinese in Seattle, spanning seven blocks
surrounding Washington Street and 3rd Ave nue. Seattle’s Chinatown, how-
ever, was not a bounded racial space. Outside, Chinese domestics lived with
their white employers, but inside, some Chinese workers lived in mixed- race
boarding houses, many Chinese merchants had shops alongside white busi-
nesses, and most Chinese residents lived next to white neighbors. In other
words, Chinatown was a polyglot community that included Eu ro pean im-
migrants, Native Americans, African Americans, and the working poor. The
vast majority of Chinese in Seattle lived in Chinatown, but they did not live
there alone. That was before the vio lence.28
Chin’s road through the vio lence in Seattle was jagged, reflecting the un-
even nature of his power. Like the elite Chinese of Tacoma, Chin attempted
104
VIO LENCE
Chin Gee Hee (c. 1904). After crossing the Pacific in the 1860s, Chin (1844–1929) began
life in the United States as a miner, railroad worker, and domestic servant. By the 1870s,
he had become a successful businessman and labor contractor in Seattle. University of
Washington, Special Collections, Asahel Curtis, photographer, A. Curtis 01281.
to use his local connections to protect himself and his community from
expulsion. This local influence offered little defense, but scale jumping pro-
vided mo
re. Through connections to the Chinese government, Chin mar-
shaled the means to withstand local hostilities.
For Chin, the vio lence at Tacoma was a warning of what was to come.
When he learned of the expulsion, he immediately alerted the Chinese con-
sulate in San Francisco. “Chinese residents of Tacoma forcibly driven out
yesterday,” telegraphed Chin. “From two to three hundred Chinese now in
Seattle. Imminent danger. Local authorities willing but not strong enough
to protect us. We ask you to secure protection for us.” When Chin sent this
desperate appeal to the Chinese consulate, he did so as a man of great wealth
and prominence. The consul general, Owyang Ming, took notice. Quoting
Chin’s message verbatim, Ming reported to the Chinese minister in Wash-
THE BANISHED
105
ington, D.C., that “outrages are still going on” in Washington Territory and
“strong appeals for protection arrive here hourly.” In turn, the Chinese min-
ister wrote to the State Department forwarding Chin’s tele gram once again
and beseeching the U.S. government to protect Chinese citizens from vio-
lence. Soon Chin’s words were sitting on the desk of U.S. Secretary of State
Thomas Bayard. Before Chin could hope to receive a response, he was
arrested.29
Chin held surprising power on a national and international scale, but lo-
cally he was subject to sudden and arbitrary arrest. The district attorney
filed an indictment against him for the crime of “maintaining a public nui-
sance” on November 4, a day after the Tacoma expulsion. The indictment
alleged that since January 1, 1885, Chin had maintained an acre of land next
to his store where he was “slaughtering a great number of hogs and other
animals and storing large quantities of decaying vegetable matter and filth.”
These “offensive substances” were “occasioning noxious exhalations, offen-
sive smel s and stenches” which were “injurious and dangerous” to the “entire
community.” According to the complaint, Chin’s actions were contrary to
the “peace and dignity of the territory of Washington.” This standard legal
language took on special irony in light of the recent vio lence.
On November 5, the sheriff, warrant in hand, arrested Chin just as anti-
Chinese agitation in Seattle threatened to break into open vio lence.30 There
is no evidence that this indictment ever resulted in a settlement or trial. In
fact, Chin spent less than a day in jail. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that
the arrest was timed to influence the outcome of a pivotal meeting to be held