Serving Whitman County since 1877
Serving Whitman County since 1877
Gazette editor
Small books sometimes carry a big impact. Two new books now making the rounds this year provide amazing reports of long-ago events in Hells Canyon.
R. Gregory Nokes, a retired reporter and editor for the Portland Oregonian, spent a decade researching “Massacred for Gold, The Chinese in Hells Canyon.”
The book gives an account of how Chinese miners, who were mining gold along the Snake River in Hells Canyon, were shot and killed by a group of young men from in Inmaha area of Oregon in May of 1887.
The shootings were done at Deep Creek at a place now called Chinese Massacre Cove upsteam from the Salmon River in Hell’s Canyon.
Nokes had to develop the account from a lean record of original material and from sources who in many cases were hesitant about one of the dark chapters in eastern Oregon history. A lengthly written account by one of the children of pioneers gave a detailed account without giving the names, and Nokes, in effect, filled in probable names by relating it to other facts he discovered.
Many aspects of the story remain unknown. As an example, Nokes begins by providing a list of 11 names of known victims of the massacre. Those names were known from records of one of the six companies in Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Associaition which acted as a combination employer, union and fraternal order.
Nokes notes the exact number of victims has never been certain, and a majority of those who died were not identified.
Whitman County Snake River sites at Riparia and Penawawa get a brief mention in the book because the bodies of some of the Chinese miners washed up here. In one case, an official from Lewiston, accompanied by a resident of the Chinese community there, went to Riparia and exhumed one of the victims and took him back to Lewiston.
News of the massacre spread as bodies were found along the river and more details of the massacre became known when another boat of Chinese miners came downstream to Lewiston and gave out the news.
Also the amount of gold, said to be around $5,000, was never known. Nokes explained the Chinese miners, who were sluicing for gold carried down to the Snake River at Deep Creek, could have each had a stash in their camp area. Nokes relates some theories about what happened to the gold, but that isn’t certain either.
The book also provides a general framework of how the Chinese were treated and the role they played in the development of the West in the last half of the 19th century. The demand for labor, particulary for the tough jobs such as railroad and constructon, led to the importation of Chinese laborers into the West.
Nokes explains most of the Chinese were males who were hired through the labor orginazations. They came here with the intent of earning a stake over a short time, and most intended to go home.
Racial prejudice against the Chinese grew after the construction boom ended and competiton for jobs grew. In 1882, immigration from China was outlawed. Chinese in Whitman County totaled 530 in 1880, contributing to a decade of railroad development here. The 1890 count had 115 in the county.
The victims of the Deep Creek massacre departed Lewiston in the fall of 1886 on flat bottomed boats. Much of the trip was made by pulling the boats upstream for 65 miles, past the mouths of Grande Rhone, Salmon and Imnaha Rivers.
Although Nokes talks about the gold, he also suggests the shootings could have been a tragic end result of outright racial prejudice. Not all of the settlers of the West fit the brave, hard working stereotypes described in the first-greneration accounts. Some were black sheep.
In fact, ringleaders of the massacre had been involved in a horse rustling operation which had come to the attention of the law just two weeks before the shooting at Deep Creek. The rustlers liked to hang around the Imnaha School and their insolent ways appealed to some of the schools older boys who were sucked into the tragedy.
Nokes early in the book wonders whether racial prejudice, and not gold, might have been the driving force behind the shootings. One account said the rustlers became enraged when the Chinese miners refused to allow the rustlers use of their boat to move animals across the river from Oregon to Idaho Territory.
In addition to what facts, records and accounts he discovered about the murders, Nokes also gives a rundown of what happened to the suspects.
He writes about some of their descendants and some of the difficulties he encountered when trying to document a tale which even today some descendants might prefer remain untold.
Four of the seven members of the gang were aquitted in what tages as “a kind of a trial” in 1988 in the second story of the first office building in Enterprise.
The 1910 fire
New York Times reporter Timothy Egan has turned out “The Big Burn, Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire That Saved America,” which deals with the 1910 fire which swept through the Bitteroots and elsewhere. Egan’s book wraps the tales of the fire in the context of the earliest days of the Forest Service and national forests.
It starts with the fire sweeping down on Wallace, Idaho, and then spins back to the first years of the last century when Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot founded the Forest Service which was in a fledgling mode when the big fire roared through northern Idaho, Montana and other locations.
Whitman County residents who like to camp along the St. Joe River, check in at Avery, Idaho, and perhaps take a ride on the Trail of the Hiawatha, the former Milwaukee Railroad Route, will have little trouble identifying some of the sites and reading all of the side tales Egan tells in his fast moving book.
This year will be the 100th anniversary of the 1910 fire and observances are planned in Wallace and elsewhere.
Nine years ago the Gazette featured an account of Walter E. Beaman of Sunset, the only known Whitman County resident who died fighting the fire. Beaman, then 26, was the lone fatality in what was known as the Danielson crew which was fighting fire in the Sullivan Mountain area just above Mullan.
Beaman is buried in the Pine City Cemetery, and his grave marker carries an Aug. 20, 1910, death date. The same date is listed on the grave markers of firefighters who are buried in a special section of the St. Maries Cemetery.
The Gazette account of Beaman’s fate was spurred by a research project conducted by Wade Bilbrey, Avery postmaster since 1999. Bilbrey started a decade-long project to document all of the fatalities from the fire. He suspected, at the outset, that reports of the day over-stated the number of fatalities, that many of the “missing in action” victims reported in the hectic days after the fire actually escaped death and lived out their lives in the 20th century.
Bilbrey to date has documented 92 deaths. A total of 57 fire victims are buried in a special memorial section of the cemetery at St. Maries with 26 from the tragic loss at Storm Creek which flows into the St. Joe three miles downstream from Avery and two from Big Creek, which flows into the river between Calder and Marble Creek.
Egan gives a harrowing account of the fires. Among other tales, he documents the deaths of two young Italians who immigrated to US. to work in copper mines in the southwest. Finding conditions horrid there, they got word of the pressing demand for manpower to fight fires in Idaho. They came north, signed on, and were in service the night of the big blowup when a high powered wind roared up the Bitteroots to provide a forced air impact on several small fires which were already burning during that record dry year.
The high-powered wind, Egan notes, was called a Palouser.
Another link to Whitman County in this book was the role of the Milwaukee Railroad. Egan notes the Milwaukee was built up the St. Joe and across the Bitteroots at Taft, east of Lookout Pass, just before the 1910 fire.
Funded by William Rockefeller, the Milwaukee obtained rights-of-way for the line just before Roosevelt and Pinchot placed it into the national forest reserve.
Egan’s book casts Idaho Sen. Weldon Heyburn of Wallace as an antagonist of the then new Forest Service who tried to obstruct funding for the new federal agency and the whole national forest concept. Ironically, the Heyburn name today is linked with one of the top recreation sites for this area, Heyburn Park on Chatcolet.
Another Egan tale gives the account of Ione (Pinkie) Adair, a young independent woman who was impressed into service as a cook to prepare piles of potatoes to feed a fire crew. Adair and the crew eventually became pinned down in a creek, but she walked off, hiked 30 miles to Avery and caught the last train out of town. She later showed up at her parents’ home in Moscow where she died in 1977.
One of two Milwaukee downriver escape trains pulled into Tekoa where first accounts of the big fire were relayed in this paper.
Bilbrey notes Egan’s book provides a good read for people who have never heard of the 1910 fire, but it’s a little sketchy for people who have studied the event for years. He suggests readers could also check out Stephen Pyne’s “Year of the Fires.” Pyne’s book gives a month-by-month account of the fires which hit the nation during the unusual weather year of 1910. August, when fire hit the Bitteroots, and September are the blockbuster chapters in the book.
Avery, which escaped the fire, plans a 100-year observance Aug. 21. Bilbrey said he’s aware of plans for observances in St. Maries, Thompson Falls and Missoula in addition to Wallace.
Bilbry also has developed a Web site, 1910fire.co.
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