The Poker Bride: The First Chinese in the Wild West [Hardcover]

Christopher Corbett (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 2, 2010

When gold rush fever gripped the globe in 1849, thousands of Chinese immigrants came through San Francisco on their way to seek their fortunes. They were called sojourners, for they never intended to stay. In The Poker Bride, Christopher Corbett uses a little-known legend from Idaho lore as a lens into this Chinese experience. Before 1849, the Chinese in the United States were little more than curiosities. But as word spread of the discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill in California, they soon became a regular sight in the American West. In San Francisco, a labyrinthine Chinatown soon sprang up, a clamorous city within a city full of exotic foods and strange smells, where Chinese women were smuggled into the country, and where the laws were made by "hatchet men." At this time, Polly, a young Chinese concubine, was brought by her owner by steamboat and pack train to a remote mining camp in the highlands of Idaho. There he lost her in a poker game, having wagered his last ounce of gold dust. Polly found her way with her new owner to an isolated ranch on the banks of the Salmon River in central Idaho. As the gold rush receded, it took with it the Chinese miners--or their bones, which were disinterred and shipped back to their homeland in accordance with Chinese custom. But it left behind Polly, who would make headlines when she emerged from the Idaho hills nearly half a century later to visit a modern city and tell her story. Peppered with characters such as Mark Twain and the legendary newswoman Cissy Patterson, The Poker Bride vividly reconstructs a lost period of history when the first Chinese sojourners flooded into the country, and left only glimmering traces of their presence scattered across the American West.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This unruly book mixes a wonderful mystery- wrapped story with the larger picture of Chinese immigration into the American West. The central story concerns a young Chinese woman sold by her family in 1872 into indentured prostitution. She turns up as a concubine in Idaho, is said then to have been won by another man in a poker game, and became Polly Bemis, the winner's legal, beloved wife in the remote wilderness of Idaho. Polly emerged into public view only in 1923, a tiny old woman on horseback, her identity and story known only to a few old-timers. Corbett wisely sets Bemis's life into the context of Chinese immigration, gold- country anti-Chinese prejudice, and life in the mining communities and remote fastnesses of Idaho a hundred years ago. The trouble is that Corbett also gives us over and over again every tale about Bemis, many of them conflicting, many more incomplete, and many no doubt apocryphal, clogging the work and making it longer than necessary. We need more of former AP editor and novelist Corbett's (Vacationland) own reflections, less of every one else's surmises and tales. (Feb.)
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From Booklist

Once the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill launched our “national madness,” the population of California exploded. Tens of thousands of Chinese, lured by tales of a “golden mountain,” took passage across the Pacific. Among this massive influx were many young concubines who were expected to serve in the brothels sprouting up near the goldfields. One of them adopted the name of Polly Bemis, after an Idaho saloonkeeper, Charlie Bemis, won her in a poker game and married her. For decades the couple lived on an isolated, self-sufficient farm near the Salmon River in central Idaho. After her husband’s death, Polly came down to a nearby town and gradually spoke of her experiences. Journalist Corbett movingly recounts Polly’s story, integrating Polly’s personal history into the broader picture of the history of the mass immigration of Chinese. As both a personal and social history, this is an admirable book. --Jay Freeman

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press; 1 edition (February 2, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802119093
• ISBN-13: 978-0802119094
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (34 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #638,305 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Christopher Corbett is the author of The Poker Bride: The First Chinese in the Wild West (Atlantic Monthly, 2010) and Orphans Preferred: The Twisted Truth and Lasting Legend of the Pony Express (Random House/Broadway Books, 2003). He is also the author of the novel Vacationland (Viking/Penguin, 1986).
Corbett is a 1973 graduate of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. A former news editor with The Associated Press, Corbett began his journalism career in his native Maine. Since 1995 he has written The Back Page for Baltimore's Style magazine, twice winner of best column from the City and Regional Magazine Association and honored by the Society for Professional Journalists for best editorial writing.
A Baltimore resident, Corbett is a faculty member at the University of Maryland Baltimore County where he is professor of the practice in the English Department. He was awarded the University System of Maryland Board of Regents' Faculty Award for Mentoring, 2007-2008. In 1990, Corbett was the James Thurber Journalist-In-Residence at Ohio State University. From 1990 to 1993, he was visiting journalist at Loyola College in Baltimore. His journalism has appeared in major American newspapers, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars We Need to Take Heed, April 19, 2010

By 

Atheen M. Wilson "Atheen" (Mpls, MN United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Poker Bride: The First Chinese in the Wild West (Hardcover)

The Poker Bride is a somewhat loosely based book on the life and times of Polly Bemis, a Chinese girl who arrived in Idaho during the gold rush years of the mid-19th century and lived there until her death during the first half of the 20th century. What the book really is, however, is a short history of Chinese immigration to the American West during this same period. What most people remember, if anything, about this period is the great contribution of the Chinese to the building of the transcontinental railway. That at least is my case. So far as I was aware, the huge influx of labor from Asia had been the product of the demand for it on the railroad. What I had not known was the potency of the call of the gold fields starting with the Sutter's Mill discovery in 1848.

Although I found the narrative thread of the book a little convoluted and at times a little repetitive, I think Mr. Corbett's book is a remarkable compendium of information. His selection of a quotation from G. K. Chesterton--one of my favorite authors and author of one of my favorite poems--is very apt here, and explains the problem exactly. "I will not say that this story is true: because, as you will soon see, it is all truth and no story. It has no explanation and no conclusion; it is, like most of the other things we encounter in life, a fragment of something else which would be intensely exciting if it were not too large to be seen....(The Secret of the Train)." To a certain extent it is the author's responsibility to pull the story out of the morass of information so it can be viewed critically by the reader; admittedly however, doing so would have pulled it from context and skewed the meaning of the actual events. I applaud the author for not giving in to the "story" but remaining true to the "history." This has to have been difficult for him, since he obviously has a story telling predilection.

There appear to be three--probably more--threads to The Poker Bride. First and foremost there is the story of the Bride herself. While there is no doubt she existed--contemporaries who knew her had been interviewed, photos exist of her, and some paperwork exists for her--there is little beyond the sketchily known events of her later life and what she said of her earlier life that goes beyond her mere existence in history. Essentially she is part reality and part myth, and the reader is allowed to decide what to believe. More than anything it is the author who, by creating an historical backdrop for Polly, gives her simple bare bones existence a significance beyond the simple documentation.

The second thread of The Poker Bride is what actually does this. Mr. Corbett has drawn as much data as possible to the recreation of the Chinese experience in the American West. By gleaning information from Western newspapers, personal accounts, and oral history drawn from those who had participated in the events, the author has given as much of an account of the Chinese immigration to pre-statehood California, Oregon, Washington, Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming as is probably possible. As he notes in the context of the work, very few of these immigrants were literate, so records of their adventures are few to absent. Furthermore, few of the literate in this country were interested in recording the unvarnished experiences of these foreigners with the people they encountered here, the notable exceptions being Mark Twain and Bret Harte. Additionally most of the Chinese who came here to work or to mine for gold returned home, if at all possible, taking whatever stories regarding their experiences here with them. Some of these stories appear to have been collected from China either from the returning sojourners themselves for from those who had known them. (It would appear to be a popular topic for MA and PhD dissertations for ethnically Chinese students, which shows the value of checking university libraries for these sources of information!)

The third thread of the book is the female--in this case mostly the Chinese female--experience in the American West. I hold as quite apt the author's description of the environment and the times of the Gold Rush years as "bachelor" societies. The rigor, the risks, and the lifestyle of the Gold Rush years had the tendency to winnow the overall society--that is the rest of the entire world--in favor of the young, healthy male. This incredible state of social imbalance had a very expectable outcome.

If one could imagine putting all males from the age of 15 to 30 in a particular quarter of any large city without any supervision whatsoever, no law other than their own, and one overreaching goal of becoming wealthy, one might get a pretty good idea of what life in the old West during the Gold Rush years was like. The demands and interests of this segment of society, combined with the willingness and ability to pay whatever was necessary to acquire it, will also give one a very clear idea of the types of "black market" activity that would arise to supply it and the great difficulty and cost that would be required to suppress it--let alone the level of graft and corruption that would arise from doing so. In many ways, it is the same system of supply and demand that makes the attempt to suppress drugs, their use and sale, an almost hopeless endeavor.

In any case like this demand creates a market, and suppliers arise. Any attempt to suppress the market also increases the stress of demand, thereby increasing the price of the item in demand. This in turn makes the risks inherent with supplying it that much more worthwhile to undertake, and means an even greater effort to undertake supply will be made. Any attempts to prevent it will increase the violence associated with protecting it--both from those who wish to suppress it and from those who wish to take it over from those already controlling it. This whole scenario--minus the violence, perhaps--can be found in any textbook on economics, which illustrates it with simple graphs called "supply and demand curves."

The lucrative benefits to those in recognized positions of influence for turning a blind eye to the activity will also increase and ensure that at least some will succumb. By virtue of the great fortunes to be made by this avenue with virtually no investment or effort, society's official law enforcement will start to crumble. Those who have become involved in the graft begin to ensure that only those who will cooperate are able to obtain office. Efforts by a jaded society to change this situation will be met with threats and violence against "clean" candidates, making it difficult to change anything.

Meanwhile society, unable to do anything at all to prevent the victimization of individuals hurt by the illicit activity, responds by making the victims the cause of their own dilemma. People begin to label these individuals as "hopeless," "debauched," "morally unfit," "strange outsiders" or simply stupid and therefore amusing. All of which were applied to the Chinese who were victimized by the society of the "Old West."

The fact that the "peculiar institution" in the American South was defended as a social necessity is another case in point. Slaves were considered "better off" being enslaved, since they were seen as incapable of taking care of themselves. To estimate how difficult it would have been to change the lives of the Chinese immigrants in the West, one simply has to remember that it took a war lasting about 4 and a half years and more lives lost than in all other wars in which the US partook thereafter combined to eliminate slavery---not to improve the overall condition, which is an on-going thing--from the country. And there were those--in fact there are still those--who considered the price to have been "too high."

That the situation of the Chinese sex slave in the American West was miserable, hopeless and short is less the point, here, than is the life of women in any society and particularly in third world societies. Would the lives of any of these girls--and they could be anywhere from 2 to 16 for the most part--have been any different had they remained in China? I doubt it. Overpopulation and famine dictated a certain cold heartedness with respect to children, especially young children who could not contribute anything but their appetite to the family's situation. In a land where hard physical labor was the norm, males are usually valued more highly than females. In times of shortage, then, it will usually be the female children that are killed, abandoned or sold to provide extra shares of whatever there is for the rest of the family. Anything more generous and humane would be an irresponsible use of resources; that is the grim reality of these families. Hence, as the author notes in The Poker Bride, the Chinese of the time believed that girls and women had no souls, like animals they were disposable. That, more than anyting, was probably the secret of their quiet acceptance of their fates. If you believe yourself unworthy of anything more, or if you simply expect nothing more, you accept life as it happens to you. It certainly enhances survival. Those that didn't accept it tended to commit suicide, and the author documents a number of cases in point.

I think Mr. Corbett's description of the plight of the poor Chinese in the American West holds a far greater significance than one might believe on the surface of the overall story. The point of the book is that it was surprising to find an elderly Chinese female alive and thriving in late 19th and early 20th century America. The likelihood that she would have survived her teens and 20ies under the circumstances of her arrival in the country made it highly unlikely that she would. More importantly, the First... Read more ›

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Ten stars Wonderful well written book, April 14, 2010

A Kid's Review

This review is from: The Poker Bride: The First Chinese in the Wild West (Hardcover)

My family has been in the mother lode area of California since the 1800 gold rush when a woman in the family ran a bakery and a brothel. And because Jackson CA in the mother lode has a Chinese graveyard, this books title caught my attention from the get go.

Very well written and researched. Charlie and Polly Bemis are two people I would have loved to know. Reading of their journey from San Francisco up to Idaho and the people and places they encountered reminded me of visiting many of the same places. The author does an excellent job of describing how the Chinese were treated when they arrived in San Francisco and how they were treated in the gold country. Something the many small towns here in the Sierras are honest about when you visit their small town museums.

Reading in the book and especially chapter 10 of Charles Shepp and Peter Klinkhammer who lived near Charlie and Polly, and helped them out, and spent the holiday with them, and would care for Polly after Charlie died, was one of my favorite chapters, as it shows how people here help each other out. Loved reading of how Polly was such a great fisherman, and how she grew a big vegetable garden and orchard which she would harvest and preserve also reminded me of how we live today. Love reading the no nonsense diaries these folks kept, which noted the weather, what they ate, how the bears ate all the berries or the horses got into the orchard, again reminded me of how they lived and the connection to how many live today. The book notes that without the help of Charles and Peter, Polly wouldn't have been able to remain on the ranch after Charlie died. And that the men were not looking for new neighbors, which is why they agreed to care for Polly and get the land after her death. Gotta love these folks.

Loved reading of Polly visiting the outside world for the first time and how when she first heard a radio she wanted to run away because she thought it was a ghost speaking. Although she was overjoyed when the men strung a phone line to her home so they could stay in touch with her, since the river could be harsh and prevent easy access to her place. Or how happy a person she was and how she loved being asked to hold babies, or getting to ride in a car, rain etc. Things many people today simply take for granted.

On page 183, we read that she fell ill in 1933, at the age of eighty-one she was taken on horseback over narrow and winding trails to the War Eagle Mine where they had arranged to have an ambulance waiting for her. And that she showed herself very grateful for all that was done for her. Thus she wrote out of the area on a horse, just as she had ridden in. She would die on November 6, a Monday, with a brief notation that it was a warm and cloudy day and she would be buried at 10 am the next morning. Peter has always planned on getting her a simple headstone. He died in 1970 at the age of eighty-nine and the heirs to his estate carried out his wishes and she has a simple head stone that notes her name and September 11, 1853-November 6, 1933. In 1987 her remains were moved back to the ranch she had shared with Charlie on the banks of the Salmon River.

As a homeschooling family this is a book we will use as part of our school studies. And highly recommend to anyone who wants an honest story about the history of the gold rush and how the Chinese were treated.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars More about life in the Gold Rush period, but still fascinating..., May 2, 2010

By 

Thomas Duff "Duffbert" (Portland, OR United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Poker Bride: The First Chinese in the Wild West (Hardcover)

One of the things I'm learning during my reading of historical titles is that we tend to forget much of our past. And actually, we *do* end up repeating many of our mistakes and ugly periods. I found some of those forgotten elements when reading The Poker Bride: The First Chinese in the Wild West by Christopher Corbett. While the book would seem to be more about the story of Polly Bemis, a Chinese "working girl" who was won in a poker game, the real story is of how life in the West was lived during the days of the Gold Rush.

In the late 1840's, gold was discovered in the West, and many Americans headed to California in order to make their fortune as miners. At the same time, large numbers of Chinese came over via steamer to do the jobs that nobody else wanted to do (reminiscent of our current migrant and immigration woes). San Francisco was the hub of much of the activity, and it was largely a male-dominated town. The women were often Chinese, and most of them were there as prostitutes and slaves. Life was cheap, and if you were on the lower end of the working girl scale, you were likely to die young and alone from disease or abuse.

One of these girls, "Polly", was brought over and purchased by a rich Chinese merchant. But as legend has it, he gambled her away during a poker game to a miner who lived and worked in Idaho. The miner, Charlie Bemis, took his newly acquired property and headed off to the hills of Idaho, to a small mining down named Warrens. It was there that Polly spent her entire life, eventually becoming Bemis's bride. Her story only became known when she came out of the backwoods in 1923 and visited a city for the first time, seeing things she had never seen before, like cars, trains, and radios. This was a national story at the time, and people were fascinated to learn more about Polly Bemis and what she had experienced during the last 60 years.

The first part of Poker Bride, and perhaps the most consistent theme throughout the book, is focused on mining life during the last half century of the 1800's and the suffering of the Chinese during that period of American history. The internment of Japanese-American citizens during the last part of World War 2 is an often-told story, but the Chinese suffered much of the same type of national backlash after the main gold rush period. They were taking jobs that many thought should belong to Caucasians, and they did work for far less money than others. The racism and bigotry during that time was rampant, and its not surprising that most Chinese wanted to go back to their own country to be buried when they died. Polly's story in the last part of the book seems to be a bit of an add-on to what the majority of the content was focused on. And since there's a number of conflicting stories about exactly who Polly was and how she ended up in Idaho, the author ends up having to give a number of alternative perspectives and let the reader sort it out a bit for themselves. I wouldn't mind so much if the title hadn't pointed to Polly being the main topic of the book, while the content was more in line with a generalization of the subtitle.

Even with the minor "bait and switch" of the title, I still found The Poker Bride quite interesting. Stripping the veneer of romance and legend off the Gold Rush stories is worth reading in order to give you more realistic look at life during that time. Makes me very glad I wasn't born and raised back then...

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