cacakerbamakhlukpolitik

You think you've got problems? Try being a Chinese girl in the American West! In 1872, a young Chinese girl, Lalu, was sold by her father during a famine and shipped (some say smuggled) from China to San Francisco for nefarious purposes. The girl was pretty, and as she stood on the dock, a miner working a claim in Warrens, Idaho, near the Salmon River, bought her for the fabulous sum of $2,500. Consequently she made the 12-day trip over towering mountains and through steep canyons on the back of a mule into the Idaho gold country. In Warrens she worked in the her owner's bar as a "hostess." There were so few women in Idaho’s rough and tumble mining camps that a Chinese girl was automatically relegated to the status of "sing-song girl.” However, her luck changed when her owner lost her in a poker game to a neighboring dining hall/saloon keeper, Charlie Bemis. Charlie turned out be the girl’s protector and, apparently, her sole love interest. The photograph

Have you ever ridden a train through the High Sierras? Through mile-long tunnels and along tracks that cling to mountainsides overlooking deep canyons? The most spectacular and dangerous routes were hacked out of solid rock, by hand, by small (110 lb), tough, energetic Chinese laborers who hauled off the earth and rock in tiny loads and, as winter approached, worked 3-shift, 24-hour days. Back in 1865 these “strange little men with their dishpan straw hats, pigtails, and floppy blue pajamas” (according to one railroad owner) proved themselves the equal of burly Irish immigrants. At first, the railroad bosses judged the Chinese too frail and unmechanical for such work. [Had they known history, of course, they might have recognized the tremendous grit and cleverness of the Chinese, exhibited in the building of the Great Wall (also hacked by hand out of mountainsides) and the invention of clocks, gunpowder, paper, ceramic glaze, etc.] The little Chinese men--actually farm boys from Cant