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Open year round, High Trek Adventures is located in Everett; about 20 minutes North of Seattle. This outdoor fun center includes several activities including laser tag, mini-golf, axe throwing, and a giant ropes course with 60 obstacles and 3 ziplines.  Walk-ins are welcome, pending availability.  Rates range from $40.00-$55.00, with multi-activity passes available for $55-80.

Northwest Trek is located in Eatonville, WA; 40 miles south of Sea-Tac Airport. Zip Wild is open from May to September and offers 5 exhilarating zip line/challenge courses that run through a breathtaking canopy. Courses include barriers that must be walked, climbed, or crawled over; or even clambered through, as well as other various challenges.  Specific challenges include: swinging log or slatted step bridges, a monkey bridge and rope, cargo nets, balance beams, and high-wire tight ropes. Zip Wild has courses that cater to all ages (6+), so an entire family can experience a wild adventure!  Rates range from $19.95-$59.95.

This zip line tour company is located on Kristoferson Farm on Camano Island; 72 miles north of Sea-Tac Airport. Canopy Tours NW operates year-round, offering several daily tours. Explore a sustainably managed Pacific Northwest forest in a historic Unimog forest vehicle, walk through 2 short foliage trails and a log bridge, and witness breathtaking views, while zip-lining up to 660 feet through 6 courses. Rates start at $65 for Youth (12 & under) and $95 for Adults (13+).

Ocean-inspired art from Portland Oregon and Kauai - tactile ceramics, watercolor paintings, fiber art baskets made with reclaimed and recycled fishing rope.

Asian immigrants faced discrimination almost upon arrival in the Pacific Northwest. In 1853, the newly created Washington territorial legislature barred Chinese from voting; later legislation enacted poll taxes and restrictions on testifying in court cases against whites. These laws were modeled on similar legislation in California (which remained the most popular destination for Chinese immigrants well into the late nineteenth century). As agitation against the Chinese escalated on the West Coast, national lawmakers began to take notice. Eventually, Congress, bowing to public pressure and prevailing racial stereotypes, acted to limit the immigration of Chinese labor.

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 set the tone for later laws designed to exclude further Asian immigration. It also fundamentally altered the shape of Asian communities in the United States by banning women immigrants. By 1890, the ratio of men to women among Chinese Americans nationwide was approximately thirty to one; not until 1940 would the ratio drop to less than two to one. In Washington state, the Exclusion Act permanently stunted Chinese American communities, which were never able to rival similar groups in San Francisco or Vancouver, British Columbia. The Exclusion Act became an instrument of violence against Chinese. The anti-Chinese movement that swept across the American West was especially extreme in Washington. An economic depression in the mid-1880s, which left white workers competing for dwindling jobs, fueled animosity. In 1885, white Tacoma residents expelled 700 Chinese (some forcibly) from that city and torched Chinese residences and businesses; the next year, Seattle residents hauled their Chinese neighbors by wagon to waiting steamers. Elsewhere, whites attacked Chinese in Walla Walla and Pasco.

Japanese and Filipino immigrants became the next targets. Since 1789, nonwhites from overseas could not become citizens; the question now swung on who could immigrate to the U.S. The 1907-08 “Gentleman’s Agreement” between Japan and the U.S. prohibited further male immigration but allowed in women, along with relatives and children of Japanese aliens living in the United States. The category “aliens ineligible to citizenship,” dating from 1789, used race to restrict naturalization. The 1924 National Origins Act, which distinguished Asians from other immigrant groups, extended this logic and further restricted all Asian immigration. The 1924 law left the door open for Filipinos, however, who were U.S. nationals. But the new act severely limited Japanese and Chinese immigration for over four decades. Upheld by legal precedent, the 1924 act had local effects on Asians living in Washington. The 1889 state constitution, in Section 33 of Article II, already prohibited resident aliens from owning land. In 1921 and 1922, the rule was extended to leasing, renting, and sharecropping of land. The 1924 Act sanctioned further discrimination, especially against the growing Filipino population. Filipinos themselves were the object of racist fears over mixed marriages and dwindling jobs. In 1927, whites expelled Filipino farmers from Toppenish in the Yakima Valley. In 1933, white farmers and workers in Wapato demanded that area growers stop hiring Filipino workers.

Again, as with the Chinese and Japanese, federal action spurred greater discrimination in the states. Filipino immigration was virtually stopped in 1934 by the Tydings-McDuffie Act, which made the Philippines a commonwealth and promised full independence within a decade. Filipinos, now defined as resident aliens, were limited to a quota of fifty annually. But attacks and recrimination against Filipinos did not end there. Filipinos, who married white women in numbers larger than their Chinese and Japanese counterparts, aroused the ire of whites obsessed with racial purity. In 1937, the Washington Legislature tried to pass a law banning mixed race marriages. Filipinos were added as resident aliens under state law in 1938; and the anti-alien land laws directed against them and other Asian Americans were not repealed until 1966.

Perhaps the ultimate expression of racial fears against Asians was the internment of Japanese and Japanese Americans during World War II. On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, bowing to public pressure on the West Coast, signed Executive Order 9066, calling for the removal of all persons of Japanese descent from coastal areas (except Hawai’i). Claiming military necessity, Japanese and Japanese Americans were forcibly expelled from their homes and businesses; no action of similar magnitude was taken against German Americans or Italian Americans. Most of those evacuated were American citizens, born in the United States and fully entitled to constitutional rights and privileges. Most Washington residents were relocated to Minidoka located near Hunt, Idaho; other West Coast Japanese went to inland concentration camps in California, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, Arizona and Arkansas. Japanese internment did not go unchallenged, however. Gordon Hirabayshi, a University of Washington student, was charged with resisting evacuation orders; his conviction was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1943. But despite the obvious injustice of internment, many American-born Japanese, known collectively as “Nisei,” volunteered for combat duty in Europe. The all-Nisei 100th Battalion and the 442nd Regimental Combat Team were some of the most highly decorated units in American military history. Yet not until 1988 did the federal government apologize and remunerate internee survivors and their families.

Even under the harsh circumstances of concentration camps, Japanese Americans relied on community organization to endure. Interned Japanese formed consumer cooperatives, baseball teams, and literary societies. Such responses were rooted in long-standing experience with adversity. Prior to the war, Japanese in Washington came together through kenjinkai, social associations that drew members who came from the same village or county in Japan. Kenjinkai helped new immigrants find jobs, make business contacts, and practice speaking their native language. Local branches of the Japanese Association of North America ran Japanese language schools. Most of these organizations catered to the foreign-born generation, or Issei. American-born Japanese, or Nisei, established the Japanese American Citizens League to promote unity and lobby for civil rights. Sports, too, were another part of the Japanese community network, with baseball a widely popular pastime. Japanese communities throughout the Pacific Northwest fielded baseball teams and played against white competitors. Religion played a part, too, as Christian and Buddhist churches provided spiritual and social comfort.

The Chinese, though smaller in number, also relied on community organizations to strengthen ethnic ties in Washington. Family associations, district associations similar to the kenjinkai, and tongs (secretive fraternal orders that also served as trade guilds) formed the framework of the Chinese community. Concentrated primarily in Seattle, benevolent family associations like the Gee How Oak Tin offered business loans, language instruction, and social activities to eligible members. In 1910, Seattle Chinese chartered the Chong Wa Benevolent Association, a coalition of local groups and businesses, to administer Chinatown politics and support Chinese causes. Prominent businessmen like Chin Gee Hee and Ah King, both labor contractors, protected new immigrants while establishing important ties with white Seattle elites. And churches, notably the Chinese Baptist Church on Seattle’s First Hill, also served to unite immigrants and older residents through ministry and community outreach.

Filipinos, largely comprised of bachelors, also found community through adversity. Large groups of single men created new “families” based on local affiliations from the Philippines. Often, Filipino women served as surrogate mothers, aunts, and sisters for men with no immediate family in the United States. Filipinos were also active in the labor movement, organizing unions to protect their interests. The harsh conditions of canning salmon inspired Filipino workers to form the Cannery Workers’ and Farm Laborers’ Union Local 18257 in Seattle in 1933. One of the most militant unions on the West Coast during the Depression, the CWFLU struggled to shield Alaskeros from exploitation. Unions and social clubs also fought against restrictive land and property laws. The Filipino Community of Yakima County, Inc., after protracted battles, eventually secured leasing rights on the Yakima Indian reservation, a privilege already granted to whites. In 1939, Pio DeCano, a recent immigrant, successfully fought the 1937 Washington state alien land law all the way to the state Supreme Court. Perhaps more than any other Asian immigrant group, Filipinos made their greatest gains through legal challenges and union organization. And as with other Asian communities, religion, notably the Roman Catholic Church, drew Filipinos together in a common faith.

The postwar period saw the beginnings of a newer sense of identity, however, one based on a hybrid sense of Asian and American heritage. In 1952, immigrants were allowed to become naturalized citizens but restrictions against Asian immigration remained. Reforms to immigration law, culminating in the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965, spurred a sharp increase in Asian immigration. Newer immigrants from Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands added greater complexity to Washington’s Asian community. New faces forced old residents to confront the issue of who passed as American — and who passed as immigrant.

The civil rights movement, spearheaded by African Americans in the South, also affected ethnic politics in Washington state. In Seattle’s Central District, where Asian Americans and African Americans had lived in close proximity for nearly six decades, community leaders crossed ethnic lines to fight together for public housing, tenant rights, election reform and employment opportunities. While ties between Seattle’s Black and Asian communities frayed by the late 1960s, the city was unique on the West Coast for its multiethnic civil rights campaigns. Asian Americans, long stereotyped as passive laborers, also made political inroads of their own as well. They became an increasingly vocal constituency in Washington state politics. In 1963, Wing Luke became the first Chinese American elected to the Seattle City Council; Ruby Chow, the first Chinese American woman, was elected in 1973; and in 1996 Gary Locke, then King County Executive, was elected as the first Chinese American governor on the mainland United States. Such victories were made possible by political coalitions that united Asian Americans of all orientations. In political as well as cultural terms, Asians began referring to themselves as Asian Americans, or Asian/Pacific Americans, reflecting an identity that transcended previous ethnic bonds.

Despite such tensions, however, Asian American communities are indisputably central to Washington’s social and cultural fabric. Discrimination continues but its effects are blunted by the prominence of Asian Americans in business, politics, the arts and education. Compared to the blatant racism of a century earlier, Asian Americans have achieved remarkable gains. Still, the dynamics of community building continue. As before, the forces that rip communities apart also are the source for their renewal. Seen one way, divisions within the Asian American community over language instruction, immigration policy, and social welfare are tears in the social fabric. Seen from another angle, they are the seams that bind communities together.

There is already a large literature on anti-Chinese violence in North America during the 19th and early 20th centuries: an important recent example is Jean Pfaelzer"sDriven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans(2007).   We do not propose to recaptulate this literature here, and in any case we feel that Chinese-American historiography is not greatly in need of still more victim narratives.  And yet we also feel that modern residents of our liberal, ethnically sensitive, politically correct region must be reminded that the Pacific Northwest has not always been that way.  As the following map shows, in the late 19th century our northwstern region was in the forefront of American intolerance and vicious persecution of non-white peoples, especially the Chinese.

Detail of picture on left: The fleeing Chinese,presented as comically wringing their hands and falling down, are protected by Governor Squire"s resolute Home Guard, composed of local citizens and University of Washington students

All Chinese in Seattle are told they will be expelled from the city the next day.  They will be allowed to take only what they can carry.  As in Tacoma the year before, actual violence is minimized at this stage, although those refusing are threatened with death.  Drawing fromWest Shore Magazine.

One of the heroes of the day was Judge Thomas Burke, who stood between the angry mob and their would-be Chinese victims with a shotgun (here, a revolver) in his hands.  He gave at least three speeches to the mob, saying that he was an Irishman just like them, that he sympathized, and that he was sure they would respect the law unlike the hooligans of Tacoma.West Shore Magazine .

The attempt to expel all Chinese from Seattle was orchestrated by the Knights of Labor, who hoped to repeat their success at Tacoma in December of the previous year.  In Seattle,the attempt was only partially successful. Whereas in Tacoma the mayor and many of the leading citizens had helped in expelling the Chinese, and even took pride in what they called the "Tacoma Solution," Seattle"s leaders opposed the idea, partly from principle and partly out of fear of what else a rioting mob might do.   These pictures are fromHarper"s MagazineandWest Shore Magazine. In both cases the artist must have worked partly from photographs. (No.16 in the map above).

34 Chinese gold miners were slaughtered by a gang of outlaws at Deep Creek on the Snake River, at the border between Idaho and Oregon.  Some of the horror was captured in a letter to the U.S. Secretary of State in February 1888, by the Chinese Minister, Chang Yen Hoon(Pinyin: Chang Yinheng)張蔭桓.  Chang reported that "three bodies of Chea-po"s party floating down the river . . .,  and upon a search being made further found Chae-po"s boat stranded on some rocks in the bar, with holes in the bottom, bearing indications of having been chopped with an axe, and its tie-rope cut and drifting in the water ...;  on examining the three bodies found a number of wounds inflicted by an ax and bullets;  theat the bodies of theothers that had been murdered have not yet been found ...."

"Feeling against the Chinese was strong in all northwestern coastal cities at that time, so local residents did not hesitate to pick up arms and turn back a group of about 30 of these foreigners before they even entered the valley.  Another larger party had already set up camp at the hop yards, however, and would not leave under threats, so on the next night a posse of five whites and two Indians entered the area and shot up the tents, killing and wounding several Chinese.  This strong approach to the situation accomplished the desired result in a hurry, because all the Orientals were gone by the next day.  Some half-hearted legal action was later attempted in Seattle against the assailants. but it never came to anything ..."

On September 7 1885, only five days after the massacre at Rock Springs, a group of Washington whites and Indians decided to copy their peers in Wyoming by eliminating Chinese laborers from competition, this time as pickers in the hop fields of the rich Squak Valley, which was then called Gilman and is now Issaquah (see SQ on the map above).  How many joined the anti-Chinese mob is unclear: about 10 started out at night from the store of George Tibbets, the local justice of the peace.  A few seem to have dropped out while several Indian hop pickers decided to take part and 20-odd onlookers trailed along behind.  Everyone had brought guns.  The Chinese, who had already put in a day or two of picking in the hop fields of the Wold brothers, were asleep in their tents.  There were about 30 Chinese in all.

" ... And then when these China riots came I got to give up my business because I cannot sell my cigars.  During that time the China riot ruined every Chinaman, including some of the finest residences in Seattle.  They have some good citizens in Seattle.  I think the big work was done by Mr. Dave Kellog.  His brother used to be fire marshall. He get up in the morning and he see this China riot and he went to the fire engine at Columbia Street.  He went in and the fire men try to stop him from ringing the bell.  He says, "I got orders from my brother."  He called all this home guard so the home guard is turn out all over in town and protect the Chinese if he can.  The only thing I see in the street I see from my window.  I see Mr. William H. White.   He was United States Attorney then.  He says to the mob, "as long I am prosecuting attorney in this city, you people have to get back to Tacoma."  He fight hard.  On account of that they didn"t drive all the Chinaman out of Seattle.  But they did in Tacoma."

Racist elements in Portland attempted to drive all Chinese out of the city in March of 1886, as they had already done in Tacoma and Seattle a month or so before.  In Portland the anti-Chinese gangs did not succeed, although many Chinese in and around the city were beaten and robbed.  Whether the white citizens of Portland were more tolerant than those of Tacoma and Seattle is debatable.  However, the chief Portland newspaper, theOregonian, followed a generally tolerant line, in sharp contrast with the scurrilously racist TacomaLedger.  Portland"s mayor, John Gates, offered even more of a contrast with Tacoma"s mayor, R. Jacob Weisbach.  Whereas Weisbach was a ringleader in the anti-Chinese events of October 1885 (and indeed took credit as a deviser of the infamous "Tacoma Solution"), Gates ignored the threats of the mob, reputedly affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan as well as the Knights of Labor, and instructed the police and militia to defend the Chinese, by armed force if necessary.

Haskell came to the Congress at the invitation of one of his IWA followers, Daniel Cronin.  An official Knights of Labor organizer, Cronin had been involved in the driving-out of Chinese from Eureka in February 1885.  The Eureka events, the first of their kind on the continent, became a model for many similar expulsions during the next two years.  Cronin was given to citing his experience in Eureka as a credential for his activity in Washington.  In September 1885, a few days after the Rock Springs Massacre, he presented a copy of the Knights" anti-Chinese "charter" to Mayor R. Jacob Weisbach of Tacoma, a German immigrant who was already a member of the Knights.  Two months later, Weisbach would become a leader in Tacoma"s Chinese expulsion, the so-called.  Whether Cronin advised Weisbach during the expulsion is not clear, but Cronin was one of the Seattle-based anti-Chinese leaders who were indicted together with Weisbach and his henchmen by a federal grand jury in Vancouver (Washington).  This added to his prestige among delegates to the Anti-Chinese Congress, who hailed him as a martyr to their cause.

Neither Haskell nor Cronin seem to have had a taste for the violence they preached.  Haskell went back to California shortly after the Congress ended in mid-February, 1886.  Cronin stayed on for a while but, perhaps due to the danger of rearrest, remained behind the scenes during the anti-Chinese riots in Seattle and Portland of March, 1886.  In April he was in San Francisco, where he gave a speech at a meeting of the International Workmen"s Association and several other labor groups, including the Knights of Labor-affiliated Coast Seamen"s Union.  In it he revealed that the real target of his activities in the Northwest had been not the Chinese but the capitalist system itself:"There is a greater evil than the Chinese.  Although there is not a Chinese at present in the town of Tacoma, the people there have discovered no radical change in the workingmen"s condition.  It is, therefore, plain that an evil more deep-seated than the Chinese must be sought, namely the present system of labor."(seeChroniclearticle cited below).

Openly revolutionary rhetoric like this may have displeased Grand Master Powderly, and no one in the Knights can have been happy that their efforts in Seattle, Tacoma, and Portland resulted in repeated intervention by the U.S. Army.  Many Knights must also have been angered at Cronin"s public admission that competition by Chinese laborers was not such a serious problem after all.  Whatever the reason, Powderly soon withdrew Cronin"s commission as organizer for the Knights. Cronin disappears from history after that.

Haskell too, by then a vociferous critic and bitter enemy of Powderly, had been forced out of the Coast Seamen"s Union and the Knights by 1888.  He lost interest in union politics at about that time, allowed the IWA to disintegrate, and for the next five years devoted his energies to a utopian community he had founded in the Sierras, the Kaweah Colony.  Whether Kaweah was anti-Chinese, like the contemporary utopian community of Port Angeles in Washington, is not clear.  Perhaps Haskell, like Cronin, had discovered that he too did not dislike Chinamen all that much anyway.

On Cronin -- Wikipedia; Carlos A Schwantes,  "Protest in a Promised Land: Unemployment, Disinheritance, and the Origin of Labor Militancy in the Pacific Northwest, 1885-1886;"The Western Historical Quarterly, Vol. 13, No. 4. (Oct., 1982), pp. 373-390; C. J. Lind, The Chinese Must Go,"Tacoma News-Tribune, 1972-02-08; San Francisco Chronicle1886-04-11 p 10

Considering that so much violence against Chinese occurred in so many parts of California and the Northwest during the years 1875-1877, anyone would think that there was a connection -- that the similarity of scenarios and speeches by anti-Chinese elements points to central planning and control.  But who were these planners?  The obvious candidates are the leaders of the Knights of Labor, an organization with a strongly racist ideology and the influence, size, and geographic reach needed to pull such a conspiracy off.

But then how to explain the many riots, killings, and drivings-out of the Chinese in 1885-1887?.  One explanation is that they were planned by a secretive, violent extremist group, the International Workingmen"s Association, operating within the larger Knights of Labor.  The West Coast (and only active American) branch of the IWA, originally British, was founded by one Burnette Haskell, a  California lawyer.  He set it up as a series of cells, much like those favored by European radicals, and seems to have maintained a high level of internal secrecy.   Curiously, in view of the internationalist ideology of his movement, he adopted the anti-Chinese stance of rank-and-file members of the Knights.  In 1883-84 he organized a IWA affiliate in Eureka, where it played a key role in driving out Chinese in February, 1885.  In February, 1886 he appeared as a leader at the Knights of Labor"s Anti-Chinese Congress in Portland, where he was acclaimed as the Chairman of the key Committee on Resolutions and gave interviews to the press describing how Chinese would soon be driven out of Portland.

Coal was a more dangerous ethnic flashpoint than was gold during the driving-out years in the Pacific Northwest, 1885 and 1886.  For one thing, coal was of much more interest to the Knight of Labor.  Coal mines tended to be bigger than gold mines, to employ more men, and to be owned and run by big-city corporations, all of which made them optimal targets for organizing by labor unions.  From the 1880s onward, the owners/managers of such mines regularly sought to hire Chinese.  Just as regularly, the unions objected, often violently.  Wyoming"s Rock Creek Massacre, supported by (and probably organized by elements within) the Knights of Labor, featured white and Chinese coal miners employed by the mining division of the Union Pacific Railroad.

In Washington State too, much anti-Chinese violence in 1885 and 1886 was coal mine-related.  All of it took place at mines in the Pacific Coal Region of Washington State, on the western flanks of the Cascades: at Coal Creek, Newcastle, Renton, Black Diamond, Franklin, and Carbonado.  Together with coalmines at Nanaimo and Cumberland on Vancouver Island, those Washington mines fueled most steam ships on the West Coast, as well as the majority of railroad locomotives and coal gas plants west of the Sierras and Cascades

For a summary of the coal-related geology of western Washington, see http://www.washington.edu/uwired/outreach/cspn/Website/Course%20Index/Lessons/15/15.html

Though based far away in California, the newspaper seems to have had excellent sources in Washington.  Its staff may have known in advance that another attack on Coal Creek was planned for the day the above article was published.

In February 1888, the Chinese Legation in Washington DC felt it had enough information about the massacre to lodge a formal protest with the U. S. State Department.for those interested in seeing evidence that the imperial government was well-informed about events in the U. S. and that it consistently tried to protect its overseas citizens.  This contradicts claims of anti-Chinese writers that the rulers of China were indifferent to the sufferings of their overseas countrymen.

Why worry about such absurdities?  Because of why non-Chinese so often feel that legends of this kind are believable: because they are told that in China, in the past, life was cheap, and that Chinese North Americans were invisible to and ignored not only by white lawmen but also by the Chinese government and even by other Chinese immigrants.  The belief that no one cared about Chinese can still be found among European North Americans.  It was formerly accepted by numerous white Northwesterners and helps to explain why so many white thugs, not to mention stone-throwing white children, felt that violence against local Chinese could be indulged in without consequences.

It is easy to dismiss the legend of the railroad at the bottom of the Ontario lake.    Other legends, set in a more credible historical context, cannot be so readily dismissed without further study.  There are many such legends, and most turn out on examination to be unprovable or entirely mythical.  One example, that of Oregon"s Lily White mine, is discussed here.  The main myth-buster in this case is Dr. Priscilla Wegars, the founder of the Asian American Comparativer Collection at the University of Idaho in Moscow, with a comment by Dr. Chuimei Ho, co-editor of the Chinese in Northwest America Research Committee.

Another myth, we think, is the supposed massacre of 25 Chinese gold miners at Salmon le Sac near Roslyn, Washington, in 1880.  [Mary Gayford mentions it without references on page 79 of her generally accurateEastern Washington"s Past: Chinese and Other Pioneers]  As in the case of Deep Creek / Snake River, the disappearance of so many, even in an area as virulently anti-Chinese as Roslyn-Cle Elum, could not possibly have escaped notice by the regional Chinese community and the white media.

Quotation from Mr. Chang Yen Hoon"s [Engliosh-language] letter to Mr. Bayard, Washington, March 3, 1888, inPapers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, Part I.1889. No. 254, pp.389-90.

Sources:  Willard G. Jue Papers, University of Washington Libraries, Special Collection;  Seattle City Directory, 1887;  NARA Archive RS 26312 "Chin Shug", RS 17422 "Kie Qua".

Other anti-Chinese leaders are mentioned by Roger Sale in hisSeattle, Past and Present(1976).  The book is a credible source because its author, a University of Washington professor, sympathized with the anti-Chinese movement.  As shown by writings of Issaquahans and Tacomans in the 1930s, such sentiments were common enough before World War II.  Many Washingtonians probably still felt that way in the 1970s, but few except Sale seem to have said so in print.  Sale was sharply critical of the extreme pro-Chinese"Law and Order people,"including David Kenny and those who displayed the"moral arrogance of George Kinnear, R.S. Greene, and Cornelius Hansford,"not to mention"the pugnacious obtuseness of Thomas Burke."He wrote approvingly of such "sensible" individuals asSheriff John McGraw,J. C. Haines,John Keane,G. Venable Smith, andMary Kenworthy-- people who"were artisans and bourgeois, not themselves threatened by coolie labor, but caring nonetheless"about the (In Sale"s eyes, justifiable) anger of white workers faced with Chinese competition.[Sales 1976: 47-48

Another example is Seattle.  In 1886, Chin Gee Hee"s close business connections with such figures as Judge Thomas Burke, along with his influence at the Chinese ministry in Washington, was a key factor in persuading the white establishment to intervene against attempts to drive out Chinese residents[Note 6].,阮洽. one of Chin Gee Hee"s successors as leader of the Seattle Chinese community, played a similar role in the early 1900s.  Goon"s friendship with J. A. Chilberg, important businessman and president of the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, is mentioned.  In Chilberg"s words,   "We [Goon and I] became great and good friends until his passing, and to him I am indebted for most of my knowledge of Confucius and his teachings."[Note 7]

Note 9.  Goon Dip and Ella McBride:  Willard G Jue and Silas G Yue, "Goon Dip: Entrepreneur, Diplomat, and Community Leader,"  Chinese Historical Society of the Pacific Northwest, ca. 1990

Community leaders in Portland, Victoria, and Vancouver, and later in Seattle too, seem to have built bridges more often and effectively.  Coming from the same backgrounds as their East Coast counterparts, with only modest educations but much experience in buying from and selling to European-Americans, the fact that some were forced to maintain personal connections with white  businessmen may have averted some of the violence that plagued most of the West.  One example is Portland, where such figures as Seid Back and Moy Back Hin maintained consistently cordial relations with the neutral, rather than anti-Chinese, city government[Note 5]

The reasons varied.  In Idaho, the unusual even-handedness of the state courts, including the Idaho Supreme Court, played a major role[Note 1].  In British Columbia, violence was tempered by the fact that most courts and enforcement agencies were under central, rather than local, government control. In Chicago and New York, an important factor was the presence of numerous other immigrant ethnic groups, many of them as exotic and as seemingly non-assimilable as the Chinese[Note 2].  And in Portland and Seattle, and in Chicago and New York as well, another moderating influence was the presence of local Chinese leaders with the political and social skills needed to work closely with the European-American elite.

A tribute to Goon"s perceived influence in forwarding the interests of local Chinese comes from  a previously unrecognized source, the diplomatic archives of China as preserved at the Academia Sinica in Taiwan.  In a report by Wu Chang, a young diplomat sent out to Seattle from the embassy in Washington, Goon received full credit for this: "As far as the issue of the [Chinese] being poorly treated, this city does not seem to see many such instances.  This is because Honorary Consul Goon has been good at protecting [them].”will be found elsewhere on this website.[Note 8]

Colonel F. A. Bee, a European-American who served as consul under the Chinese consul-general in San Francisco, was one of those assigned to investigate the massacre.  His comments show that he was not only an effective spokesman and propagandist but also not immune to ethnic prejudices of his own.  The article itself, being published in Oregon, also shows that Northwestern agitators would have been well aware of the Rock Springs precedent when they began planning for Tacoma, Seattle, and other anti-Chinese violence in the Pacific Northwest

country by asking such a question as that. Thank God, no!  Most of them were laborers brought from Europe by the Union Pacific company to operate the mines. Cornwall and Wales furnished the major share.  Brutes who have lived underground from boyhood were the assassins.  Low-browed, square-jawed, ignorant and villainously visaged men, men whom you would fear to meet on a crowded street even if you were armed on both hips. Clubs and rocks aided the murderers, for when they found a wounded and helpless Chinaman, they dashed out his brains with the clubs or crushed in his skull with rocks. While the men were shooting the Chinese and firing cabins, the women were looting the vacated dwellings. There are, I should think about four hundred white men in the settlement. The women are bold and rude, and if a soldier strays away from camp the women stone him and howl at him until he is glad to beat a retreat." "

By February 1, it was clear to everyone that trouble was imminent.  Tacoma"s apparent success in getting rid of its Chinese had emboldened Seattle"s anti-Chinese crusaders.  They were now convinced that the federal government"s unsympathetic attitude, as shown by the arrests of Seattle-based agitators in the previous year, was just a pretense.  So they were pressing ahead openly with their expulsion campaign.

The consulate was virtually powerless under the circumstances, when anti-Chinese riots and expulsions were breaking out all over the American West.  However, it did respond with telegrams to the relevant American officials.  One of those telegrams is shown here.  Addressed to E. G. Squire, Governor of Washington Territory, it reads

In conformity with instructions from Washington through Chinese Legation to call your attention without delay to any threatened outrage upon Chinese in your territory we now kinform you that we are this day in receipt of information that Chinese in Seattle have been notified by the so-called Knights of Lablor to leave that place or take the consequences.  Will you please give your immediate attention to this matter

Owyang and Bee"s telegram may have done some good.  It must have helped to convince Squires, who had remained passive during the Tacoma expulsions the year before, that now he would have to play a more active role.  Washington was still a federal territory rather than a state.  This meant that Squires was appointed by and directly answerable to the government in Washington, D.C.   Keeping his job might not be easy if he continued to wink at anti-Chinese activity in the most important place under his charge.

European-Americans also paid other prices for violence against and exclusion of Chinese in the U.S.  One was a loss of reputation for justice that harmed America"s national standing in many other countries, European as well as Asian.  Another was damage to American economic interests as shown byin the 1890s as well as by the.

As late as the 1960s, local sentiment was still on the side of the murderers, several of whom had descendents in the Issaquah area.  An article published in 1962 by Edwards R. Fish and illustrated by Harriet Fish, "The Past at Present in Issaquah, Washington," summarizes the incident in this way:

The Fish article is on file at the Issaquah Historical Society.  Other data comes from  Brad Asher, "The Night They Came to Kill Chinamen,"Wild West Magazine,Leonard H. Mattingly"s "The Massacre at Wold Farm," in the Issaquah Historical Society"sNewsletter, 1992 andReport of the Governor of Washington Territory, made to the Secretary of the Interior, 1886, p. 51. Bessie Wilson Crane"s,Memoirs(1963), are available in a mimeograph version at the Issaquah Library, King County Library System.

This was not the first time that Chinese and Indian came into conflict over picking hops which, because of the high quality of the beer made from them, were an important commercial crop in western Washington.  In 1879, the following article appeared in a Seattle area newspaper

It has been puzzling to persons interested in Deep Creek that the Chinese of Portland, who had the largest Chinatown in the Northwest and who had closer contacts with Lewiston than Chinese in any other large city, did not react to the massacre.  Now it turns out that they did react.  In fact, they were the ones who originally informed San Francisco Chinese, and through them the Chinese and American national governments, that the massacre had occurred.  The local and state authorities in Idaho and in Oregon seem not to have felt obliged to inform anyone outside Idaho and Oregon.

Ho also researched Lewiston"s Beauk Aie Temple, one of the most intact Chinese temples in the Northwest. She believes the temple"s wooden artifacts, dated 1888, were purchased by the Chinese community as a way to cope with the murders.