How Chinese women were barred from the American dream

Listen to The real American frontier, part 2, with Megan Kate Nelson

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When in 1921 American newspaper heiress Countess Eleanor Gizycka, on a tour of the West, docked her boat on a private beach on the banks of the Salmon River, she was stunned to be welcomed by a petite Chinese woman, 67 years old, "neat as a pin, wrinkled as a walnut". She was known to all her neighbours in this patch of Idaho, where she'd lived for nearly half a century, as Polly Bemis.

There was something of the uncanny in the sight of an elderly Chinese woman on the American frontier. It did not match the story of the West that Eleanor and the rest of the country had been told. After she wrote up the encounter for popular outdoors magazine Field and Stream , Polly became famous.

By then America had completely forgotten that during the conquest of the West, there had been whole frontier towns that were almost entirely Chinese.

In 1850, word of the California gold rush had reached Southern China, where times had been difficult, and soon tens of thousands of Chinese men had crossed the Pacific. Almost immediately, California imposed a tax on foreign miners that made it impossible for Chinese men to profit as their white peers did. When the California veins that could easily be mined by single men without much capital investment dried out, men fanned out across the West. In 1864, a few were hired on a trial basis to build the transcontinental railroad – jobs that white Americans shunned because they could make more money in mining. Within five years, Chinese men were the majority workforce on the railroads, their transport and employment organised by a professionalised network of recruiters, contractors and logistics firm on both sides of the Pacific. Nearly 20,000 Southern Chinese men worked for the Central Pacific Railroad Company alone in 1869, laying the tracks between Sacramento and Utah – the largest single workforce employed by a private enterprise in American history.

1. Joseph Becker, "Across the Continent. The snow sheds on the Central Pacific Railroad in the Sierra Nevada Mountains." Originally printed in Frank junnjoewspaper, Vol. 29, February 6, 1870, p. 346. 2. Nearly 20,000 Chinese men were working for the Central Pacific Railroad Company building the Western leg of the transcontinental railroad when it was completed in 1869 – the largest workforce then ever assembled for an American private enterprise. They are completely absent from the ceremonial driving of the last spike on 10 May 1869, which symbolically completed the making of the United States. (Both public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.)

Chinese women followed, though never in as significant a number. San Francisco in 1872 had 1,000 Chinese women for 11,000 Chinese men, out of a total population of 150,000. Polly Bemis landed in the city that year from Guangdong. A sailboat down the Pearl River, a steamship from Hong Kong to San Francisco, another north to Portland and the Oregon Territory. Her parents had sold her at 18 to feed the rest of the family. She was spared San Francisco's brothels but may have been sold as a wife to a Chinese man. The record is unclear. Women were still traded and transported on American soil years after Abolition. What was human trafficking, what was sex work (whether consensual or not) and what was a monetised arranged marriage is hard to distinguish from a distance of 150 years.

Polly settled in Warren, Idaho, a remote mining town up in the mountains. In the 1880 census, the town had 470 residents, 80% of them Chinese men. It was already declining from its peak. (Today, it's got a dozen year-round residents, a Chinese cemetery and a crumbling frontier town aesthetic.) Polly, one of just five women and the only Chinese one, was listed as a widow – perhaps of the man who purchased her. She was with another man now, Charles Bemis, and together they ran a boarding house for workers. The town called her Mrs Bemis, but they weren't technically married for a while yet. The law wouldn't allow that because he was white and she was not.

Polly and Charles Bemis by their cabin. (Idaho State Archives, P1962-44-4 and P1962-44-5)

After the financial panic and recession of 1873, white Americans had grown increasingly resentful of Chinese immigrants. The transcontinental railroad had been completed, the economy was bad, why were they still here? There had been lynchings, even in Warren.

In 1875, Congress passed the Page Act, the first federal statute specifically designed to curtail immigration – but under the guise of fighting human trafficking. It banned the immigration of anyone from Asia (and Asia alone) who was involved in forced labour, as well as people from any country with a criminal conviction. The Page Act introduced the policing of immigrant women's sexuality. Enforcement was near exclusively targeted at East Asian women, and especially Chinese women, "few of whom are brought to our shores to pursue honourable or useful occupations", according to President Ulysses S. Grant. They were all assumed prostitutes.

In truth, many Chinese women who were entering the US were intended as companions for Chinese men – as concubines, second wives, future wives... – but not necessarily to work as prostitutes. Candidates for emigration were subjected to repeated interrogations, bodily examinations and the whims of bureaucrats. Chinese women, not men, were the first immigrant group subjected to photographic identification. It was only they and criminals. This resulted in the near-total exclusion of Chinese women from the American dream. In 1882, 39,443 Chinese men entered the United States. Only 136 Chinese women did.

The Page Act had the exact opposite effect of its stated intent. By excluding Chinese women, it made it impossible for Chinese men, who could not realistically marry in any other ethnic group, to find partners and start families. It pushed them to brothels. It incentivised young men to go home and prevented the establishment of a US-born, ethnically Chinese population. With more white babies born, the population of Warren began to shift. I wonder what whispers Polly may have heard from her own community for choosing a white man. But by all accounts, she and Charles were beloved by their neighbours, Chinese and white. They married with a few friends as witnesses in the living room of their house in 1894.

1. Polly Bemis in her wedding dress, 1895. (Idaho State Archives, P1975-228-43h) 2. Court proceedings against Polly for failing to register as a Chinese immigrant by the deadline set under the Geary Act. This could have earned her deportation, but she successfully argued that she had been waiting for the promised visit of a federal agent to her remote mountain town.

Polly got in under the wire. But in 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which suspended all Chinese immigration for 10 years and barred any Chinese person from becoming naturalised as a US citizen. Though Polly saw the passage of women's suffrage, she never could vote. As a pre-1880 arrival, she was allowed to stay in the country but could not travel freely without identification. Her status was precarious, her safety always in question. In 1892, the Geary Act extended the Chinese Exclusion Act for another 10 years and went further. It required all Chinese people to carry photographic registration certificates, or risk prison and deportation. The Geary Act is the only reason we have the above photograph of Polly Bemis. A photographer traveled to Warren to register all Chinese-born residents.

With immigrants deported or discouraged, mining in decline and the impossibility of Chinese births, the Chinese population on the frontier shrunk. There were still about 100,000 in 1890, but white Americans had taken control of both the land and the narrative. It's no wonder that a whole generation later, in a land of aeroplanes, cinemas and radio sets, where the frontier was already a national myth, coming across an elderly Chinese woman living in a remote mountain camp that had dwindled to just 131 inhabitants would have struck Eleanor as odd and worthy of a write-up. Though Polly was one of those who had built the American West, she hadn't been allowed into its story. She lived long enough to see women's suffrage – to her 80th birthday in 1933 – but she couldn't cast a vote. She was never considered an American.

Polly Bemis and her dog Teddy. (Idaho State Archives, P1975-228-43e)

Learn more

Most of the information in this article is drawn from The Westerners , by Megan Kate Nelson, my guest on the podcast this week. I very warmly recommend her book; it reads like a novel.

UK readers will have to import it, which unfortunately is only feasible on Amazon right now. Or walk into your favourite bookshop and ask.

What next

The podcast is taking a short break while I prepare the summer series on the American revolution... and the future of Broad History beyond it. A series on witch trials for the autumn, a history of mysogyny (because honestly, it baffles me too, where does that even come from?) Ideas abound, I just need a minute of quiet to make them happen. I'll still be in your inboxes occasionally – especially if you're a supporting member... and I've got a couple guests in the wings who may not wait. So I'll talk to you... soon.

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