Intrigue Continues for 1887's Unsolved Murders

The unsolved murders of more than 30 Chinese gold miners in Oregon's Hells Canyon in 1887 drew two dozen guests to the High Desert Museum on a snowy night last week. They came to hear how an author unearthed evidence pointing to an improbable gang of rustlers and schoolboys, one age 15, as the killers. R. Gregory Nokes, who traveled the world as a reporter and editor, talked about the facts he uncovered about the crimes while writing the book Massacred for Gold: The Chinese in Hells Canyon.

The Chinese gold miners at Deep Creek near the Snake River were killed during two days in 1887. A gang of about six – or possibly seven – local horse thieves saw the Asian immigrants collecting the gold before robbing and murdering them. The killings went unnoticed until bodies began to be found along the shores of the Snake River near Lewiston, Idaho. A man turned in six alleged murderers, but claimed that he had nothing to do with it. The six were arrested, but three escaped. A jury of non-Chinese found the remaining three not guilty.

The event was forgotten until a transcript of the trial surfaced in 1995. When Nokes read about the discovery, he wrote about it for The Oregonian. Nokes continued investigating, drawing upon his experience as a reporter for The Associated Press, where he was chief state department correspondent in Washington, and covered Presidents Ford, Carter and Reagan.

The images of memorial ceremonies at the site, officially named Chinese Massacre Cove, were poignant. A Nez Perce medicine man’s cleansing ceremony included chanting and sage burning. Chinese participants honored the victims by burning paper offerings so that the smoke would carry the message to the heavens.

Museum Volunteer Thomas McDannold covered Nokes’ talk for High Desert Musings. McDannold, emeritus professor at Ventura College, who has written extensively about the Chinese in the West, presents Oregon’s Chinese Heritage: A Legacy of Places, about Oregon’s ethnic history, April 2 at 2 pm at the High Desert Museum.

Ellen Waterston, award-winning author of Where the Crooked River Rises, talks tomorrow at 2 pm about how her book reveals the blessings and challenges of decades spent as a rancher, and how the High Desert is her teacher. She describes its lessons with grace and care, inviting readers to look at their own lives through a lens of wide-open spaces, sagebrush and juniper, pumice and rabbit brush.

She captures the otherness to the High Desert, its momentous, sacredness in the purity of the silence. Her latest book is a compelling collection of personal essays that illuminates the people, places, and landscape of Central Oregon's vast High Desert.

"Ellen Waterston's new book is a slug of juniper air, a breath-taking view of a rough-edged land, as bracing and taut as October mornings—part celebration, part elegy, all love and the wisdom that grows from deep roots in basalt rock. Like Wallace Stegner and Ivan Doig, Waterston writes masterfully about what it means—what it really means—to live in the West.”
—Kathleen Dean Moore, author of Wild Comfort

Waterston is the author of two collections of poetry, Between Desert Seasons and I Am Madagascar, both of which won the WILLA Award for Poetry in 2009 and 2005 respectively. Her memoir Then There Was No Mountain was selected by The Oregonian as one of the top ten books in 2003 and was a finalist for Foreword Book-of-the-Year. She is founder and president of the Writing Ranch and founder and director of The Nature of Words. Waterston ranched in Oregon’s High Desert before moving to Bend, Oregon.

Icy Dip for Otter Specialist

The next time you're having fun watching our river otter, Thomas, frolic in his outdoor pond, you may appreciate it more after reading this. The glass that lets you see Thomas swim and flip-turn above and below water needs to be kept clean, even in winter. Ever wonder how we do it? You may not have guessed hip waders, a fly fishing float tube and a 10-foot-long squeegee, but that was the solution that Wildlife Specialist Jennifer Zalewski thought up.

Yesterday, after the Museum closed, Zalewski embarked on a frosty mission. Thomas was snug in his den as she walked through snow and entered the pond. After a few steps, she was afloat, the inflated ring about her wader-clad waist. Squeegee-paddling and moving her legs toward the window at the far edge of the pond, she wished she’d brought her flippers. Her walkie-talkie, on a rock beside the pond, crackled with a comment from Jim Dawson, curator of living collections. “It looks like a space walk,” he said, watching her through the window inside the exhibit viewing space.

“Brrrr!” said Zalewski, now with goose bumps on her wet arms in the 40-degree air.

“I owe you a beer for this,” Dawson said via radio. He pointed to spots on the glass for her to swipe with the squeegee. She scrubbed at a spot where Thomas had rubbed his nose. “I have such a great team,” he said. “They are all really dynamic.”

Zalewski has a master's degree in wildlife biology. She has done extensive field study of otters, but has never worked anywhere with a live otter exhibit – much less cleaned any of them. She made it look easy. The glass was sparkling, but not time to run for that beer just yet.

Next task: remove several coins visitors had thrown (against Museum policy) into the pond. Wielding an 18-inch grabbing device, Zalewski plunged her arm into the ice cold pond. It took a few tries. “Got it!” she exclaimed.

She emerged, smiling and triumphant, and changed into warm clothes. Just another day in the life of a Museum wildlife specialist.

A Lunchtime Conversation – True Grit on the Oregon Trail

She sits on the tongue of the wagon with her back to us. We cannot see her face, but by the way she slumps forward, we know she is weary – perhaps even in despair. This emigrant woman on the Oregon Trail is waiting for her husband, who went off to search for water.

He had unyoked the oxen, and the wagon wheels lay on the ground beside his hammer and blacksmithing tools. When he comes back, he’ll shim the metal rims back tight against the wooden wheels until they reach a place with enough water to soak the wood tight again. He has to do this every day, sometimes more than once, depending upon the kind of ground they come upon.

They are not “no account” people. They had owned a farm in Illinois until the banks failed and nothing was worth what it had been. The only choice was to sell what they could and leave everything they knew. That was as hard as the times that had come down upon them.

They aren’t alone in this fix. People from all over the country and even from all over the world are doing the same. Many of them are on this same trail walking to good green country in Oregon. They talk different, but otherwise, she allows, they are pretty much the same.

She and her husband have been walking beside the wagon for five months now, on the Southern route of the Oregon Trail. They call it the Applegate Trail after that poor family that capsized coming down the Columbia and got their sons drowned. It was good of them to come back after reaching comfort in the Willamette Valley to find a safer trail west and to spare other families the same tragedy.

In the next six weeks, they will walk across the Great Basin, a fearful land of high desert and higher mountains, long on dust and short on water. They have to get there before winter sets in. On a good day, they cover 15 miles.

She keeps her kitchen toolbox, butter churn and flour barrel set neatly by the wagon when the wheels are off. We hope that her good dishes are still packed in the flour barrel. Castoff items littering the trail nearby show that other emigrant women were not lucky enough to keep even a few pretty things from home.

Her baby cries inside the wagon, where we can see a quilt, made during her easier life. We know she’ll tend to the child before unpacking her dishes box and sets to fixing lunch. But right now, she just needs a moment.

At the Spirit of the West exhibit, we are privileged to share that moment with her and to witness her grit and gumption to do whatever is necessary, no matter how hard. The Living History volunteer who portrays the emigrant woman, dressed in period clothing and surrounded by authentic artifacts, is just one of the people visitors may encounter in the Hall of Exploration and Settlement.

Every day, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., a different character is in one of eight re-created 1880s scenes, from a settlement town and fur trader encampment to a placer mine. They subtly invite conversations about their stories – by what is seen and often, more powerfully, by what is unseen.

Written by Living History Volunteer Susie Linford.