Rampant Racism Anti-Chinese Violence Left 31 Dead, But No One Ever Was Convicted

One body washed up above Lewiston. It had a bullet hole in its back and two ax wounds to the head.

Another body, found farther down the Snake River at the current site of Lower Granite Dam, had two gunshots in the back. A severed head and arm, possibly the victim’s, were wrapped in a coat and tied with a belt around his waist.

About the same time, a group of Chinese miners turned up in Lewiston and reported a scene of carnage and destruction some 60 miles upstream in the remote Hells Canyon wilderness.

More than a century later, the so-called “Chinese Massacre of 1887” is a historical footnote compared with the fresh memory of the Fairchild Air Force Base massacre in which, a year ago this week, Dean Mellberg killed four people and wounded 22 others.

Yet, the Chinese massacre clearly ranks as one of the bloodiest in the history of the American West, let alone the Inland Northwest, and as one of the nation’s worst acts of anti-Chinese violence.

The best estimate holds that 31 Chinese were killed over two days.

“It was the most coldblooded, cowardly treachery I have ever heard tell of on this Coast, and I am a California ‘49er,” wrote J.K. Vincent, justice of the peace for the Idaho Territory’s Nez Perce County, who was hired to investigate the killings. “Every one of them was shot, cut up, stripped and thrown in the river.”

An investigation prompted by the Chinese government - but slowed in part by local disinterest - ended with the indictment of six men for the murders. Three stood trial. None was found guilty.

The obvious motive: gold.

But David Stratton, a Washington State University historian and a leading authority on the killings, attributes the murders and the acquittal of the suspects to the antiChinese sentiment sweeping across the West at the time.

In 1887, the dark basalt cliffs of Hells Canyon, the deepest gorge in America, were home to little more than horse thieves and foolhardy wayfarers.

The Nez Perce had given up the region only 10 years earlier, fleeing with Chief Joseph in an epic flight to Canada that ended with their surrender in Montana.

Soon after they left, Thomas Douglas became the area’s first white settler, securing land where Joseph’s Wallowa Band crossed the Snake. He was shot and killed in an ambush in 1883, leaving as a legacy a legend of gold bars that he left behind and a misspelled namesake, Dug Bar.

The land wasn’t worth much - if it had been, Chinese would not have been allowed in.

With the decline of the major railway projects, the Chinese were unwelcome in most other lines of work.

Congress was passing laws against their immigration and nationalization, and Chinese were being killed in labor disputes and anti-Chinese riots in Tacoma, Seattle and elsewhere.

But as white prospectors picked over the meager mineral wealth of the Hells Canyon, Chinese saw steady work in their wake. It was slim pickings, with miners going through a pile of sand twice the size of a house to glean an ounce of gold. In the process, the Chinese developed a reputation of being able to wrest huge amounts of ore from the leanest of ground. It was this stereotype, Stratton surmises, that led a group of outlaw cowboys to plunder the isolated Dug Bar camp that Chea Po established for the Sam Yup Co. in the spring of 1887.

At the head of the band was Bruce “Old Blue” Evans, reputed robber and brand switcher, and his fellow rustlers, J.T. Canfield and C.O. “Homer” LaRue.

Frank Vaughn, Carl Hughes and Hiram Maynard were local cowboys, while Robert McMillan was a 15-year-old who, Stratton says, “apparently had fallen into bad company.”

On a day in late May, by Stratton’s reckoning, Vaughn stayed back at the old Douglas cabin to cook dinner while McMillan took the horses and Hughes and Maynard were posted up-and downstream to act as lookouts.

With Canfield and LaRue standing on the rim of Robinson Gulch and Evans below, the trio opened fire on the unsuspecting miners with high-powered rifles.

The Chinese struggled to escape, but trapped by the canyon walls, they were picked off one by one.

When their ammunition ran out, Evans, Canfield and LaRue broke one miner’s arm in an apparent attempt to make him reveal where gold was hidden. He broke free and tried to escape in a boat, but the men caught him and beat out his brains with a rock.

He was the 10th and last man killed that day.

The following day, the three men returned with more ammunition and killed eight more Chinese as they arrived by boat. The men then went four miles downstream to another camp and killed and mutilated another 13 men.

Bodies turned up for months, washing ashore as far away as Penawawa, 100 miles downstream in Washington’s Whitman County.

As word of the murders spread, the Chinese minister to the United States demanded justice. Local authorities either didn’t care or were stymied by the limits of their jurisdictions. The Lewiston sheriff said he was willing to make arrests, but had no authority to go into Oregon, where the murders occurred.

At one point, before the details of the murder were well known, “Old Blue” Evans, the ringleader, was in the Wallowa County Jail on a rustling charge. But he escaped by sticking up Sheriff’s Deputy Thomas Humphries with a gun left by a friend in the jail outhouse.

He disappeared, possibly to Montana.

J.T. Canfield was sent back to recover the loot and convert it to coin. He was either murdered by his companions or made off with the cache, valued at anywhere from $1,000 to $55,500.

Homer LaRue, the third of the chief culprits, disappeared and was rumored to have been killed playing poker in California.

Finally, J.K. Vincent, hired by the Sam Yup Company to track down the killers, coerced Vaughn into turning state’s evidence against his six cohorts. The three local men were charged with the killings and jailed without bail.

They had substantial support. According to the Wallowa County Chieftain, Hughes, Maynard and McMillan were released after 33 “tax-paying, house-holding” county residents said they were being held illegally.

Tried in August 1888, the three men lay the blame for the murders on Evans, Canfield and LaRue, who were nowhere to be found. They were acquitted.

Years later, George Craig, a local stockman who attended the trial, chalked up the verdicts to simple racism.

“I guess if they had killed 31 white men, something would have been done about it,” he said. “But none of the jury knew the Chinamen or cared much about it, so they turned the men loose.”

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