When the AACP newsletter went on hiatus back at the beginning of 2011, the last person I interviewed was Priscilla Wegars (Dec. 2010). I’m glad to have another chance to touch bases with her and to interview her for this article.

Dr. Wegars is founder of the University of Idaho’s Asian American Comparative Collection (AACC). She is a renowned historian, archaeologist, and author of books on the Chinese and Japanese experience in the Northwestern United States.

Welcome!

Thanks so much for getting back in touch with us when we restarted the AACP newsletter. We’ve been hoping to do this interview for a while now, but due to scheduling issues on our end, we were not able to do this sooner. However, I’m very glad that the timing works out to coincide with Women’s History Month. What better feature to have than to be having a discussion with one of the eminent authorities on the Chinese American pioneer Polly Bemis (written about in novels such as Ruthanne Lum McCunn’s “Thousand Pieces of Gold” and a number of other books).

Your book contains an amazing amount of information on Polly Bemis and the context in which she lived. For our readers who have no knowledge of Polly Bemis, please briefly summarize who she was.

Polly Bemis, born in Northern China in late 1853, was forcibly brought to the United States, and to Warren, in Idaho Territory, in mid-1872 when she was not quite nineteen years old. In 1894 she married a Euroamerican man, Charlie Bemis, and they moved to a mining claim on the remote Salmon River. Charlie died in 1922 and Polly died in 1933.

I find that whenever I see a good biopic or read historical fiction, I wish to learn more about the real characters. For those that have read one or more of the books on Polly Bemis or perhaps have read or seen other things about her, what new things will they learn from reading your book (give us a hint to what they will find in it)?

Since her death, Polly Bemis's life has been greatly romanticized. Various sources have stated that she was a prostitute, that “Hong King” was her Chinese owner, that “Lalu Nathoy” was her Chinese name, and that Charlie Bemis “won her in a poker game.” Convincing proof is lacking for all of these statements.

Your new book is an amazing testament to your hard work in researching and compiling all there is to find on Polly and her husband Charlie Bemis.

When did you first become interested in learning more about her and what precipitated it?

After reading Ruthanne Lum McCunn’s fine book, Thousand Pieces of Gold (1981), and despite knowing that it was a biographical novel, as stated on the title page, I believed everything in it was true. Then in 1988 I helped a University of Idaho student find information on the Chinese in Idaho for a term paper. When finished, she gave the Asian American Comparative Collection (AACC) a copy of it. She had interviewed her uncle, Herb McDowell, who grew up in Warren, Idaho, and who knew Polly when he was a boy. He stated emphatically, “Polly wasn’t won in no poker game!,” and his explanation was more believable than the legend. That started me wondering what else about Polly might be a legend or even a myth.

When you set off on your project, did you have certain goals in mind? Were there aspects to Polly’s life that you wanted to uncover and where were you successful and not? What mysteries of her life remain for you and may never be known?

The main goal was to see whether I could separate the truth about Polly Bemis from the myths and legends about her. Mainly, was she a prostitute, was her Chinese owner’s name “Hong King,” was her name “Lalu Nathoy,” and was she “won in a poker game”? I believe that I have successfully confronted and challenged those legends about her life. I appreciate that others may differ with my interpretations of the materials available to us. Still, I hope I have persuaded readers to at least be more skeptical of some of the supposed "facts" about Polly Bemis's life, while recognizing that other information may yet emerge that would resolve these main questions more satisfactorily.

Your book is not just about Polly, but also a great deal about the time and places she lived in, and about the people she knew. When there are often few primary sources on the main subject to draw upon, why is it important to give all the background context?

Yes, Polly is in very few primary sources, and the secondary sources that mention her often perpetuate the myths about her, and sometimes embellish those or even create newer tales. Fortunately, she frequently appears in diaries kept by her neighbor, Charlie Shepp, and those mentions, together with details of Shepp’s ranch life, extended to the Bemises, enhance our knowledge of Polly’s life and times. Also, Chinese customs helped explain some details of Polly’s life, such as her once-bound feet, and the fact that she appears in the 1880 census, surprisingly, as a widow.

Your writing at times reads like a mystery where the protagonist (you) is uncovering clues and following the paper trail. Is that how you felt and is that par for the course for historical researchers? Your work reminds me of the movie “Zodiac” where the reporter doggedly tries to figure out the identity of the mass murderer. Anyone who has done family or historical research of any kind would find your book fascinating, especially chapter nine, where you reveal the myths and inaccuracies to Polly’s story.

You’re right – “Finding Your Roots” is one of my favorite TV programs! Besides being a historian, I’m also a historic archaeologist, and these days I do little “digging in the dirt” and much more “digging in the documents,” i.e., hunting down clues in libraries, in newspapers on microfilm, in county records, in photographic archives, and more. It was always exciting to discover some new fact about Polly, but I was especially thrilled to locate several photographs of her that probably hadn’t been seen since they were given, years ago, to the various repositories that now house them.

Since there is a relative ease of the creation of inaccuracies, and the propagation of these untruths take on a life of their own, does that make it harder to uncover the truth about Polly Bemis? For example, you devoted a good portion of time trying to prove that the winning of Polly in a poker game by Charlie Bemis was a myth – you successfully show that many of these stories seem to be exaggerations of a few questionable tellings of her story. However, it also seems impossible to disprove that no part of this story was true. I particularly find author Walter Mih’s speculation plausible – that Polly was turned over to Charlie Bemis to pay off debts (possibly gambling) when Polly’s owner was leaving town. However, without further evidence, this can only be a good guess at best.

In one place in the book, when discussing the speculation surrounding Polly’s original name, I mention the principle of “Occam’s (or Ockham’s) Razor, meaning that the most obvious answer is usually the correct one. (The “razor” cuts through the unlikely answers.) Admittedly, some explanations are the most likely, i.e., the “best guess.” For example, with regard to the “won in a poker game” story, there is no evidence to show that the tale began at the time the event supposedly occurred, compared with quite a lot of evidence to show that it was made up later.

One other account that I read mentioned that Polly had a pet cougar. I don’t recall reading about it in your book – I may have missed it. Is there any truth to that story? I know your book mentioned that she had pet cats. Could one of these pet cat stories have been exaggerated to the point where it was turned into a cougar? Living in a rather remote corners of Idaho, did they befriend wild animals?

The mention of the Bemises’ pet cougar is on p. 222 of the book. It does seem to be true, from the accounts of people who saw it. Amusingly, our Moscow, Idaho, newspaper sometimes reports “cougar sightings” in town but these “cougars” are invariably pet cats, as you suggest. (We currently have several visiting moose, though!) I don’t recall anything in Charlie Shepp’s diaries of them befriending wild animals, although when Polly lived in Warren, she raised a nest of baby robins. “When they found fresh meat at a nearby market … they spent so much time there that a French clerk killed them. This made Polly very angry” (p. 284).

When did Polly’s life start to become of interest to the general public and do you think the myths of her being a prostitute who was won in a poker game help to sensationalize her story? Did race play a major factor in the popularity of her story in that she was seen as an exotic Asian that was being saved by a Euroamerican (the term that you used throughout the book to differentiate the Chinese from the non-Chinese)?

Did her relative isolation from the Chinese American community (possibly because of her regional, cultural, and language differences from the other Chinese that immigrated to the US during the 1800s) and her proximity to Euroamericans help to bring her story more attention – allowed the non-Chinese to get to know her much better? In October 1921 Outing magazine ran a story that mentioned Polly, and in June 1923 an interview with her appeared in the magazine Field and Stream. Both of these would have brought her to the attention of a national audience. Locally, she seems to have had “novelty value.” Polly was a Chinese woman who was married to a Euroamerican man, she was not sequestered in the home as were the few other Chinese women who lived in Idaho at that time, she spoke English well, and was friendly and approachable. People wanted to know her and they wanted to be her friend. This is quite astonishing considering the amount of prejudice that most Chinese individuals endured at that time, yet Polly was invited into Euroamerican homes, even overnight.

Yes, that is pretty amazing for those times. Polly lived in a part of Idaho that was not far from the 1887 Hells Canyon massacre where as many as 34 Chinese miners were brutally killed by Euroamericans. Could you find any news coverage and reaction in Warren of the massacre? How did Polly’s community react and what evidence of racism did you find locally?

The Snake River Massacre occurred in late May 1887. Yes, “as the crow flies,” it is “not far” from Warren, but the areas were separated geographically from one another and transportation was mainly by foot and horseback. Even people in Lewiston, Idaho, didn’t learn about the massacre until June, when bodies of the murdered Chinese miners washed downstream and were recovered. Although Warren didn’t have a newspaper of its own, people did subscribe to newspapers from communities such as Lewiston, but, sadly, the non-Chinese population was likely to have taken little notice of the massacre of Chinese miners, and the Chinese population would have been less likely to have learned of it at all.

However, there certainly was racism locally. In November 1879, two Warren Chinese men were lynched, reportedly for robbing a miner’s cabin (pp. 24-25). The editor of the Lewiston newspaper suggested that “some new men must have come to the camp,” because he could not think of a single Warren resident who could possibly commit such an atrocity.

Your book mentions the changing demographics of Warren over time and how Chinese sometimes outnumbered Euroamericans. Because of this imbalance and possibly the remoteness, do you believe that the Euroamericans in Polly’s community learned to get along with the Chinese a little better just out of the need to survive? In some remote communities such as Truckee, California, the Chinese and Euroamerican communities were quite at odds with one another. Was Warren more civil or more like Truckee?

Yes, I do think that, for the most part, the Warren Chinese and non-Chinese residents interacted peacefully with one another, especially during times when the Chinese in Warren comprised over 80% of the inhabitants of that community, and later when the few remaining Chinese had lived there for many years. In the late 1920s and the early 1930s, for example, Jung Chew, the Chinese man called “Ah Sam” and “China Sam,” was “greatly respected and loved by all Warren residents” (p. 216). The film, “Thousand Pieces of Gold,” which fictionalizes Polly Bemis’s life, ends with the Chinese being run out of Warren. Although similar events did happen in other Idaho communities, it never happened in Warren.

I like your use of researcher Kathleen Whalen Fry’s comment (I’ll paraphrase it so I won’t have to footnote and get permission for it here :) – that Polly’s life story should not be sensationalized and objectified above all other Chinese American pioneer immigrants. Her story is just a part of the larger Chinese immigration experience. At the same time, you use J. Loyal Adkison’s account that Polly did stand out. In your own statement, you say “Polly Bemis’s own history is genuinely fascinating; she was a remarkable person whose life doesn’t need embellishment.” One last opportunity – what made Polly so fascinating and remarkable?

People often ask me, what makes Polly Bemis so famous? I think it is because she represents all the forgotten Chinese women who came to the United States during the late 19th century, women who arrived often unwillingly, without knowing English, and with no prospect of ever returning home. While here, these women faced racial prejudice from Euroamerican people and sexual discrimination from Chinese men. Polly Bemis lived in Idaho for over 60 years. During that time, her strength of character enabled her to rise above adversity, winning respect and admiration from everyone who knew her. Despite the ambiguities and contradictions about Polly's life that still remain, there is one thread that joins all the sources together. In one way or another, they have all said, "Polly was a wonderful person, and everybody loved her."

Thank you very much for this chance to interview you and for your answers! Congratulations on your years of hard work.

Thank you for this opportunity to introduce Polly Bemis to your readers!