By Ron Brown
 
April 23, 2010
 
JACKSONVILLE, Ore. - Today, Jacksonville is a mecca for tourists looking for some of the Old West mining town experience.
 
160 years ago, it was a magnet for miners and merchants hoping to make a fortune in the Oregon territory. Among those were hundreds of Chinese miners.
 
"There were thousands. There was a lot of people here. In fact, in the 1870s there were more Chinese miners than there were Euro-American miners," Southern Oregon University Archeologist Chelsea Rose said.
 
They didn't have much status, but they were willing to work over what other miners left behind, and some got very wealthy at it. Mining boss Gin Lin is said to have deposited one-million dollars in gold at Beekman's Bank over the years before he returned to China. He was an early advocate of hydraulic mining, and it paid off very well.
 
"When everybody kind of moved out of an area and thought it wasn't worth anything, that's when the Chinese miners came in, and they were very successful in reworking old tailing piles that other people thought didn't have any value," Rose said.
 
In fact, they weren't allowed to file new claims, but could only buy a claim nobody else wanted. Most Chinese were bachelors and common laborers who mined, built railroads and did the hard, heavy work that laid the economic foundation for the west in the last half of the 19th century.
 
"As a unit, they were pretty discriminated against, for sure. And after the racial tensions really started to ramp up in the late 19th century, most Chinese, if not all, in Southern Oregon would have fled to the larger, urban Chinatowns in Portland or San Francisco where there was more safety in numbers," Rose said.
 
Much of Jacksonville's Chinese populated settled in what is now the La Fiesta Mexican Restaurant. Those buildings burned down more than a hundred years ago, and even the graves in the cemetery are now gone.
 
State and federal laws by the early 1880s banned new immigration of Chinese, and led to efforts in several cities the run the Chinese out. Some followed the next gold rush and that led many to Idaho and Northeast Oregon.
 
In 1887 a group of about three dozen Chinese miners from Lewiston, Idaho pushed up the Snake River to what is now Wallowa County, Oregon. Working in the deepest canyon in North America, they likely gleaned several thousand dollars in gold dust.
 
Beginning on May 25th, 1887 A group of local ruffians, horse thieves and school boys ambushed the miners from the rocky bluffs above, took their gold, and dumped their bodies in the Snake River. Former Oregonian Writer Gregory Nokes has written a book about the case that sometimes presented more questions than answers. It's called Massacred for Gold.
 
"One of the questions that I had as I went into this book is, 'why did the killers kill the Chinese?' They could have just as easily taken their gold. Would've been so easy for the miners to just have taken their gold and said, 'sorry boys. see you'. And who would the Chinese complain to or cared? Well, the answer can only be that it was a savage act of racial hatred. Not only did they take the gold, but they killed the Chinese too and threw their bodies in the river. To me that's one of the saddest parts of this story. That's the racial element to the story, because those Chinese did not have to be killed," Nokes said.
 
Three of the suspects were tried and acquitted, but the ringleaders skipped the state and may have taken the gold, or most of it, with them. They were all known, but were never taken to trial. n fact, one of them is honored on a bronze plaque at the Wallowa County Courthouse.
 
"I just kind of glanced at them the first couple times. But then one time I looked a little closer, as I became more interested in the story, naturally, and noticed "B.E. Evans" name and some of the honored settlers on the memorial arch. And I thought, 'how bizarre. This is the same Blue Evans, Bruce E. Evans, who was a leader of the gang of killers, escaped felons, leader of a gang of horse thieves, bail jumper, the whole bit. And yet, the county saw fit to honor him years later and did nothing to honor the Chinese," Nokes said.
 
Nokes' book did lead to federal recognition of the massacre site, even over the objection of county commissioners. It's now called Chinese Massacre Cove.
 
"Which is, as far as I know, the first official recognition that the crime ever actually occurred," Nokes said.
 
Now that the site is named, efforts are underway to place a bronze marker near the site to explain what happened and to honor the victims, who likely never understood why they were gunned down more than 120 years ago.