The Poker Bride: The First Chinese in the Wild West

by Christopher Corbett

Overview

When Gold Rush fever gripped the globe in 1849, thousands of Chinese came through San Francisco to seek fortune. In The Poker Bride, Christopher Corbett uses a legend of one extraordinary woman as a lens into this experience. Before 1849, the Chinese in the United States were little more than curiosities. But as word spread of gold in California, San Francisco's labyrinthine Chinatown sprang up, a city-within-a-city full of exotic foods and strange smells where Chinese women were smuggled into the country. At this time Polly, a young Chinese concubine, was brought by her owner to a remote mining camp in the highlands of Idaho, where he lost her in a poker game. Polly and her new owner then settled at an isolated ranch on the banks of the Salmon River. As the Gold Rush receded, it took with it the Chinese miners, but left behind Polly, who would make headlines when — as an old woman — she emerged from the Idaho hills nearly half a century later to tell her astounding story. The Poker Bride reconstructs a tale of the real American West: a place where the first Chinese flooded the country and left their mark long after the craze for gold had vanished.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802145277
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	02/08/2011
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	1,054,571
Product dimensions:	5.32(w) x 8.22(h) x 0.68(d)

About the Author

Christopher Corbett is the author of Orphans Preferred: The Twisted Truth and Lasting Legend of the Pony Express, as well as a novel, Vacationland. He teaches journalism at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

Table of Contents

Preface xi

1 Celestials and Sojourners 1

2 Chinatown 27

3 Sold 45

4 Coming into the Territory 63

5 The End of the Road ... Warrens 83

6 Soiled Doves 105

7 Fond of Playing Cards 121

8 The Shooting Affray in Warrens 135

9 Saving Polly 151

10 Last Days on the River 169

Epilogue The Caravan of the Dead: Ghosts of the Oro Fino 185

Acknowledgments 199

Bibliography 203

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Christopher Corbett has brought home a tale delicate and sad and not a little bit heroic, and in doing so he has rescued from oblivion an extraordinary chapter of the immigrant experience in America. With The Poker Bride and his earlier reconsideration of the Pony Express, Orphans Preferred, Corbett has established himself as a fresh and thoughtful voice in the historical realm of the American West.”—David Simon, author of Homicide: A Life on the Killing Streets and producer of The Wire

“In The Poker Bride, Christopher Corbett delves deep into the soul of the real old west, using the story of one Chinese ‘sojourner’—a young woman named Polly—as the thread to link a thousand pearls of fact and lore and whatever you call those fragments of story that lie somewhere in between. All I can say is, Twain would be proud.”—Erik Larson, author of The Devil in the White City

“There is no alkali dust in these pages. The Poker Bride is a gorgeously written and brilliantly researched saga of America during the mad flush of its biggest Gold Rush. Christopher Corbett’s genius is to anchor his larger story of Chinese immigration around a poor concubine named Polly. A tremendous achievement.”—Douglas Brinkley, author of The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast

“In Corbett’s expert hands, the extraordinary story of Polly Bemis, the unlettered Chinese concubine lost in a poker game, acquires tragic grandeur without losing any of its comical unpredictability.”—Christoph Irmscher, author of The Poetics of Natural History, Longfellow Redux and Public Poet, Private Man

“Utilizing his skills as a literary detective to piece together this saga of boom times during the Gold Rush, Christopher Corbett introduces us to one of the more beguiling characters to emerge from the Wild West. He tells the story of Polly Bemis—the poker bride—with panache, sensitivity, and wondrous detail.”—Wil Haygood, author of In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis, Jr.

“The Poker Bride offers a compelling look at a largely invisible—and mostly unremembered—population of the mid-19th century American West: Chinese laborers and prostitutes. In chronicling the life of one Chinese girl who was sold into slavery, brought to Idaho, and ceded to a man during a poker game, author Christopher Corbett weaves a fascinating tale about the underbelly of the Wild West.”—Laura Wexler, author of Fire in a Canebrake

“On July 8, 1872, a young Chinese concubine arrived by horse in Idaho gold country, where a white gambler soon won her in a poker game. and so begins Christopher Corbett's amazing tale of the Chinese in the making of the American West—a slice of largely forgotten history that is by turns funny, chilling, and poignant.”—Jill Jonnes, author of Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World

Editorial Reviews

“Exhaustively researched…Corbett uses Bemis’s story as a platform for a larger discussion about the hardships of the Chinese experience in the American West.”—Aaron Leitko, The Washington Post

“Corbett’s accomplishment in pulling this dark history into a popular narrative is all the more impressive when you consider the difficulty of reporting on a foreign population that lived mainly outside the reach of census takers and journalists…Corbett handles a great deal of sordid material with sensitivity…In restoring to the poker bride a more honest and complete history, Corbett undoes generations of self-serving mythology.”—Dominique Browning, The New York Times Book Review (Editor’s Choice)

“Imagine McCabe & Mrs. Miller, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Deadwood hand-stitched together and given a novel slant as a mini-epic of Chinese immigrant life. That suggests the polyglot vitality of The Poker Bride…a juicy combination of social history and deconstructed myth…[Corbett] juggles facts and apocrypha like a master…with The Poker Bride, Corbett cements his claim as an ace surveyor of America’s borderland of fable.”—Michael Sragow, The Baltimore Sun

“In The Poker Bride, Christopher Corbett delves deep into the soul of the real old west, using the story of one Chinese ‘sojourner’—a young woman named Polly—as the thread to link a thousand pearls of fact and lore and whatever you call those fragments of story that lie somewhere in between. All I can say is, Twain would be proud.”—Erik Larson, author of The Devil in the White City

“[Corbett] provides a colorful overview of the Chinese experience.”—Melanie Kirkpatrick, The Wall Street Journal

“Corbett gracefully weaves the history of the Chinese in the 19th-century American West…Corbett’s intriguing book will appeal to readers interested in the narrative history of the American West and tales of the mining camps…Corbett’s accomplished book will engage history buffs and general readers alike.”—Library Journal (starred review)

“[Corbett] turns a dark chapter in our history into compelling reading.”—The Week

“The main strength of Corbett’s book is his detailed description of life in wide-open California and the Pacific Northwest… [Polly Bemis’] story is remarkable, and Corbett’s research is certainly thorough. The Poker Bride adds immeasurably to the Asian-American nonfiction catalog.”—Martin Brady, Bookpage

From the Publisher

Corbett's accomplishment in pulling this dark history into a popular narrative is all the more impressive when you consider the difficulty of reporting on a foreign population that lived mainly outside the reach of census takers and journalists (though Mark Twain and Richard Henry Dana both wrote about the gold rush). On the whole, Corbett handles a great deal of sordid material with sensitivity.
—The New York Times

Dominique Browning

This unruly book mixes a wonderful mystery- wrapped story with the larger picture of Chinese immigration into the American West. The central story concerns a young Chinese woman sold by her family in 1872 into indentured prostitution. She turns up as a concubine in Idaho, is said then to have been won by another man in a poker game, and became Polly Bemis, the winner's legal, beloved wife in the remote wilderness of Idaho. Polly emerged into public view only in 1923, a tiny old woman on horseback, her identity and story known only to a few old-timers. Corbett wisely sets Bemis's life into the context of Chinese immigration, gold- country anti-Chinese prejudice, and life in the mining communities and remote fastnesses of Idaho a hundred years ago. The trouble is that Corbett also gives us over and over again every tale about Bemis, many of them conflicting, many more incomplete, and many no doubt apocryphal, clogging the work and making it longer than necessary. We need more of former AP editor and novelist Corbett's (Vacationland) own reflections, less of every one else's surmises and tales. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly