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China Polly: Poker Bride
| Article
# : |
19540 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1991 |
2,024 Words |
| Author
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Peggy Robbins
Peggy Robbins, a Tennessee native, is a free-lance writer
living in Gulfport, Mississippi. Over the past three decades,
she has written extensively about American heritage and
military history. |
China Polly, a beautiful 18-year-old Cantonese slave girl, was smuggled into San Francisco in 1871 and passed from tong to tong, finally reaching the wealthy tong leader in Warren, Idaho, who had purchased her sight unseen. At the time, Warren's population of three thousand included one thousand Chinese. This ratio of yellow to white men was quite normal in the majority of Idaho gold camps: Thousands of Orientals had been brought into the United States to build the western part of the first continental railroad; after its completion, many turned to mining as a means of making a living.
There were no white women in Warren, largely because of the difficulty of getting into the remote, rugged, roadless Salmon River region of central Idaho that the town dominated. Because of the Salmon's rapid current and rock-strewn rapids, it had been dubbed the River of No Return. In Warren there were only Sheepeater (Lapwai) Indian girls--some bought and some stolen from their families by the miners--and a dozen or more Chinese prostitutes owned by "Boss Big Jim," the Chinaman who had bought "Little China Polly."
The girl was, indeed, "little"; according to one source, "she never in her life weighed over eighty pounds." Big Jim was described by an Idaho inspector for the Salmon River Mining District as "a notorious gambler about fifty years old, quite large for a Chinese. He had very yellow skin, slant eyes that were beady and black, and he was pig-tailed; he always wore a long, black gown. He didn't plan to stable Polly with his prostitutes; she was to be his wife."
The night of the day Polly arrived in Warren, Big Jim and a miner named Charley Bemis, also noted as a gambler, were playing poker in the largest saloon in town. Bemis, about twenty-one, was tall and thin; his face was weather-beaten, bronzed by the sun, but he was good looking. A Connecticut farm boy, Bemis had run away from home to sail the seas while still in his early teens. After serving as cabin boy, sailor, and mate, he found himself in San Francisco, where he heard tales about the Idaho gold rush and hurried to the gold fields to seek his fortune. After reaching Warren, he spent more time, and was more successful at, gambling than mining. He always went armed and was known as being "somewhat strange and unfriendly."
The saloon was packed to its swinging doors that night, but there was no noise or movement except at the poker table; the miners were watching, or straining to watch, as the stakes in the game, which had been going on since midday, grew higher and higher.
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