CHAPTER
6
In 1890, ace investigative reporter Julian Ralph was in the middle of a distinguished career that would take him to China, India, Greece, Africa, every part of the United States and half of Canada, reporting on wars and rebellions, pleasures and pastimes. That year, he made an investigative trip to the northwest United States, attempting to determine the answer to a question that had inflamed the sensationalist press of the region. Were thousands of Chinese being smuggled into the United States from Canada, and if they were, did such smuggling pose a huge threat to the country?
Coming from New York, where he worked for Harper’s magazine, Ralph was surprised at how much of an issue the purported smuggling was. It had its roots in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which forbade Chinese labourers and any Chinese employed in mining from entering the United States, though those who were already there could leave and come back, and Chinese merchants and professionals were permitted to immigrate. Two years later, amendments to the act made it more difficult to leave and return. Further changes in 1888 made it illegal.
The acts were a response to the extreme hostility of many in the western United States to Chinese immigration. Organized white labour hated the Chinese, because Chinese men worked far cheaper and much harder than white men, but their hostility could not diminish the demand for cheap Chinese labour. Nor could it change the desire of Chinese men to enter the United States, where they thought they could earn enough money to return to China after a number of years and make good lives for themselves and their families. Ironically, the prohibition on Chinese immigration resulted in a shortage of Chinese labourers and raised the wages for those who were already in the United States.
Many western Canadians felt a similar hostility, but Canada approached the problem by enforcing a head tax of $50—raised to $100 in 1900 and $500 in 1903—on all Chinese entering Canada. If the person who had paid the tax left the country, he could re-enter provided he had a certificate attesting to his previous residence in Canada.
Though it was discriminatory, $50 was not a particularly high price to pay for entry into North America. Once in Canada, Chinese who wanted to go to the United States could be smuggled south across the border. Ralph was one of many who wrote about the trade. In 1885, for example, the New York Times reported on the issue: “The inhabitants of [Puget] Sound ports claim that new Chinamen are arriving every day, and that they were forced to some action to keep themselves from being seriously injured by them. The smuggling of Chinese from British ports to Washington Territory is a very profitable business.”
The reporter found himself faced by a conundrum. Yes, certainly the Chinese were willing to work for less, and yes, certainly, if they were not on the coast, then pay for such occupations as wood chopping, salmon canning and other hard labour would have to be higher.
For there is a particular dislike among laborers on this coast to working for small money . . . The population of the West is an extremely independent one. Every man feels that he can somehow make a living, and if one’s prices or the kind of work does not happen to suit, he remarks, with the air of an Eastern millionaire, that “he does not have to assent to the job,” and walks away . . . They also get restless and are constantly being convinced that they can do better in some other place than in the one they are in.
The opposition to Chinese labour was strongest among this class of men, for without the Chinese, the picky labourer would claim “extravagant wages.” Trying to support white labour, one man hired a white man to chop his wood; that labourer promptly hired a gang of Chinese, paid them half the wages and pocketed the rest.
Thousands of Chinese workers were employed in building the CPR line across Canada; that job completed, many looked south for work. “The temptation to go into smuggling Chinamen across the border is very strong,” reported the New York Times, “as for each one landed the owners of the boat receive generally $25, a sum which well repays those who make the venture if they escape with their lives, elude the American customs officers, and manage to return to Victoria to claim the money from the agents.”
Until 1882, Chinese merchants in Canada and the United States often arranged transport and immigration for Chinese labourers legally entering the United States. Once the restriction act came into force, the merchants continued to be prime movers in smuggling Chinese across the border. Usually, though, the men who took the illegal entrants into the United States were white, for it was far simpler for white men to enter the country without being noticed than it was for Chinese.
The arrival of smuggled Chinese and the presence of legal Chinese in the United States aroused much anger. In 1885 and 1886, labour and political leaders encouraged and led riots against Chinese in Seattle and Tacoma, burning, beating and blowing up property as they surged through the cities’ Chinatowns. Attacks followed in smaller towns wherever Chinese workers lived. Troops were called out to quell the rioting but could not stem the anti-Chinese sentiment. When many Chinese in Washington fled to Oregon, further, though less severe attacks took place in Portland. In California, anti-Chinese riots dated back to 1871; expulsions, arson, beatings and even killings occurred throughout the state in the 1880s.
During that decade, newspapers continued to print claims of high profits from smuggling Chinese across the border. A Victoria newspaper article, reprinted across Canada and into the United States, claimed that a three-person Seattle firm had cleared $5,000 for smuggling Chinese in 1884 and explained how it was done:
The primary move consists in having the Chinamen, or as many contrabands as there chance to be in a party, photographed in Victoria. The photos are forwarded to Seattle, and there exhibited to those familiar with the scheme who are ready, for a consideration, to swear that the Chinaman whose photograph accompanies the affidavit was formerly a resident of the Territory, and left prior to the passage of the Restriction Act.
The affidavit and photo were then forwarded to a Victoria lawyer, who presented them to a customs agent. “If he feels satisfied that the evidence is sufficient, he passes John; if insufficient, he rejects him.”
And then there was the switch. Sometimes an American of good character identified the photo as one of a Chinese man he knew to have been resident in Seattle or some other American place, but who was not there at the time. Then a photo of a different applicant would be substituted for the verified photo, and the affidavit would be accepted.
After the law was changed in 1888, smuggling by stealth became the more common way of getting Chinese into the United States. Though many crossed successfully, some were less lucky. In December 1884, two boats were reported missing. One three-ton sloop with 19 Chinese men and two white men on board was said to have been swamped, with all hands lost. And a leaky boat that left Foul Bay in Victoria in late October with 12 Chinese aboard, bound for Washington Territory, was never heard from again. A third boat, a small schooner, was found bottom up off Dungeness on Puget Sound with the bodies of three Chinese men on board.
Some stories were true; some probably were not. In 1885, a Portland newspaper reported, dubiously, that an Italian boatman had left Victoria with seven Chinese on board. He was intercepted by an American customs cutter. As the cutter approached, he called the Chinese out on deck, struck each man on the head as he emerged from the cabin, then pitched them overboard.
More certain is the story of 24 Chinese men who were aboard a schooner that left Victoria for Puget Sound. For some unknown reason, they were dumped on a rock in Juan de Fuca Strait. They were discovered and ordered back to British Columbia. The province refused to take them unless they paid the head tax, an amount no one was willing to proffer. The Chinese men were sent to jail in the United States but eventually were taken back to British Columbia and unloaded there.
Frustrating, though not fatal, was the occasional scam played upon the would-be immigrants. In 1901, the Colonist reported a story that the reporter cheerfully concluded might be false. An unidentified young white man agreed to take nine Chinese to the United States from Victoria, dropping them on one of the San Juan Islands, from where, he assured them, they could make their own way to the mainland. The cost of $25 a head would be paid, according to the agreement, once the young man returned to Chinatown with a receipt from the “boss man” of the nine.
The group left by sloop in darkness; the next morning, the man returned to Chinatown with the receipt and duly collected his $225. He was not seen again. The following afternoon, “nine weary and bedraggled Chinese walked into Chinatown,” and created quite a fuss when they learned the man had been paid for their transport. Shortly after they had left aboard the sloop, a fog had come in. The man had landed them in a place he assured them was the United States and duly got his required receipt. “When the sloop pushed out to sea again they went up to explore. In time they came upon a Chinese place and soon discovered they had been outwitted. Then they walked back.” They had been landed, not in the San Juans, but on the shores of Sooke, on Vancouver Island.
More gruesome is an oft-repeated story about smuggler Ben Ure, who lived on an island in Deception Pass. There is no doubt that Ure smuggled Chinese into Washington aboard his small boat. It is said that Ure’s wife would signal him as he approached the pass, to let him know if it was safe to proceed. Some claim that Ure tied the Chinese in burlap bags; if danger threatened, he would throw them overboard to drown, and the currents would take the bodies to what became known as Dead Man’s Bay.
It was to sort out truth from fiction that Julian Ralph arrived in 1890 to write his Harper’s article. Were the Canadians worried by reports of people smuggling? Not so you would notice. “They come here to enter your country,” one influential Canadian told Ralph, “and you can’t stop it, and we don’t care.”
Ralph was indeed amused, or bemused, that the only time Canadian authorities did something about smuggling was when the steamer North Star, “after a busy career in violating the laws of our country without interference by Canadians, had at last excited their displeasure by returning from our border with smuggled goods upon which the Canadians impose an import tax.” The owners of the ship were charged with failing to provide bills of lading for their cargo, failing to answer all questions with regard to cargo and crew, and failing to take out proper clearance papers and to produce any smuggled goods.
Ralph noted that the steamship line that brought tea, rice, opium, oil and Chinese immigrants to Canada profited greatly from the money paid in passages, making at least $200,000 over three years. The Canadian government profited from the $50 per person head tax. And the two-way traffic benefited some Americans as well, for the ships could smuggle back into Canada such things as playing cards, gambling layouts and whisky.
Following twisted lines of communication, Ralph decided that the smuggling of Chinese across the border was a business “of small extent and petty results.” Between 1887 and mid-1890, some 4,000 Chinese men entered British Columbia. He believed that at least half of those men were smuggled into the United States.
He confirmed that many of the Chinese entering Canada were committing fraud as well, writing that, “Chinamen who go away from Canada looking at least forty years of age, return appearing to be only twenty-four; and others who measure five feet and nine inches when they depart, come back in a few months several inches shorter or taller.” Many went to great lengths to look like the man who had left. Ralph noted, “One of these tricksters arrived with a great scar burned in his forehead, a cut disfiguring one cheek and a deep pit burned in his neck.” All to no avail: the man under questioning confessed he had never been in Canada before.
Ralph was highly critical of American policy that refused re-entry to Chinese labourers who had come legitimately to the United States but were refused re-entry once they left. It was, he said, “unconstitutional, Unchristian and dishonorable” and an affront to victimized men, many of whom had worked long and hard to build the western United States.
Opium and People, People and Opium
As Julian Ralph noted, the smuggling of Chinese south across the border often went hand in hand with the smuggling of opium. If you had connections in the Chinese community in Victoria, where you bought opium to take into the United States, you might well use those same connections to smuggle Chinese labourers across the border.
The long and convoluted 1893 trial in Portland that saw Nathan Blum testify against William Dunbar and other conspirators accused of smuggling opium was followed that same year by a trial of 28 men, among them Dunbar and customs agent Mulkey, as well as half a dozen Chinese merchants from Portland, on charges of conspiracy to smuggle Chinese into the United States.
The trial revealed an intricate smuggling network. According to testimony, Major John Wilson approached Chinese merchants in Victoria to obtain lists of Chinese who might want to enter the United States illegally. The merchants provided the names and sent the Chinese men to Wilson and the steamship line. A price was paid for the landing of all illegal entrants, and men such as Portland collector of customs James Lotan and treasury agent Mulkey made sure that they were allowed into the United States. Nathan Blum and other witnesses for the prosecution described the acquisition of forged birth certificates, residence certificates and other identity papers that illegal immigrants carried with them so that the bribed American officials could claim that their entry was indeed legal. But there were many hitches in the business, including certificates that were wrongly filled out, missing photographs and claims that moneys had not been paid.
The case against the accused turned largely on Nathan Blum’s testimony. Claims and counterclaims ricocheted around the courtroom as spectators crowded in to hear what the Portland Oregonian termed “the great smuggling case . . . the case of the century.”
The judge summed up very carefully. For lack of sufficient evidence, he directed the jury to acquit a number of the defendants, including a ship’s captain, several other accused conspirators and all the Chinese accused, except for Seid Back—a merchant who frequently acted as an interpreter when the ships arrived in Portland—and Ching Ghong Quie. There was not a great deal of evidence against Quie, he said, so the jury must decide whether enough had been said to convict him.
But in the cases of six of the defendants, including Dunbar, Mulkey, Lotan and Back, the judge suggested much more consideration was required. There was no doubt that Chinese had been illegally landed; the jury must decide about the guilt or innocence of the accused. Given such a large hint, the jury took just a day to review the mountains of evidence and decide that Dunbar, Back, Mulkey, Lotan and the two others were guilty. Nathan Blum was duly rewarded for turning state’s evidence. Although others remained in jail during the trial, he was put up at a hotel and left as soon as the trial was over for Washington to seek a pardon for himself and another conspirator who had testified in the trial. The Oregonian wryly reported:
As they have not yet been sentenced, it would seem they are rushing things; but probably they would like to be pardoned before they are sentenced, as they might then claim that they were not convicted of an infamous crime . . . If they are pardoned perhaps the infamy will be removed from them, and they will go on the stand [in trials yet to come] purged and purified and with good reputations—of the kind.
With that, the Oregonian closed their books on the trial, which they termed “the greatest legal event of the age [that] has no parallel in this history of this section.” Appeals in the case went all the way to the Supreme Court, but the original verdicts were upheld, and Dunbar, among others, went to jail.
The great smuggling ring was no more, but there were many more individuals and groups still eager to take on the profitable smuggling of Chinese into the United States.