| The Poker Bride: The First Chinese in the Wild West |  | Author: Christopher Corbett
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
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Rating:  25 reviews
Sales Rank: 39,471
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 240
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 9.5 x 6.9 x 1.2
ISBN: 0802119093
Dewey Decimal Number: 973.04951
EAN: 9780802119094
ASIN: 0802119093
Publication Date: February 2, 2010
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
When gold rush fever gripped the globe in 1849, thousands of Chinese immigrants came through San Francisco on their way to seek their fortunes. They were called sojourners, for they never intended to stay. In The Poker Bride, Christopher Corbett uses a little-known legend from Idaho lore as a lens into this Chinese experience. Before 1849, the Chinese in the United States were little more than curiosities. But as word spread of the discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill in California, they soon became a regular sight in the American West. In San Francisco, a labyrinthine Chinatown soon sprang up, a clamorous city within a city full of exotic foods and strange smells, where Chinese women were smuggled into the country, and where the laws were made by "hatchet men." At this time, Polly, a young Chinese concubine, was brought by her owner by steamboat and pack train to a remote mining camp in the highlands of Idaho. There he lost her in a poker game, having wagered his last ounce of gold dust. Polly found her way with her new owner to an isolated ranch on the banks of the Salmon River in central Idaho. As the gold rush receded, it took with it the Chinese miners--or their bones, which were disinterred and shipped back to their homeland in accordance with Chinese custom. But it left behind Polly, who would make headlines when she emerged from the Idaho hills nearly half a century later to visit a modern city and tell her story. Peppered with characters such as Mark Twain and the legendary newswoman Cissy Patterson, The Poker Bride vividly reconstructs a lost period of history when the first Chinese sojourners flooded into the country, and left only glimmering traces of their presence scattered across the American West.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 25
 New Light on the Old West June 29, 2010
Robin Friedman (Washington, D.C. United States)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Christopher Corbett's "The Poker Bride" is an appealing combination of yarn with serious history. The poker bride was a young Chinese immigrant who became known as Polly Bemis. During a famine in China, Polly's family sold her to avoid starvation. Polly was sold several times upon immigration to San Francisco where a fate as either a concubine (to a wealthy Chinese man) or a prostitute awaited her. In 1872, Polly was the stakes in a poker game. A white man from Connecticut and proprietor of a bar and gambling den in a remote mining town in Idaho, Charlie Bemis, won the hand and won Polly. Polly nursed Charlie back to health after he was shot in the face by an unhappy gambler. The couple married in 1894 and lived on a remote farm in the wilds of north central Idaho on the upper reaches of the Salmon River near a small community called Warren. In 1923, following Charlie's death, an aged Polly visited the small Idaho town of Grangeville, her first departure from the family farm in over thirty years. The following year Polly visited Boise, Idaho. She then returned and lived quietly on her farm until her death in 1933.
A mix of history and legend, Polly's story occupies only about one-third of Corbett's book. Most of the rest of the book offers a brief history of the Chinese in the early West as they were involved with mining. The history sets Polly Bemis's story in context but is of course highly important in its own right.
The story moves from early California to Idaho with stops in Oregon. It essentially begins with the California Gold Rush of 1848 and the influx of Chinese immigrants which followed in its wake. The overwhelming number of immigrants were men. They were willing to work long and hard for little pay at jobs few others would want to do. The Chinese immigrants soon became perceived as a threat and were subject to severe discrimination and ill-treatment which Corbett documents poignantly. Unhappily, Congress took a rare and drastic step of banning Chinese immigration in the Chinese Immigration Act of 1882. Polly and Charlie may have married in an attempt to avoid Polly's deportation under this law.
The relatively few Chinese women immigrants were, in the early days, much like Polly Bemis. They had been sold and came to the United States to work as sex slaves. Most of them lived in dreadful conditions in cribs and cheap bars under the eye of Chinese gangs or "tongs". Polly Bemis was a rarity in that she managed to escape the fate of many other Chinese women and make a life for herself.
Corbett's book offers a good portrait of the wildness and lawlesness of the early West in San Francisco, Idaho, and the mining camps. Before describing Polly's story, the book discusses the history of Chinese immigration, including the long ocean passage which reminded me of the earlier conditions pertaining on the slave ships several centuries earlier, the development of "Chinatowns", and the spread of prospecting from California to Oregon. Several chapters are devoted to the condition of Chinese women and to the spread of prostitution and sex slavery. Polly Bemis's story is told from the sparse and conflicting contemporaneous records and from accounts prepared by Sister Alfreda Elsenshohn, a nun who lived in the area and who devoted her retirement years in the 1940s-50s to writing about the early history of Idaho County.
The book recounts an unhappy part of the American experience in the mistreatment meted out to the Chinese. The character of this experience comes through in Corbett's account even though Polly Bemis's story is treated with eclat. The book lacks an index or notes. Instead it has a detailed bibliography which Corbett draws upon extensively in his text. He makes good use of well-known authors such as Bret Harte and Mark Twain but more importantly he draws upon many contemporaneous, obscure accounts of life in the early West. As does any historian, Corbett tries to sift through and assess his sources to arrive at a reasoned interpretation.
I was glad to have the opportunity to read this book and to learn something of Polly Bemis and about the wildness of the old American West. The book is enriched by several photographs, but a map of the Salmon River and its environs in Idaho would have been useful.
Robin Friedman
 "Polly Bemis did just that." June 27, 2010
frumiousb (Amsterdam, the Netherlands)
I had some doubts when I began to read The Poker Bride. Lately it has seemed to me many popular history books were little more than magazine articles expanded to include a bibliography. The story of Polly Bemis-- a sex worker who got luckier than most-- seemed an excellent candidate for the "not long enough for a book" prize.
To my surprise, Corbett seems to have a book here. And an interesting book at that. We know precious little about Polly Bemis today, and Corbett shares as much of the story as can be told. He also tells us the folklore and the myth that grew up around this unlikely western wife. Best of all (at least for me) Corbett gives us a lot of the context of the early Chinese experience in the US West. It's fascinating stuff. Some of it I knew vaguely from other reading, but I've never had such a clear image of the Chinese migration.
I'd recommend the book for the material alone. Corbett, however, is worth mentioning for his writing. I found it exceptionally good history writing. Books like this are so often obtuse. The prose here is crisp, economical, and always clear. I enjoyed the book itself and not just the subject matter.
Recommended for anyone with an interest in the history of the US West, prostitution, or the Chinese experience in the US.
"Where She Could Hear The River Roar" June 25, 2010
Brian E. Erland (Brea, CA - USA)
Have you ever heard of a more romantic plot than the one offered up here by Christopher Corbett in his new book `The Poker Bride?' I mean come on, a tale set in the chaotic era of the Wild West Gold Rush involving a helpless Chinese girl sold into slavery and prostitution who's eventually rescued by her future husband who wins her freedom in the proverbial poker game! Even more fascinating, it's a true story! It just doesn't get any better than that does it?
However before you get too excited and inform the local women's book club about this heartrending period piece be aware that this is not a romance ala Jane Austin, nor is it the latest release from the Harlequin romance series. The woman known as Polly Bemis (aka: Poker Bride) is utilized by the author as a vehicle through which a greater story is told. In seeing through the eyes of Polly the reader is given the opportunity to experience what life in the American Gold Rush era must have been like for "the first Chinese in the West." In other words this is first and foremost a history book while Polly and her life provide the personal, literal and symbolic face of the immigrants. She's something the reader can identify and sympathize with. In the end one comes to realize her story and the history of the Chinese in the American Wild West were one in the same.
While the prospective romance novel reader will probably not find this book to be what they're looking for, the lover of history certainly will. Christopher Corbett provides us with an expansive portrait of the times that I found absolutely fascinating; early San Francisco history, cultural influences, societal make-up and how these influences where lived out in the everyday life of the rural, shabby townships and mining camps.
Even more impressive is Corbett's treatment of the plight and experiences of the Chinese immigrants; the harsh trans-Pacific sailing conditions, the hatred for the migrant workers and the subjugation of women from both the predominately white society as well as the prevailing cultural traditions practiced by the Chinese themselves. I found the mention of P.T. Barnum and his Asian/Chinese "freaks" exhibit, which included the famous Siamese twins Chang and Eng, to be not only unexpected but to be quite revealing concerning the white American opinion of the Asian culture.
Again, if you're looking for a hot, titillating romance look elsewhere, but if you appreciate a comprehensive, well researched, read offering the reader not only a rare glimpse into an exciting moment in American history but a tale of individual endurance and triumph try `The Poker Bride'.
The dark side of the California Gold Rush June 21, 2010
D. Roberts (Battle Creek, Michigan United States)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Everyone knows about the horrors of slavery experienced by 19th century African Americans who lived in the southern U.S. While their story should never be downplayed, there is a forgotten chapter of another ethnic group that was enslaved in the western U.S.: the Chinese. More specifically, an ethnic gender (Chinese women) faced situations every bit as harrowing and hopeless as the African Americans who were southeast of them. Nor were Chinese males treated fairly, either. While they were not enslaved, their treatment by white men was egregiously unfair.
Professor Christopher Corbett has done an exemplary job of disinterring the lost stories of the Chinese in the west. In particular, Corbett focuses on the human trafficking of Chinese women from the Chinese mainland to their arrival in San Francisco.
One of the outcomes of the law-of-unintended-consequences of the California Gold Rush was the demand for courtesans / concubines / female slaves by the influx of miners who entered the western states. One such slave was Polly Bemis, and this is her story.
While it is outrageous to think of any woman being "won" in a poker game, the irony of this book is that Polly was far luckier than most Chinese prostitutes whose lives were cut short by their involuntary involvement in the sex trade. Polly actually ended up with people who showed her kindness, which made her far more fortunate than most women in her dire situation.
What I was expecting from this book was a sort of historical novel about Polly's life. On that point I was wrong. Roughly 75% of the book lays out the milieu created by the California Gold Rush rather than a biography of a lone Chinese courtesan. This approach worked very well as it laid the backdrop for what Polly experienced.
This book was a real eye-opener and leaves one with a great familiarity of the Gold Rush days as well as a Chinese courtesan. The work is well researched and the author's erudition of the topic is obvious. In some ways, this book is to the 19th century Chinese who lived in the west what Roots (Four-Disc 30th Anniversary Edition) and Amistad are for African Americans who were in the south during the turbulent 19th century. If Chinese American or Chinese and American history is something that intrigues you, then the present book belongs on your bookshelf. Either way, it's a story you'll never forget.
China Polly and the Heathen Chinee in the Old West June 9, 2010
Zack Davisson (Seattle, WA, USA)
One of the saddest scenes in the TV series Deadwood is when Mr. Wu imports a load of slave Chinese girls to be prostitutes in the frontier town. In those days, where a white prostitute was afforded a certain level of respect and even celebrity, and where a common French streetwalker could pass her self off as an educated and expensive courtesan, the Chinese girls were just so much meat to be pounded into at pennies a turn, until their used-up bodies were tossed into the trash heap and space made for the next load of slaves to take their place.
This was the world that Polly Bemis arrived to in 1872, sold by her father for two bags of seed and smuggled in as a slave to San Francisco. Polly, born Lalu Nathoy, was luckier or prettier than most of her shipmates as instead of winding up in one of San Francisco's infamous "cribs" she was most likely the private concubine of a wealthy merchant until she was lost as property in a game of Poker to prospector Charlie Bemis. What happened next is the most extraordinary turn in her life, because in a time of anti-Chinese sentiment when lone Chinese wanders might find themselves hung and when anti-racial relationships were not just considered immoral but also illegal, Charlie Bemis married the girl he won in a card game.
Christopher Corbett (Orphans Preferred: The Twisted Truth and Lasting Legend of the Pony Express), uses the unlikely tale of Charlie and Polly Bemis as the framework for his exploration of the Chinese under-culture of the Old West in his book "The Poker Bride." A non-fiction history book, Corbett does not attempt to provide a narrative for Polly's life, but merely to lay out the facts as they are known, and delve into the background of the world in which she arrived.
Indeed, "The Poker Bride" cannot truly be said to be about Polly Bemis; she only shows up in page 121 of the 197 page book. Truly, this is the story of the many Chinese people who came to America seeking their fortune, sold on a false dream, only to find themselves slaves in a country where racial prejudice and economic greed led people to use other human beings in despicable ways. Although the American Civil War was over and California was always a Free State, there was no Uncle Tom's Cabin for the Chinese and a blind eye was turned to the slave labor that built, fed and serviced the Western frontier. It didn't help that the worst slavers were the Chinese themselves, who imported village girls for the use of Chinese men, naïve girls who were lied to with promises of good husbands and wealth in a far off land.
Corbett's book covers the lives of some of these "Celestials and Sojourners" and the attitudes at the time towards them. Although at first the Chinese were seen as a valuable resource, especially as they did not want to integrate or immigrate into the US but just make their fortune and go home, fear and yellow journalists fanned the flames of hate until the anti-Chinese sentiments of the late 1800s led to scenes such as the Seattle riot of 1886. Although some reporters, such as Mark Twain, tried to show sympathy for the poor creatures, by far the louder voices were singing songs of "The Heathen Chinee."
As for Polly's story herself, Corbett does not romanticize or glamorize it as was done with the book and film Thousand Pieces of Gold. Polly most likely worked as a prostitute, Corbett says, although well-meaning folks who knew her have tried to cover up this part of her past. And Bemis most-likely married her to prevent a valuable work-mate from being deported rather than out of some custom-defying and fiery love. Corbett just gives us real life, not fancy or neat but still extraordinary.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 25
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