Chinese Mining Kongsi in Eastern Oregon: A Case Study of Cultural Amnesia

Abstract

This research article draws on transnational histories of Chinese mining companies to argue that biases of the dominant Euro-American population diminished the contribution of Chinese immigrants to the formation of modern Oregon. Chinese immigrants who were highly skilled at the art and science of gold mining dominated placer gold mining in eastern Oregon during the nineteenth century. For over a century, however, historical narratives have generally portrayed them as unskilled laborers subsisting on scraps of gold recovered by rewashing the waste rocks abandoned by white miners. Chinese miners from Guangdong Province had worked in southeast Asia for a century before the discovery of gold in Oregon. By the time Chinese miners reached eastern Oregon in the 1860s, they were experienced at moving people, supplies, and gold over great distances in foreign lands. Following the established practice, most Chinese miners in eastern Oregon worked in partnerships wherein they earned a share of the profits, instead of wages. Several nineteenth-century documents accurately describe these Chinese mining partnerships in eastern Oregon, and as author Don Hann argues, the disconnect between those earlier depictions of Chinese mining companies and the later portrayal of the Chinese as unskilled laborers is a form of cultural amnesia.