The Coming Man from Canton: Chinese Experience in Montana, 1862–1943 by Christopher W. Merritt

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Coming Man from Canton: Chinese Experience in Montana, 1862–1943 by Christopher W. Merritt Roland Hsu The Coming Man from Canton: Chinese Experience in Montana, 1862–1943. By Christopher W. Merritt. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017. vii + 248 pp. Illustrations, references, index. $65.00 cloth. Christopher Merritt's new book is a welcome addition to the study of Chinese immigration to North America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It's a compelling account of Chinese immigrants' contributions to the economic and social development of the Great Plains in general, and to the state of Montana in particular. Merritt is adept in placing the chronology of the region's gold rush, the building of the Northern Pacific Railroad connection to the Transcontinental line, and the growth of Chinese commercial districts into larger historical context. This book replaces the prevailing view of the Chinese as exploited and passive victims with a view of nineteenth-century Chinese immigrants as foundational actors in the regional history of enterprise, and in the social fabric of the American West. Through historically informed research, Merritt reveals that by the last decades of the nineteenth-century, individual Chinese were able to circumvent the racially discriminatory Alien Law to purchase and work older placer mines. Several thousand Chinese also moved from the recently completed Central Pacific Railroad line in California, Nevada, and Utah to contribute significantly to the building of the Northern Pacific rail line. Merritt's distinctive theoretical contribution is to rethink the casting of the Chinese immigrant community as peripheral. While the Chinese at the time were indeed segregated from non-Chinese residences and work groups, in this analysis the Chinese in fact maintained direct economic and social ties to their homeland. In Merritt's account, an important and sustainable source of wealth generated by the Chinese community in Montana came from the business of provisioning its own laborers. The business of supplying the Chinese miners, railroad workers, and urban small businesses meant thoroughly integrating into a network of Chinese ethnic organizations in the United States—so-called secret societies and the Chinese Six Companies—and doing profitable business with wholesale purveyors of foods and goods from China. Merritt shows how the Chinese artifacts from sites of former rail line work camps, food and supply retailers, and burial plots point to the vital role of the Chinese community as consumers in the Pacific's marketplace. Finally, as Merritt notes, the extensive research for this book did not produce a description of the experience of immigrant Chinese women, and their absence for the most part from the historical record is particularly poignant. The author's sensitivity to the subject of gender whets our appetite for further research in this area. Roland Hsu Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project Stanford University Copyright © 2018 The Center for Great Plains Studies and The University of Nebraska Press