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Chinese miners in the West faced extreme prejudice. Idaho’s Moose Creek Mining District disallowed Chinese immigrants from owning mining claims, driving many Chinese prospectors into Montana. As other miners abandoned Louisville and moved farther down Cedar Creek, Chinese miners filtered into the older claims. Their arrival was greeted with suspicion and derision. “The Chinamen are the curse of the gulch,” one newspaper wrote. “They now number two to one over the white population.” By November 1870, the Chinese had established a store, a doctor’s office, and a meat market. The newcomers focused their efforts on a small creek above Louisville. Locals called it China Gulch.

Chinese immigrants made up as much as 10 percent of Montana’s population in 1870. “Popular prejudice against them is very strong,” explorer A. K. McClure observed in 1867. “They are not allowed to work placer-diggings until the whites desert them; and then they must avoid all disputes with the ruling race.” A Louisville posse once suspected several Chinese miners of stealing gold; after torturing a local Chinese couple with threats of hanging, the vigilantes shot four Chinese who had fled the settlement.

Some residents, however, coexisted peacefully with the Chinese miners. Henry Reslip ran a pack train into Cedar Creek in the 1890s. He recalled that the Chinese sent and received the most mail, and that they competently totaled their bills using abacuses. McClure remarked that the Chinese miners were, “as a rule, industrious and inoffensive.” Cedar Creek John, recognizable for his skill with chopsticks and his long braid, was a popular figure in Superior. At his death in 1922, the local newspaper memorialized him as “the only welcome Chinese in Mineral County.”

In 2008, the University of Montana excavated several Chinese mining settlements, including Louisville. Archaeologists uncovered hearths, opium tins, ceramic pottery, calligraphy stones, a poker chip, bottles, and hundreds of soup bones.  “The Chinese had a huge impact on every corner of this state,” observed archaeologist Chris Merritt. Their presence on the gulch, however, has been all but erased by time.

Credits and Sources:

Cramer, John. “Far East Meets Big Sky: Chinese Miners' Story Told Through Newly Discovered Artifacts." The Daily Missoulian,June 29, 2008.

“Creeks That Flow With Gold: The Story of the Cedar-Quartz Creek Historic Mining District,” Interpretive sign, undated.

Davis-Quitt, Deb. Gumboot Gamblers: Tales of the Cedar Creek Gold Rush.Seeley Lake, MT: Deb Davis-Quitt, 1987.

Hahn, Margie E. Montana’s Mineral County in Retrospect.Stevensville, MT: Stoneydale Press Publishing Company, 1997.

McClure, A. K. Three Thousand Miles Through the Rocky Mountains.Philadelphia, PA: J.B. LippinCott & Co, 1869.

Reslip, Henry. Interview by Mabel C. Olson, undated (ca. 1939–1940). MC 177: U.S. Work Projects Administration Records, Montana Historical Society Archives. Box 18, Folder 7.

Historic photograph of “Louisville” courtesy of the Mineral County Museum.Contemporary photograph of the Louisville Jail courtesy of Historical Research Associates, Inc.