Just downstream from this point, is a place known as Chinaman Bar.

During the 1850s, miners explored remote drainages throughout the American West in search of the next big strike. This activity came to Pend Oreille County in 1855 when a gold discovery led miners to a stretch of river between Metaline Falls and Z Canyon. The prospectors worked over gravel bars “looking for color,” or mineral anomalies that somehow deviated from their surroundings. Since the gold deposits were largely glacial debris of outside origin, the miners exhausted most deposits within a few years and moved on.

The Pend Oreille gold mining settlements consisted of little more than tent camps and tended to cluster around the diggings. Chinese immigrants figured prominently among these early prospectors. Generally speaking, they made their way to the Northwest after migrating to California during the 1849 gold rush. An estimated 18,000 Chinese worked the California gold fields by 1850. Racial tension led many of them to look for opportunity elsewhere, including the Columbia River drainage and Pend Oreille River valley. In 1882, Spokane Falls merchant Ah Yen brought a group of 25 of his countrymen to prospect an area 3 miles below Metaline Falls, which became known as Chinaman Bar—a name that persisted long after the miners had moved on.

Despite the pervasive negative racial attitudes that existed in Pend Oreille County and beyond in the nineteenth century, the region’s relative isolation and scattered nature of the diggings enabled the Chinese to prosper there for a time. Whether Chinese miners along the Pend Oreille were driven out due to growing hostilities or whether they simply packed up once the gold deposits had played out is unknown. Scattered mine tailings and log cabin remnants provide the only physical evidence of what occurred at Chinaman Bar, but the name has held for well over a century, serving as a reminder of some of Pend Oreille County’s earliest non-Indian inhabitants.  

Credits and Sources:

Bamonte, Tony, and Susan Schaeffer Bamonte. History of Pend Oreille County. Spokane: Tornado Creek Publications, 1996.

Hudson, Lorelea, et al., Cultural Resource Consultants, Inc., A Historic Overview for the Colville and Idaho Panhandle National Forests and the Bureau of Land Management Spokane and Coeur d’Alene Districts, Northeastern Washington/Northern Idaho: A Cultural Resource Narrative. Missoula, MT:U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Northern Region, Report No. 6, 1995.

Unknown. “Oldest Building in Pend Oreille County Built by Spokane Chinese Merchant in 1882.” Records of the Pend Oreille County Historical Society.

Photographs courtesy of the Idaho State Historical Society.