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Clear skies. Low 51F. Winds W at 5 to 10 mph..
Clear skies. Low 51F. Winds W at 5 to 10 mph.
Serving Sun Valley, Ketchum, Hailey, Bellevue and Carey
The Oregon Short Line stop in Hailey, pictured here, was reached by locomotive in the spring of 1883.
A typical anti-Chinese ad in the Wood River Times, circa September 1882.
Most Chinese settlers in Hailey took physically demanding, low-paying jobs as laundrymen, wood cutters, servants and cooks in order to avoid violence in the mines and on the railroad. Here, Chinese launderer Kee Le Wah poses for the camera, circa 1890. Wah most likely lived in the Wood River Valley, according to The Community Library’s Regional History Department.
The Oregon Short Line stop in Hailey, pictured here, was reached by locomotive in the spring of 1883.
This is the first part of a two-part series. The next installment will look at the rise and fall of Hailey's Chinatown in the 1880s.
When the locomotive whistle sounded for the first time in Hailey in May 1883—coinciding with newly strung telegraph wires, the first electric street lights and, just three months later, a telephone line—life for many was becoming increasingly comfortable.
A stationary store, drug store, lumber store and grocery provided staple goods faster than ever before. The latest extension of the Oregon Short Line meant easy access to fresh produce from California, pharmaceuticals from New York and lumber and nails from the Midwest.
Residents started building homes, no longer consigned to makeshift tents along the Big Wood River. Hotels and theaters sprang up, too, attracting city dwellers and acting troupes from San Francisco and Chicago.
“Brick and lime are now so plenty and cheap that every new building should have brick flues and plaster in place of stovepipes, lining and paper,” the Hailey-based Wood River Times declared that year.
By day, residents ventured out to fish and picnic along the Big Wood. Children enjoyed baseball games, popcorn and teeter-totters at a park near present-day Flying Hat Ranch.
By night, the wealthy mingled at masquerade balls at the Grand Central Hotel—near the present-day The Mint—or socialized during intermission at the Hailey Theater. Hailey’s 18 saloons, two breweries and uncounted brothels, meanwhile, catered to a rowdier crowd on the west side of town.
The newly blossoming town had sprung up “like a summer breeze,” wrote one of Hailey’s first arrivals-by-train, Carrie Adell Strahorn, in her 1911 memoir, “Fifteen Thousand Miles by Stage.”
By May 1883, the 70-mile branch of railroad from Shoshone to Hailey was complete. Lawyers, doctors, and prospectors from the east and Midwest poured onto the Hailey Depot platform on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Carbonate Street, greeted by brass bands and beer kegs.
“Civilization has advanced into the hills,” the Wood River Times stated.
But for Hailey’s several hundred Chinese settlers, whose stories have gone largely untold, harassment, bigotry and unchecked violence was the norm in the late 19th century.
Quantum leaps in infrastructure were made long before the first train chugged into Hailey. In 1869, Union Pacific Railway workers finished the country’s first transcontinental railroad line, linking Council Bluffs, Iowa, to San Francisco via southern Wyoming, northern Utah and northern Nevada.
The line revolutionized trade and travel nearly overnight, allowing ore and dry goods—and passengers—to move with greater ease between the East and West coasts. The commute between San Francisco and New York City famously dropped from several months to seven days.
Then, in 1881, work began on the Oregon Short Line, a subsidiary of the Union Pacific, to extend the Transcontinental Railroad from Wyoming up to eastern Oregon. The 600-mile route connected Granger, Wyoming, to Huntington, Oregon, retracing the Oregon Trail through southern Idaho.
But the Wood River Valley had a problem. The Short Line offered no nearby rail connections, meaning that stores depended on six-horse stages to ferry in flour and other staples from the nearest rail stops in Blackfoot, Idaho and Kelton, Utah, closing frequently whenever there was a delay.
Passengers, too, had to follow present-day Highway 26 to the Blackfoot rail depot. And travel by stage came with risk: horse thieves, desperadoes, poor road conditions, exposure.
“The Chinese immigration to Hailey must cease.”
Editor of the Wood River Times
Add to the picture the valley’s new mining boom, which had kicked off around 1879 with the discovery of three-foot-wide veins of silver in the area. Mineral strikes were being discovered at a rate “next to impossible to keep track of,” according to the local Ketchum Keystone newspaper.
Young men eager to get in on the silver belt—some from as far as Ireland and Sweden—had filled hundreds of jobs at the nearby Muldoon, Vienna, Bullion and Red Elephant mines. Galena ore was stacking up at the Philadelphia Smelter in Warm Springs and the Muldoon Smelter west of Bellevue. Freight took three days to reach Salt Lake City.
With the area’s many mines, smelting facilities and timber, railroad magnates smelled a promising future. In 1882, a band of Union Pacific Railway investors bought the Hailey townsite from congressional delegate John Hailey for $100,000.
It had already been decided at that point that Hailey would be the Short Line’s northernmost terminus; the businessmen were simply acting on that inside information, eager to transform the rugged land into a railroad town.
In February 1883, the Oregon Short Line reached Shoshone, informally called the “Junction.” Thus began track-laying work on the Wood River branch of the Oregon Short Line.
The Wood River branch was not built without tremendous sacrifice from hundreds of immigrants.
Grading work on the Wood River branch began near Silver Creek in 1882, where laborers were divided into two main camps—one focusing on grading from Picabo north to Hailey and the other from Picabo south toward Shoshone. It could take one week to grade half a mile, Wood River Times editor T.E. Picotte reported in August 1882.
W.H. Kilpatrick and his three brothers, who had won the contract for building the Wood River branch, hired around 1,000 Italian men to blast through rock and pile dirt 5 feet above the ground to keep future tracks clear of snow.
The graders arrived by the carload from Denver, Omaha and Kansas City and laid the foundation for the railroad using horse-drawn scrapers, dump carts, shovels, axes and dynamite.
But the varied terrain of the Wood River Valley—deceptively thick cuts of volcanic rock, “strong sulphureous vapors” from hot springs and the wetlands near Silver Creek—made for backbreaking work and high turnover, according to Picotte.
“In some places it is as fair and gravelly as it looks … in others solid rock is encountered by the plow at a depth of a foot or so,” he wrote.
Between Aug. 18 and 19, two dozen Italians quit on the spot. Others held out until the next payday.
“The great difficulty which has been experienced by the contractors has been that most every day … squads of graders, after a few days’ work, pick up their blankets and travel for the mining or agricultural districts,” Picotte reported.
The Kilpatricks—already months behind—pushed unremittingly forward on the Wood River branch, hiring hundreds more Italians and upping their wages to $3 per day. Twenty-seven Black men from Virginia were hired that fall, but were paid significantly less, according to the Times.
“Colonel Kilpatrick is on the ground, and pushing the work rapidly, determined to complete the line hence to Shoshone by Dec. 1st,” Picotte wrote. “Mr. Kilpatrick says that he can grade the road from his present camp, 25 miles below Hailey, to this town as fast as his men can walk.”
When snow began to fly in October, it became clear that construction would have to wait until the following spring.
“Thousands of Italians are working upon the railroad lines all about us, and macaroni soup is served at every lunch stand,” an unnamed Wood River Times reporter wrote in October 1882. “The winter weather does not suit them.”
Most Chinese settlers in Hailey took physically demanding, low-paying jobs as laundrymen, wood cutters, servants and cooks in order to avoid violence in the mines and on the railroad. Here, Chinese launderer Kee Le Wah poses for the camera, circa 1890. Wah most likely lived in the Wood River Valley, according to The Community Library’s Regional History Department.
According to Chinese-Scotch author Ruthanne Lum McCunn, the news of California’s gold rush inspired thousands of Chinese villagers to leave their hometowns and travel a grueling 6,000 miles by ship to California.
Food shortages, drought, higher taxes and increased corruption in rural Chinese villages had become more common starting in 1860, following the country’s loss to Britain in the second Opium War, Lum McCunn wrote in her 1979 book “An Illustrated History of the Chinese in America.”
“Some left the villages to look for jobs in the cities, but there was no work available. Finally, in order to keep their families alive, Chinese men had to go overseas to work,” she wrote.
The ship bunkers were filthy and cramped, according to M. Alfreda Elsensohn’s 1970 book “Idaho Chinese Lore.” As The San Francisco Examiner put it, the space assigned to each Chinese migrant was “about as much as is usually occupied by one of the flat boxes.”
“It would be a strange sight to one not accustomed to it to see a framework of shelves, not eighteen inches apart, filled with Chinese,” the newspaper stated.
Western railroad companies’ interest in recruiting—and exploiting—Chinese laborers piqued with the passage of the Credit Ticket System in the 1860s. Under the system, a small network of employers paid Chinese laborers’ passage by ship to California but demanded that money back once the laborers started working.
“The employer also took back the cost of food from the earnings, leaving the laborer with very little,” Lum McCunn wrote.
Thousands of Chinese men took mining jobs in Idaho, Montana and California under the Credit Ticket System. Around 1,500 Chinese immigrants found their way to the Elk City gold mining district in central Idaho between 1872 and 1884. Other “Chinatowns,” or Chinese-majority mining camps, sprang up in Lewiston, Salmon, Rocky Bar, Silver City and Challis.
Chinese miners frequently faced violence from white peers, Elsensohn wrote, with white miners taking “matters into their own hands” with little consequence.
“[Miners] expelled the Chinese from the mining camps, sometimes beating and even shooting the Chinese they found … Fake tax collectors searched out Chinese miners to steal their gold. The real tax collectors were as bad as the fake ones, killing those who refused to pay,” she wrote.
Many fearing for their lives, Chinese immigrants went to lay track for the Transcontinental Railroad and, later, the Oregon Short Line. Around 1,700 Chinese men found work on the Short Line in Oregon in the early 1880s, working for only 80 cents per day while their white peers earned $1.50 per day.
Around the same time, upwards of 150 Chinese men found work in the Wood River Valley as vegetable and fruit vendors, laundrymen, personal servants and wood cutters. Those who settled in Hailey built a close-knit row of log cabins along River Street, near the present-day China Gardens subdivision across from Lions Park—Hailey’s new “Chinatown.”
Those that had settled in Hailey were far from home, mostly without wives or children, and paid scanty wages that only decreased with systematic boycotting.
“Most of the men [in Idaho] endured lonely existences, with only the hope of the future to sustain them. The men earned very little money, and almost everything they earned was either sent home to their families or saved so that they could return to China for a visit,” Lum McCunn wrote. “Some tried to escape their loneliness by taking drugs. Others tried to get rich faster by gambling … They died in America, and only their bones made the journey home to China for burial.”
In 1882, President Chester A. Arthur’s Chinese Exclusion Act levied a 10-year ban on immigration of foreign laborers and denied American citizenship to all Chinese nationals. More than 40,000 Chinese immigrated to America in 1881; only 10 entered in 1887.
Locally, the law set off anti-Chinese sentiment and culminated in “No Chinese” ads in the paper and racial violence.
A typical anti-Chinese ad in the Wood River Times, circa September 1882.
Three Chinese men were murdered on Camas Creek in June 1882, the Lewiston Teller reported. In August 1882, two Chinese produce vendors were murdered along the Little Wood River, “throats cut from ear to ear,” the Hailey paper reported. Their team of four horses had been stolen, along with $700 in savings.
In September 1882, two Chinese men were shot and stabbed near what is now Rinker Rock Creek Ranch, “undoubtedly murdered for their money.” Their horses’ legs were tethered together as to not draw attention to the scene. A white man was “strongly suspected” but never caught, the Times reported.
The following spring, amid the Kilpatricks’ rush to finish the Wood River branch of the Short Line, around a dozen Chinese men found work loading ties for the railroad near Bellevue.
They were forced to work at gunpoint in at least one instance, according to the Wood River Times.
“This morning the foreman or boss at the tie-camp on the base of Wood River above Bellevue became enraged at some misconduct on the part of the Chinamen who were employed under him in loading ties upon the flat cars,” the Times stated on May 23, 1883. “An altercation ensued between the white boss and the dozen Chinamen who composed his crew ... The boss seized a crowbar, it is stated, and knocked down two of the [Chinese], killing one of them almost instantly.
“The other Chinamen who had gathered around him, seeing their comrades fall, scattered,” the paper continued.
The assistant railroad master ordered the men back to work, but they refused.
“Upon their refusal to obey he drew a pistol, drove them back to the ties, and compelled them to resume their duties,” Picotte wrote. “The dead man was taken to Chinatown, nearby, where his countrymen collected and held a warlike demonstration.”
That same month, two cabins in Hailey’s Chinatown were intentionally set on fire with coal oil, Picotte casually noted.
In his daily writings, Picotte channeled his hatred for Chinese immigrants and drew a heavy link between Chinatown and nefarious activity.
According to the Wood River Times, the first drug bust in Hailey’s Chinatown occurred during a raid of opium dens on River Street on Sept. 8, 1883. Sheriff D.H. Gray and three of his officers detained eight Chinese men and one white man after finding $350 worth of opium, pipes and paraphernalia.
"The citizens are willing to let the Chinamen remain until starved out, so as long as they earn no wages and receive no income. The most stringent boycott against the Chinese prevails."
“Down in Chinatown the population hold high revels, and indulge in opium-smoking, the eating of rice and other very greasy food … smoking more opium … Chinese human nature is as perverse as any other,” Picotte wrote in January 1884. “There is absolutely nothing worth seeing in Chinatown.”
Picotte—and the editorial board of the Idaho Statesman—also frequently complained about Chinese residents stealing labor from “natives” and accused them of driving down white men’s wages.
“There are no ifs or buts about it. The Chinese must go if Hailey expects to encourage … good, substantial supporting citizens,” he wrote.
By 1886, anti-Chinese leagues had popped up in Hailey and Ketchum to drive out local Chinese settlers. The “Hailey Anti-Chinese League” crafted an exclusionary ordinance in January 1886 at the Hailey Theater:
“These coolies [Chinese] can live on five cents a day, then gamble the long nights away over their few pennies or in their vile opium dens … the amounts sent [back to China] from this town alone aggregate $3,000 per month,” the ordinance stated. “The Chinese immigration to Hailey must cease.”
Picotte made no effort to water down his intentions.
“The citizens are willing to let the Chinamen remain until starved out, so as long as they earn no wages and receive no income. The most stringent boycott against the Chinese prevails,” he wrote in February 1886, “no white man buying from, selling to, or dealing with them. Poverty and destitution are forcing them away.” 
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That is a great story. Hailey was never a sheep town.
Fascinating story, excellent journalism, thanks.