The Chinese massacre at Deep Creek
May 1887Chinese Massacre Cove, Deep Creek on the Snake River, Hells Canyon, Wallowa County, OR
As many as thirty-four Chinese gold miners were ambushed and killed in Hells Canyon for the gold they had panned. Six men and boys were indicted, three were tried, all were acquitted.
A crew of Chinese miners from the Sam Yup Company of San Francisco was working a bend of the Snake River at Deep Creek, deep in Hells Canyon, in the spring of 1887. They were there because the Chinese Exclusion Act and the expulsions sweeping the West had closed most other work to them, and because the claims nobody else wanted still held gold.
In May a gang of horse thieves and schoolboys from Wallowa County ambushed the camp. As many as thirty-four men were shot, and their bodies mutilated and thrown into the river, apparently for the gold they had accumulated. Bodies washed up downstream for months.
The Sam Yup Company pressed for an investigation, and Lee Loi engaged a Lewiston judge, Joseph K. Vincent, to look into it. A grand jury indicted six men and boys in 1888; three were tried in Enterprise that September and acquitted after two days. Nobody was punished. The county's records of the case then disappeared for more than a century, until a clerk found them in 1995 in an unused safe - misplaced, or hidden. The United States Board on Geographic Names formally named the place Chinese Massacre Cove in 2005, and a memorial was installed in 2012.
The exact number was never established; accounts put it at thirty-one to thirty-four men.
Sources
- Chinese Massacre at Deep CreekThe Oregon Encyclopedia, Oregon Historical Societyoregonencyclopedia.org
- “A Most Daring Outrage”: Murders at Chinese Massacre Cove, 1887Oregon Historical Quarterly, Oregon Historical Society (2006)ohs.orgR. Gregory Nokes's reconstruction from the court records recovered in 1995.