The People's Songbag

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30919, 27 November 1965, Page 5

The People's Songbag

(Specially written for “The Pr 'J’HE history of goldfields is littered with racial hatred; and the worst sufferers have been the Chinese. Washee, washee, morn till night,\ No get drunkee, no go fight; No give sasee Melican man, Workee hardee all he can. Jibed the “Boston Post” in October, 1878, ostentatiously condemning its white breth-

•ess" by DERRICK ROONEY.) ren’s treatment of the Chinese, while at the same time perpetuating prejudice from its superior stance and comical dialect. In New Zealand acts of violence were not unknown against the Chinese who moved in, after the impatient white gold-miners had moved on, and gleaned from gravel too poor to tempt the whites enough gold to support themselves and send a little to their relatives in China. In the American goldfields the treatment of the Chinese matched on a smaller scale what has happened to Negroes in the South. As might be expected, the oppression of the Chinese seldom gets a mention in white American goldfields balladry; but some of the violence was on too massive a scale to be kept secret. The following somewhat ungrammatical stanza is from a ballad which sprang from a massacre in Idaho in 1885. The yellow-skins now know how

it appears. To have their gold by others

stole. 4s we have suffered for years Get out, Vellow-skins, get out.’ We’ll do it again if you don't go. Get out, yellow-skins, get out.'

In July, 1885, eight white cowboys descended on a Chinese camp near the mouth of the Imnaha river, shot and killed 32 Chinese and threw their bodies in the river The cowboys ransacked the camp and found 17 flasks of gold dust; but they were afraid to take it away, and buried it in the sand near the camp. When the news of the massacre got out the Chinese Government demanded reparations, and the arrest and punishment of the murderers. Two men and a teen-age boy were arrested, but they said the murders had been done by five others who had left the country. So the massacre went unpunished.

Whether the murderers went back for the gold is not known: but in 1902 two young men rode into Joseph, Oregon, with a whisky flask of gold worth about 700 dollars, which, they said, they had I found near the old camp.