Polly Bemis is arguably one of Idaho’s most famous pioneers. The story of her life also could be one of the most embellished.
Sold by her parents in China, Bemis was 18 when she stepped off a pack train to start a new life in a mining town in remote Warren, Idaho. She lived out her days in the state and was a curiosity in her own time. The myth-making began before she died in 1933, and tall tales shaded by stereotypes persist today.
In the new nonfiction book “Polly Bemis: The Life and Times of a Chinese American Pioneer,” published by Caxton Press, historian Priscilla Wegars lays out the evidence for what can be proven about Bemis’ life, along with the mysteries that remain.
Despite discriminatory laws and widespread prejudicial attitudes toward the Chinese at the time, people saw Polly as different, said Wegars.
“She was just an amazing woman. As I said at the end of the book, everybody loved her. You could have this friendship with her; it was OK. People weren’t thinking of diversity. It was good for Euro-American people to know her as a Chinese American woman who was making a life in this country, despite all the adversities she encountered.”
Some of the falsehoods the book discounts with hard evidence are that Bemis was a prostitute and that her husband, Charlie Bemis, won her in a poker game.
Wegars is the volunteer coordinator of the Asian American Comparative Collection at the University of Idaho, which documents the Asian experience in the state through artifacts and bibliographical materials. Proceeds from the book will benefit the collection. Wegars talked to Inland 360 about her work to demystify Bemis’ life.
Bemis was not won in a poker game
The story that Charlie Bemis won Polly in a poker game was repeated and embellished by different writers over decades. In her book, Wegars shows how the story was romanticized over time. For example, Lewiston author Ladd Hamilton’s 1954 article, “How Mr. Bemis Won the Chinese Slave Girl,” described her as a “sloe-eyed slave girl with the skin like whipping cream,” “velvet hair” and “smooth, warm thighs.”
The 1981 novel “Thousand Pieces of Gold,” by Ruthanne Lum McCunn, and a 1991 movie loosely based on the book, spread the poker game story to a wider audience.
Wegars was familiar with the book when she was working on her Ph.D. at the UI in 1988 and met a student who was writing a paper about Warren, Idaho. The woman had interviewed an uncle, Herb McDowell, who as a boy knew Polly. He told her, “Polly wasn’t won in no poker game,” explaining that some old-timers made up that story.
