The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [73]
Outraged Chinese diplomats demanded proper action from the United States government, but Thomas Francis Bayard, the U.S. secretary of state, explained that Washington was not responsible for crimes committed in a territory. Later, the American government grudgingly paid $147,000 in indemnities to the Chinese for destroyed property, but failed to bring any of the murderers to justice. During this era, it should be noted, even Chinese diplomats were not safe from violence. In New York in 1880, Chen Lanbing, the Chinese minister to the United States (a position then equivalent to ambassador), was “pelted with stones and hooted at by young ruffians,” according to the New York Times. The police stood by and laughed.
Then, in the Snake River Massacre of 1887, which the historian David Stratton calls “one of the worst, yet least known, instances of violence against Chinese,” thirty-one Chinese miners in Hell’s Canyon, Oregon, were robbed, killed, and mutilated by a group of white ranchers and schoolboys intent on stealing their gold and cleansing the region of their presence. A federal official who investigated the crime called it “the most cold-blooded, cowardly treachery I have ever heard tell of on this coast, and I am a California 49er. Every one of them was shot, cut up, stripped, and thrown into the river.” Apparently some body parts were kept as souvenirs; according to Stratton, “a Chinese skull fashioned into a sugar bowl graced the kitchen table of one ranch home for many years.” After the state identified the murderers, only three were brought to trial—and all three were acquitted. A white rancher later commented, “I guess if they had killed thirty-one white men something would have been done about it, but none of the jury knew the Chinamen or knew much about it, so they turned the men loose.”
Yet perhaps the most hurtful cut was still to come. These episodes of physical violence by local citizenry were followed by federal legislation that further restricted the lives of the Chinese.
Initially, the Exclusion Act had restricted only new Chinese immigration. But two years later, in 1884, Congress amended the act, now permitting only those Chinese laborers who had lived in the United States before November 1880—the date of the last treaty signed with China—the right to travel freely between the two countries. A special certificate was issued promising the émigré that should he leave, he would be guaranteed the right to return. So for those laborers who had arrived before this date, travel out of the country was still an option. But then in 1888, only a few years after amending the Chinese Exclusion Act, Congress broke the promise the United States had made to the earlier-arriving group by passing the Scott Act, which canceled all certificates granting Chinese laborers their right of reentry. Twenty thousand Chinese who had the misfortune to be out of the country when the legislation was enacted were unable to return, despite the previous guarantee from the United States government and the fact that many owned property and businesses here and had families here as well. At the very moment the law went into effect, some six hundred Chinese were on their way back to the United States with government-issued certificates granting them the right of reentry, yet they were not allowed to disembark.
The Chinese minister in Washington strongly protested the Scott Act with the