The Stuff of Legend
As a former Associated Press reporter, Christopher Corbett knows how to spot a good story. So when he noticed that although thousands of Chinese had come to America during the gold rush, none of them were interred in boom town cemeteries, he followed the lead.
“I asked this old lady who had a store in the town, ‘Where is the Chinese cemetery?’ And she said, ‘The bone collectors came and took them back to China,’” he recalled. “I had never heard that the Chinese repatriated their dead, and my curiosity about that led me to this book.”
The book is The Poker Bride (Atlantic Monthly Press), in which Corbett tells the story of the Chinese in the West through the life of one such immigrant, Polly Bemis. Polly was sold by her famine-stricken parents, smuggled into San Francisco by her master, and won in a poker game by the man who would eventually become her husband. She lived an isolated life until 1923, when she came down from her home in the Idaho hills to tell her story.
At least, that’s how the legend goes. “You’re in what they call the borderland of fable once you cross the Missouri, so it’s one of those stories that’s rooted in fact and layered with a lot of embellishment,” said Corbett, a professor of the practice in English.
Whether or not the story is one hundred percent true, it’s been getting a lot of praise. The Baltimore Sun called it “a juicy combination of social history and deconstructed myth,” and the Wall Street Journal said the tale “reflects the essence of the American immigrant experience.”
“I think the response in part is indicative of the interest in the Chinese experience in the 19th century West. People are curious about it,” said Corbett.
For Corbett, the book’s biggest accomplishment is that it tells the story of these forgotten immigrants. Most Chinese returned to their homeland after the gold rush, taking their stories as well as their countrymen’s bones with them, and left behind few traces of their presence.
“The larger matter is that we know something about Polly,” explained Corbett. “She’s the human face on this immigrant experience that we know so little about.”
This book wasn’t the author’s first foray into the Wild West. His 2003 book Orphans Preferred: The Twisted Truth and Lasting Legend of the Pony Express (Random House/Broadway Books) gained him notice as one of the premier scholars on the iconic service. That book was recently reissued as a paperback.
The Pony Express will celebrate its 150th Anniversary on April 3, and Corbett’s calendar is already filling up with invitations to discuss his work. Most notably, he will be the keynote speaker for the anniversary celebrations at St. Joseph, Missouri’s Patee House, which housed the Pony Express.
With two books demanding his attention in addition to his regular duties of teaching English and mentoring the Retriever Weekly staff, Corbett acknowledges that “things are slightly wild”—just like they were in the Old West.
Corbett will speak at the Poe Room at the Enoch Pratt Free Library on February 24 at 6 p.m., and at UMBC’s Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery on March 9 at 4 p.m.
(2/19/10)
