Sarah M. Griffith

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Sarah M. Griffith | Border Crossings: Race, Class, and Smuggling in Pacific Coast Chinese Immigrant Society | The Western Historical Quarterly, 35.4 | The History Cooperative

Border Crossings: Race, Class, and Smuggling in Pacific Coast Chinese Immigrant Society

In 1893, dozens of Chinese and white conspirators were indicted for smuggling Chinese laborers and opium into the U. S. In the light of U.S. DistrictCourt case U.S. v. Wilson, this paper illustrates the intersections of race, transnational trade and immigration, and class division among and between Chinese merchants, immigrants, and white elites in Pacific Coast cities.

IN DECEMBER 1893, the U. S. district attorney for Oregon indicted twenty-eight men in the United States District Court. The case turned on events that had occurred two months earlier, in October of the same year, when a 450-pound shipment of opium was loaded aboard the steamer Wilmington in Victoria, British Columbia. Suspicious of the shipment, a Victoria customs agent telegraphed ahead to the Astoria, Oregon customs house, located at the mouth of the Columbia River—the main waterway into the city of Portland. Working on a tip, the owners of the Wilmington headed downriver to retrieve the ship and dump its illicit contents. But customs agents had already apprehended the shipment. Then began one of the largest nineteenth-century opium and immigrant smuggling cases on the West Coast. Of the Portland-British Columbia operation, one San Francisco newspaper declared, "the [smuggling] has been carried to an extent and audacity little short of marvelous."¹

The men indicted, both white and Chinese, were charged variously with smuggling and concealing opium and aiding and abetting the landing of illegal Chinese immigrants in the United States.² In the thirteen months before their arrest, the indictment charged business partners in the Merchant Steamship Company (MSC), Nathan Blum, and William Dunbar, and P. J. Bannon, a Portland attorney, and Glen O. Holman, notary public for the State of Oregon, had conspired with Port of Portland customs officials to land illegal immigrants from China, via ports in British Columbia.³ With the assistance of a Victoria, British Columbia, co-conspirator, Major John Wilson, the smuggling operation quickly expanded to include an extensive network of powerful Portland and Victoria-based Chinese opium manufacturers and merchants, and legal and political officials from the white communities in both countries.

The trial revealed much about the nature of transnational immigration and trade networks cultivated by a Chinese merchant elite in the decades prior to Chinese Exclusion and extended, by certain merchants, into illegal ventures during the Exclusion Era. Furthermore, the case illuminated the changing nature of border-crossing between the United States and Canada. As the U. S.-Canada border closed to Chinese laborers, it offered new opportunities for Chinese merchants, many of whom extended their wealth and power after Exclusion took effect. Physical borders between nations, in this case, reflected symbolic borders that often separated the Chinese and white communities. Chinese laborers, discriminated against for their purported corruption of the white labor market in the United States, were divided from the white community before and after Exclusion. Chinese merchants, however, more willing to assimilate to American standards of business and the English language, did not experience the dramatic division that separated Chinese laborers and whites. Rather, Chinese merchants used their business savvy to extend their presence into the white economy as labor contractors, goods merchants, and later as collaborators with whites, who saw a potential for profit arising out of the ban on Chinese immigration into the United States. These opportunities for cross-racial collaboration not only changed the nature of transnational immigration and China-United States-Canada trade networks, they also provided many Chinese merchants an opportunity to forge a privileged class-standing among their fellow countrymen—and no less, the larger white community.

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