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In a small lab on the outskirts of Rapid City, South Dakota, Donn Ivey, an itinerant researcher whose business card reads "Have Trowel, Will Travel," swiveled in his chair and peered into a small pile of dirt. With his left hand, he adjusted his trucker's cap. With his right, he nudged a pair of stainless-steel forceps into the dark earth. "I found a pair of tweezers, right there," he said, pulling out a rusted, V-shaped strip of metal and carefully putting it aside.
Last summer, Ivey drove his RV to this lab, run by the state's Archaeological Research Center, to participate in the excavation of a 19th-century Chinese neighborhood buried under the fabled Wild West boomtown of Deadwood (once home to Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane). State archaeologists have been working at the Deadwood site, in the Black Hills 50 miles northeast of Rapid City, for three years. In August they closed down the dig and shipped the final box-loads of bone, wood, metal and glass to the state's lab for analysis.
The excavation is South Dakota's largest: a half-million-dollar project that began in May 2001, after a developer announced plans to tear down a former restaurant to build a parking lot. The city of Deadwood is a National Historic Landmark, so an archaeological assessment had to precede the demolition. When researchers examined the property, they realized that the Chinese residents, who first arrived in the frontier town in 1876, had left behind thousands of significant artifacts. The discovery has helped fuel interest in Chinese-American history, already the subject of recent books and a PBS documentary. Even HBO's gritty period drama "Deadwood" uses the city's Chinatown as an important setting.
Inside the Rapid City lab, located in an office park behind a hardware store, archaeologists are sifting through the city's turbulent past. A table near Ivey's desk displayed newly labeled specimens, including two tattered fedoras, an opium smoking kit and an 1860 Army-issue Colt 44. On Ivey's lap rested a 19th-century Sears catalog, to help him identify objects. "The Chinese would never shave," he said, studying the metal strips on his tray. "They would pluck their hair. Tweezers were also used for smoking opium, but this one looks like it was for grooming."
Deadwood's Chinatown, like so many others throughout the West, was built during one of the country's great gold rushes. In 1874, Civil War general George Armstrong Custer scouted the Dakota Territory and observed, "It has not required an expert to find gold in the Black Hills." Prospectors, adventurers and outlaws soon flooded the region. The dirt trail into Deadwood was beaten hard by "ten thousand venturesome, excited gold seekers," one pioneer wrote. The first settlement was a jumble of canvas tents, clapboard shops and saloons clustered near a muddy creek.
The several hundred Chinese immigrants who made the journey to this lawless frontier were no strangers to gold fever. In the villages of southern China, people called America "Gold Mountain," a place to find one's fortune. The California gold rush of 1849 had triggered America's earliest wave of Chinese immigration, with some 66,000 people, mostly men, arriving over the next decade. (About half of them stayed.) Chinese workers pursued opportunities eastward into Nevada, Montana, Wyoming and elsewhere. In 1870, they made up nearly 30 percent of the Idaho Territory's population.
By the time the Chinese began migrating to Deadwood, most had learned to negotiate the Wild West's fierce rivalries and racism. White miners held deep prejudices against the Chinese, and many Chinese chose to avoid the highly contested world of gold digging in favor of heavy labor or service work. During the 1860s, at least one out of every six Chinese immigrants living in the United States worked on railroad construction; others became cooks, farmers, merchants, blacksmiths and innkeepers. In the early days of the Black Hills gold rush, more than 100 labored as laundrymen in and around Deadwood—a monopoly that earned them the title "knights of the washtub" from one contemporary newspaper.
The fortunes of Deadwood's Chinatown grew along with the town. Locals soon took to calling the Black Hills "the richest 100 square miles on earth." The boom eventually generated a billion dollars in gold. But by 1918, with the town's major gold deposits tapped out, Deadwood's economy went into a sharp decline. The Chinese left for other parts of America or returned to China; by 1935 none remained.
Thanks for the concise history. My grandfather, great-grandfather, and granduncle(s) came to America at, or shortly after this period. My grandfather landed in Boston,MA as a storekeeper. They never speak of bad times or treatment, which is typical, especially since my grandfather became a convert to Christianity. I would like to visit SD and Locke before it is too late.
Posted by Aileen Shane on May 21,2008 | 02:58PM
im looking for wild bills first grave site or charlie utters camp site the exact location anyone intrested in helping me
Posted by sean hill on March 8,2009 | 04:24PM