New West Book Review

Seeking the Truth Behind Idaho’s Chinese “Poker Bride”

By Jenny Shank, 6-21-10

The Poker Bride: The First Chinese in the Wild West
by Christopher Corbett
Atlantic Monthly Press, 218 pages, $24

In 1872, a teenage girl who was to become known as Polly Bemis, “Idaho’s most romantic character,” was sold into slavery by her impoverished family in China.  She was shipped across the ocean to San Francisco, where a wealthy Chinese businessman purchased her for $2,500.  Polly’s owner transported her on a steamboat and a pack train to Warrens, Idaho, a rough mining outpost that featured a thriving saloon run by a gambler from Connecticut named Charlie Bemis. 

According to many accounts, Polly’s owner wagered her in a poker game with Bemis, and Bemis won.  Several years later, Bemis was shot in a dispute over money, Polly nursed him back to health, and eventually Bemis married her, probably to keep her from being deported in the wake of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.  This match was unheard of in those times when whites and Chinese did not intermarry.  In the 1890’s, when Warrens’ gold-mining era had passed, Charlie and Polly moved into the wilderness by the Salmon River, and there Polly lived happily until 1933, when she was 81, and two prospectors carried her to the hospital in Grangeville to die.

This is the singular Western story that Christopher Corbett painstakingly reconstructs in The Poker Bride, a task made more difficult by the fact that Polly was illiterate, and so left no diaries or letters.  She had no children to preserve her history.  The many accounts of her life recorded in interviews and articles conflict, and as Corbett writes, “the Chinese were nearly invisible in the American West.”

The Poker Bride also tells the story behind Polly’s story, how it was kept from being lost by chance encounters Polly had with passersby through the wilderness who went on publish accounts of their experiences with her, and how a nun, sister M. Alfreda Elsensohn, wrote a history of the Chinese in Idaho, thus saving “the legacy of Polly Bemis.” Once the basic facts of Polly’s life were preserved, Corbett writes, the “appealing story would become a staple for amateur historians, newspaper feature writers, and latter-day heirs of the dime novel tradition in the American West.”

After outlining Polly Bemis’s life, Corbett demonstrates how improbable its events were by placing it into historical context.  Chinese workers came in large numbers to California to work during the Gold Rush.  Almost all Chinese immigrants were men who planned to work in the United States until they had saved enough money, and then return to their families in China.  This naturally created a demand for Chinese prostitutes, and thousands of Chinese families sold their daughters to be transported to California “under conditions that commentators compared to the Middle Passage, the voyage of slave ships coming from Africa.”

Once in San Francisco, girls were sold at auction and sent off to a variety of terrible fates. Corbett writes, “Wealthy Chinese merchants and businessmen bought the best of these girls as mistresses and concubines.  Some girls were sold to higher-class brothels; the less attractive prostitutes were sent to the so-called cribs.” Cribs were shacks in which a number of prostitutes worked simultaneously, and almost all of whom died of venereal disease within a few years.

Polly was spared the worst treatment of her fellow sex slaves, and although she must have worked as a prostitute for a time, she soon settled into the respectable life of a housekeeper for Charlie Bemis and eventually became his wife.  Everyone who recorded his or her encounter with Polly portrays her as a warm, generous, energetic, happy person, who welcomed visitors and was glad to share her tale with anyone who asked.

Throughout The Poker Bride, Corbett maintains a neutral journalistic stance, presenting his carefully researched evidence of Polly’s life to the reader with limited commentary, which is beneficial in telling a story that has as much potential for romanticization as Polly’s does. 

There are a few passages, however, where some more commentary by Corbett would have been welcome.  For example, he quotes historian Benjamin E. Lloyd as writing of Chinese prostitutes in America, “some of them have led this life of shame in their native country, prostitution there not being looked upon as an infamous business, but followed by many as a legitimate avocation.” I assumed this was not true, and was a statement that arose out of the prejudices toward Chinese prevalent during the time Lloyd wrote his history, but Corbett could have rebutted Lloyd’s statement for clarity.

Even though Corbett sticks to a straightforward, just-the-facts delivery of Polly’s story, the reader can’t help but become caught up in it.  The West that Polly Bemis encountered was a rough, unwelcoming place toward people of her gender, ethnicity, and situation, yet somehow she rose above her circumstances to live a long, contented life, isolated in the Idaho wilderness. 

“What Polly Bemis did most successfully was survive,” Corbett writes.  “She survived an experience and a system that killed most of the young women who entered it, and she remains the face of nearly every Chinese woman brought into this country in those days because of that simple fact.” In The Poker Bride, Corbett has done an admirable job of sorting out truth from fiction, bringing Polly’s remarkable story to a new generation.

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