1887 robbery, death of Chinese recalled in Oregon

PORTLAND – It may be too late to seek justice for the 19th-century massacre of nearly three dozen Chinese gold miners by white frontiersmen, but one group of friends says it’s never too late to honor their memory.

The friends, who call themselves the Chinese Massacre Memorial Committee, plan to bring a monument to the Snake River cove in Hells Canyon where the gold miners were robbed and killed on May 25, 1887.

The killers were believed to be a gang of Oregon horse thieves, ranch hands and a 15-year-old schoolboy. They could have robbed the unarmed miners without killing them, said R. Gregory Nokes, of West Linn, author of a book about the massacre and one of the friends working on the memorial.

“It was really a savage act of racial hatred,” Nokes told the Oregonian.

The memorial committee plans to have a helicopter deliver the 4-by-5-foot granite monument to the cove for a ceremony commemorating the killings. It begins June 21. The monument will be engraved in English, Chinese and Nez Perce with the words: “Chinese Massacre Cove. Site of the 1887 massacre of as many as 34 Chinese gold miners. No one was held accountable.”

The brutal killers are believed to have hacked their victims with axes after they were dead. The crime was discovered when the mutilated bodies began showing up 65 miles downstream in Lewiston.

“It was the most cold-blooded, cowardly treachery I have ever heard tell of on this coast,” Judge Joseph K. Vincent, a 19th-century Idaho justice of the peace and U.S. commissioner, is quoted as saying in Nokes’ book. “Every one was shot and cut up and stripped and thrown in the river.”

The killers’ take probably amounted to 312 ounces of gold dust valued at roughly $5,000 at the 1887 rate of exchange of $16 per ounce, Nokes said. One of the robbers, 21-year-old J.T. Canfield, was delegated to sell the gold for money and probably ended up with all of it, he said.

Six Oregon men eventually faced murder charges in the massacre. Hiram Maynard, Hezekiah Hughes and a schoolboy named Robert McMillan, all of Wallowa County, were tried and found innocent in 1888. The ringleaders, Canfield, Homer LaRue and Bruce “Blue” Evans, fled Wallowa County and were never caught.

Another suspect, Frank E. Vaughan, turned state’s evidence and wasn’t charged. A relative later said he “was guilty as sin.”

Canfield, who ended up with the Chinese gold, is believed to have spent 10 years in a Kansas prison for stealing mules. Afterward, he went to Texas, then owned a blacksmith shop in Glenns Ferry, Idaho, Nokes said. He may have achieved some local prominence, because at his death in 1929 at age 63, his tombstone was the biggest in Glenns Rest Cemetery.

Chuimei Ho, of Bainbridge Island, Wash., vice chair of the Chinese Massacre Memorial Committee, planned to spend several days this month scouring Panyu District archives south of Canton City, China, where the miners were believed to have come from, in hopes of unearthing their identities, she said.

“In a way, I feel very honored to be involved,” she said. “But I don’t want to raise hopes. It is a very small chance.”