THE Asian Range

This is another in a series of ethnic minority Range Histories. After profiling one of our Jewish WWII vets a few weeks back, I thought it would be interesting to present a sampling of articles, circa 1906-1909, that indicates how citizens of Asian descent were portrayed in our local papers. These stories cover the whole spectrum from respect to stereotypical prejudice, and serve as a reminder that our area was always more diverse than we often choose to remember.

-Jason Scorich Fine Hotel

The European hotel, L. Fong and H. Shing, proprietors, have opened their hotel, corner of Chestnut street and Cleveland avenue, and report a fine run of business. The hotel is one of the most modern on the range. There are 35 rooms, all furnished with brass and iron beds and in each room is a lavatory. There are baths on each floor. A feature which makes the guest feel that he is in a large hotel in the city is the individual telephone system service. The hotel is run on the European plan with day and night café service. The Virginian—Fri., March 22, 1907

Passing of San Francisco's Chinatown

SAN FRANCISCO’S Chinatown was long both a magnet for tourists and a plague spot in the community. The fire following the earthquake swept it completely out of existence, and in the opinion of many people its destruction was a blessing in disguise. It was a headquarters for vice and crime, the depths of which the officials of San Francisco were never able fully to sound. In the new San Francisco care will be taken to prevent the vices of the orient from taking root so deeply as they did in the old. How deep underground the Chinese of San Francisco sent in their efforts to evade inspection of their ways of living white men never knew, but the fire has revealed the strange and awesome facts.

high school. It is said to be a very funny production, entitled “Through to China.” There are sixty characters in the cast and the seniors will play the leading parts. The first act is laid in America. Then a hole is drilled through to China and the last three acts are laid in that country. The play will be produced during the first week in June at the Roosevelt auditorium and will run two nights. The proceeds will be used for the purchase of a class memorial to be placed in the auditorium. The cast of characters is as follows: The conflagration made a complete job of it in Chinatown. Not a single painted wooden fabric was left. The flames ate down to bare ground, and joss houses, gambling dens, opium joints and

theaters all went up like so much tissue paper. Hundreds of crazed yellow men fled from the scene, bearing in their arms opium pipes, money bags, ebony furniture, silk hangings, clothing and such other articles as they could snatch up in their flight. Some who lingered to save more of their property were driven out by soldiers when the flames pressed close upon the colony, but even the soldiers could not enter the holes in the ground where slave women who had lived for years without ever seeing the light of day were confined and where the victims of opium lay in a stupor which even an earthquake could not disturb. How many perished in these underground passages will never be known, but the fire has unmasked the secrets of the hidden city and laid bare tunnels leading down fifty, sixty, perhaps a hundred feet into the ground.

The Chinese colony of San Francisco is supposed to have numbered about 30,000. The Chinese quarter was near the old city hall and was full of winding alleys leading to all kinds of resorts and curious places of entertainment possessing a strange fascination for tourists. The population lived both above ground and under ground. Above ground as many as a dozen persons often slept in an apartment which a white man would consider too small for one. How they lived underground nobody can exactly say. Every tourist had the privilege of seeing Chinatown, and every tourist went away satisfied he had seen all the strange and mysterious things that were to be seen, but he was mistaken. Secretary Tsing, a Chinese aristocrat stationed at the legation in Peru, once took two white men to a theater in Chinatown. After the performance he conducted his friends to the rear of the stage, slid a secret door back and asked his guests to follow him. They walked for an hour through tunnels leading past doors to gloomy apartments, some of them dungeons, against the bars of which unfortunate prisoners of both sexes pressed their faces.

In telling afterward of their experience the visitors said that there appeared to be hundreds of women and children as well as men in this underground town. Ordinary tourists saw only the picturesque and more or less pleasing side of Chinatown. In the underground city rich Celestial merchants carried on a slave traffic, leprosy flourished, and numerous murders were committed. Battles between the “tongs” were fought and the victims buried far beneath the surface.

But now the catacombs in which these deeds were done and in which so many persons dragged out a miserable existence lie exposed to the glare of the sun. The new Chinatown, if such a place exists in the San Francisco of the future, will not rise above the holes in the earth which a short time ago were dens of vice. The Chinese are being quartered at some distance from the site of their former colony, and it is prophesied that the conditions which made the old Chinatown a plague spot will never exist again. In the days now gone by it was a very easy thing for a highbinder who had just shot or stabbed a fellow countryman to get away from the police. The roofs of many of the buildings almost touched. A fugitive would skip to a roof and, taking a plank, cross upon it to another building and next to another, always taking his bridge with him. Then he would go down into an underground passage and either remain hidden away from the police or come up blocks away from the scene of the crime and escape suspicion in connection with it. The Virginian—Friday, May 18, 1906

European Hotel and Cafe

Corner of Chestnut and Cleveland avenue, Virginia, is the only first class, European hotel on the range and enjoys the patronage of an excellent class of people, its capacity being constantly taxed to the utmost. The building was finished and opened to the public early in the season of 1906 setting a pace which has found few successful imitators. It is a substantial threestory brick building comfortably furnished in unique and appropriate style and contains thirty-five guest rooms each equipped with steam heat and electric lights and call bells; bath rooms with hot and cold water on each floor.

There is a first class buffet in connection and the café offers all the advantages of a first class restaurant al the delicacies of the season being obtainable at reasonable prices, while the cookery will satisfy the most fastidious patrons.

The proprietors are Louie Fong and Henry Shing. Mr. Fong has been in Virginia for fourteen years and his skill as a chef is well known to travelers and citizens alike. He is the owner of other

property in this city as well. Mr. Shing carried on a hotel and restaurant in Duluth for several years and for two years conducted a restaurant at Hibbing. Since coming to Virginia, he has acquired a wide acquaintance and now gives his attention to the hotel office. [1909 Virginia Enterprise Industrial Number]

A ROUGH HOUSE

The Frisco Restaurant the Scene of Wild Commotion Monday Night.

Too much booze, a disposition to run things to his liking and the inclination to make things lively, was the cause of a rough house created by William Hudson at the Frisco restaurant [311 Chestnut St.] Monday night. After having refreshed the inner man to a degree quite beyond the necessary, Hudson went into the Frisco for a light repast in the line of a lunch.

While being waited upon he opened up a conversation which seemed to the management an octave or two higher than the occasion demanded and Jim Young, the Chinaman night cook, had the audacity to butt in and interfere with Hudson’s innocent little pastime. This was quite forcibly resented by Hudson and he immediately took steps to put the place out of business. He smashed Him a soaker in the cheek, right where the bone is most prominent, followed this up with a solar plexus blow that nearly landed Jim under the table. Jim was game, however, and came back at his antagonist with a mad rush. When the men came together Hudson snatched a catsup bottle from the counter and threw it across the room, the bottle striking a small mirror and shivered it to pieces, the catsup spattering on the walls in all directions. In the mix-up following, dishes were thrown from the tables, chairs tipped over and amid the screams of the waiter girls, the Frisco was the scene of wild commotion for a few moments. Hudson finally made his exit but his departure was not followed by many regrets from the employees or from Young. After gaining the street, Hudson kept up his incessant loud talk which attracted the attention of the police who placed him under arrest. After putting up a $10 bond for his future appearance, Hudson was allowed to depart. This arrest

was made for disorderly conduct upon the street, but here Hudson’s troubles did not cease. The next morning, upon the request of the management of the Frisco, Assistant County Attorney Poirier issued a warrant charging Hudson with feloniously assaulting one Jim Young, a cook at the Frisco, and the warrant is now in the hands of the chief of police. The Virginian—Friday, May 31, 1907

CAST OF THE CLASS PLAY

To Be Produced This Year By Seniors of Roosevelt High School

Rehearsals are now being held frequently for the class play to be produced this year by the seniors of the Roosevelt

Prof. Mark M. Lowe ......Edward Berg
Phalen Phlunk ..Lester N. McDonald
Will Knot ..........................Alex B. Dahl
Noah Heep ............William J. Hooper
Allegrette Smythe .... Herbert S. King
Vera Wise ................... Grace A. Owens
Retta Rick ..............Eloide B. Johnson
Minna Marky ............ Hulda A. Hanna
Ada Flunker ...... Agnes H. Lundmark
O’Tang ................... Daniel L. Mahoney
Nakoda ........................ Mary G. Gowan
Millie Terry ............ Agnes J. Hovland

Edward M. Deering May
McWang ......Kissem ................. Rhoda Pony .................. Carrie Way ......................Ying Ling ........................ Chip Chop ..................Warwick Martin
Gertrude De Noble
Grace Bonner
Ray Simonds
Lambert Gill
Sing Sing .......................... Chas. Butler
Sana ..............................Florence Ryan
Yum, Chinese Maid ........Lulu Martin
JAPANESE MAIDS:
Onota ........................... Ethel C. Morell
Watana ............. Genevieve A. Murphy
Tu Tu .......................... Bertha G. Smith
Tunnan ..................... Minnie G. Cohen
The Virginian—Tue., May 19, 1908

THE JAPANESE

He Is Child, Fanatic and Emotional Savage All in One

He is a bundle of contradictions, and, measured by American standards, he is a bedlamite, straight from topsy turvy land. He may be a Chesterfield and a cheerful liar one minute and a red Indian the next—a sycophant and a welsher today and a Napoleon tomorrow. We westerners have been taught to regard the little Jap as an amusing an precocious child given to obstructing sidewalk traffic with his polite contests in kowtowing, to suspending from the branches of the cherry tree his dainty poems addressed to his friends and to dawdling for hours over the ceremonial tea, and whenwe see him under the tent flap, bowing and laughing and playing checkers, he seems

a velvet pawed kitten in khaki. And yet you and I have seen him in battle a ramping, raging tiger, greedy of Slav bayonets and afterward dragging himself to the field hospital, shot to rags, unwhimpering, a mere bull hide wrapped around a will.

We never know a character until we have seen it put to the test under stress—least of all the combination of sphinx and Janus known as the Japanese. So studied, the embattled brown boy strikes me as a strange compound of Little Lord Fauntleroy, Peter the Hermit and Sitting Bull—child, fanatic, and emotionless savage, all in one. –Appleton’s Magazine The Virginian—Friday, July 5, 1907 Court Notes

A little too much booze was the cause of a stabbing affray Monday night. John Bossi and a friend got into an argument and as the drinks increased the argument became quite heated. A mix-up followed and during the melee the friend received a slight cut in the breast. The two were finally landed in the lockup for the night and the next morning were taken before Judge Nelson who fined Bossi $10 for his friendliness.

The case against William Hudson, who was arrested for assault on the person of one Jim Young, a Chinese cook at the Frisco restaurant on Monday night of last week, has been dismissed at the request of Assistant County Attorney Otto A. Poirier, who upon investigating the facts in the case found no cause for action. The Virginian—Friday, June 7, 1907