REBROADCAST Unearthing the buried history of Eastern Oregon’s Chinese cowboys

Like many aspects of Western history, what we've been taught by history books or the movies isn't the full story.

So today on the show, we're kicking off a special series in collaboration with Oregon Experience, the Southern Oregon University Laboratory of Anthropology, and Jefferson Public Radio.

Chelsea Rose joins us to talk all about unearthing Oregon history, the real stuff.

This has been a really important part of the story of ranching, which still really defines a lot of the identity of folks in eastern Oregon today.

that's been erased or, you know, forgotten about.

Before Eastern Oregon ever existed, the land where it now sits made up the homelands of indigenous people like the Umatilla, Cayuse, and Northern Paiute peoples.

They were the original stewards of this land.

They began to be forced off their land as European settlers arrived in the 1800s.

The Lewis and Clark Expedition, the Oregon Trail, those histories are well known.

But less well documented is the presence of people of Chinese descent in the pre-statehood and early statehood eras of Oregon's history.

Early Chinese residents were among the first generations of non-Indigenous people to settle in the region.

There were Chinese people settling there.

across the state.

So it's not just concentrated in John Day and Portland and Jacksonville.

It's everywhere.

Dr. Jennifer Feng is an independent historian and the director of exhibitions at the Wing Luke Museum in Seattle.

She's studied and written extensively about the early Chinese diaspora in Oregon.

The census data tells us that in a lot of these places in the state, Chinese people made up a really significant portion of the overall population.

So like in Grant County in 1870, the total population comprised of 42% Chinese people.

Fang has helped share this history in collaboration with the Oregon Chinese Diaspora Project, a grassroots multi-agency collaboration that focuses on documentation of early Chinese Oregonians in rural parts of the state.

Joining her in that work is historical archaeologist Chelsea Rose, the director of the Southern Oregon University Laboratory of Anthropology, or

SULA.

My specialty is the settlement and development of the American West, the gold rush, building railroads, development of the communities across the state.

Under the umbrella of the Oregon Chinese Diaspora Project's work, Rose and others have learned more about not only the prevalence of early Chinese Americans in eastern Oregon, but what they did there.

We've been shocked to find not only the scale of these populations over time, but also the extent to which Chinese Americans were involved in industries far beyond what you hear about normally, which is, you know, railroads and mining.