I used to live in a plain white house in Montana’s Rattlesnake Valley, in a neighborhood that was built over plots of bones. The existence of the bones is something everyone has heard about, but the story of who, exactly, the bones belonged to can vary.
I learned about the bones sometime in 2023, around the time westerly winds blew a Chinese high-altitude balloon across North America and into the big sky of Montana. Soon after, Republican Congressman Matt Rosendale, during a cable news appearance, succinctly summarized the crisis: “We are being invaded on all sides.” A few weeks later Sen. Jon Tester, a seven-fingered farmer whose 2018 Democratic Senate campaign I had worked for, led the bipartisan committee to investigate the “Chinese spy balloon,” and pushed for a suite of anti-Chinese bills including a federal ban on Chinese individuals purchasing land in America.
In an interview with NPR, he made his case: “Any company and any individual living in China that comes and tries to buy land can be controlled by the Chinese Communist Party because they have that kind of control over their people,” Tester said. “In this particular case: Guilty until proven innocent — let’s put it that way.”
From the political divide emerged a rare bipartisan consensus that the greatest threat to American life was China and the Chinese. This was a flashback to the era of the “Yellow Peril.”
At the time, I believed China to be somewhere far away, secondary to the everyday concerns of Montanans: paying rent, filling up the gas tank, making it through winter. I wrote off politicians’ Chinese fixation as mere opportunism; after all, xenophobia has historically been a winning political strategy.
But as talk of the spy balloon played out, one morning a neighbor with an interest in local history took me on a hike up to the saddle of the mountains above the Missoula Valley. From there, he pointed out the graves. At the base of the mountain, there beneath the houses, he told me, sat a forgotten Chinese cemetery. The Chinese were indeed already in Montana, not through aerial invasion as the politicians claimed, but rather in the very dirt beneath my neighborhood.
This was the start of my obsession. I began reading dusty leather-bound books in the county archives and the oral histories in the University of Montana’s Mansfield Library. I wanted to understand how houses came to be built on top of unmarked graves. I wanted to unearth the history of Montana’s Chinese. I wanted to uncover forgotten truths about Montana’s history and, in doing so, perhaps understand Montanans more deeply than they understood themselves.
MY GRANDPARENTS arrived in America from Korea without legal documentation during the fall of 1972, early enough in my father’s life to spare him the cultural markings of foreignness, but far too late for him to resolve his own complicated geographies. When I was a child, my father would often make declarative statements that began with “As Koreans, we …” — a practice I would later come to understand as an attempt to negotiate his relationship to the place our family had left behind. I inherited his sense of dispossession.
I moved to Montana the day after I graduated from high school, taking a job on the Tester campaign. He talked proudly of tilling the same land his grandfather homesteaded. My own home was far away, or perhaps nowhere at all, and I was starting a new life in Montana. As Koreans, we work hard to make a home.
That election became a referendum on whether Tester or his opponent, Rosendale, could more credibly lay claim to the title of Authentic Western Man. Both wore cowboy boots and flattop haircuts, held guns in their ads, swore on camera. Rosendale chose a Western character of his own: rancher. In the West, I was learning that a man could reinvent himself, even if that man had only moved out here from Maryland a decade ago.
Challenges were made, one by each campaign: Rosendale invited Tester to a fence-building contest, while Tester dared Rosendale’s campaign surrogate, Donald Trump Jr., to face him in a rock-hauling contest. Neither offer was accepted. But this was my introduction to Montana, seemingly a place where grit, brawn and rootedness in the land were decided at the ballot box. On a campaign mailer, Tester held a gun, the words “Our Heritage” below his beaming face. The significance of heritage telegraphed as a weapon had not yet occurred to me. When Tester won, I cried tears of joy.
Winters passed. I worked on an unsuccessful Democratic gubernatorial campaign and went on to lobby for the ACLU at the state Legislature.
Then the spy balloon came along, anti-Chinese rhetoric ramped up, and I found out about the graves underneath my neighborhood.
I learned that the Chinese comprised nearly a quarter of Montana’s population in the late 19th century. They lived and worked in nearly every town across the state, from the most remote mining camps, to Butte, the largest city at the time.
Chinese people operated popular restaurants, brokered friendships and alliances with their white neighbors, and formed fraternal organizations and secret societies. Chinese men operated laundromats and grocery stores and constructed the railroad. Chinese workers blasted the railroad through treacherous mountain terrain, where their deaths far outnumbered their white counterparts’. “There are probably 1,000 Chinese buried, who worked for the railroad company between Spokane Falls and Helena,” the Helena Daily Independent reported. “Verily the road was built with Chinaman’s bones.”
“Verily the road was built with Chinaman’s bones.”
Federal and state law banned the Chinese from mining for precious metals and obtaining citizenship — banned them, even, from starting families. In 1892, prominent politicians stumped across the West to win support for the renewal of the Chinese Exclusion Act, and workers in Missoula, whipped into a frenzy, decided to take matters into their own hands. Following anti-Chinese riots in dozens of Western towns, Missoulians stormed their own city’s Chinatown. The details in the historical record are sparse beyond a recollection in Montana: A State Guide Book, produced by the Federal Writers Project during the New Deal: “In 1865 many Chinese came in from the Cedar Creek placer diggings but left after four of their number were killed by white laborers in 1892.” Their names are unknown. If their bones were recovered, it is likely that they would have been buried in the Rattlesnake.
The Chinese sought to make Montana home, anyway. They shot off fireworks to observe the Chinese New Year and held large funeral processions to bury their dead, events that drew thousands of curious onlookers.
In Missoula, these funeral processions culminated at the base of Mount Jumbo, with the remains of the dead deposited in the earth underneath what is now my neighborhood. Each gravesite was marked with a headstone — a critical marker for identifying the bones of the dead, so that they could be exhumed 12 years later and returned to ancestral plots in China, in accordance with custom. But the Chinese were ultimately driven out, and their bones never made it home. Eventually, the cemetery fell into disarray and the headstones were cleared. Real estate ads from 1910 urged people to buy lots on land that was being developed on top of the cemetery — a prime investment opportunity.
How far has Montana progressed beyond the murderous politics that won the West? If we are to take Montana’s congressional delegation at its word, it is China that poses the greatest danger to our way of life. This is the rationale that guided the Montana Legislature in 2023 to pass two anti-Chinese bills: HB 602, which bans state contracts with Chinese manufacturers, SB 419, a first-in-the-nation prohibition on the Chinese-owned app TikTok. One bill that sharply echoed the past — HB 755, prohibiting certain Chinese individuals from buying land in Montana — died.
In America, we pave over our true history and conjure up a more flattering alternative. The truth is ugly and difficult to face; but not even pavement can cover bones forever or obscure the fact that American “greatness” has been achieved through the subjugation and enslavement of the racialized other. What we choose to remember — who we choose to remember — depends on whose lives we deem to be valuable in the first place. The Chinese did not end up underneath the asphalt of my neighborhood by accident. They were not forgotten as a product of clerical error or historical oversight. Their place in the dirt is a direct consequence of our American way of life. Our politics then resemble our politics now: paranoid, racist, genocidal. For years, I wrote letters and spoke before the Missoula City Council. And finally, last year the city approved the dedication of a plaque commemorating the Chinese cemetery.
A ceremony took place in early summer at a small park in the lower Rattlesnake neighborhood. City staff hung Chinese paper lanterns from the trees, and someone in the crowd brought white chrysanthemums. Surrounding the ceremony was a crowd of 50. I read a poem, “Indian Graves at Jocko,” by Richard Hugo, the preeminent Montana poet, who lived in the Rattlesnake. It concludes with these lines:
Dead are buried here because the dead will always be obscure, wind the one thing whites will always give a chance.
Cement was poured and the plaque was installed. The crowd applauded.
For the Chinese who were driven out of Montana, the four men murdered in Missoula, the dozens whose remains were forgotten, this plaque is not justice. But for Missoula, my home, my hope is that the plaque represents a commitment to facing the truth of the violence wrought against the Chinese, a light on the dim path leading toward historical redemption. The plaque is a promise: There still remains the possibility, however distant, that we may learn to live in reciprocity with each other on this land.
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