The Chinese of Hope, Idaho

By: Bob Gunter

The Chinese that were located in Hope, Idaho came there on contract to help build the Northern Pacific Railroad.

Kermit Kiebert, a resident of the Hope area gives us, in his own words, a picture of the daily life of these men who were no more than slaves.

There's a lot of history on the Chinese and, of course, it goes back to the building of the Northern Pacific Railroad. They were a very inexpensive source of labor and people would go to China and pick them up and have them sign a twenty-five year contract to come over and work for the railroad. Well, over that twenty-five years, many times their folks in China passed away or they lost touch with their families, and after the railroad was completed, the Chinese that weren't working on sections and so forth, came to Hope. This was their retirement community.

There was an old feller who was the head of the Tong and he led the Chinese, his name was Louie Ben. Old Louie got so much a day out of their pay and it went into a fund and it was their retirement fund. It might have been the first one in Idaho for all I know. That fund paid for them to come back here to Hope.

Chinese Artifacts, Hope Idaho. The Chinese that were located in Hope, Idaho came there on contract to help build the Northern Pacific Railroad.
Click photo to enlarge

Not many of them came but there were probably, I would say, somewhere between thirty and fifty at the height of the retirement. Many of them died while they were working and some did go back to China. The Chinese actually had an establishment in Hope and they called it the China den where they all stayed. They brought a lot of their stuff in on rail and they had a tunnel out to the railroad track and they'd cart it in through the tunnel and up into the China den. They pretty much stuck to themselves. They didn't necessarily mix because, needless to say, we weren't at a diversity point in those days. In fact, they were treated very cruelly many times when they were working.

The money they made working, I imagine, was absolutely minimal. But it was better than the life they had in China and that's what brought them over here. I can remember someone telling me at some point in my life that Louie collected ten cents a day per man. I don't know the authenticity of that statement. I imagine that they worked for so much a month and it would have been for a pittance, I'm sure, but they did send money back to the old country.

Old Louie last one of the Chinese and he was an interesting character. For instance, he was the one that started the first authentic Chinese restaurant in Spokane. Of course, he came to Hope to get his ducks and most of them were wild and he also got his fish in Hope. I can remember him as a kid and old Louie, you know, he was the last of the Chinese to go. That's kind of a short history of them. Actually, by the late thirties, early forties, most of the Chinese had died off.

All photographs have been used with permission of the Bonner County Museum.