STORY BY KAREN BOSSICK
Learn about the Chinese experience in the Boise Basin when Renae Campbell presents “The Light of a Hundred Fires: Chinese Experiences in Idaho’s Goldd Rush Era.”
The free presentation will start at 5:30 p.m. tonight—Tuesday, Feb. 18—at Ketchum’s Community Library. You can see it in person by registering at https://thecommunitylibrary.libcal.com/event/13755393.
It also will be livestreamed and recorded to watch later at https://vimeo.com/event/4813239.
Chinese migrants were among the first and most numerous participants in Idaho’s gold rush, which began in 1960 after gold was discovered near present-day Pierce in northern Idaho.
They often made up more than half of the local population in Idaho’s mining towns. One of those sites was Idaho City where today’s visitors can still visit the Pon Yam House and see Chinese artifacts.
The Idaho city area sports a rich archaeological and historical record that has allowed historians to reconstruct what daily life was like for 1,500 Chinese individuals who established livelihoods in towns like Idaho City, Centerville, Pioneerville and Placerville, despite racial discrimination and an evolving array of exclusionary laws that would eventually drive them out of the area by the early 20th century.
Chinese often purchased claims abandoned by white miners, leaving their imprint in placer mining scars around the Boise Basin. Chinese also provided services, selling vegetables and doing laundry.
Campbell is a historical archaeologist and director of the University of Idaho’s Asian American Comparative Collection, a nonprofit facility dedicated to research on Asian American heritage.
Her 2023 dissertation, “The Once Bustling Basin: A Historical Archaeology of Chinese Mining Networks in Southern Idaho,” examined the relationships between Chinese merchants and miners with Boise Basin’s gold industry from 1860 to 1915.
The program is part of the 2025 Winter Read, where Wood River Valley residents are reading a common book: Jenny Tinghui Zhang’s “Four Treasures of The Sky,” a novel about a young Chinese woman trying to claim her place in the 1880s American West against the backdrop of the Chinese Exclusion Act.