R. Gregory Nokes, Massacred for Gold: The Chinese in Hells Canyon (2009)
Content warning:
Death, discrimination & bigotry, gun violence, hate crimes, hate speech, murder, torture
Synopsis
R. Gregory Nokes’s Massacred for Gold: The Chinese in Hells Canyon investigates and recounts the 1887 murder of more than thirty Chinese gold miners along Oregon’s Snake River, one of the deadliest yet least remembered episodes of anti-Chinese violence in American West history. Drawing on archival documents, newspaper accounts, court records, and historical research, Nokes reconstructs the events leading up to the massacre, the identities of the victims and perpetrators, and the subsequent failure of the criminal justice system to hold those responsible accountable. While documenting the miners’ pursuit of economic opportunity in the American West, the book also situates the massacre within a broader history of anti-Chinese discrimination, exclusion, and racial violence in the Pacific Northwest. By recovering a neglected historical event, Nokes shows how racism, economic competition, legal indifference, and environment shaped the experiences of Chinese immigrants in nineteenth-century Oregon.
Essay
Massacred for Gold should be considered Oregon literature because it confronts a foundational, but often overlooked, episode in Oregon history. While many narratives of the state celebrate pioneers, settlement, economic development, and the American dream, Nokes’s book offers a more complicated and informative look into the violence that accompanied those processes. This book expands the boundaries of who belongs in Oregon’s historical memory.
The book is explicitly concerned with Oregon geography, as Hells Canyon, located along the Snake River bordering eastern Oregon, offered the perpetrators of the crimes an isolated environment to disappear from memory, alongside the victims. The landscape is painted with careful detail to honor the geography that shaped this unfortunate event. Nokes pays attention to both the geography of the physical space and the significant role Chinese communities played in the economic development of the Pacific Northwest through mining, railroad construction, agriculture, and other forms of labor. Despite their labor being essential to the industry and success of the region, the Chinese Americans of Oregon have been placed in the background of history or as a footnote beneath other White settlers.
Nokes’s book is relevant and important to Oregon Literature because it begs its readers to recognize who has been heralded as the “pioneers” of Oregon and then American West as a whole. He then asks the reader to reconsider who has been excluded from this history and the role racism plays in both history and in our current age.
Author Bio
R. Gregory Nokes is an Oregon historian and author who has long worked to unveil forgotten episodes in Pacific Northwest history. Also a journalist, he has reported and edited for The Oregonian and the Associated Press. Nokes has written extensively about race in Oregon and the histories of early Oregon days. His research into the Hells Canyon Massacre has helped renew public attention to both the event and the circumstances of Chinese immigrants in the American West. Nokes attended Willamette University in Salem, Oregon, as well as Harvard as a Fellow.
Further Reading
R. Gregory Nokes, Breaking Chains (2013)
Kristina McMorris, The Girls of Good Fortune (2025)
- A novel about a half-Chinese young girl who gets kidnapped and brought to the Shanghai Tunnels in Historic Portland.
Daniel P. Johnson, “Anti-Japanese Legislation in Oregon, 1917-1923” Oregon Historical Quarterly (Summer, 1996)
- An article that contextualizes the early nineteenth-century immigration from Japan to Oregon.