Eureka Chinatown Project

Chinese Expulsion of 1885

In the 1880s, Eureka’s Chinatown was the thriving center of Chinese life in Humboldt County and home to hundreds of men and women engaged in a variety of occupations and trades including vegetable farming, mining, fishing, construction, retail shops, laundries, restaurants, and domestic service.  Although about half the Chinese people in Humboldt County lived in the segregated community in downtown Eureka, many others lived in neighboring towns, logging camps and mines, and in households where they worked as cooks and servants.

Many Eureka residents, including judges and journalists, were overtly hostile to the Chinese community and openly disparaged and attacked them. Violence against Chinese community members, including harassment, robbery, and murder, often went unpunished and local newspapers frequently justified such crimes with racist slogans. As anti-Chinese sentiment and policies grew at the national level, including passage of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, anti-Chinese voices in the local press grew even more insistent. On February 5, 1885, the Humboldt Times-Telephone condemned Chinatown as a blight on the community and called for the removal of its inhabitants “by any means necessary.”

On February 6, 1885, a stray bullet hit and killed city councilmember David Kendall. An angry mob of over 600 people quickly gathered at Centennial Hall. It erected a gallows at the edge of Chinatown and demanded violent retribution against the entire Chinese community. Some Eureka residents objected to the mob’s demands to murder the Chinese and burn Chinatown, perhaps because they employed Chinese people as ranch hands, cooks, gardeners and servants; many saw them as decent, hard-working people. They spoke out against the mob only to be shouted down and, in one instance, hanged in effigy.

Local Eureka leaders, organized as the Committee of Fifteen, won the support of the mob that voted to remove all the Chinese residents of Eureka and Humboldt County. They presented a deadly ultimatum to Chinatown’s leaders: collect whatever belongings they could carry and leave in two days. Otherwise, they would face mob violence. On that scary night, the Chinese of Eureka packed what they could. The next day the sheriff and local vigilantes marched the residents of Chinatown to a cold warehouse at the wharf.

On February 8, 1885, 263 men, women, and children were loaded onto two steamships bound for San Francisco. They were forced to leave behind their homes, businesses, farms, boats, furniture, clothing, and vegetable gardens--anything they could not take with them. The next year, 1886, fifty-six Chinese individuals, led by the Wing Hing Company, brought a lawsuit against the City of Eureka in the Ninth District Court of California claiming $132,820 ($3.7 million in current value) in damages. The lawsuit was dismissed in March 1889, with the excuse that since Chinese immigrants were legally barred from owning land, they could not experience loss of property.

In the months and years following the 1885 expulsion, most Chinese residents of Humboldt County were forced to leave or go into hiding.  In 1906, a “Second Expulsion” occurred when owners of a salmon cannery on the Eel River brought in Chinese and Japanese workers. They were quickly rounded up and held on Tulawat Island until a ship arrived to return them to Astoria Oregon. The workers refused to leave until they were paid for a full season’s work.

A few resilient Chinese men, such as Charlie Moon and Willie Bow, remained in Native American communities of the Chilulah, Karuk, Hupa, Wiyot, and Yurok, while others lived in secluded ranches and logging camps where their skills were valued. Yet in an era when anti-Asian racism dominated the politics and culture of the West Coast, Eureka retained its reputation as a virulently anti-Chinese city. For the next sixty years, Humboldt County proudly claimed that it was “Chinese free,” and sought to erase the evidence of Chinatown and hide the Chinese people’s legacy of perseverance, enterprise, and resistance.

It was not until after the Second World War, the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943, and the repeal of the California Alien Land Law in 1956, that Chinese Americans began to return to Humboldt County. One such pioneer was Ben Chin, a decorated Army veteran who established Chin’s Café in South Eureka in 1954. Since then, the Asian American community of Humboldt County has continued to grow and thrive, demonstrating resilience and capacity for reconciliation in the face of hatred and discrimination, and an ability to work with other communities in Humboldt County to strive for peace and prosperity for all of the county’s residents.