The 'Annie' mystery solved

Slowly but surely, the appeals made here and on the radio paid off in gathering facts about the Chinese girl smuggled into the United States as a sex slave and won by a young white man in a poker game from the elderly Tong leader who "owned" her.

That girl was the subject of my September 28, 2011 column. At that time I called her "Annie" because I couldn't remember her real name. A tremendous amount of research into her life was done by writer Ruthanne Lum McCunn. Her book, "Thousand Pieces of Gold," was published by Beacon Press of Boston in 1981 as fiction because she had to imagine some events and characters that were beyond retrieving, but she states in the preface " the essential story of Polly's life remains accurate." I was also told by good readers who called there was a movie made, but it wasn't done very well.

The girl's name was Lalu Nathoy but took the name Polly Bemis for most of her life in America. She was born in September of 1853 and died at age 80 on Nov. 6, 1933 at the county hospital in Grangeville, Idaho. The man who won her and took her as his wife was called Charlie in the book. They lived together for around 50 years, and she out lived him.

When he died from injuries caused by a fire at their home on the Salmon River, she gave a neighbor friend the papers to the "mining homestead" property with the understanding he would build her a new cabin to live in there until she died and could be buried next to Charlie. When she died in the hospital, there was no way to get her body back into the snow-bound Salmon Wilderness, so she was interred at Grangeville.

Near as I can tell, Polly was 19 when taken from her family by bandits and sold in a Chinese slave market. That part of her life, as portrayed by author McCunn, is not always a fun read but likely quite accurate portrayal of those times. There are other disturbing parts to the book regarding her shipment across the Pacific Ocean, and touching vignettes such as one where in Idaho, Polly learned about America's Civil War and she wondered, "Why would the United States government free Negro slaves but not the Chinese?"

Our daughter Heidi found the book on eBay and gave it to me for Christmas. Did a fast read. It is well done but a little too dramatic for my reading tastes in these golden years.

The September column mentioned my not knowing if Polly was still alive when I first heard her story while working in the Salmon River country in 1950, but the book had dates which show she died when I was still very young. There are pictures, including one of her "wedding day."

She was a small woman and suffered through life from crippled feet that had been bound up when she was small. Apparently that was a custom in China, where women with "big feet" were not considered beautiful and thus more difficult to place in a "good marriage." Her father apparently unbound her feet when farming disasters made it necessary for her to leave off housework and go labor in their fields.

While my recap on the almost unbelievable life of an extra-ordinary woman makes interesting reading, it also leaves me a feeling of guilt. The dilemma is in my good fortune to learn the whole story while leaving readers with questions and lack of more details.

The saving grace of Polly's life story lies in the fact she did have many years of a loving, sharing life with Charlie. She earned the respect of other pioneers in that rough and tumble Salmon River country, had many close friends and led a giving, productive life. Not many could have achieved what she did under the same circumstances.

The wonder of it all? "The right man won her in a wild, drunken, smoke-filled saloon ... at a poker table."

G. George Ostrom is a national award-winning Hungry Horse News columnist. He lives in Kalispell.