‘Poker Bride’ tells amazing tale of the Old West
Published 1:40 pm Thursday, February 18, 2010
“The Poker Bride” by Christopher Corbett ($24)
Imagine “McCabe &Mrs. Miller,” “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” and “Deadwood” hand-stitched together and given a novel slant as a mini-epic of Chinese immigrant life.
That suggests the polyglot vitality of Baltimore writer Christopher Corbett’s new nonfiction book, “The Poker Bride.”
An unofficial follow-up to his rollicking frontier saga, “Orphans Preferred: The Twisted Truth and Lasting Legend of The Pony Express,” “The Poker Bride,” a juicy combination of social history and deconstructed myth, pivots on the fact-based Old West legend of Polly Bemis.
This Chinese woman debarked in San Francisco and rode horseback in a pack train to the mining camp of Warrens, Idaho, in 1872. She became the concubine of a wealthy Chinese master — and then the life partner of a white gambler from Connecticut, Charlie Bemis, who won her (many say) in a poker game.
Corbett, a veteran freelance journalist and former Associated Press and editor, and a professor of English and journalism at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, juggles facts and apocrypha like a master. Readers won’t mind that Polly merely hovers in the background for the book’s first half.
Corbett uses Bemis’ life to flesh out the 1849 California Gold Rush — and vice versa. “The Poker Bride” is about how the Gold Rush kept attracting miners from every land to Idaho and other states for decades.
Chinese men flooded into the West to make money for the families they left behind. Poor Chinese families sold their girls into American prostitution. The rags-to-riches-to-rags stories keep the narrative vital, even enthralling. Polly’s tale keeps it from becoming grueling.
“She was lucky,” Corbett said in his sunny Baltimore home. Polly eventually went to live with Bemis on a remote spot on the Salmon River, married him and outlived him. When she finally wandered down into Grangeville and then Boise after 50 years in the high country, newspapers treated her with affection and respect.
They celebrated her as a female Rip Van Winkle, awakening to history. “The Poker Bride” is a literary and historical sleeper — a true surprise, not a snooze.
Corbett, who hails from northern Maine, confesses to loving the American West as much as another son of the Pine Tree State, John Ford. “When you cross the wide Missouri, the stories start to get bigger, and you don’t often let the facts get in the way.
“In some ways, it’s a small story,” Corbett said. “It’s not Gettysburg. But Polly provides a way to talk about the Chinese experience. … You read 19th-century newspapers, and you see it was truly a nightmare to be Chinese on the frontier. The Chinese were treated as figures of fun or rascals up to no good.
“Stories like this are like Paul Revere’s Ride or the Alamo. And Americans like these stories.”
McClatchy-Tribune Information Services
