Women, Chinese Miners, and Gold Rush Relationships in the Boise Basin

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "In the Sticks but Not in the Weeds: Diversity, Remembrance, and the Forging of the Rural American West", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Southern Idaho’s Boise Basin was the site of a late-nineteenth-century mineral rush that attracted gold seekers from around the globe to the western slope of the Rocky Mountains. For more than fifty years, this pluralistic population took up residence in small towns throughout the Basin and pursued livelihoods in its placer mining industry. Recently, the Boise National Forest and the University of Idaho initiated a partnership to address several large legacy collections related to this once-thriving gold rush community. This paper presents some of the results of that project, which reveal a variety of working relationships between Chinese miners and women landowners. Illustrating how larger social and political forces manifested within the unique occupational landscape of the Boise Basin, these relationships also demonstrate ways that women and Chinese miners each defied restrictions to establish themselves among the diverse members of their rural mining industry.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2024   •
• In the Sticks but Not in the Weeds: Diversity, Remembrance, and the Forging of the Rural American West

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow