Kim Chung Lung & Co. was located behind McBurney House, which faced Deer Lodge's main thoroughfare. The original buildings are long gone, but newspaper ads and archival photos can help us imagine what was once there.
The McBurney House hotel was razed in the early 20th century, and a bank built in its place. While this corner provided a lodging place for people 140 years ago, today it is where the savings of Deer Lodge residents’ rest.
Photo by: John Schrantz/Flickr | CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
In 1881, Chinese Lunar New Year began on the last Sunday in January. For Deer Lodge's Gem Kee, there was a lot to celebrate. He was 32 years old, and the past 12 months had been especially good to him. His businesses—Kim Chung Lung & Co., a two-story mercantile and warehouse, and a laundry business—had done well, and he had recently married a Chinese woman from an elite family. After they wed, the local newspaper reported that Gem Kee seemed very happy with his new life as a married man. [1] Lunar New Year was a chance to share his good fortune with the community, and so he decided to plan a special night of food, fireworks and music for Saturday evening, Feb. 5. Invitations went out to some of the 700 Chinese people residing in the county.*
By the time the big night arrived, the Chinese residents of Deer Lodge had already spent the week celebrating. [2] Every evening, they gathered along the western half of the block between Missouri and Milwaukee streets for “the discharge of innumerable fireworks” and music by a band with “an old gong, a small drum head, triangle, and other noisy, diabolical and disagreeable instruments”—or at least that’s how James Hamilton Mills, the editor of Deer Lodge’s weekly The New North-West newspaper, bitterly described it. [3] This area was the small city’s Chinatown. Facing Milwaukee Street, on the lot behind the McBurney Hotel, stood Gem Kee’s store and laundry house. [4] On the other side of the warehouse, there was a “dilapidated hut” where Chinese and European Americans gathered to smoke opium. [5] There was also a corral for horses. The rest of the block was filled with log dwellings occupied by the Chinese community—some of which faced 2nd Street and the rest of which faced in toward the alley. On Missouri Street at the north end of the block was a lodging house for Chinese women. [6]
Kim Chung Lung & Co. was located behind McBurney House, which faced Deer Lodge's main thoroughfare. The original buildings are long gone, but newspaper ads and archival photos can help us imagine what was once there.
On the night of the event, the Chinese of Deer Lodge poured forth from their homes and joined Gem Kee’s guests and a few curious, non-Chinese residents of Deer Lodge; together they formed a crowd of spectators in front of Kim Chong Lung & Co. A band played music as the sky grew dark, and anticipation built for the fireworks show that would put the exclamation point on the year’s festivities. Gem Kee’s wife may have made her way to the second-floor balcony above the store to watch the pyrotechnics, her mobility limited by her bound feet. Finally, the fuses were lit, and the air filled with crackles and sparks and cheers. Even Mills found nothing negative to comment on when he wrote about the display in the following week’s paper: “Gem Kee entertained his friends right royally.” [7]
This was neither the first nor last Chinese New Year celebrated in Deer Lodge. Gem Kee opened his store in Deer Lodge in 1870, when the Chinese population of the city numbered only 15. [8] That was not a big enough market for the silk, china and other imported Chinese goods that Kim Chong Lung & Co. freighted in by train from Utah Territory or up the Missouri River on steamers. Historical archaeologist Chris Merritt thinks it was likely that "Deer Lodge, and the various Chinese merchants in that community, served as a central distribution point for goods and facilitated communications between companies across southwest Montana Territory and out-of-territory interests.” Chinese miners and mining companies preferred Chinese goods, and they would ride to Deer Lodge (or Virginia City or Helena) rather than buy domestically produced items from closer, European American owned businesses. [9] While studying Chinese miners, historian Sue Fawn Chung found that merchants also played an important role within Chinese communities; most were literate in Chinese and spoke some English, and so they "often were the leaders of the community and interfaced with the European American community leaders.” [10] Gem Kee, in fact, had formally studied English during his early years in Deer Lodge. [11] The fact that he hosted the community’s big Chinese New Year party likely indicates that Gem Kee was a leader, in addition to a person of means.
An 1888 fire insurance map of Deer Lodge shows the buildings on Gem Kee’s block and provides some indication of who owned them or how they were used.
In 1880, Kim Chong Lung & Co. was doing well enough that Gem Kee decided to travel to San Francisco and marry an elite Chinese woman with bound feet, whom he brought back to Deer Lodge. This decision points to his financial success: Gem Kee could afford to travel to California and was considered an acceptable match for the daughter of a wealthy Cantonese family. He also could afford the domestic help required by women with bound feet, who were not able to walk easily and without pain. [12]
Elite women like Gem Kee’s wife were a small minority within the already small proportion of women in the Chinese population of the American West. In 1880, there were fewer than 100 Chinese women counted by the census in the entire Montana Territory, 31 of whom lived in Deer Lodge County. The census majorly undercounted Chinese women, and when enumerators did count them they were usually listed as sex workers, regardless of whether that was true.
The McBurney House, a hotel across the alley from Gem Kee’s store, often advertised in the Deer Lodge newspaper, soliciting “a share of the patronage of the traveling public."
Life could be difficult for Chinese women in the west, although it is thought that Gem Kee’s wife may have fared slightly better. [13] There is some evidence her husband was doting. In April of 1881, the newspaper reported that Gem Kee "has introduced Sunday afternoon balcony concerts for the diversion of his wife.” [14]
The story of Gem Kee and his wife is different from the narratives that are often told about 19th-century Chinese emigrants. History tells us the Chinese came and built the transatlantic railroads and panned for gold from California to Colorado, but historian Elizabeth Sinn points out that many Chinese emigrants "were not in fact laborers; there were traders, entrepreneurs, and investors, and many who started life as laborers ended up as shopkeepers and businessmen.” [15] By 1880, there was a substantial increase in the number of Chinese men working in service and entrepreneurial ventures, mostly cooking, laundry, domestic service and produce growing. [16] There were also merchants like Gem Kee who took advantage of the thriving Pacific trade between San Francisco and Hong Kong; Sinn, in her book “Pacific Crossing,” describes how after west-bound ships were emptied of their cargo of Chinese migrants, consumer goods and opium, they were filled with timber, ginseng, silver and gold, and sailed back east. [17] Produce farming, commonly called Chinese gardens, was a more localized entrepreneurial activity. It filled a gap in the Montana economy; farming was not what most settlers had come to Montana to do. A merchant in Deer Lodge, Quong Lee, grew produce for his market, and by the mid-1880s, there were a few other Chinese gardeners in the area who brought vegetables into town and sold them at great profit. [18]
An ad placed in The New North-West spread the word to Deer Lodge residents that Kim Chung Lung carried items perfect for holiday gift-giving.
It’s unclear what became of Gem Kee. In 1888, Kim Chung Lung & Co. ran classified ads in the newspaper offering the “China Store and two Warehouses, and Wash House adjoining” for sale. Perhaps Gem Kee sold it and the new owner continued the business under the same name—ads for the store appear in the newspaper in the early 1890s—or maybe it didn’t sell, and Gem Kee forged on. [19] What we do know is that by the turn of the century, only 12 Chinese Americans were living in Deer Lodge. Changes in the U.S. economy made larger urban areas better places for Chinese Americans to earn a living, and many of Montana’s Chinese residents migrated to bigger Western cities. With them went the market for Chinese goods. [20]
* Today, Deer Lodge is in Powell County, Montana, which was split off from Deer Lodge County in 1901. Before 1901, Deer Lodge was in Deer Lodge County. When used in this story, Deer Lodge County refers to its pre-1901 boundaries, not present-day Deer Lodge County.
No photos remain of Gem Kee or Kim Chung Lung & Co. This photo, of Huie Pock’s mercantile in nearby Butte, Montana (taken between 1880 and 1920), provides some insight into what Gem Kee’s store may have looked like and how the goods he carried may have been arranged.
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