Massacred for Gold
Breaking Chains
The Troubled Life of Peter Burnett

Three by R. Gregory Nokes

Massacred for Gold; 208 Pages, Oregon State University Press, 2009
Breaking Chains; 240 Pages, Oregon State University Press, 2013
The Troubled Life of Peter Burnett; 288 Pages, Oregon State University Press, 2018

Reviewed by Ken Bilderback, June 7, 2020

This seems like an appropriate time to talk about race. Few do so as eloquently as Greg Nokes. This is a review of three of his books, which does not do justice to any of them.

I’ll start with Massacred for Gold. It’s the story of more than 30 Chinese miners (no one knows exactly how many) who were butchered and thrown into the Snake River Canyon in 1887. Law enforcement pretty quickly had a list of suspects but let most slip away. After a tepid prosecution, the rest were acquitted. In my own research, I found this quote from a nonchalant local: “If they had killed 31 white men something would have been done about it, but none of the jury knew the Chinamen or cared much about it, so they turned the men loose.” Nokes expands on that terrifying sentiment in his book.

Next up is Breaking Chains: Slavery on Trial in the Oregon Territory. The book sheds light on the fact that there were slaves in the Oregon Territory and that many settlers strongly supported slavery. Ultimately settlers and federal law outlawed slavery, but Oregon responded by banning free blacks from the territory and later the state. The story is more poignant because the Nokes family had a sobering personal tie to slavery.

My favorite is The Troubled Life of Peter Burnett: Oregon Pioneer and First Governor of California. In 1843 Burnett settled just a few miles from where Kris and I live. We’ve written extensively about him, even opening one of our books with one of his often-cited quotes about the utopian quality of life here when the populace was almost entirely white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Nothing could be further from the truth. The per capita homicide rate, for example, was dramatically higher than it is today. But Burnett was a propagandist for slavery. He moved to California when he realized that Oregon would not be a slave state but that California might be, and became California’s first Governor in 1849. Nokes talks about Burnett’s almost debilitating obsession with race.