Unearthing Missoula’s Chinese heritage
In 1892, white residents killed four Chinese people in Missoula. The legacy of the murders and the larger effort to exclude Chinese people from the community lives on in bones buried under Missoula’s Lower Rattlesnake neighborhood.
Researcher Paul Kim with the ACLU has been working with a documentary team investigating the history of Missoula’s de facto Chinese cemetery. The site, located around Cherry Street at the base of Mount Jumbo, first came to light in a Missoulian notice in 1878. At the time, according to Kim, a variety of community members were buried in the old cemetery.
Paul Kim, a researcher with the ACLU, has been working with a documentary team investigating the history of Missoula’s de facto Chinese cemetery. The cemetery is buried underneath Missoula’s Lower Rattlesnake neighborhood.
BEN ALLAN SMITH, Missoulian
But by the 1880s, the cemetery had fallen into disrepair, and a new cemetery emerged on Missoula’s Westside. Prominent white Missoulians like Fred Worden were disinterred and relocated to the new cemetery, while the bodies of nonwhites — particularly a notable number of Chinese — were left to
