Week 2 - Family Legends

 Week 2: Family Legends


“Uncle Jim” is a much beloved character in my family. He is my 3rd great-uncle or as Ancestry puts it, my 2nd great granduncle. He was orphaned as a teen and he and his brother (my 2nd great grandfather) came out west along the Oregon Trail to seek gold in 1850. Jim was 17 years old, and Robert was 12. They moved from place to place, chasing gold and ended up in Idaho City, Idaho when this story takes place. This comes from the book Melvin Alsager put together about the Kirkpatricks. 


“Idaho City grew with the Basin gold boom to a peak population of about 10,000 in just a few short years. A large number of miners including Chinese were from Oregon and California chasing one gold find after another.


Jim caused quite a stir in Idaho City when he cut off the hair queue of [a] Chinese laundryman for stealing a chicken from him. The Chinese gentleman was upset because their belief was that God would not be able to pull him to heaven without his queue.


Big Jim quickly went to the sheriff to tell him his side of the story. The Chinese man saw Jim talking to the sheriff and figured his case was useless or queueless.” 


The beliefs about the hair queue sounded fishy to me since eastern religions are so different from western religions, so now in the age of the internet, I looked it up. This didn’t have anything to do with a religious belief or heaven, but instead was a sign of repression, courtesy of the Qing dynasty in China.  During this time and area where the Chinese man came from, if you didn’t have your head shaved and your queue, you could be put to death for treason.  Before the Qing dynasty, the Chinese wore their hair long and in elaborate styles, but the Qing dynasty requirement enforced a showing of loyalty to those who ruled.  (Khan) Basically, a Chinese man in the US who lost his queue also lost his opportunity to return to China. California even came up with a “pigtail ordinance” that forbade the men from having queues in an effort to push them out of California.


The above information about the hair queue was researched by Bethany Khan and can be found at https://researchworcestershire.wordpress.com/2016/07/20/pigtail-of-a-disgraced-chinese-man/

Comments

  1. Donna Salter MullenJanuary 19, 2021 at 9:06 AM

    Great job with the myth-busting but it was a great family legend.

    ReplyDelete

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