Ghosts of Wyoming: Ghost of China Mary haunts…

Lukis Hill and his father were driving down China Mary Road in Evanston, Wyoming one evening when they saw a woman who appeared to be walking home.

“We went to stop by her side to see if she needed a ride,” Lukis said.

And that’s when he and his dad got the surprise of their lives.

“When we opened the door, she literally started screaming at us,” Hill said. “And she was so small, tiny, like an old Chinese woman. And we just asked, “Hey, do you need some help?” when she started screaming, ran to our truck and then just disappeared.”

Both Hill and his father saw the same thing.

“After that, my dad was like, I don’t understand anything,” Hill said. “And I was literally a child. It scared both me and him.”

Hill has since learned that they weren’t the only ones who had a similar experience on China Mary Road in Evanston, and he still remembers the exact spot where they saw her.

“We’ve seen her in these little places right around a little bend in the river,” Hill said. “We stopped right outside the shops because we thought she needed help.”

Who was China Mary

The first thing to know about China Mary is that it is not a real name. In the late 1800s, people in Evanston and other cities had difficulty pronouncing Chinese names, so they often called women Marys and men Johns.

But Evanston has a Chinese woman who has become widely known as China Mary. Her name, or what we know of her real name, was Ah Yuen, or literally Miss Yuen. The rest of her name, as well as most of her history, is lost to time.

All that is known is that she arrived in America in 1863, and that she was probably born between 1848 and 1854, meaning she was between 9 and 15 years old when she made the long journey across the Pacific.

It was a time of upheaval and unrest in China, with many Chinese men choosing to immigrate to the United States, where they could find work in the mining industry and on the railroads.

Since most of these men were poor, they usually left their families. This, in turn, fueled the high demand for Chinese sex workers.

The girls involved in the sex trade who fed this desire were often quite young. Some were sold by families who could not afford to keep them. Others were kidnapped or tricked into believing they had been brought to America as brides.

And Ewen never talked about this period of her life, except to tell a Works Progress Administration interviewer that she came to America via San Francisco and lived in Denver for a while before going to Bear River City in the Territory Wyoming.

But unless the woman came from a wealthy family, it was very unusual for Chinese women to come to America outside of the sex trade. Yuen’s arrival also coincided with the heyday of the sex trade in China in the 1800s.

An annoying topic

One of the things that people soon discover is that the subject of the China Mary is a sore point in Evanston in general.

“It’s a big (ghost) story here,” Suds Bros. general manager said. Rhonda Berlener Brewery Cowboy State Daily. “And a lot of people won’t talk about it because, I mean, there was a massacre.”

In 1868, historical records show that Ah Yuen took a job as a cook in Bear River City, Wyoming Territory, about 10 miles southeast of present-day Wyoming. The town originated after a Salt Lake City businessman named Joseph F. Nunnan contracted to build the Union Pacific Railroad in the area where it crosses the Bear River in southwestern Wyoming.

To complete the task, he built a warehouse and housing for his men on a section that ran along the Overland Stage Route.

Nunnan’s location proved to be an excellent choice, and the small town grew rapidly as more and more Chinese workers arrived to help build the Union Pacfic railroad line.

Ewan’s job at this time in this young, thrown-together railroad town was to prepare huge amounts of food every day. Every day she would feed 200 to 400 hungry Chinese.

It was at this time that Ewen witnessed the riot in the town of Bear River on November 19, 1868.

The riot was sparked after the lynching of a murder suspect who worked on the railroad. The suspect’s friends fought back against the guards, and the entire city erupted in violence.

During the riots, there were several gunfights and fires that destroyed much of the city, including most of the city’s government buildings.

The marshal at the time, Thomas J. Smith, was newly appointed but possessed unusual courage. He resisted both factions and, with the help of the townspeople, repelled the storming of the town prison. This led to several deaths, earning him the nickname Bear River Smith.

But even that wasn’t enough to stop what was happening to the city. A US cavalry unit from Fort Bridger had to be sent to Bear River City to enforce martial law.

A total of 16 people died that day. The town was quickly cleared after troops arrived to restore order. After that, it is almost gone, but it will never recover.

Evanston’s Chinatown

After the riot in Bear River City, Ewen next appears in Utah’s Chinatown in Park City, where she set up shop in the 1880s and lived there until her husband’s death sometime around 1900, after which she returned to Evanston.

Evanston has created its own bustling Chinatown.

There was a barbershop, a blacksmith shop, several laundries, storekeepers, saloons and a shop. There were also Chinese herbalists and there was even a Joss House — a Chinese house of prayer.

Jos. Evanston’s house was special, one of only three in all of America at that time. The exquisitely decorated temple was built in 1874 and served as an overnight accommodation for visitors.

It was destroyed along with the rest of Chinatown in a fire in 1922.

No one knows exactly how the fire started.

At the time, fires along railroad tracks were not uncommon due to coal from coal-fired locomotives. Union Pacific even hired spotters to go around the tracks to put out flares in certain areas.

Others, however, claimed that the fire was deliberately started by Union Pacific or the Chinese.

A fire in 1922 forced many of Evanston’s Chinese residents to leave the city, but Yuen stayed. By then, she had married her third husband, Lok Long Chung, known locally as “Mormon Charlie”.

According to locals, Ah Yuen was well known and loved to tell stories about her time in San Francisco, Denver and Park City. She also agreed to take pictures with tourists for 10 cents each, money she used to pay local children for fish caught from the Bear River.

In Ah Yuen’s biography, The Secrets of China Mary, Denis Wheeler says that the Chinese woman liked to gamble and smoke opium. Because of this, as well as the history of prostitution that hung over her, she was never fully accepted by society during her lifetime.

But when Ah Yuen died in 1939, her funeral was attended by a large number of townspeople and officiated by a Presbyterian minister. She was buried in the Evanston Pauper’s Cemetery, but her grave was marked with permission from the city.

China Marie Road was named after Chinese contributions to Evanston, including Ah Yuen.

Hill does not know if the apparition he and his father saw was A Yuen or some other Chinese woman of the period. But some like to think she’s the one walking the road named after her decades after her death.

Rene Jean can be reached at the address [email protected].