Monday February 20th at 6:30 Greg Nokes will lead a book club discussion of Massacred for Gold. The Pacific Northwest is the site of the worst massacre of Chinese in US history.  Right here in Hell’s Canyon by a bend in the Snake River up to 34 Chinese miners were murdered.  Worse yet, some of the killers were mere school boys, teenagers lured toward easy money and a quick kill by a nefarious horse thieving rancher.  It is best not to turn our backs on the past lest the same mistakes are perpetuated.  Prejudice and hate are sorrowful emotions.  Those Chinese miners could have been robbed without taking their lives, but they were hated for being different.  The taking of those lives would stay with those kids forever.  Might it be a good idea to reflect on the cost to our souls of racial hatred? Massacred for Gold brings to light the contribution of Chinese workers.  They were integral to the building of our railroads, working harder and for less money than US citizens.  These men were willing to hang off cliffs to set dynamite charges, work every day, and endure horrid conditions.  Unlike other groups of immigrants, the Chinese wanted to make enough money to help their families then return home.  They missed their homeland and loved ones ferociously. Instead of being thanked for their hard work, appreciated for their sacrifices, they were hated.  Racial hatred fueled an environment of despair for the Chinese.  They were ridiculed, beaten, robbed without any hope of justice or protection.  Gold mining was beyond the means of the Chinese when the claims were paying but as the claims played out the Chinese came in to labor extracting the last reluctant grains of gold. The claim the massacred men had been working was thought to be one of the better claims mined by Chinese.  They had been working about a year, so there was gold to be taken.  The Chinese were sitting ducks for their killers.  Sheer cliff walls and fast flowing water gave them nowhere to run. Hells Canyon, the Snake River, and the Imnaha River Gorge is a forbidding remote landscape.  It was a lonely place to die so far from their homeland at the hand of outlaws who would never pay for their crime.