Underground History

The Medford Mail Tribune, established in 1909, will cease publication this week.(Roman Battaglia / JPR News)

The Southern Oregon Historical Society is preserving the Medford Mail Tribune’s archives, keeping more than a century of local reporting after the newspaper closed in 2023.

The collection reaches beyond published stories. Research files, reporter correspondence, photographs and an in-house reference library document how journalists covered Southern Oregon and the work behind what readers saw in print.

“It’s really more than the papers,” said Anna Sloan, the society’s curator.

Moving the collection required staff and volunteers to act quickly.

“We basically had 48 hours to figure out how to move all of these materials from their original location to our own facility in downtown Medford,” Sloan said.

They packed and transported dozens of bankers boxes, oversized filing cabinets and thousands of loose and bound newspapers to the former J.C. Penney building in downtown Medford. The collection also includes reference books, photographic negatives and historical memorabilia.

Now, the society faces the slower work of organizing and protecting those materials.

Acidic newsprint can deteriorate quickly. The society is using acid-free storage boxes purchased with an Oregon museum grant to help preserve the newspapers. Staff have filled 16 shelves with stacked archival boxes and set aside an “archives annex” inside the building.

The collection also includes photographic outtakes and printing machinery. The society is negotiating to acquire a 1930s Linotype machine from the era when the Mail Tribune won a Pulitzer Prize in 1934.

Project managers have cataloged 956 boxes of microfilm in an online database, helping researchers identify materials in the collection.

Guest

• Anna Sloan, curator, Southern Oregon Historical Society

Men and women in front of the Baker White Pine Mill near Baker City, Oregon, circa 1910-1918. The main mill building, smoke stacks and water tower are visible in the background. (Courtesy of the Sumpter Valley Railroad Archives / OPB )

This story is a special collaboration with the Southern Oregon University Laboratory of Anthropology and the Oregon Historical Society, with support from Roundhouse Foundation.

Iron pipe, concrete foundations and an abandoned railroad grade off a dirt road deep in an Eastern Oregon forest mark a once-bustling mill community that operated in the early 20th century.

Established in 1910 by the Baker White Pine Mill Lumber Company, the site was occupied for less than a decade. Now only traces of the industrial landscape remain as testament to the extractive timber industry that once dominated the region.

Archaeologists working at the Baker White Pine Mill site a century later found it a welcome opportunity to explore daily life at the mill.

The artifacts recovered challenge mainstream notions of flannel-clad lumberjacks doing manly things in the woods into a more nuanced story, recognizing the important contributions families made in the male-dominated lumber industry.

The rise and fall of the Baker White Pine Mill

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the rich pine forests of the Blue Mountains in Northeastern Oregon were seen as a resource ripe for harvest. With the depletion of East Coast timber reserves, attention shifted West. Railroads made accessing remote forests easier and also created a near-insatiable need for lumber as they continued to build and maintain tracks.

The Baker White Pine Lumber Co. logged public and private lands using a system referred to as ‘milling in transit.’ Workers built their own railroad grades, logged trees and used their own rail cars to transport their harvest to the mill at White Pine.

The logs were then milled into rough cut lumber, railroad ties and timbers, which were transported by the Sumpter Valley Railroad to their mill in Baker City for drying and finishing.

When the mill closed and moved its operations elsewhere, all of the portable infrastructure was moved with it, leaving little trace of the once bustling community that supported it.

The short occupation, abandonment and remote location of the site made it an excellent candidate for archaeological inquiry.

SOULA archaeologist Katie Johnson documents the floor boards visible in one of the excavation units in the summer of 2022. Like most of the buildings at the Baker White Pine Mill site, materials would have been repurposed where possible, leaving only floorboards and foundations to mark the site of former homes.( Courtesy of the Southern Oregon University Laboratory of Anthropology.)

The Southern Oregon University Laboratory of Anthropology (SOULA), local archaeologists and citizen scientists investigated the former Baker White Pine Mill in 2022, and have spent the last few years analyzing more than 8,000 artifacts recovered from the site.

Those items revealed important information about the former logging town’s immigrant workforce and also uncovered new insights into the domestic lives of logging families in Oregon’s early lumber industry.

The working wives of Baker White Pine Mill

Historians might be able to tell you how a tree in Grant County became a mansion in Portland, but only an archaeologist can tell you what the loggers and their families had for dinner.

During the Baker White Pine Mill era, there was a shift from an all-male workforce living communally under the company’s care towards a company town model where workers’ families were invited to join them.

This kept families together, but was also a means for companies to save costs for feeding and caring for the all-male workforce, by discretely outsourcing the labor to their wives. As an added bonus, company stores could now sell the very food and supplies they once provided for their workers for free.

The presence of women at the Baker White Pine Mill can be seen in a number of ways through the material culture left behind. The drudgery of household chores and caring for lumbermen can be seen in the washboard fragments, enamelware basins and shoe polish bottles recovered from the abandoned households.

These items were found alongside corset stays, jewelry and face creams that indicate a care and attention to appearances in the remote community. High-end tablewares and decorative household furnishings reflect the emulating of middle-class domesticity deep in the forests.

Artifacts found during excavations in 2022 at Baker White Pine Mill included face cream and corset stays that highlight the desire to maintain appearances despite the rural setting.( Courtesy of the Southern Oregon University Laboratory of Anthropology)

Canning jar fragments and lids and a copious amount of tablewares speak to women’s roles provisioning their families. Where the mess hall meals were designed to recruit and retain workers by providing high quality and plentiful meals, families were incorporating wild game, home canning seasonal ingredients and employing other cost saving measures to stretch the dollar.

The presence of teapots, tea cups and large serving vessels also indicate that social entertaining was practiced.

Household assemblages from Baker White Pine Mill speak of families that closely curated their dinner tables, decorated their homes with cut glass and hung curtains: Activities aligned with the “cult of domesticity” one might not expect in such rural or industrial contexts.

A porcelain doll arm and porcelain plate fragments with children’s poems and decorative motifs reflect on-site education and play over a century ago.

Finding families in the forest

The presence of women is surprisingly loud in the archaeological record of the Baker White Pine Mill, in direct contrast to how silent they are in the documentary record.

This reinforces why archaeology matters: To give voice to the voiceless and make space for the invisible labor that was capitalized on by this company town.

Whether or not these women were willing participants does not really change their contributions to the industry at this key moment in Oregon history — when flannel and corsets alike helped build the West.

A day in the life of the Southern Oregon University Laboratory of Anthropology Field School.(SOULA)

For our second annual Archaeological Field School Roundup, Underground History host Chelsea Rose is joined by Chris Ruiz, interim director of the Archaeological Research Division at the University of Oregon's Museum of Natural and Cultural History, and Oregon State University professor Molly Carney to discuss highlights, challenges, cool finds and the best ways to unwind after a month in the field.

Guests

• Chris Ruiz, interim director, archaeological research division, University of Oregon’s Museum of Natural and Cultural History
• Molly Carney, anthropological archaeologist, Oregon State University

The obituary of 'Buckaroo Sam' (left) was published in a 1935 edition of the East Oregonian. Sam was a well-known cowboy buckaroo in eastern Oregon. He is pictured in his later years in the John Day Chinatown. ( OPB / The Evergreen Podcast)

This story is a special collaboration with the Southern Oregon University Laboratory of Anthropology and the Oregon Historical Society, with support from Roundhouse Foundation.

Dale Hom looks out over the wild expanse surrounding Stewart Ranch in Grant County, one of dozens of historic ranches that have been linked with early Chinese immigrants in Eastern Oregon.

Hom, a retired forester and artist, has been part of a wider movement to add Chinese pioneers back into Western scenes like this one.

The site is now part of the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife’s (ODFW) Phillip W. Schneider Wildlife Area, accessible only by a rugged dirt road. This remote location has helped to preserve the early ranch and kept the modern world at bay, allowing researchers to search for evidence of the little known Chinese cowboys and ranch hands employed here in the early 20th century.

Over the course of a hot and dusty week in July 2025, Southern Oregon University archaeologists and project partners dug into the compacted soils of Stewart Ranch in search of tangible traces of men who’ve left only sparse paper trails in the documentary record.

Men like Buckaroo Sam, Markee Tom, Fon Chung, Jim Lee, Tom Lim and Hi Moon. Working as cowboys, cooks, shepherds, foreman and even as ranchers themselves, these individuals have been hidden in plain sight on the Oregon frontier.

The myth of the American Cowboy

Scholars have worked hard to tease fact from fiction and update the archetypal American Cowboy. While Wild Bill Hickok, Wyatt Earp and other white cowboys may be real historical figures, historians have estimated that, in reality, one in four cowboys were Black.

The original cowboys came into the American West from Mexico as early as the 18th century. These vaqueros — a name that stems from vaca, the Spanish word for cow — brought with them the pointed boots, wide-brimmed hats, bandanas and chaps that form the core suite of cowboy material culture that defines the genre to this day.

The term buckaroo is an anglicized version of vaquero and is often used interchangeably with “cowboy.” However, the buckaroo tradition is more specific to California and the Great Basin, which extends up into Eastern Oregon.

Over the 20th century, mainstream American cowboy culture and imagery was romanticized into a fantasy version that largely erased its Mexican, Black and Chinese heritage.

Chinese American cowboy Markee Tom (L, on far left) photographed circa 1900. Tom worked for the J.C. Moore family at their ranch near Dayville, Ore., as a cook and ranch hand. Dale Hom’s 2023 painting (R) imagines the informal shared moment between friends just before the photograph was taken.(Courtesy of the Kam Wah Chung State Heritage Site and Dale Hom)

Work is underway to reclaim those lost histories.

In 2021, the Oregon Historical Quarterly published Dale Hom’s comic, “They Called Him…Buckaroo Sam” in a special issue dedicated to Oregon’s Chinese diaspora.

Hom draws from his personal experience as a Chinese American who spent decades exploring the great outdoors and pairs it with the scattered photographs, newspaper clippings and oral histories to imagine the life of a Chinese cowboy — giving visibility to these men for the first time.

Buckaroo Sam has been linked to the now publicly-owned Stewart Ranch. According to his obituary printed in the May 8, 1935 East Oregonian, Sam was “considered one of the best horseman” and “qualified as a real hand with his riding, roping or any of the work of a western cow hand.”

Locals described Sam as never without his red handkerchief and skilled at hand rolling cigarettes without losing tobacco. He had a distinctive scar and potentially some paralysis on his face from getting bucked off a horse.

Stewart Ranch also had a series of Chinese cooks, including Jim Lee and a man named Chung. Lee was described as a “really, really good cook” in an oral history by Eminger Stewart — grandson of ranch founder and namesake Eminger “Billie” Stewart. “Particularly good with desserts.”

After his tenure working on cattle and sheep ranches, Jim Lee worked in, and even owned, restaurants across Grant and Baker counties.

Uncovering Oregon history with the Chinese Diaspora Project

Ongoing efforts to rustle up evidence of early Chinese American cowboys fall under the umbrella of the Oregon Chinese Diaspora Project (OCDP), a grassroots, multi-agency collaboration that focuses on documentation of early Chinese Oregonians in rural parts of the state.

Southern Oregon University Laboratory of Anthropology (SOULA) partnered with ODFW archaeologists on a summer field school at Stewart Ranch, where investigations focused on two historical bunkhouses associated with the property.

The collaborative project included community outreach, public programming and field assistance from local volunteers and the Burns Paiute Tribe’s Youth Opportunity Program.

SOULA’s excavations at the site targeted bunkhouses and areas where food remains and trash might be discarded by Chinese American cowboys and cooks.

The team recovered buttons, broken dishes and bottles. They also discovered flakes representing the byproducts of stone tools made by Indigenous peoples that lived at the site long before the first livestock arrived.

SOULA field school student Rebecca Chapman holds up a small ceramic fragment for inspection (R). Students Zoey Ahl and Victoria Mozdy learn from archaeologist Tyler Davis how to describe sediments using a Munsell soil color chart (L). Grant County, Ore., July 15, 2025.(Courtesy of the Southern Oregon University Laboratory of Anthropology)

Buttons and rivets reflect sturdy workwear, spent ammunition suggests hunting or protecting livestock from predators and food remains provide a glimpse into the meals prepared by the Chinese cooks working on site.

Katie Johnson, a zooarchaeologist with SOULA, found evidence of hearty communal meals in the animal bones recovered from outside the cookhouse.

Elements representing lower limbs from mammals would be tougher, “So you would’ve put them into stews or soups where you can make a large portion to share with the group that’s working there.”

The fragmented bones show beef and deer were enjoyed, along with cuts from a medium-sized mammal that could represent sheep—mutton reportedly being one of Jim Lee’s signature dishes.

Piecing together Oregon’s early cowboys

While Indiana Jones emphasizes the adventurous side of archaeology, in reality the bulk of the work is tedious and happens away from the dig site.

Artifacts from the Stewart Ranch dig are being carefully cleaned and sorted in the lab by staff and students. Time-consuming research continues, including scouring historical newspapers and photographs as well as ongoing conversations between project partners and stakeholders.

Much of the OCDP’s access comes from local partnerships with the Grant County Ranch and Rodeo Museum and Friends of Kam Wah Chung in John Day, who helped make connections between the project and local ranching family descendants.

As the project continues, the OCDP will rely on these community relationships to interpret and contextualize findings and track down and access additional sites.

SOULA staff and students and OCDP project partners meet with Howard Gieger of the Grant County Ranch and Rodeo Museum in John Day. July 14, 2025.( Courtesy of the Southern Oregon University Laboratory of Anthropology)

Archaeology allows for small finds to make big changes, and is actively helping to counter the erasure of Chinese Americans from Oregon history.

Decades of anti-Chinese sentiment, culminating in state, federal, and local laws effectively deterred or prohibited, in some cases violently, many Chinese Americans from building generational roots. Census records for Grant County listed more than 40% of its total population as being of Chinese descent in the 1870s. In 2020, that dropped to less than 1% reporting Asian ancestry.

While the dozens of Chinatowns in Eastern Oregon were abandoned by the early 20th century, the Chinese Americans who stayed, built careers and lived out their lives in these communities — including some of the former ranch hands.

Jim Lee spent his final days under the care of the Catholic Home in Baker City. According to a local rancher that was one of Lee’s friends and former employers, he left the Catholic Home his sizable estate upon his death.

Buckaroo Sam retired to the John Day Chinatown when he got too old for cowboying. He lost his home and savings to a catastrophic fire in 1927. The family that ran the city’s Benson Hotel took him in, where he performed odd jobs in exchange for room and board.

An oral history with Loyce Phillips, granddaughter of the hotel owners, is on file at the Kam Wah Chung State Heritage Site. In it, she speaks with great fondness about Sam, how he helped the family and took particular care to watch out for her.

A fuller and more complex picture of life in Eastern Oregon is emerging, allowing for what Dale Hom describes as a “retelling of a story” by artists, archaeologists and others helping to sweep away the dust of time.

“The more we find out, the greater it expands on what it means to be an American and be an American cowboy here out in the West.”

Cinematographer and editor Christie Goshe (L) with Producer Chelsea Rose (R) during a break in filming.(Courtesy of Parker Loris Underkoffler)

Kam Wah Chung and Company was a home, a general store, a community center and a medical clinic, where co-owner Ing "Doc" Hay served as a beloved doctor to residents across the region. (Courtesy of the Oregon Historical Society / OPB )

In Eastern Oregon’s John Day, a 160-year-old building holds one of the biggest collections of traditional Chinese medicine in the world. Kam Wah Chung and Company, once part of a thriving Chinatown, was owned and operated by Lung On and Ing Hay for over half a century. It was a home, a general store, a community center and a medical clinic where Ing Hay served as a beloved doctor to residents across the region. His practice included herbal remedies, noninvasive treatments, essential women’s healthcare and more.

Archaeologists and historians are continuing to deepen our understanding of the legacy of Kam Wah Chung and traditional Chinese medicine in Eastern Oregon.

We join them to learn more about Ing Hay’s important contributions to rural communities in John Day and beyond, as part of our special series in collaboration with OPB’s “Oregon Experience,” the Southern Oregon University Laboratory of Anthropology and Jefferson Public Radio about unearthing Oregon history.

Curiosity seekers visit Zane Gray's cabin, which has been added to the Oregon registry of historic places. (BLM photo / Statesman Journal )

On this week's episode of Underground History, host Chelsea Rose speaks with Bureau of Land Management archaeologists Tony Saunders and Duane Erikson about their recent restoration at the Zane Gray Cabin along the Wild and Scenic Rogue River.

Gray built his rustic cabin in 1926 along Winkle Bar, where he wrote and drew inspiration for his novels about the American West over the decade that followed.

Today, this building is just one of the many resources cared for by archaeologists dedicated to preserving shared heritage on public lands for future generations.

Guests

• Tony Saunders, BLM archaeologist
• Duane Erikson, BLM archaeologist

Men and women in front of the Baker White Pine Mill near Baker City, Oregon, circa 1910-1918. The main mill building, smoke stacks and water tower are visible in the background. (Courtesy of the Sumpter Valley Railroad Archives / OPB )

This story is a special collaboration with the Southern Oregon University Laboratory of Anthropology and the Oregon Historical Society, with support from Roundhouse Foundation.

Iron pipe, concrete foundations and an abandoned railroad grade off a dirt road deep in an Eastern Oregon forest mark a once-bustling mill community that operated in the early 20th century.

Established in 1910 by the Baker White Pine Mill Lumber Company, the site was occupied for less than a decade. Now only traces of the industrial landscape remain as testament to the extractive timber industry that once dominated the region.

Archaeologists working at the Baker White Pine Mill site a century later found it a welcome opportunity to explore daily life at the mill.

The artifacts recovered challenge mainstream notions of flannel-clad lumberjacks doing manly things in the woods into a more nuanced story, recognizing the important contributions families made in the male-dominated lumber industry.

The rise and fall of the Baker White Pine Mill

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the rich pine forests of the Blue Mountains in Northeastern Oregon were seen as a resource ripe for harvest. With the depletion of East Coast timber reserves, attention shifted West. Railroads made accessing remote forests easier and also created a near-insatiable need for lumber as they continued to build and maintain tracks.

The Baker White Pine Lumber Co. logged public and private lands using a system referred to as ‘milling in transit.’ Workers built their own railroad grades, logged trees and used their own rail cars to transport their harvest to the mill at White Pine.

The logs were then milled into rough cut lumber, railroad ties and timbers, which were transported by the Sumpter Valley Railroad to their mill in Baker City for drying and finishing.

When the mill closed and moved its operations elsewhere, all of the portable infrastructure was moved with it, leaving little trace of the once bustling community that supported it.

The short occupation, abandonment and remote location of the site made it an excellent candidate for archaeological inquiry.

SOULA archaeologist Katie Johnson documents the floor boards visible in one of the excavation units in the summer of 2022. Like most of the buildings at the Baker White Pine Mill site, materials would have been repurposed where possible, leaving only floorboards and foundations to mark the site of former homes.( Courtesy of the Southern Oregon University Laboratory of Anthropology.)

The Southern Oregon University Laboratory of Anthropology (SOULA), local archaeologists and citizen scientists investigated the former Baker White Pine Mill in 2022, and have spent the last few years analyzing more than 8,000 artifacts recovered from the site.

Those items revealed important information about the former logging town’s immigrant workforce and also uncovered new insights into the domestic lives of logging families in Oregon’s early lumber industry.

The working wives of Baker White Pine Mill

Historians might be able to tell you how a tree in Grant County became a mansion in Portland, but only an archaeologist can tell you what the loggers and their families had for dinner.

During the Baker White Pine Mill era, there was a shift from an all-male workforce living communally under the company’s care towards a company town model where workers’ families were invited to join them.

This kept families together, but was also a means for companies to save costs for feeding and caring for the all-male workforce, by discretely outsourcing the labor to their wives. As an added bonus, company stores could now sell the very food and supplies they once provided for their workers for free.

The presence of women at the Baker White Pine Mill can be seen in a number of ways through the material culture left behind. The drudgery of household chores and caring for lumbermen can be seen in the washboard fragments, enamelware basins and shoe polish bottles recovered from the abandoned households.

These items were found alongside corset stays, jewelry and face creams that indicate a care and attention to appearances in the remote community. High-end tablewares and decorative household furnishings reflect the emulating of middle-class domesticity deep in the forests.

Artifacts found during excavations in 2022 at Baker White Pine Mill included face cream and corset stays that highlight the desire to maintain appearances despite the rural setting.( Courtesy of the Southern Oregon University Laboratory of Anthropology)

Canning jar fragments and lids and a copious amount of tablewares speak to women’s roles provisioning their families. Where the mess hall meals were designed to recruit and retain workers by providing high quality and plentiful meals, families were incorporating wild game, home canning seasonal ingredients and employing other cost saving measures to stretch the dollar.

The presence of teapots, tea cups and large serving vessels also indicate that social entertaining was practiced.

Household assemblages from Baker White Pine Mill speak of families that closely curated their dinner tables, decorated their homes with cut glass and hung curtains: Activities aligned with the “cult of domesticity” one might not expect in such rural or industrial contexts.

A porcelain doll arm and porcelain plate fragments with children’s poems and decorative motifs reflect on-site education and play over a century ago.

Finding families in the forest

The presence of women is surprisingly loud in the archaeological record of the Baker White Pine Mill, in direct contrast to how silent they are in the documentary record.

This reinforces why archaeology matters: To give voice to the voiceless and make space for the invisible labor that was capitalized on by this company town.

Whether or not these women were willing participants does not really change their contributions to the industry at this key moment in Oregon history — when flannel and corsets alike helped build the West.

A sewn hide, pictured from the front and the back, alongside another hide artifact from Cougar Mountain Cave were among a collection of artifacts dating back 12,000 years. A collaborative research study between the University of Oregon and University of Nevada, Reno reveals a culture of sewing textiles and fashion from many generations of indigenous peoples in Oregon.(Richard Rosencrance / Smithsonian Magazine )

What do you think of when you picture an archaeological investigation? Most likely, you imagine excavations. But there is much to discover from artifacts buried deep in archives and museum collections.

A recent publication by a group of archaeologists from the University of Nevada, Reno, and the University of Oregon featured an assemblage of needles, textiles, elk hide and woven cord from Oregon’s Great Basin. The artifacts were pulled from recent excavations and museum collections, revealing early technologies and highlighting the value of revisiting old archaeological collections to address new research questions.

Underground History host Chelsea Rose spoke with Richie Rosencrance, lead author and UNR Ph.D. candidate, and Geoffrey Smith, professor of anthropology, executive director of the Artemisia Archaeological Research Fund and director of the UNR Museum of People, Place, and Time to discuss the recent findings, which include the world’s oldest known example of sewn material, estimated to be approximately 12,000 years old.

Guests

• Richie Rosencrance, lead author and Ph.D. candidate at the University of Nevada, Reno
• Geoffrey Smith, professor of anthropology, executive director of the Artemisia Archaeological Research Fund and director of the UNR Museum of People, Place, and Time

Marc James Carpenter, Ph.D. is an associate professor in the Department of History and Political Science at Jamestown University. He's the author of "The War on Illahee."(Logan C. Adams) "The War on Illahee" by Marc James Carpenter, Ph.D. is published by Yale University Press.(Yale University Press )

Host Chelsea Rose speaks with Marc James Carpenter about the research behind his recent book "The War on Illahee: Genocide, Complicity, and Cover-Ups in the Pioneer Northwest." The book explores the many ways historians have erased, overwritten or morphed the atrocities of settler colonialism into what Carpenter calls "cozy pioneer histories."

Carpenter investigates the Rogue River War as part of a larger War on Illahee, which allows for a more nuanced and honest view of the violent settlement of the American West. The audiobook version, narrated by the estimable Rick Adamson, was just released by Tantor Media.

Guest

• Marc James Carpenter, associate professor of history at the University of Jamestown and author, "The War on Illahee: Genocide, Complicity, and Cover-Ups in the Pioneer Northwest"

The obituary of 'Buckaroo Sam' (left) was published in a 1935 edition of the East Oregonian. Sam was a well-known cowboy buckaroo in eastern Oregon. He is pictured in his later years in the John Day Chinatown. ( OPB / The Evergreen Podcast)

This story is a special collaboration with the Southern Oregon University Laboratory of Anthropology and the Oregon Historical Society, with support from Roundhouse Foundation.

Dale Hom looks out over the wild expanse surrounding Stewart Ranch in Grant County, one of dozens of historic ranches that have been linked with early Chinese immigrants in Eastern Oregon.

Hom, a retired forester and artist, has been part of a wider movement to add Chinese pioneers back into Western scenes like this one.

The site is now part of the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife’s (ODFW) Phillip W. Schneider Wildlife Area, accessible only by a rugged dirt road. This remote location has helped to preserve the early ranch and kept the modern world at bay, allowing researchers to search for evidence of the little known Chinese cowboys and ranch hands employed here in the early 20th century.

Over the course of a hot and dusty week in July 2025, Southern Oregon University archaeologists and project partners dug into the compacted soils of Stewart Ranch in search of tangible traces of men who’ve left only sparse paper trails in the documentary record.

Men like Buckaroo Sam, Markee Tom, Fon Chung, Jim Lee, Tom Lim and Hi Moon. Working as cowboys, cooks, shepherds, foreman and even as ranchers themselves, these individuals have been hidden in plain sight on the Oregon frontier.

The myth of the American Cowboy

Scholars have worked hard to tease fact from fiction and update the archetypal American Cowboy. While Wild Bill Hickok, Wyatt Earp and other white cowboys may be real historical figures, historians have estimated that, in reality, one in four cowboys were Black.

The original cowboys came into the American West from Mexico as early as the 18th century. These vaqueros — a name that stems from vaca, the Spanish word for cow — brought with them the pointed boots, wide-brimmed hats, bandanas and chaps that form the core suite of cowboy material culture that defines the genre to this day.

The term buckaroo is an anglicized version of vaquero and is often used interchangeably with “cowboy.” However, the buckaroo tradition is more specific to California and the Great Basin, which extends up into Eastern Oregon.

Over the 20th century, mainstream American cowboy culture and imagery was romanticized into a fantasy version that largely erased its Mexican, Black and Chinese heritage.

Chinese American cowboy Markee Tom (L, on far left) photographed circa 1900. Tom worked for the J.C. Moore family at their ranch near Dayville, Ore., as a cook and ranch hand. Dale Hom’s 2023 painting (R) imagines the informal shared moment between friends just before the photograph was taken.(Courtesy of the Kam Wah Chung State Heritage Site and Dale Hom)

Work is underway to reclaim those lost histories.

In 2021, the Oregon Historical Quarterly published Dale Hom’s comic, “They Called Him…Buckaroo Sam” in a special issue dedicated to Oregon’s Chinese diaspora.

Hom draws from his personal experience as a Chinese American who spent decades exploring the great outdoors and pairs it with the scattered photographs, newspaper clippings and oral histories to imagine the life of a Chinese cowboy — giving visibility to these men for the first time.

Buckaroo Sam has been linked to the now publicly-owned Stewart Ranch. According to his obituary printed in the May 8, 1935 East Oregonian, Sam was “considered one of the best horseman” and “qualified as a real hand with his riding, roping or any of the work of a western cow hand.”

Locals described Sam as never without his red handkerchief and skilled at hand rolling cigarettes without losing tobacco. He had a distinctive scar and potentially some paralysis on his face from getting bucked off a horse.

Stewart Ranch also had a series of Chinese cooks, including Jim Lee and a man named Chung. Lee was described as a “really, really good cook” in an oral history by Eminger Stewart — grandson of ranch founder and namesake Eminger “Billie” Stewart. “Particularly good with desserts.”

After his tenure working on cattle and sheep ranches, Jim Lee worked in, and even owned, restaurants across Grant and Baker counties.

Uncovering Oregon history with the Chinese Diaspora Project

Ongoing efforts to rustle up evidence of early Chinese American cowboys fall under the umbrella of the Oregon Chinese Diaspora Project (OCDP), a grassroots, multi-agency collaboration that focuses on documentation of early Chinese Oregonians in rural parts of the state.

Southern Oregon University Laboratory of Anthropology (SOULA) partnered with ODFW archaeologists on a summer field school at Stewart Ranch, where investigations focused on two historical bunkhouses associated with the property.

The collaborative project included community outreach, public programming and field assistance from local volunteers and the Burns Paiute Tribe’s Youth Opportunity Program.

SOULA’s excavations at the site targeted bunkhouses and areas where food remains and trash might be discarded by Chinese American cowboys and cooks.

The team recovered buttons, broken dishes and bottles. They also discovered flakes representing the byproducts of stone tools made by Indigenous peoples that lived at the site long before the first livestock arrived.

SOULA field school student Rebecca Chapman holds up a small ceramic fragment for inspection (R). Students Zoey Ahl and Victoria Mozdy learn from archaeologist Tyler Davis how to describe sediments using a Munsell soil color chart (L). Grant County, Ore., July 15, 2025.(Courtesy of the Southern Oregon University Laboratory of Anthropology)

Buttons and rivets reflect sturdy workwear, spent ammunition suggests hunting or protecting livestock from predators and food remains provide a glimpse into the meals prepared by the Chinese cooks working on site.

Katie Johnson, a zooarchaeologist with SOULA, found evidence of hearty communal meals in the animal bones recovered from outside the cookhouse.

Elements representing lower limbs from mammals would be tougher, “So you would’ve put them into stews or soups where you can make a large portion to share with the group that’s working there.”

The fragmented bones show beef and deer were enjoyed, along with cuts from a medium-sized mammal that could represent sheep—mutton reportedly being one of Jim Lee’s signature dishes.

Piecing together Oregon’s early cowboys

While Indiana Jones emphasizes the adventurous side of archaeology, in reality the bulk of the work is tedious and happens away from the dig site.

Artifacts from the Stewart Ranch dig are being carefully cleaned and sorted in the lab by staff and students. Time-consuming research continues, including scouring historical newspapers and photographs as well as ongoing conversations between project partners and stakeholders.

Much of the OCDP’s access comes from local partnerships with the Grant County Ranch and Rodeo Museum and Friends of Kam Wah Chung in John Day, who helped make connections between the project and local ranching family descendants.

As the project continues, the OCDP will rely on these community relationships to interpret and contextualize findings and track down and access additional sites.

SOULA staff and students and OCDP project partners meet with Howard Gieger of the Grant County Ranch and Rodeo Museum in John Day. July 14, 2025.( Courtesy of the Southern Oregon University Laboratory of Anthropology)

Archaeology allows for small finds to make big changes, and is actively helping to counter the erasure of Chinese Americans from Oregon history.

Decades of anti-Chinese sentiment, culminating in state, federal, and local laws effectively deterred or prohibited, in some cases violently, many Chinese Americans from building generational roots. Census records for Grant County listed more than 40% of its total population as being of Chinese descent in the 1870s. In 2020, that dropped to less than 1% reporting Asian ancestry.

While the dozens of Chinatowns in Eastern Oregon were abandoned by the early 20th century, the Chinese Americans who stayed, built careers and lived out their lives in these communities — including some of the former ranch hands.

Jim Lee spent his final days under the care of the Catholic Home in Baker City. According to a local rancher that was one of Lee’s friends and former employers, he left the Catholic Home his sizable estate upon his death.

Buckaroo Sam retired to the John Day Chinatown when he got too old for cowboying. He lost his home and savings to a catastrophic fire in 1927. The family that ran the city’s Benson Hotel took him in, where he performed odd jobs in exchange for room and board.

An oral history with Loyce Phillips, granddaughter of the hotel owners, is on file at the Kam Wah Chung State Heritage Site. In it, she speaks with great fondness about Sam, how he helped the family and took particular care to watch out for her.

A fuller and more complex picture of life in Eastern Oregon is emerging, allowing for what Dale Hom describes as a “retelling of a story” by artists, archaeologists and others helping to sweep away the dust of time.

“The more we find out, the greater it expands on what it means to be an American and be an American cowboy here out in the West.”

Cinematographer and editor Christie Goshe (L) with Producer Chelsea Rose (R) during a break in filming.(Courtesy of Parker Loris Underkoffler)