Missoula Buried Its Chinatown, Then Made Up a Story About Tunnels

Ask around town about what's under downtown Missoula and you'll get some version of the same story. Tunnels. Chinese tunnels, dug so Chinese residents could move around unseen, usually with an opium den somewhere at the end of them.

I've been down there. The tunnels are real. That story isn't.

What sits under the sidewalks downtown is mostly steam-heat infrastructure, old basements, and the concrete vaults that once held glass prisms to light them. Nikki Manning spent a University of Montana master's thesis on this exact question, working with the Missoula Historic Preservation Commission to inventory what's actually down there. She set out to test the Chinese tunnel stories and came back calling them a common myth. Priscilla Wegars, the ranking authority on Asian history in the American West, reports that no Chinese-built tunnel has ever been identified.

The story survives because it beats the truth for entertainment, and because it flatters an old assumption about people who were never hiding in the first place.

They weren't underground. They were upstairs on West Main, with the lights on.

The Summer the Ground Gave Something Back

In 2019, a construction crew working on a new brewery on West Main cut into the ground and found another Missoula underneath: broken rice bowls, small glass vials that once held Chinese medicine, coins, game pieces, and the bones of meals eaten more than a century ago.

University of Montana researchers came down to help. For weeks, students and archaeologists worked alongside the construction, pulling thousands of objects out of the dirt at what is now Cranky Sam Public House.

A few steps away, people were ordering pizza and walking downtown like it was any other August afternoon.

The Chinatown on West Main

For roughly sixty years, the blocks around West Main and West Front held Missoula's Chinatown. The heart of it was the 200 block of West Main, where historic maps put Chinese homes, stores and a temple. The temple ran from sometime in the 1890s into the 1910s, upstairs in a building on that block. Biga Pizza occupies ground connected to the site now.

The word "Chinatown" oversells it a little. There were no borders, no gate, no sign. What existed was a dense cluster of houses, laundries, stores and restaurants wedged in among saloons, boarding houses and the city's red-light district. Newspapers later used that address against the people living in it. Live near vice, the logic ran, and you must be part of it. The tunnel story is the same reflex, still running a century later.

How many people? You'll see 405 repeated in nearly every local retelling of this, pinned to around 1890. That figure appears to describe Missoula County, which covered far more ground and far more rural territory than the city did. Researchers who have gone back to the census geography think the city itself topped out closer to a hundred.

Six Laundries, Four Stores, Two Gardens

When Sam's Café closed in 1940, a local paper ran a look back at the district's better years and counted about six Chinese laundries, four stores, two large market gardens and the temple. Chinese workers also handled a large share of the city's janitorial and odd-job labor, the kind of work that keeps a town running and never makes the paper.

The gardens are the part that complicates things. Chinese gardeners grew produce and sold it around town, and by that same account, some of them brought nuts or candy around to their customers at Christmas.

Set that next to the editorials. The papers were calling Chinese residents a problem while Chinese gardeners were handing treats to their neighbors, and those neighbors were still telling the story fifty years later.

Missoula wanted the labor. It was less sure about the people.

Sam Tom Raised Eleven Kids Here

The convenient myth about a western Chinatown is that it was a labor camp full of single men who would leave as soon as the work did. Sam Tom's family makes that hard to hold onto.

He was born near Canton around 1852 and came to the United States as a boy. Before Missoula he worked the mining camps at Alder Gulch, Bearmouth, Garnet and Pioneer, and he got to town ahead of the railroad. Here he ran a general store and worked as a merchant, a watchman, a janitor, a restaurant hand and a truck gardener.

In October 1891 he married Gee Sue Yee in San Francisco. Their first child was born in Missoula the following September. They had eleven. The kids went to Missoula schools and grew up speaking both English and Chinese.

A 1915 newspaper profile made much of the family, in the way papers of that era made much of any Chinese family that struck white readers as unexpectedly American. However long they had been here, they were still being introduced.

Sam Tom died in 1935. He is buried in Missoula Cemetery.

New Year's on Front Street, 1894

In February 1894 a Missoula reporter and a police officer walked through the district during Lunar New Year and wrote up what they saw. They stopped at Chung Foy's place on West Front and at Ah Ping's store on Main. At the temple there was tea, there were cigars and sweets and fruit and nuts, firecrackers going off, music playing, and offerings left at a shrine.

Read the source with your eyes open, though. A white reporter wrote it with a cop at his elbow, in the language of 1894. He probably got the food right. What any of it meant is a different question.

The dig gives us the version nobody filtered on the way in. Sarah Grenfell's 2024 University of Montana thesis went through the animal remains from the West Main site and turned up bear, turtle, several species of fish, crab, shellfish and cuttlefish. Part of it came from around Missoula, part from the Pacific Northwest, and the rest was shipped from China.

These weren't people eating whatever was in front of them. They were rebuilding a food culture in a place that made it difficult, substituting where they had to and paying to import what they couldn't replace.

There's a small story from 1906 that fits. A Chinese laundry worker the paper called Quong Wah Tom pulled a fourteen-pound bull trout out of the Clark Fork, and it became a shared meal in Chinatown. The paper ran it as a joke, complete with fake broken English. Take the mockery back out and what's left is a man fishing his river and feeding his neighbors.

Why Missoula's Chinatown Went Away

Nobody ran Missoula's Chinese residents out on a single night. What happened took decades, and it worked better than a mob would have.

The laws came first. The Page Act of 1875 was used to keep Chinese women out of the country. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 barred Chinese laborers and closed the door on citizenship, and the Geary Act of 1892 required Chinese residents to carry papers or face deportation. Exclusion stayed on the books until 1943.

The arithmetic followed. By 1900 Montana had something like forty Chinese men for every Chinese woman, and the state banned interracial marriage from 1909 to 1953. A community that cannot marry and cannot bring in spouses does not get a second generation. Statewide, the numbers track it plainly: roughly 2,564 Chinese residents in Montana in 1890, down to 1,188 by 1910, and 258 by 1940.

Locally, the temperature was easy to read. An 1885 Daily Missoulian editorial told readers to drive them out, while taking care to specify that it be done peaceably.

None of that requires an expulsion. It requires immigration law that stops new families from arriving, marriage law that narrows the ones already here, a press that describes your neighbors as an invasion, and an economy that takes the work while questioning the right to stay.

H. Dirk Yue closed Sam's Café at 137 West Front in 1940, after roughly thirty-two years behind it. His wife had stayed in China the entire time, which is the whole architecture of exclusion in one sentence. The paper called it the last Chinese restaurant in Missoula.

The Cemetery at the Foot of Mount Jumbo

The hardest part of this is in the Lower Rattlesnake.

An 1884 map puts a Chinese cemetery near the base of Mount Jumbo. Funerals sometimes drew long processions out from town. Mourners left food and offerings, and in traditional practice families would exhume the bones later and send them back to ancestral ground in China.

As the community shrank, the cemetery went out of use. Some remains were moved. Others weren't, and houses eventually went up over the site. At least one of the burials was a child.

In 1923 a work crew digging in the area turned up a skeleton. Somebody remembered the ground had been a Chinese cemetery. The remains were put back in the trench and covered over.

Which is what lost means here. Nobody misplaced this neighborhood. The city built on it.

A Sign in a Park, Eighty Years Late

On June 6, 2025, the City of Missoula and Missoula County dedicated an interpretive panel in Sgt. Don Gregory Park for the cemetery and the people buried near it.

I've stood at that panel. It takes about two minutes to read. Then you're standing in a neighborhood park with houses around you and nothing else marking what the ground holds.

Late. It counts anyway.

The part I keep coming back to is this. Missoula built a whole folklore about Chinese residents hiding in tunnels they never dug, and did it while paving over the cemetery where they actually were. The invented story got told for a century. The real one needed a construction crew to hit it by accident.

The bowls and the medicine bottles and the coins are still under West Main. The dead are still out by Mount Jumbo. This neighborhood didn't disappear so much as stop being recognized, and there's a difference between the two.

Sources and further reading: Sophia Hattie Etier's 2026 University of Montana dissertation on Missoula's Chinese community, 1860–1940; Sarah Grenfell's 2024 University of Montana thesis on faunal remains from the West Main site; Nikki Manning's Missoula Historic Underground Project and Historic Underground Missoula; Priscilla Wegars on Chinese tunnel mythology; U.S. Census population figures for Montana; National Archives records on the Chinese Exclusion Act; City of Missoula and Missoula County, June 2025 memorial dedication.