Chinese migrants were some of the first and most numerous participants in Idaho’s 19th century gold rushes. In mining communities across Idaho, Chinese residents often made up more than half of the local population and an even higher percentage of gold seekers. This presentation from Dr. Renae Campbell will focus on one such community, Southern Idaho’s Boise Basin, where a rich archaeological and historical record allows us to reconstruct what daily life was like for some of the thousands of Chinese individuals who, despite facing racial discrimination and an evolving array of exclusionary laws, established diverse lives and livelihoods during Idaho’s gold rush era. This program is part of the 2025 Winter Read. Renae Campbell is a historical archaeologist and the Director of the University of Idaho’s Asian American Comparative Collection (AACC), a non-profit facility dedicated to promoting research on Asian American heritage and material culture. Renae specializes in Chinese and Japanese diaspora archaeology, archaeologies of race and gender, and the history of the rural American West. In 2016, she created the Historical Japanese Ceramic Comparative Collection (www.lib.uidaho.edu/digital/hjccc/), one of the first online resources for identifying archaeological Japanese ceramics. Her 2023 dissertation, The Once Bustling Basin: A Historical Archaeology of …

In September of 1885, the Chinese coal miners who were brought into Wyoming as strikebreakers were ambushed and driven out of the town of Rock Springs at gunpoint by white coal miners. Teow Lim Goh’s “Bitter Creek” revisits this dark episode—known today as the Rock Springs Massacre—revealing the stories beneath this violent, decade-long culmination of labor struggles and racial hostilities in the Union Pacific Coal Mines. Through the eyes of the struggling railroad workers, their families, and the corporation working them to the bone, Teow Lim Goh creates an ode to buried history that blends epic tradition with modern composition and astonishing empathy to ask the question, “What turns ordinary people into monsters?” This program is part of the 2025 Winter Read, a community-wide program. This year we’re reading “Four Treasures of the Sky,” by Jenny Tinghui Zhang, set in 19th century Idaho and whose main characters hear of the Rock Springs Massacre as they face their own threats of violence in the small mining town of Pierce. Books will be available for pre-order from Torrey House Press, which is publishing the book in May 2025. Teow Lim Goh is a poet and essayist who writes from the nexus of …

To kick off the 2025 Winter Read of “Four Treasures of the Sky” by Jenny Tinghui Zhang, we’ll be opening a new exhibit, enjoying light refreshments, and sharing how you can participate in this community-wide read! The Winter Read is a community-wide read and collaboration of The Community Library in Ketchum with the Hailey Public Library, Bellevue Public Library, and Stanley Community Library. Learn more at https://comlib.org/programs/winter-read-2025/