'Chinese Remembering' conference leads to research on fate of Penawawa victim

Gazette Editor

Research of Whitman County’s lone known link to the massacre of Chinese gold miners in Hells Canyon on the Snake River indicates an official investigation was never conducted here 125 years ago.

The naked body of a Chinese male, believed to be one of 34 victims of the massacre, was found naked with a single bullet hole at Penawawa.

The sketchy accounts carried in frontier newpapers was reflected in what was then called the Palouse Gazette, a predecessor of this paper which was then in its 10th year of publication under Charles B. Hopkins.

The Gazette’s informal printing museum t...