Pendleton, OR

Sometime in the 1980s, the first mysterious pothole appeared in a street in Pendleton. More soon followed.

They weren’t like other potholes, as the city crews discovered when they arrived to fix them. In fact, at the bottom of them was an underground city — complete with businesses both legal and illegal — all connected by tunnels.

For several decades around the turn of the 20th century, there were two towns in Pendleton: One above the soil line for all to see, and one below it known only to the chosen few.

The underground town got its start in the late 1800s. At that time, the hard work of building the railroads was mostly finished — the transcontinental railroad linked Portland to the East Coast in 1883. So the country no longer needed the thousands of Chinese workers who had helped build them. They had gone from providing a valuable service to a new nation, to competing with “native sons” for jobs and depressing the wages.

The climate in the U.S., never warm and friendly for them, was becoming downright hostile. Crimes against Chinese people were not prosecuted. The Chinese Exclusion Act and other laws like it were promulgated, prohibiting them from becoming citizens or owning land and blocking further immigration. Residents of West Coast cities such as Tacoma and Sacramento started forming mobs and running them out of town. It wasn’t a full-blown pogrom, but it could easily have become one at any time — and only an idiot would just sit back and wait for that to happen.

The Chinese in America were not idiots. In various cities, they responded to this official and unofficial persecution by forming self-sufficient ghettos — Chinatowns — and keeping such a low profile that today, the official estimate of how many Chinese there were in Oregon — 150,000 — is nothing but a wild guess. No one really knows.

In Pendleton, the Chinese had an additional challenge: Cowboys. They tended to get liquored up and commit crimes after sunset. Chinese people made very appealing victims for this — one could do all sorts of things to them, up to and including murder in many circumstances, without fear of punishment — and they were easily identifiable. It soon became an unofficial rule that Chinese people must be off the streets by sundown. (In some places in Oregon, that rule actually was made official.)

So, to facilitate after-dark movement from one Chinese-owned business to another, access tunnels were dug. And added on to. And expanded.

The tunnels became very useful for illegal businesses such as opium dens and brothels, which were built either entirely underground or with a concealed entrance to the tunnels through which personnel might flee in the event of a police raid. After the Volstead Act kicked off Prohibition in 1919, tunnels became even more useful for this — especially the tunnel that led to the airport.

Yet the tunnels remained, for the most part, a Chinese community secret — until those potholes started to appear.

Today, you can take a tour of these tunnels, guided by an actual historian. It includes both legal and illegal businesses operated entirely underground — opium dens, laundries, apothecary shops, everything a Chinese fellow might need after dark in a hostile, foreign land.