johanna ogden

Ghadar, Historical
Silences, and Notions
of Belonging
Early 1900s Punjabis of the Columbia River

On May 30, 1913, the Astoria Budget printed a notice from “Munsii
[Munshi] Ram, Secretary of the Hindu Association, Astoria, Oregon.” It was
an invitation to hear Har Dyal, a Stanford professor and “noted philosopher
and revolutionist in India,” deliver a special “lecture on India for the Ameri-
can residents of Astoria” at the local Finnish Socialist Hall.1 That a Hindu
Association and a Finnish Socialist Hall existed in remote, 1913 Astoria is its
own startling news for many. But this was far more than a lecture in a “red”
hall arranged by a surprising organization. Dyal’s 1913 speech in Astoria was
the keynote at the founding of the revolutionary nationalist Ghadar Party,
an uncompromising and radical new direction in Indian nationalist politics.
Created by the Asian Indians (or Hindus, as they were referred to at
the time) of the U.S. West Coast, Ghadar’s aim was nothing less than the
armed overthrow of British rule in India.2 The group included intellectu-
als such as Dyal as well as students, but its ranks were the laboring Punjabi
men who worked the region’s mills and farms. Men from the length of the
Columbia River and beyond filled the hall that May in Astoria. Within a
year of the meeting, hundreds of Punjabis, overwhelmingly laborers from
the West Coast led by Sohan Singh Bhakna from Portland, returned to India
with the hope of sparking an insurrection against British rule. Most were
promptly captured, detained, tried, or executed; Ghadarites were the target
of conspiracy trials in Lahore, India, and San Francisco, California, the lat-
ter at the time the most costly trial in U.S. history.3 These setbacks aside,
Ghadar’s secular politics united an unprecedented combination of social

 OHQ vol. 113, no. 2 © 2012 Oregon Historical Society

 Clatsop County Historical Society

Two unnamed Punjabi men, of the hundred or more living and working in early
1900s Astoria, often as millworkers, pose for a photograph. At the time, Punjabis
were often called “Hindus,” in reference to Hindustan on the Indian subcontinent,
sometimes in a mistaken notion about the men’s religion. Many of the Punjabis in
Astoria were Sikhs and wore turbans as a mark of their faith, while others, for a
variety of reasons, opted for a western style of dress.

Ogden, Ghadar, Historical Silences, and Notions of Belonging 

 castes and religious backgrounds and made an indelible mark on the Indian
imagination and politics. For that, Indian historiography views Ghadar as an
opening salvo in the Indian nationalist endeavor. Ghadar Party memorials
exist in Jalandhar, Punjab (India), and San Francisco, California.4 Yet, this
major political accomplishment and link to Indian independence is largely
unknown today in the American West, and its birthplace in Oregon stands
in mute anonymity.
Men from British Columbia to California accomplished the formation
of Ghadar despite facing numerous legal proscriptions and extra-legal mob
violence, frequently perpetrated with government backing or an official blind
eye. Oregon was perhaps more nuanced in its treatment of the migrants
because prominent figures in the state — for their own self-serving rea-
sons — openly championed the economic usefulness of the Punjabi men’s
presence and stridently opposed violence against them. But while they were
not physically driven from the state, the Punjabis have been run out of
Oregon historically. There are no identifiable vestiges of them in Oregon’s
landscape, little recognition of their lives or accomplishments exist in our
collective memory, and the watershed founding of Ghadar is largely forgot-
ten. If remembered at all, Ghadar’s Oregon story is eclipsed by that of San
Francisco, the later home of its office and press.5
The story of Ghadar in the Pacific Northwest is, without a doubt, intrigu-
ing. For me, its historical importance lies in the realities it reveals about the
transnational making of the region and the historical downplaying, if not
silencing, of that very process. The erasure of Asian Indians in Oregon is
rooted in myths that have privileged settlement over transience and rigid
nationalist fables over stories of global peoples — whether Chinese, Japanese,
or Hindustani — who were, and are, intrinsic to the region. Those myths
have shaped our archives and stories, and they continue to haunt us through
their impact on the notions of belonging and otherness in post-9/11 America.
Re-rerembering the Punjabis of Oregon — communities of laborers and
political activists stretching the length of the Columbia River — prompts
one to consider the process of their erasure.
The Punjabis’ story also unearths a history of transnational collaboration
and divergent outlooks among diverse and often underestimated peoples
that, if not a cause for optimism, is at least a reminder that with respect to
religious, ethnic, and political tolerance and inclusion, social habits and
beliefs can be more of our own making than we might assume.

The Colonial Vortex of Punjabi Migration

The populations of Asian Indians who came to North America were small,
especially as compared to Chinese or Japanese migrations, and temporally

 OHQ vol. 113, no. 2

 Washington State Historical Society
The S.S. Minnesota arrives in Seattle, Washington, on June 23, 1913. The term
“tide of turbans” was a common pejorative used when speaking of migration from
India, with the turban itself becoming a symbol for, and target of, anti-immigrant
sentiments.

compressed, beginning roughly in 1905 and ending in 1914, the apex of

Ghadar. The causes of and reactions to their migration provide a lens onto
global colonial politics.6
Some thirty million people left India between 1830 and 1930. By choice,
economic imperative, or force, Indian men left home to work as merchants,
policemen, soldiers, plantation workers, or laborers, largely in other Crown
colonies in Asia, South Africa, and Australia. For most of those migrants,
no matter the distance traveled, the British colonial story of Indians’ sup-
posed inability to self-rule, despite centuries of having done so, followed
and branded them as second-class, colonized subjects.
In the years around 1906, several elements came together to push Indian
migration toward North America. First was the growing anti-colonial unrest
in Bengal and its spread to the Punjab, which deepened in 1907 with an
outbreak of the plague and the resulting deaths of over a million people.7
Second was the development of colonial exclusionary policies against Asian

Ogden, Ghadar, Historical Silences, and Notions of Belonging 

Clatsop County Historical Society

This photograph of Pacific Northwest millworkers from the early twentieth century,
likely including a number of Sikhs, captures the regional mix of workers the industry
relied on and recruited from around the world.

Indians in Australia and South Africa, persuading some to seek new oppor-
tunities in the booming economies of western North America. Furthermore,
attempting to quell Bengali and Punjabi unrest, the British colonial regime
expelled numerous nationalist students and leaders and increased surveil-
lance of established European émigré-nationalists, prompting a number
of organizers and newly exiled Indian activists toward the American East
Coast.8 Ultimately, some fifteen thousand to thirty thousand Hindustanis
landed in North America and provided the elements for the historic mix of
radical intellectuals and laborers that became so critical to Ghadar.9
While most students and intellectuals initially landed in the East, the
booming economies of the West attracted the mass of migrant laborers,
farmers, and former military men. British Columbia was the earliest migra-
tion site, attracting some eight thousand men. But after 1908, when Asian
Indian immigration was essentially banned in British Columbia, nearly
seven thousand migrated to the United States from Canada and other parts
of the globe.10 Most were from the Punjab. They were Muslims and Hindus,
but overwhelmingly they were Sikhs, often easily identified by their turbans

 OHQ vol. 113, no. 2

and beards.11 Once in North America, they formed a community of labor-
ers that stretched and moved through the West from British Columbia to
California, working in mills, at land reclamation, and on farms. Hundreds
lived and worked along Oregon’s Columbia River from Astoria to The Dalles.
Drawn by and landing in the midst of the frenzied building of the West,
it should come as little surprise that the region was a political ground zero
for how and under what social terms it would be constructed, with the
rhetoric and promises of American democracy and the realities of American
colonial expansion often violently clashing on the bodies of migrant men.
On the one hand, these were times of radical labor activism, like that
of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW or Wobblies); socialist orga-
nizations dominated by German, Italian, and Jewish migrants; and immi-
grant nationalist groups such as the Irish Sinn Fein, who all argued that
the fruits of industry should be shared by labor. Those organizations were
often established with a belief in the equality of all nationalities and races.
Cross-fertilization was frequent in factories, mines, mills, and conferences
as well as through the many radical presses of the day.12 Indian émigrés
such as Har Dyal jumped into that mix, making common cause with Irish
revolutionists and labor radicals, and the international uprisings of the day
provided ready inspiration.
On the other hand were organizers of a different sort — those who
believed the American West was meant for whites only. The arrival of the
Punjabis spurred a frenzy of anti-Asian activity. The Punjabis were hardly
the first such target. The nativist movement had begun with the arrival of
Chinese migrants during the 1850s California gold rush and raged over
forty years. Its tactics included riots, round ups, expulsions, and murder at
a level described by some historians as ethnic cleansing. The on-the-ground
violence was accompanied by legislative restrictions against Chinese on
everything from immigration to laundry operations, land ownership, voting,
and marriage. This was not simply a misguided popular movement but was
hailed, if not fomented, in the California legislative halls.13
In many ways, the West was a last stand: politicians had promised it
to those whites who had yet to enjoy the “American dream,” pushed ever
westward in hopes of securing the reality. Since Thomas Jefferson’s days,
the white yeoman farmer, with his family at his side, had been touted as the
backbone and ideal of American citizenry. Yet, since the nation’s founding,
its democratic ideal had its parallel reality of slavery and the colonization of
indigenous peoples. By the close of the nineteenth century, the Carnegies,
Rockefellers, Mellons, and others were rapidly transforming real and still
aspiring yeomen into industrial wage slaves. The West was held out as the
last frontier for those whites left out of the American dream.14

Ogden, Ghadar, Historical Silences, and Notions of Belonging 

 The furnace of westward colonial expansion was not stoked simply by
domestic migration but also by infusions of men from every corner of the
globe. As late as the first three decades of the 1900s, 80 percent of the West’s
population growth was comprised of single men from the world over. That
mix created any number of political and social tensions, many related to
accepted domestic arrangements and the relative rights and privileges of
whites versus other laborers. As historian Nayan Shah argues, the “United
States and Canada responded to this immense plurality of human mobility
and the demands of industrial capitalism” with a series of “local and federal
laws to deny any political voice or social status to transient workers” and
“by developing a system of democratic government in which large swaths
of their residents were proscribed from full participation,” with race a cru-
cial divide.15 The Punjabis arrived in the midst of this western moment and
became for a time its political lightening rod, simultaneously indispensable
labor and indispensable political fodder.
Like the Chinese and Japanese before them, Punjabis were utilized for
work by land, factory, and mill owners but barred by law from citizenship.16
Although there were tactical differences between the United States and
Canadian governments, there was essential agreement between their respec-
tive governmental policies and exclusionist movements: each nation was to
be white and Christian. In the American tradition of African chattel slaves
and indigenous laborers, Asian laborers became part of a highly racialized
continuum of peoples whose labor and land were used but who were outside
the pale of political inclusion.17 In this way, Punjabis and Asians generally
helped define the meaning of Canadian and U.S. citizenship by what it was
not. Attitudes in both countries were captured in the popular bar song and
on-the-ground movement of the day, “White Canada Forever”:
For white man’s land we fight.
To Oriental grasp and greed
We’ll surrender, no, never.
Our watchword be “God save the King,”
White Canada forever.18

Riots and Change

By 1905, the Asiatic Exclusion League (AEL), the latest permutation of
Asian exclusionist organizing, born and centered in San Francisco, had
an organizational influence and core message — of the West belonging to
whites — that infected the entire coast. The Punjabis, with their telescoped
arrival and identifying turbans, quickly became nativist targets.19 In 1907,
a year of sharp economic downturn, the rising racial tensions of the entire

 OHQ vol. 113, no. 2

West Coast exploded in
a watershed moment: the
anti-Indian riot in Belling-
ham, Washington.
Bellingham was a boom-
ing mill town with active
labor organizations and
a vocal anti-Asian faction
affiliated with the AEL. By
1906, Punjabis who had
left Vancouver’s increas-
ingly hostile atmosphere had
found ready work in nearby
Bellingham. In September
1907, however, job insecurity
in Bellingham combined
with anti-immigrant hatred.
Several hundred white work-
ers and some of Bellingham’s
municipal and commercial
leaders mobbed and beat
many of the roughly two
hundred Asian Indians in
town and ransacked their
living quarters. In the riot’s
wake, no Chinese, Japanese, Published on August 13, 1910, in the San
or Asian Indians remained. Francisco Call, a popular press of the day,
Support for and approval of this cartoon expresses the powerful attitudes
the Bellingham riot spread towards Asian Indian migration to the United
throughout the West via the States.
mainstream press and AEL
papers. Outbreaks of vio-
lence followed in numerous other Washington towns, as well as in Alaska
and California. Euro-American workers established a hold over lumbering
in Washington that would not be broken until World War I.20
Fleeing Bellingham, Punjabis scattered throughout the West, many cross-
ing back into Vancouver. A few short days later, with the encouragement
of local leaders and Seattle AEL organizers, a riot broke out in Vancouver
with a mob marching on city hall, then Chinatown. Armed Japanese finally
stopped them. Order was not restored for several days, and the riot made
international news. The riots resulted in a turning point in Canadian immi-

Ogden, Ghadar, Historical Silences, and Notions of Belonging 

 gration history. Fearing that continued Asian immigration would weaken
the remote province’s allegiance, the Canadian federal government backed
the province’s effort to make a “white Canada forever.”21 The federal govern-
ment imposed quotas on Japanese emigration, created “continuous voyage”
regulations requiring that Asian Indians travel directly to Canada from their
country of origin and possess a $200 landing fee, enforced head-tax laws
against the Chinese, and, later, created the Chinese Exclusion Act.22
Immigrant communities fought back in myriad ways. But unlike the
Chinese and Japanese, who came from countries with national reputations
at stake, the Asian Indians received no backing from the British colonial
government. Instead of assisting their subjects, the British, concerned about
the effect of such race politics on their global empire, instituted their own
measures to restrict Punjabi migration: passport controls by the Raj in Hin-
dustan; cancellation of direct travel between Canada and India, making it
impossible to meet Canada’s continuous journey provision; and for those
Punjabis already in North America, establishment of a global police network,
particularly strong in Vancouver, to monitor and disrupt any organizing.23
Punjabis responded in a variety of ways to the tremendous change in
conditions following the Bellingham and Vancouver riots. Some simply
left for India, although most stayed on, working in Northwest mills and on
rural California farms. Some turned inward, cultivating religious and purity
movements, while others, especially in British Columbia and despite its heavy
police surveillance, also began to develop more radical outlooks.24 Where
could such politics flourish? Oregon’s community of Punjabis was hardly
the largest and outwardly was the least successful. Compared to California
and British Columbia, they built little that was tangible, such as temples,
businesses, or farms. Nevertheless, several critical factors conducive to radical
sentiments and the founding of Ghadar coalesced in Oregon.
First, unlike California and Washington, the AEL had little political and
organizational sway in Oregon. The state was not free of anti-Asian ani-
mus, but key political and business leaders, while still opposing the social
and political inclusion of Asians, lobbied Oregonians to shun the violence
occurring throughout the West. Their success resulted in little hold for anti-
Asian activity, less communal violence, and when violence did occur, less
tolerance for it, especially by public officials.25 This provided some measure
of breathing room.
In addition to Oregon’s relative racial peace were the cosmopolitan and
radical currents of Astoria and its stable community of Punjabis. Moreover,
Oregon’s and Astoria’s remoteness was likely a plus because it provided some
distance from British Columbia’s political police and hostilities, yet was not
so far, especially with rail and ship connections, to prevent ties to Vancou-

 OHQ vol. 113, no. 2

ver’s political ferment and organizers. Finally, in Portland were key leaders,
particularly Sohan Singh Bhakna and Kanshi Ram, who had the astuteness to
recognize political openings, the ability to bridge the laboring and intellectual
communities, and the strength of political vision to make Ghadar a reality.
Punjabis began arriving in Oregon through direct immigration to the
United States and through the fluid border with Canada. It is easy to imag-
ine that Punjabis displaced by the Bellingham and Vancouver riots found
their way south, swelling existing Punjabi settlements or creating new ones.
It is also easy to envision mill operators in out-of-the-way towns along the
Columbia River greedily hiring these newly arrived men, as labor was chroni-
cally short in this land rich with trees. The largest community of Punjabis
developed in Astoria but was amplified by others in The Dalles, Hood River,
Bridal Veil, Winans, Portland, St. Johns, Linnton, Goble, Clatskanie, Rainier,
John Day, and Seaside.26
Oregon was not free of hostility toward Asian Indians. Newspapers in
both Portland and Astoria ran their share of stories promoting the exclu-
sionist myth of the “Hindu invasion,” along with reports on the riots against
the Punjabis in Bellingham, Everett, and Vancouver.27 In Boring, just outside
Portland, an Asian Indian man was shot to death on Halloween 1907, the
victim of a hate crime.28 Asian-exclusion societies gained some coverage in
the daily press and took some nominal organizational forms in both Port-
land and Astoria.29 Communal violence occurred as well, most notably in
St. Johns. On March 24, 1910, nearly three hundred men moved on Punjabi
laborers’ homes, ransacked them, beat and robbed the men, and drove out
those still at work in the mill. All the Punjabi men left St. Johns that night.30
The following day, however, the Punjabis were back in St. Johns with the
county district attorney (D.A.) in tow, identifying those who had participated
in the riot against them: the mayor, police chief, a newspaper reporter, two
volunteer firefighters, some shop owners, and numerous laborers from the
local mills. The D.A. convened a grand jury to investigate the riot, which
issued 190 warrants for beating and robbing thirty-eight “Hindu work-
men.” Moreover, the D.A. charged the mayor, city attorney, and police chief
with dereliction of duty.31 The mill, the main employer of the Punjabis in
St. Johns, continued to employ the men despite threats.32 Most of the Pun-
jabis returned to work immediately, but several were arrested for carrying
revolvers, stating: “We have no protection.”33 Besides arming themselves,
the Punjabis stayed active throughout the long course of the St. Johns riot
legal battle, unsuccessfully attempting to involve the British consulate and
testifying in many court cases.
That in their fight the Punjabis had the considerable backing of the
District Attorney of Multnomah County is significant and demonstrative

Ogden, Ghadar, Historical Silences, and Notions of Belonging 

Map by Jesse Nett

Marre Singh
Esr Singh Metz Singh
Ganga Singh Munshi Karim Ram
Amr Singh Gasava Singh Munshi Ram Bhagat Singh
Argensa Singh Gerbachen Singh Narian Singh Bhawan Singh
Babo Singh Gudid Singh Pakker Singh Bita Singh
Bahader Singh Hagara Singh Pakhr Singh Bleagot Singh
Ban Singh Hajour Singh Peter Singh Boor Singh
Bar Singh Hardet Singh Pohauen Singh Dewa Singh
Basnt Singh Hookam Singh Ram Singh Ganda Singh
Boga Singh Inder Singh Ri Singh Indor Singh
Bud Singh Jager Singh Santa Singh Jaget Singh
Butra Singh Jenda Singh Saporn Singh Jaget Singh
Butte Singh John Singh Sarin Singh Jai Singh
Butte B.S. Singh Jowanda Singh Shanker Khan Labh Singh
Caser Singh Kesar Thathgarh Singh Singh, Marre Narain Singh
Dahna Singh Ksai Singh Sunder Singh Rud Singh
EA Singh Lal Singh Surain Singh Samand Singh
Esar Singh Mala Singh Tota Singh Sunder Singh
Esor Singh Manga Singh Tova Singh Sunder Singh
Astoria Surain Singh
Surain Singh
Surain Singh

Clatskanie Chanda Singh

*
Fanj Singh
Jawand Singh
Co
lu Karbant Singh
m Ofagar Singh
b
John Day i Sohn Singh
OCEAN

Sunder Singh
a
Ahmed Khan Dovna Singh Jowala Khan Natha Singh
Suraien Singh
Ajmat Khan Fattah Khan Kan Singh Niamat Khan Rainier Wasawa Singh
Arjan Singh Firman Singh Kartar Singh Nowab Khan
(Punjabis located
Bashanta Singh Ganda Khan Kehr Singh Omar Singh
at this site. Detailed Goble
Bhag Singh Ganda Singh Lan Singh Pakher Singh
records unknown)
Bhan Singh Ganga Singh Marain Singh Rulia Singh
Budh Singh Gurbachan Singh Massa Singh Santa Singh
Ali Mahamed Hazara Singh
Chanda Singh Gurbachan Singh Mastan Singh Sikander Khan
Ali Raka Indar Singh
Chanda Singh Harman Singh Moti Singh Sunder Singh
B Singh Jagal Singh
Chet Singh Ishar Singh Naram Singh Umar Khan
Basant Singh John Kim
Dalel Khan Jhanda Singh Nassrulla Khan Usaf Khan
Ri

Batan Singh John Sandi

Dogar Singh Jindo Singh Natha Khan Wamdar Khan
Ber Singh Konah Singh
ver

Wasan Singh
Cashar Singh Mahamed Alah
PA C I F I C

H. Khan Chand Kim Sanda Singh

Seaside Krem Khan Chand Khem
D. Singh
Singh Singh
Suba Singh
M. Khan
Ganga Singh Succha Singh
Harnan Singh Surin Singh
Beer Singh Kader Singh Masav Singh St. Johns
Boggit Singh Kanshi Ram Mat. Singh Sohan Bhakna Singh
Hardit Singh Lahna Singh Matah Singh Sunder Singh
Ganda Singh M. Singh Naidu Singh Thakar Das Dhuri
Gings Singh Makand Singh Nathu Singh Udham Kasel Singh
Hernan Singh Mar Singh Noud Singh Wasava Singh
Hun Khan
Mahamond Khan
Linnton
Jawnar Singh Marca Singh Ron Singh Wasawa Singh
Unerak Iphsahan 100
John Singh Masas Singh Sarvan Singh Wasawa Singh
Portland

 OHQ vol. 113, no. 2

re-marking the imaginative
l andsc ape
1910 punjabis and the columbia River

*
WA Ghadar Founding
Meeting Site
Ghadar Organizing Sites /
100 Number of Attendees
OR

This map is compiled by the author from a number of sources, including:

the 1910 census, various city directories, legal records, and Ghadar histori-
cal accounts. It does not presume to be complete or historically accurate. Its
purpose is to begin to imaginatively place the men — as individuals and as a
community — in the landscape of the area’s history.

Paula Singh
Arjon Singh Sham Singh
Bhola Singh Sham Singh
Bishn Singh Shib Diyal
Esar Singh Son Singh
Gois Singh Son Singh
Hookam Singh Sunder Singh
Blagwan Singh Mangl Singh Jag Singh Talok Singh
Boota Singh Marna Singh Kehr Singh Tebe Singh
Gugi Singh Nalain Singh Ker Singh Uttam Singh
Kishon Singh Ojagi Singh Kheru Vir Singh
Lall Singh Rain Singh Palle Singh Visawa Singh

Amar Singh Hood River River The Dalles

Hari Singh
Harman Singh
Kishon Singh ia
Shik Singh u mb
ol
Bridal Veil C Winans
20 100

Ogden, Ghadar, Historical Silences, and Notions of Belonging 

 of the larger racial policy regarding Asian laborers that shaped Portland and
much of the state.34 In 1859, Oregon was the first state admitted to the union
with an explicitly anti-Chinese constitution, which legislators in California,
the heart of the anti-Chinese movement, envied. Barred from citizenship,
Chinese were also explicitly excluded from both the right to vote (as were
“Negroes and Mulattos”) and from property ownership. Yet, Oregon’s Chi-
nese population increased from 1880 to 1910, and Portland was home to
the second largest Chinatown in the West. This seeming contradiction was
due, as historian Marie Rose Wong argues, to two critical factors. First, a key
framer of the Oregon constitution (including its anti-Asian stance) was also
a law-and-order judge, Matthew Deady, who was concerned by the spread
of vigilante violence and, with Portland’s mayor, took strong stands against
it. Second, Portlander Harvey Scott, the Oregonian’s leading journalist and
editor for fifty years, penned editorials on the issue.35
Scott’s was a bully pulpit. Although he openly supported Oregon’s Chi-
nese Exclusion Act and opposed Chinese citizenship, he lobbied against
Oregonians imitating the vigilante violence of Washington and California,
scoffed at the notion that Chinese labor was draining the country of wealth,
and excoriated newspapers that claimed otherwise. Scott, in short, promoted
the “good sense” of Oregon growing rich by utilizing Asian laborers driven
out elsewhere, while also assuring their departure once that work was done.
Especially in western Oregon, those views gained considerable currency
among local businessmen, politicians, and ordinary citizens during Scott’s
tenure and created a notable, if self-serving, counterweight to the violence
that engulfed so much of the West.36 Thus, backwater Oregon, judged by the
times, was relatively safe for Punjabis and wanted their labor.
Arguably, Scott’s views influenced Astoria, ninety miles west of Portland
and a town where no anti-Asian communal violence ever occurred. Other
factors distinguished the town. From Astoria’s inception, it had been mark-
edly international, and by 1910, near the height of the Punjabi community
there, nearly half of Astoria’s 9,600 residents were foreign–born, including
large communities of Chinese and Finns.37 Those groups shaped the town,
some giving it strong currents of radical nationalism. While Astoria was
not the only Oregon town without anti-Asian riots, it was home to a large,
visible Punjabi settlement and was the birthplace of Ghadar.

Astoria and “Hindu Alley”

Astoria and its environs seemingly had the most diverse community of
Asian Indians in all of Oregon, estimated at around a hundred people at its
peak, with most employed at the Hume Lumber Mill. Having established the
hugely profitable salmon-canning industry centered in Astoria, the Humes

 OHQ vol. 113, no. 2

 Clatsop County Historical Society
This undated photograph of Astoria’s Hammond Lumber Mill may depict what
was known as “Hindu Alley,” the living quarters of a number of Punjabi workmen
employed at the mill, in the foreground.

expanded and diversified their holdings, starting a lumber mill in 1903.38

The mill was bought by A.B. Hammond, who employed some six hundred
people of different nationalities: Italian, Greek, Japanese, and Middle East-
ern. Initially, Hammond traveled to India to recruit laborers, but such direct
recruitment was short-lived as Punjabi migrants began arriving in Astoria
on their own. Many lived in a row of bunkhouses along the waterfront near
the mill that came to be known as “Hindu Alley.”39
The Punjabis were overwhelmingly single men ranging in age from nine-
teen to fifty. There was, however, one family. Bakhshish Singh Dhillon and
his wife Rattan Kaur built a house in Astoria and sent their four children,
Kartar, Budh, Kapur, and Karm, to the Alderbrook public school.40 The
Punjabi community was predominantly Sikh, but there were also Hindus
and Muslims. Bhagat Singh Thind, a college student from the University
of California, Berkeley, worked some summers in the mill and went on to
both serve in the U.S. military and challenge the racial bar on citizenship in
a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case.41 Leading intellectuals such as Rama
Chandra spent time among the laborers. An important propagandist for
the soon-to-be-formed Ghadar press, Chandra visited, talked politics with
millworkers, and briefly convalesced in Astoria with his wife.42

Ogden, Ghadar, Historical Silences, and Notions of Belonging 

University of California, Berkeley, Doe & Moffitt Libraries

The photograph of the Dhillon family and friends shows Rattan Kaur, one of the few,
if not the only, Punjabi women in Oregon. The children pictured — Kartar, Budh,
Kapur, and Karm — attended the Alderbrook public school in Astoria. Descendants
note that family stories speak of radicals of varying nationalities coming to visit with
their grandfather, Bakhshish Singh Dhillon.

During their years in Astoria, the Punjabis were involved in wage strikes,
taught wrestling and fielded competitive wrestlers such as Dodam Singh and
Basanta Singh, opened bank accounts, sued one another in court, got arrested
for drinking and fighting, filed for citizenship, celebrated a cross-cultural
wedding, played with the few Punjabi children in town, cared for one another,
buried one another, talked, and otherwise entertained themselves during the
times they were not working.43 This is not to say that life in Astoria was idyllic.
Their neighbors, employers, and sometimes the town’s presses used racist
and anti-immigrant justifications to argue for the Punjabis’ expulsion from
the mill, to cut their wages, or to justify individual acts of physical violence.
Schoolmates taunted the children in their turbans.44 Still, during times of

 OHQ vol. 113, no. 2

widespread ethnic violence, a stable and relatively diverse community suc-
ceeded in Astoria. Punjabis undertook a major exodus in 1914, as the local
paper explained, “for the purpose of joining in the revolution that is expected
to ensue, while England is involved in the war with Germany.”45 This was a
sign of Ghadar’s influence. But it was the Hammond Mill fire in 1922 that
finally ended their tenure. It is impossible to understand the Punjabis’ lives
in Astoria, including their political lives, without considering the entwined
histories of the Finnish and Chinese communities.

Finns and Chinese

In many ways Astoria, a contested ocean port at the edge of a contested
U.S. empire, was founded on a diverse group’s dream of growing rich via
ties with China. During the early 1800s, the dream involved selling pelts to
China and attracted French and Canadian trappers as well as Hawaiian ship-
men and gardeners, all living among, and often dependent on, the Chinook
communities of the area.46 By 1900, the continuation of that dream lived in
Astoria’s salmon-canning industry, reliant on Finnish fishermen, Chinese
cannery crews, and international millworkers.
The salmon-canning industry was important not only to the nation’s
food supply but also as a major source of wealth for the Pacific Northwest,
trailing only timber and wheat in value. Chinese laborers made it possible
and profitable and were essential to the town’s and the region’s wealth
production. Industrialists such as the Humes depended on, recruited,
and attracted laborers from around the world, especially Asia, to fill their
crews. These ties between remote Astoria and a global system of people and
goods underscores the centrality of migrants from the global East to wealth
creation in the North American West.47 Nonetheless, the Chinese standing
in the community expressed a tension between personal acceptance and
structural estrangement.
The Chinese were integral to Astoria’s commercial and social life.48
By 1880, more than a third of Astoria was Chinese, overwhelmingly men
employed in the cannery. Additionally, they operated stores and gardens as
well as gambling and prostitution quarters and provided various domestic
services to the town’s better-heeled.49 They also faced a racialized world.
There were speeches, press articles, and fights against the Chinese; they lived
in poor and segregated housing; they were allowed only the most menial
cannery jobs; and, given the state’s laws, they were unable to own property
or gain citizenship.50 But there also seemed to be acknowledged limits to the
racism. In 1886, the Weekly Astorian commented, “they [the Chinese] congre-
gate here [Astoria] in the same fashion [as San Francisco] because they are
driven off elsewhere and have no place else to go” and reasoned that “many

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Clatsop County Historical Society

Astoria’s Chinatown was located on Bond Street. Chinese residents accounted for
roughly one-third of Astoria’s population at the turn of the twentieth century and
were integral to the town’s life and industries. Chinese nationalist activist Sun Yat-
Sen visited Astoria on a fundraising junket.

Astorians refrained from anti-Chinese activities because they believed the

laborers might abandon the canneries, thereby causing the collapse of the
local economy.”51 Whatever the source of the article’s reasoning, its conclu-
sion that Astoria benefited greatly from the Chinese was well founded. On
some level, the townspeople of Astoria understood that their prosperity was
based on tolerance.52 This fact, along with the Finns of Uniontown, helped
ease the entry of Asian Indians.
The Finns made their own mark on Astoria and affected the Punjabi
experience there. Called the “Helsinki of the West,” Astoria had the largest
Finnish community west of the Mississippi, comprising almost 20 percent of
the town in 1905. Astoria’s Finnish community was sharply divided between
the more conservative, or so-called “Church Finns,” and the radicals.53 While
the Church Finns were numerically dominant, the radical Finns had an
influence well beyond their numbers. The peak of the radicals’ activity and
influence tightly coincided with the presence of the Asian Indians in Astoria,
from roughly 1904 through World War I.

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 In 1904, a small group of Finns formed the Astoria Finnish Socialist Club
(ASSK); a third of its members were women and the rest largely bachelor
fishermen. It became “the most active Finnish-American organization in
Astoria” and was one of the largest and most influential locals within the
national Finnish Socialist Federation (SSJ).54 The Finnish socialists shaped
the story of the Punjabis in Astoria in two very concrete ways: their press
and their hall.
Remarkably, there were two weekly socialist Finnish papers produced
in Astoria. Besides suggesting the

Clatsop County Historical Society

vigor of these circles, having two
papers also extended the social-
ists’ influence across Astoria and
the country. The largest Finnish
newspaper in town, the Toveri, was
often the main source of news for
both the Church Finns and social-
ists alike. Furthermore, given the
papers’ prominence, editors and
contributors from around the
country were drawn to Astoria.
Those men and women were
talented organizers and propagan-
dists, schooled and experienced
in the broader socialist politics of
the United States and arguably a
critical counter to the parochial-
ism of a small town. In April 1911,
moreover, the Finnish Socialists
unveiled their five-story hall, the
second largest hall in Astoria and
a hub of the town’s, and the social-
ists’, social life.55 The Asian Indians
used that hall for the foundational Finns made up about one-fifth of early
meeting of Ghadar. 1900s Astoria, with many radicals among
In short, the Finnish socialists them. Built in 1911, the five-story Finnish
of Astoria were a force beyond Socialist Hall was the second largest
building in Astoria and became a major
their numbers, through their
social center in Astoria with its bowling
presses, the talent those presses alley, dance floor, theatre, athletic events,
attracted, and their social hall. At and numerous lectures and events.
the core of that influence were In 1913, it was the site of the founding
their beliefs in a nation’s right to conference of Ghadar.

Ogden, Ghadar, Historical Silences, and Notions of Belonging 

 self-rule and in the unity of laborers regard-
Courtesy of David Thind, The South Asian American Digital Archive

less of national origin.56

That radical message likely resonated
across many of Astoria’s communities.
Chinese nationalist Sun Yat-Sen’s fundrais-
ing visit to Astoria suggests one quarter.57
Descendants of the Bakhshish Singh Dhil-
lon family recount tales of Finns and IWW
representatives meeting in their grand-
father’s house.58 British surveillance files
describe then-student Bhagat Singh Thind
as “ke[eping] company with a bunch of
socialistic I.W.W. anarchistic Finns.”59 Both
stories evidence the explicit affiliations and
affinities with other revolutionary groups
for which both the Finnish socialists and
Punjabi nationalists were known. Astoria,
then, can be imagined as a place with strong
currents of explicit radical sympathies and
Bhagat Singh Thind poses of relative social ease for its international
for a photograph in his U.S. community of workers.60 And people had
Army uniform in about 1918. the ability to express these affinities. In the
Thind enlisted in the Army rich mix of newspaper editors and writers,
and trained at Camp Lewis, merchants and labor contractors, visiting
Washington. After World
scholars, literate laborers, and laboring
War I, an Oregon court
granted him U.S. citizenship. students were many avenues for English
In United States v. Bhagat becoming the lingua franca.
Singh Thind, (261 U.S. 204 It is hard to imagine that people were
1923), the U.S. Supreme not alert to the like–minded around them.
Court overturned the ruling, Pressed between the hills on the south and
defining a “white person” by the river to the north, Astoria was not large.
the “popular” sense (that is,
Men — mostly bachelors, whether fisher-
by appearance), and thereby
revoked Thind’s citizenship.
men, cannery workers, or millworkers —
frequented bars, pool halls, and wrestling
matches; bought groceries and staples; rode
busses and trains; and walked the town. While largely inhabiting ethnic
enclaves, lives nonetheless overlapped. So far, no record tells us exactly what
happened between the Ghadarite organizers and the radical Finns, but the
very fact that Ghadar’s meeting was held in the Finnish Socialist Hall implies
a connection. We know the Punjabis utilized Astoria and its socialist hall to
launch a movement that reverberated around the world.

 OHQ vol. 113, no. 2

 GHADAR
Some push us around, some curse us.
Where is your splendor and prestige today?
The whole world calls us black thieves,
The whole world calls us “coolie.”
Why doesn’t our flag fly anywhere?
Why do we feel low and humiliated?
Why is there no respect for us in the whole world?61

Ghadar, like the men who formed it, sprang from and existed in a close
and continual interplay between local and global conditions. In our age
of hyper-connectivity, it is perhaps easy to underestimate the degree of
communication among earlier communities, which historians refer to as
“migrant networks.” With startling reach, speed, and detail, news traveled
the globe through letters, telegrams, newspapers, religious services, and
word of mouth by those traveling via ship, rail, and their own two feet. The
Punjabis of Oregon were wired into a global migrant community, includ-
ing that of the North American West, that was growing increasingly restive
against British colonial rule.
Ghadar was formed by men who, as the poem said, felt “low and humili-
ated” and without respect “in the whole world” and who laid the cause of
their disrespect at the feet of their colonizers. Asian Indians confronted
colonial and exclusionary policies the world over, underscoring that simply
leaving India was not enough to escape their second-class status.
Furthermore, while their experience in North America was as targets
of police networks, mob violence, and restrictive laws, for some, life in the
United States also provided critical new perspective. In the United States,
Punjabi migrants witnessed previously unknown freedoms, such as a broad,
if unequally held, political franchise, the right to bear arms, and a self-ruled
land where wealth was not extracted by an imperium. By contrast, as Dyal
explained in a June 1913 Astoria talk, “England has applied to India with
success and in every detail the ‘Colonial System,’ which cost her [England]
the allegiance of the American colonies.”62 Dyal’s political conclusion was
that Hindustan needed to do what the United States had done: overthrow
British rule and establish a “United States of India.” Many began to interpret
the taunt of being “Indian slaves” as true and as a challenge to establish an
independent, self-ruled, secular state.63
It is outside the bounds of this article to analyze Ghadar’s political pro-
gram, let alone the international revolutionary movement of which it was a
part. But it is worth noting here the irony of Ghadar’s call for the establish-
ment of a United States of India. Ghadar and Dyal called for the emulation
of a nation that persecuted and excluded Punjabi migrants. They attributed

Ogden, Ghadar, Historical Silences, and Notions of Belonging 

 Punjabis’ bad treatment to the United States being unduly influenced by the
British. Ghadar’s attitude toward the United States is partially understand-
able given that the defeat of England was pivotal to U.S. independence. It was
also a strategic appeal to an American audience and an attempt to avoid the
wrath of the U.S. government.64 But it also illustrates the Ghadarite concep-
tion of the problem: Ghadar sought to overcome the British, not imperial-
ism or nationalism. Ghadar’s opposition to British rule, while completely
understandable as a counter to great-nation chauvinism (such as that of the
United States, Canada, and Britain), nonetheless remained within nationalist
confines, and therefore included all of nationalism’s inherent inequalities. In
this sense, there is a question of whether the story could end in any way other
than problematically, if not tragically. In 1947, the dream of an Indian nation
was realized, years after the practical defeat of Ghadar but armed nonetheless
with its historical contributions. That dream produced two separate coun-
tries, the partition of the Punjab, and horrific dislocations and violence. The
partition enhanced and ossified divisions among Sikhs, Muslims, and Hindus,
because the definition of the new states of Pakistan and India were based
on essentialized differences — akin to American racial theories — between
historically intertwined and largely cooperative peoples.65
Nevertheless, the years of Ghadar’s gestation were years of great hope
and optimism. Nationalist strivings charged the air from the Japanese expul-
sion of Russia to the Mexican and Russian revolutionary preambles. Disil-
lusioned by their status and influenced by the many movements of radicals
and nationalists they encountered, many Punjabis began to dream less of
making it somewhere new and more of remaking their homeland under self
-rule. Such change never happens overnight and is rarely the product of a
single event or person. Ghadar was the political culmination of numerous
efforts, false starts, and dead-ends across the West, all notoriously difficult
(and outside the bounds of this article) to trace in detail.
Broadly speaking, the Sikh temples and cultural and religious organiza-
tions, especially in Vancouver, B.C., became increasingly politicized centers
of protest and publicity regarding the people’s mistreatment and desire for
respect and self-rule. In 1909, a particularly significant foreshadowing of
Ghadar occurred outside the gurdwara, or Sikh temple, in Vancouver. Bhai
Bhag Singh, a former Bengali Lancer and a Vancouver leader, “made a bon-
fire with his certificate of ‘honorable discharge’” from the British military
service. His act was accompanied by the Temple’s Executive Committee’s
condemnation of any further wearing of British military medals.66 News of
this and other actions spread throughout worldwide networks.
The importance of Bhag Singh’s public burning of his Indian military
papers is hard to overstate. Since the annexation of the Punjab by the Brit-

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ish in 1849, Sikhs had played a critical role in the Indian army, including
saving British rule during a mutiny by Indian troops in 1857. A decorated
veteran burning his military papers was a renunciation of this tradition of
loyal fighting service and destroyed all personal claims to future benefits
that service guaranteed in India.67 Bhag Singh’s protest also gives pointed
meaning to ghadar as the name of the movement and press that activists
soon developed. Translating both as ‘mutiny’ and ‘revolution,’ the group’s
central strategy became calling on the troops of India to take exactly those
actions.
While burning military papers represented a significant political turn
against British rule, this act of ghadar was not yet an organization or
movement. The critical bridging of Vancouver’s political ferment to the
broader laboring migrants of the West and its gelling into an organization
of unapologetic revolutionary action took place in the United States. Several
key individuals were Dyal, the Stanford, California professor, along with
Sohan Singh Bhakna, a Sikh mill worker, and Kanshi Ram, a Hindu labor
contractor, both of Portland, Oregon. In 1912, Ram and Bhakna met with
G.D. Kumar, an activist from Vancouver, and later with Dyal.
Dyal, an activist Hindu from Delhi who left for the émigré activist circles
of Europe and finally the United States, was the group’s most visible public
spokesman and propagandist. He associated with radical circles of all kinds,
especially in the greater San Francisco area.68 Bhakna was a farmer working
at the Monarch Lumber Mill in Portland, largely to earn money to save his
family’s landholdings in the Punjab. Living outside a colonial setting for
the first time was an eye-opening experience for Bhakna, who witnessed
the rights even many common citizens enjoyed along with the exclusion
and violence of the North American West.69 He was in St. Johns during the
anti-Punjabi riot and likely played a role in seeking justice. He was attuned
to Canada’s increasing exclusion of Punjabis and, like others, was outraged
that Asian Indians were the butt of British colonial policy the world over.
Kanshi Ram, a successful labor contractor in the lumber industry, was a
major driver in both organizing and funding the political organizing. Like
Bhakna, Ram was involved in the opposition to the St. Johns riot, a plausible
signifier of the growing resolve to no longer be treated like “black thieves
everywhere.”70 If Dyal was Ghadar’s most prominent spokesman, Bhakna
and Ram were its critical bridges, connecting organized politics with the
Hindu laboring community.
For his part, the British Columbia activist G.D. Kumar had by 1909
attempted to bring his anti-colonial politics to the laborers of the region.71 A
former college teacher in India, he made his living in Canada as a shopkeeper,
while organizing and producing publications that circulated in Canada

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 and India. As the British stepped up measures against Indians everywhere,
Kumar’s paper called on Sikh troops to rise against the British, and his paper
was promptly banned in India. Kumar and others also secretly met with
groups of working men in Vancouver. All of this caught the attention of
authorities, including Vancouver’s daily papers, and Kumar felt compelled
to leave the country around 1911. He joined Taraknath Das, a Bengali radical
and important propagandist then publishing Free Hindustan, a nationalist
paper in Seattle. The two established and ran the press and United India
House in Seattle, which attracted a small group of laborers and students to
its weekly lectures. Kumar visited laborers around the Pacific Northwest,
and in early 1912, he went to Portland.72
On March 12, 1912, a meeting was held in Ram’s rented house in Portland
and resulted in the formation of the Hindustani Association of America.
Bhakna was elected president, Ram treasurer, and Kumar the general sec-
retary. Later that year, a second chapter was formed in Astoria. The groups
held Sunday political meetings and produced a short-lived press in Urdu,
the latter ending when Kumar was hospitalized soon thereafter.73 Beyond
the production of a newspaper, the groups’ stated aims were: “receipt of
vernacular papers from India, importation of youth from India to America
for education and with a view to devoting their lives to ‘national’ work in
India and weekly meetings to discuss politics.”74 While notable, such activi-
ties lacked a focus on power.
On the evening of March 25, 1913, Ram gathered workers in his house in
St. Johns for a historic meeting. With Kumar’s sudden illness, and presum-
ably to help catalyze the movement, Ram, Taraknath Das, and Bhakna had
sent for Dyal, who met with the men that night.75 After great debate, the
laborers rejected Dyal’s suggestion of sponsoring Indian students to the
United States as a necessary precondition for obtaining Hindustan’s freedom.
Instead, they decided on immediate, direct, and radical political propaganda
directed to the thousands of men of the West Coast. The group also voted
to carry a proposal for the Asian Indian workers to “gird their loins to lib-
erate India and work on revolutionary lines.”76 Other key decisions of that
meeting affirmed that British rule was the cause of all suffering in India;
that youth educated in India under British rule were incapable of fighting
for independence; that overseas workers in the United States were key to
liberation because they had gained political consciousness and money; and
that they now needed an organization to end British rule in India through
armed revolution, with the aim of establishing an American-type democratic
government, a so-called United States of India. To propagate these goals, it
was decided they needed an organizational center and press (Ghadr), both

 OHQ vol. 113, no. 2

based in San Francisco, where Ghadar could utilize the general politicized
atmosphere of the area, along with the larger population of Asian Indian
farmers, laborers, students, and intellectuals, as well as the greater financial
resources amongst them.77 The political turn towards Ghadar was made,
and the men set to the task of establishing it.78
Within two weeks of the gathering, Bhakna, Ram, and others organized
meetings in the mill towns scattered along the Columbia River, working
to establish chapters united by the March 25 resolutions of the Hindustani
Association of America, commonly known as Ghadar. From March 31
through April 14, 1913, local men and others traveling from Portland and St.
Johns gathered in Bridal Veil (twenty men), Linnton (one hundred men),
and Winans, a whistle stop in the woods south of Hood River (one hundred
men). By late spring, they were ready for the culminating meeting in Astoria.79
That meeting was the May 30, 1913, public gathering announced in the
Astoria Budget and keynoted by Dyal. It was attended by the Punjabis of
Astoria and by delegates from along the river and beyond. Here the official
program of Ghadar was proposed and passed. Those attending looked to
England’s engagement in World War I as their opportunity to realize their
dream of ending British rule. Central to their revolutionary analysis and
strategy was convincing the armed forces in India, still dominated by Sikhs,
to turn their guns against the British colonizers. That action, they believed,
would be spontaneously and ineluctably followed by a general uprising
among the broader Indian population.80
From these beginnings in Oregon, the movement established a weekly
press published out of San Francisco in numerous languages — Urdu,
Punjabi, Hindi, and occasionally English. Dyal oversaw the office and pub-
lications in San Francisco. The first issue of Ghadr, carrying news of the
organization’s formation, garnered great interest among Punjabi farmers in
California, and a second organizational conference was held in Sacramento
in December 1913. Chapters spread throughout North America and on to
India and the far-flung communities of Punjabis in Shanghai, Hong Kong,
Manila, Siam, and Panama, weaving thousands of men across the globe into
a movement for power.81
For his role in Ghadar, including leading hundreds back to India to
fight, Bhakna spent some twenty years in Indian prisons. He remained
deeply involved in politics throughout his life, and his stature in Indian
radicalism was such that one author described him as being “an institution
by himself.”82 Ram was hanged after his conviction in India in 1915.83 Dyal,
threatened with deportation, left the United States for Europe and shortly
thereafter recanted his revolutionary views.84

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 Historical Silencing and Historical Paths
Despite their historic accomplishments, these men and this community are
largely unknown in Oregon.85 I find the difference between the magnitude
of their story and its regional obscurity stark. In their time, these were not
unknown men. In India they were heroes. In Oregon they worked in mills
side-by-side with other men. Storekeepers sold them produce and bank
tellers took their money. They were listed in city directories and state cen-
suses. People sold them land, and title clerks recorded their purchases and
sometimes their marriages. Wardens listed them as prisoners. There were
public matches with Punjabi wrestlers. Newspapers reported on riots against
them and on Punjabis’ desire to return home and overthrow the British.
Wobblies and socialists wrote of their collusions. But in a classic Catch-22,
to find such records today I first had to know to look for them. In this I am
indebted to Indian historical works that, from the other side of the globe,
provided a road map to tiny towns such as Winans, Bridal Veil, and Astoria.86
The puzzle is: if Oregonians then were aware of the Punajbis’ presence, why
are we not today? How and why does this happen?
The key lies in seeing how a set of shared social assumptions function
in devastatingly simple, effective, and largely transparent ways to shape the
history we know. On one level, history is a fairly simple process. A person
or a group decides something is important to remember, whether it be oral
tales, photos, news articles, or other memorabilia. People put them in a
shoebox or an archive or recite the memories to their circle, and from such
things we weave further tales. But historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot stresses
a critical feature of this process we call history. Trouillot highlights the con-
ceptual duality embodied in history between what happened and what is said
to have happened — the irreducible distinction and the irreducible overlap
between the two. His point works to explain how our cultural assumptions
and beliefs affect our collection and narration of events and navigate the
divide between that conceptual duality.87 Otherwise said, what we believe
affects what we remember and what we tell.
Think, for example, of how a family gathering can become one relative’s
dark tale and another’s triumphalist clan lore, whether using identical or
differing “facts.” Assuming one narrative is not complete fabrication, the
story likely to gain credence is affected by the status of the storyteller and
his or her interpretation’s resonance with existing family stories. The family
memory will be embedded in a story because, whether as a family, town, or
nation, we humans ultimately relay and remember stories, not lists of facts.
Such narratives are where history lives, believes Trouillot, who argues that
“history reveals itself only through the production of specific narratives,”
which have very real stakes.88 His approach is to examine our narratives as

 OHQ vol. 113, no. 2

an insight into our beliefs and relations

Clatsop County Historical Society

of power. Applying that perspective here,
what is the narrative that has supplanted
the Punjabis and Ghadar from our collec-
tive memory? What are the stakes of this
narrative omission in the present?
That erasure perhaps begins with
the early-nineteenth-century maps
that depicted Oregon country as empty
despite extensive and longstanding Native
communities.89 It continues with ledgers
of “pioneer” names or of local deaths
that never list the name Singh despite
the presence of people with that name.
It resides in sheriff arrest ledgers that
under the heading “nativity” contrast
American with Jew, Negro, or Indian.90
It is the recording of marriages, but not
the many other domestic associations and
liaisons among laboring men.91 It is the
leaving of newspapers and ephemera of
radical laborers out in barns, never trans-
lating them to tell us of the multi-ethnic
efforts that occurred in mills and camps
everywhere. It is a thousand seemingly
benign acts of overlooking and erasure
that undergird and feed the persistent
foundational myth of Oregon as a land
of white, pioneer families and foster that
reality through a continual retelling of the Astoria was the home of several
myth.92 Papers, photos, or the ephemera “Hindu” wrestlers who competed
of the myriad who do not fit the narrative in the town and region, including
often never find their way into our archives Basanta Singh, featured in this
or our stories, due not to conspiracy but handbill, and Dodam Singh; one
to social assumptions about who counts of the two is the likely subject of
the photograph, taken in Astoria.
or belongs. Of the many immigrants from
Wrestling was a relatively
the “East” — whether from the Punjab or common site of cross-ethnic
Missouri — whose labor made the West, mixing both among competitors
one is the pioneer and citizen, the other — such as Basanta Singh’s
the perpetual outsider, a historical sidebar matchup with Nels Jepson —
or simply forgotten altogether, making all and among spectators.

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 the easier America’s enduring acceptance of laborers working without the
hope of legality, let alone the promise of permanence.93
Citizenship in America has always involved conferring legal rights on a
select, worthy few, defined by gender and race.94 It did not trump cultural
assumptions but instead sprang from and codified them. Focusing on race,
citizenship laws concerning indigenous peoples, African slaves, or Asian
laborers were not simply exclusionary. They were also constitutional. The
bestowal of citizenship on the “right people” imaginatively and practically
established Americans as white, Christian, family men in contradistinction
to the non-white and non-Christian peoples, with varied interpersonal
relations, who have been in and built up North America from day one.
Exclusion, then, has been an American value and it has shaped our archives
and our stories.
Some might argue that these prejudices have been overcome. Punjabis,
Chinese, and Japanese were all, eventually, granted access to citizenship in
both Canada and the United States, and increasingly their contributions to
the West have been recognized. But such changes in status have also proven
to be socially and legally tenuous if not revocable. During World War II,
Japanese-American citizenship was stunningly negated based on ethnicity.
It is difficult to argue we have left this legacy and logic far behind when
considering the treatment of and outlook toward Muslims and Arabs in
post-9/11 America. Hate crimes skyrocketed in the wake of the attack on
the Twin Towers, with the first fatality being Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh,
seemingly shot to death for the crime of wearing a turban. Campaigns from
Middle America to Ground Zero have opposed the building of mosques and
promoted Quran–burning. In April 2012, four Associated Press reporters
were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for exposing the widespread surveillance of
Muslim communities throughout the eastern United States by the New York
Police Department (NYPD). As summarized by journalist Amy Goodman:
Hundreds of mosques, businesses and Muslim student groups were investigated, moni-
tored and, in many cases, infiltrated. Police monitored and cataloged daily life in Muslim
communities, from where people ate and shopped to where they worked and prayed.
Police used informants, known as ‘mosque crawlers,’ to monitor sermons, even without
any evidence of wrongdoing. Also falling under the NYPD’s scrutiny were imams, cab
drivers, food cart vendors.

Despite being banned from spying on Americans, the NYPD was aided in
this campaign by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), most concretely in
the form of its top spy and enduring employee, Larry Sanchez. In Portland,
Oregon, this year, area residents Jamal Tarhuni and Mustafa Elogbi, both
long-time, naturalized, Muslim-American citizens, in separate incidents,

 OHQ vol. 113, no. 2

Courtesy of the Oregon State Archives, Oregon Penitentiary Records

These fingerprints and signatures are emblematic of the mere trace that remains
in the historical record and memory of the Punjabis’ presence in Oregon. While
garnered from an Oregon State Prison record, the author in no way believes, or
wishes to promote, that Punjabis comprised a criminal population.

were barred by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) from returning to

the United States for over a month after visiting friends and family in their
native Libya, and in Tarhuni’s case, delivering medical supplies for Medical
Teams International. The FBI detained and then interrogated each man
about his faith, contacts, and extremism in Libya.95
The list of similar events in the ten years since 9/11 is long and cannot be
done justice here. But arguably, there remains a menacing, stubborn under-
current in America that “immigrants are aliens, not citizens,” as historian
Mae Ngai so aptly puts it. It is little wonder that Japanese Americans were
among the first to denounce the official and unofficial targeting of Arabs,
Muslims, and South Asians in the wake of 9/11.96 From bitter experience,
they recognized the lurking danger that remains with us: the thread and
threat of “otherness” and the ugly lengths it can travel.97
The story of Punjabis, among others, begs for a renewed and critical
look at our historical constructions of belonging, or what Foucault termed
“an historical investigation into the events that have led us to constitute

Ogden, Ghadar, Historical Silences, and Notions of Belonging 

 ourselves and to recognize ourselves as subjects of what we are doing,
thinking, saying.”98 This story is one window into the entwined creation of
“us” and “them,” and argues for the recognition that the constitution of the
“alien others,” the “non-citizens” is equally the construction of “the citizen”
or “the included.” More simply, to ask who they were or are one must ask
who we were or are.
Historicizing ourselves in this way — even our most personal selves —
takes the onus off nature and leaves the possibility for humans to do things
differently. Joan Scott eloquently expresses this theme as embedded “in the
way different epochs posed problems and found solutions to them; the way
in which some solutions came to seem inevitable and necessary while others
were overlooked or rejected. In what he called ‘the profusion of lost events,’
Foucault called into question the self-proclaimed inevitability of any moral
or social system.”99 For me, this story of the radical Punjabis in Oregon
holds one such lost event: the unexpected, real-life experience of so-called
common people — Chinese, Punjabi, Finns, Socialists, or Sikhs — stepping
outside traditions of rigid nationalism or Balkanized thought. Their experi-
ence argues that who we are, far from inevitable, has involved choice and
different forks in the road. My hope is that knowing such alternatives exist
not just in theory but in our lived past will provide perspective and mettle
for our difficult present.

notes
This research would not have been possible important local stories alive. Finally, I would
without the following support: a 2009/10 like to thank Branden and Mona Mayfield for
fellowship from the University of British inspiration.
Columbia, History Department; a 2010 Social 1. Astoria Budget, May 30, 1913, Clatsop
Sciences and Humanities Research Council County Historical Society [hereafter CCHS]
(SSHRC) grant; and the 2010 Center for “Hindu” archive file. I rely on the Astoria press’
Columbia River History Castles Fellowship. reported meeting date, but Ghadarite scholars
Besides such important financial support, I give differing dates for this meeting.
was pointed towards this story by Prof. Ghanea 2. Hindoo or Hindu was the term widely
Bassiri of Reed College and received invalu- used on the Pacific Coast, in both Canada and
able input from Profs. Paul Krause and Anne the United States, to describe immigrants from
Murphy of UBC. I also received help from India. It is a corruption of the term Hindustan.
archivists, librarians, and other holders of I use the alternative terms Asian Indians and
stories up and down the river, not the least of Punjabis, as Punjab was the region from which
whom was Liisa Penner of Clatsop Historical most of these immigrants came. I also use
Society and Debbie Hazen of the Clatskanie the term migrants, not immigrants, given the
Chief who were inordinately generous with latter’s implication of an intention to relocate
their time and have done so much to keep permanently.

 OHQ vol. 113, no. 2

 3. Jan-Paul Shason, “Evolving Utopias: to 15,000 men arrived in the West. Jensen,
An Overview of Three Representative Punjabi Passage from India, 60, 62, 65.
Works from 1890s, 1910s & 1930s” (M.A. thesis, 11. Puri, Ghadar Movement, 16. Under-
University of British Columbia, 2009), 75. standing the turban’s relationship to Sikhism
4. See, for example, Dr. T.R. Sareen, Select is critical. It is part of the practice of the “Five
Documents on the Ghadr Party (New Delhi: K’s” (unshorn head and facial hair, the wearing
Mounto Publishing House, 1994), 1–14. of a sword, steel bangle, comb, and garment of
5. Harish K. Puri notes one nationalist modesty) and the taking of the name Singh for
organizing effort involving five men in 1912 in men and Kaur for women. These can denote
California’s farmlands. It failed to generate any those Sikhs identifying with the heritage of
further traction, but the men involved went on Guru Gobind Singh (1666–1708), the tenth and
to play prominent roles in Ghadar. Harish K. final Sikh prophet, and their membership in
Puri, Ghadar Movement: Ideology, Organisa- the Khalsa he founded. Singh’s legacy is also
tion [sic] & Strategy (New Delhi: Communist linked to the origin of the so-called “martial
Party of India, 1997), 52. qualities” of Sikhs, born in their fight with the
6. See also Joan Jensen, Passage from India: Mughals of the time. It is also a heritage much
Asian Indian Immigrants in North America promoted by the British, especially in its use of
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), Sikhs in the colonial army, a topic in its own
2–3. right. There are, however, many practicing and
7. For a more detailed account of the self-identifying Sikhs, past and present, who
Indian nationalist movement in the early do not either identify with this strain of Sikh-
1900s, including its relationship to the ism or choose not to adopt its outward signs.
broader nationalist upsurges in China, Rus- In the context of migration to North America,
sia, and Japan, see Jensen, Passage from India, the turban frequently operated as an identifier
1–22; Puri, Ghadar Movement, particularly and thus a target of nativists. Furthermore,
11–20 and 104–116; and Arun Coomer Bose, wearing the turban was both a strategic
Indian Revolutionaries Abroad, 1905–1922: In decision and point of controversy for Sikh
the Background of International Developments individuals and the broader migrant com-
(Allahabad: Indian Press Private, 1971), 1–36. munity. Their complexion and hair, without
See also Johanna Ogden, “Oregon and Global the turban, could have enabled many to “pass”
Insurgency: Punjabis of the Columbia River as Mexicans, Portuguese, or Italian — groups
Basin” (M.A. thesis, University of British Co- still low in the racial hierarchy but above the
lumbia, 2010). “Oriental” Punjabis. Adopting western dress
8. See, for example, Jensen, Passage from was a choice and/or strategy pursued by some
India, 20–22; Bose, Indian Revolutionaries migrants for varying reasons and/or at various
Abroad, 32. times while many others strictly maintained
9. Puri, Ghadar Movement, 2, and Jensen, their turban. For these many reasons, and in
Passage from India, 22–23, both argue the short, the turban is not equivalent with Sikh-
uniqueness of Ghadar’s merging of intel- ism. It should also be noted that Muslims also
lectuals and laborers. Estimates range from wear turbans
10,000 to 15,000 men (Jensen) to 30,000, as 12. On IWW, see Patricia Nelson Limerick,
argued by Nayan Shah, Stranger Intimacy: The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of
Contesting Race, Sexuality, and the Law in the the American West (New York: W.W. Norton
North American West (Berkeley: University & Co., 1987), 118–19.
of California Press, 2011), 2. For comparison, 13. See, for example, Jean Pfaelzer, Driven
25,000 Chinese were estimated to be in Van- Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Ameri-
couver alone in about 1906 (Jensen, Passage cans (Berkeley: University of California Press,
from India, 1, 62). 2007), 29–33; Marie Rose Wong, Sweet Cakes,
10. For the United States, the official num- Long Journey: The Chinatowns of Portland,
ber entering was 6,600. Thus, perhaps 10,000 Oregon (Seattle: University of Washington

Ogden, Ghadar, Historical Silences, and Notions of Belonging 

 Press, 2004), 6, 22–23, 28n21, 33, 36–39, 62, 24. Ali Kazimi, informal conversation with
229–37, 293n106; Alexander Saxton, The Indis- the author, April 2009.
pensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti- Chinese 25. In this I am indebted to the argument
Movement (Berkeley: University of California put forward by Wong, Sweet Cakes, Long
Press, 1971), 19; and Limerick, The Legacy of Journey, 29–74.
Conquest, 262–68. 26. G.S. Deol, The Role of the Ghadar Party
14. See, for example, Limerick, The Legacy in the National Movement (Deli and Jullundur:
of Conquest, 58, 94–95, 124–29 135–52, 262, Sterling Publishers, 1969), 56–60.
268–273; and Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy, 27. Examples include: “Driven from Bell-
12–14, 16, 21–28 ingham Washington,” Oregonian, September
15. Shah, Stranger Intimacy, 2–3 7, 1907, 1; “Everett Police Prevent Serious Riot,”
16. Ali Kazimi, Continuous Journey (Pe- Oregonian, November 3, 1907, 1; “North is Ac-
ripheral Visions Film & Video Inc., 2004). cused,” Oregonian May 16,1910, 2; and “Hindu
Even being allowed to enter as laborers was Menace Is Serious,” Astoria Daily Budget,
not consistently available. December 11, 1907.
17. Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Il- 28. Oregonian, November 6, 1907, 6.
legal Aliens and the Making of Modern America 29. For Portland, see “Local Branch Or-
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, ganized,” Oregonian, December 7, 1907, 10;
2004), 5, 7, 25. I use Asian as a convenient, if and “Arranges for Mass Meeting,” Oregonian,
problematic, term to define people from the December 21, 1907, 13. For Astoria, see Astoria
many countries loosely referred to as Asia — Daily Budget, “Chinese Exclusion: Astoria
Japan, China, Korea, etc. — but not to indicate Central Labor Council is in Favor of It,” April
agreement with the existence of an “Asian” 10, 1906, 5; “A Whopper!! The People’s Verdict
race, as nativists and Orientalists were fond is that ‘The Chinese Must Go!’,” October 3,
of arguing. 1893, 1; “Do Not Delay: The Chinese Must Go
18. Jensen, Passage from India, 62. beyond Any Question of Doubt,” October 4,
19. Ibid., 44. 1893; and March 7, 1894, 1.
20. Ibid., 30, 44, 42–56. I realize that a 30. This riot sketch is drawn from numer-
thread in this article argues against Jensen’s ous press articles other than those directly
“driving out” of Punjabis from the Pacific quoted. See, for example, Oregonian, March 24,
Northwest to California, and yet, here I seem 1910, 4, March 25, 1910, 4, and March 26, 1910,
to embrace that outlook. A finer look at the 6; and St. Johns Review, March 25, 1910, 1 and 5.
history of Punjabis in Washington may reveal 31. Oregonian, April 19, 1910, 4.
that they were not just “driven out.” Wong, 32. St. Johns Review, March 25, 1910, 1 and 5.
Sweet Cakes, Long Journey, 43–47. 33. Oregonian, March 25, 1910, 4.
21. Jensen, Passage from India, 57. Asian 34. “Asian labor” is inclusive of Chinese,
immigration in Canada, as in the United Japanese, Asian Indians, and populations of
States, was overwhelmingly confined to west- Filipinos and others who came later. This
ern regions. was more the case in the northern and west-
22. See Chinese Canadian National ern portions of Oregon, as the southern and
Council, [Link]/redress/[Link] eastern districts, with their mining interests,
(accessed May 16, 2012). had a somewhat different trajectory.
23. Jensen, Passage from India, 75. Puri 35. Wong, Sweet Cakes, Long Journey, 6, 31,
also discusses these same points, noting that 33, 34, 47, 49–50.
Canada and the Crown hatched a plan to 36. Ibid., 51–60.
send the migrants from Vancouver to British 37. “Interesting Figures in Population
Honduras in 1908, making clear that migra- Survey,” Daily Astorian, May 10, 1914, from
tion per se was not the issue, but the country CCHS “Hindu File.”
to which they were migrating. Puri, Ghadar 38. Daily Astorian, April 26, 1973, 9B.
Movement, 34–36. 39. Karen L. Leedom, Astoria: An Oregon

 OHQ vol. 113, no. 2

History (Pittsburgh: The Local History Com- no. 4, Clatsop County Oregon, prepared by
pany, 2008), 119. Oregon Historical records Survey Division,
40. CCHS, Photo 10,506-00D. In speak- WPA, Portland, Ore., September 1940; Friday,
ing of Astoria’s Punjabi population, I include Organizing Asian American Labor, 56, 57. Wives
other population centers such as John Day just of Chinese laborers were barred from entering
slightly upriver from the town. the United States.
41. Email correspondence from David 50. See, for example, Astoria Daily Budget,
Bhagat Thind to Liisa Penner, archivist at April 10, 1906, 5; October 3, 1893, 1; October 4,
CCHS, March 6, 2006. Singh Thind is known 1893; March 7, 1894,1; January 9, 1894, 4; April 3,
for his spiritual leadership and his legal 1906, 6; October 8, 1907, 2; and “Astoria Labor
case challenging citizenship standards for Council Petitions Astoria Water Commission
non-Europeans. See: [Link] and Public Library to Replace Chinese Janitors
rootsinthesand/i_bhagat1.html (accessed May with White Men,” Astoria Daily Budget, Febru-
2, 2012); and United States vs. Bhagat Singh ary 20, 2007. The Finns also lived in ethnically
Thind (261 US 204). segregated housing. Additionally, the national
42. UC Berkeley, Bancroft Special Collec- anti-Chinese campaigns eventually affected
tion, BANC MSS, 2002/78 CZ box 4, transcript Astoria’s canning industry negatively, if indi-
of interview of Padma Chandra, November rectly. See Friday, Organizing Asian American
18, 1972, 34, 41. Labor, 2–3, 18–19, 82–87.
43. Astoria Daily Budget, May 3, 1909, 6; 51. Quoted in Friday, Organizing Asian
The Daily Astorian, March 16, 1988; The Morn- American Labor, 58.
ing Astorian, January 11, 1920, 2; CCHS “Hindu 52. Historians Chris Friday and Alexander
file” records, Singh v. Lall, Clatsop County Saxton argue that a distinction can be made
Circuit Court Complaint dated February 28, between industries whose employment of
1920; CCHS, City of Astoria Police Ledger, July Asian laborers directly displaced Euro-Ameri-
1910–July 1916, unpaginated; CCHS, “Hindu cans and industries where the employment of
File,” “Declaration of Intent” of Amin Chand Asian laborers, especially where labor was in
Sherma, March 2, 1911, Behari Lall Verma, short supply, expanded the opportunities for
August 31, 1910, [illegible] Singh, July 26, 1910; Euro-American laborers, primarily in the up-
Behari Lal, July 13, 1910, and S. Chhajju, June per and more stable tiers of the industry. The
15, 1921; Kartar Dhillon, “Astoria Revisited: A latter was, as Friday argues, the case with the
Search for the East Indian Presence in Astoria,” salmon-canning industry. Saxton, The Indis-
Cumtux 15:2 (Spring 1995), 7. Interestingly, pensable Enemy, 74–77; and Friday, Organizing
Puri argues that wrestling was one of the Asian American Labor, 9–21.
means of training Ghadarites (Puri, Ghadar 53. Paul George Hummasti, Finnish Radi-
Movement, 129). cals in Astoria, Oregon 1904–1940: A Study in
44. Denise Alborn, “The Hindus of Up- Immigrant Socialism (New York: Arno Press,
pertown,” Cumtux 10:1 (Winter 1989): 15; 1979), 3, 19–20.
Turbans, directed by Erika S. Andersen (2000). 54. Ibid., 36.
45. Astoria Daily Budget, August 6, 1914, 4. 55. Ibid., 40, 44, 50, 57, 70–74. The first was
46. See James P. Ronda, Astoria & Empire the Toveri, launched in 1907. The second was
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1990) for an a separate woman’s press called the Toveritar,
interesting examination of Astoria and empire. which began in 1911.
47. Chris Friday, Organizing Asian Ameri- 56. The Finnish community as a whole
can Labor: The Pacific Coast Canned-Salmon had reasons to distance itself from some anti-
Industry, 1870–1942 (Philadelphia, PA: Temple Asian rhetoric. Many throughout the Finnish
University Press, 1994), 2, 6. diaspora considered their country’s ruin to be
48. Friday, Organizing Asian American caused by Russia’s occupation. Thus, Japan’s
Labor, throughout, but especially 8–9. defeat of Russia in 1905 was viewed positively,
49. CCHS, County Archives of Oregon, and the war’s coverage was extensive in the

Ogden, Ghadar, Historical Silences, and Notions of Belonging 

 mainstream press of Astoria. The Astoria China, Japan, Turkey, India, and Russia.
Daily Budget, from roughly December 1904 70. Puri seems to argue similarly regard-
through March of 1905, had almost daily ing the importance of the resistance to the St.
front page coverage of the conflict. See, for Johns riot. Puri, Ghadar Movement, 52.
example, January 4, 1905,1; and January 23, 71. Josh, Baba Sohan Singh Bhakna, 55n4.
1905, 1. 72. Puri, Ghadar Movement, 43–45, 52, 56.
57. Friday, Organizing Asian American 73. Ibid., 59.
Labor, 60–67. 74. Deol, quoting from Lahore Conspiracy
58. Author’s discussion with family trial documents, 56.
members, May 2010. On the centrality of in- 75. Sending for Har Dyal was evidently the
ternationalism to the Finnish socialist move- suggestion of Thakar Dass, a revolutionary ex-
ment, see The Tyomies Society (Photographs) ile from Punjab who had worked with Madam
Records, Finnish American Collection, Im- Cama in Paris before arriving in Portland in
migration History Research Center, University 1912. Puri, Ghadar Movement, 59.
of Minnesota. 76. Deol, 56–57.
59. Quoted in Shah, Stranger Intimacy, 77. Ibid., 57–58. The different spellings of
242. Ghadar/Ghadr reflect a transliteration issue.
60. Jensen’s examination of the typol- 78. Puri, Ghadar Movement, 60. Ghadar
ogy of the Bellingham riot, highlighting the was the first Indian overseas organization to
importance of organizations in the develop- join intellectuals, students, and workers, and
ment of such movements, might apply to the nature of that relationship has been hotly
progressive movements, making the existence debated. See Puri, Ghadar Movement, 53–54;
of Finnish Socialists in Astoria critical to fos- and Jensen, Passage from India, 22, 23. The dy-
tering a movement of radical nationalism and/ namics of this Portland meeting provide some
or socialism. Jensen, Passage from India, 42. insight on key dynamics of the later organiza-
61. Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Dif- tion. Intellectuals were critical in articulating
ferent Shore: A History of Asian Americans the party’s conscious political agenda and
(Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, more literate and experienced in some of the
1989), 301. practicalities of political organizing, such as
62. “Conditions in India — Hindu lec- newspaper production. But in many ways the
turer tells of oppression of people,” Weekly laborers dominated the movement numeri-
Astorian, June 5, 1913, 5. cally and shaped it politically. Bose, however,
63. Puri, Ghadar Movement, 20, 46. seems to argue the intellectuals were simply
64. Sohan Singh Josh, Baba Sohan Singh filling an empty vessel or utilizing “raw mate-
Bhakna: Life of the Founder of the Ghadar Party rial” of the laborers (Bose, Revolutionaries
(New Delhi, Ahmedabad, Bombay: People’s Abroad, 48). This debate according to scholars
Publishing House, 1970), 14; Puri, Ghadar also relates to the debate regarding the site of
Movement, 110. Ghadar’s founding; those more focused on the
65. See David Scott, Conscripts of Moder- role of intellectuals tend to view San Francisco
nity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment as the original organizing center given it was
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004). home to Dyal and other intellectuals, along
66. Puri, Ghadar Movement, 46. with many students.
67. Kazimi, informal discussion with the 79. Puri, Ghadar Movement, 61; Deol,
author, April 2009. 59–60.
68. Puri, Ghadar Movement, 57, is one of 80. Puri, Ghadar Movement, 68, 146.
many references to Dyal’s broad political ties 81. Deol, 60, 61.
and involvement. 82. Josh, Baba Sohan Singh Bhakna, xxi.
69. See Josh, Baba Sohan Singh Bhakna, 83. Letter from Puri to the author, July
1–4, 13, and throughout. The mill employed 2011.
an array of workers from around the globe: 84. Puri, Ghadar Movement, 103.

 OHQ vol. 113, no. 2

 85. One notable exception is Clatsop great qualification given that that phrase in
County Historical Society, which has at- turn elides the indigenous peoples and history
tempted a retroactive fix of sorts to its archive, of the region. On the persistence and power of
largely due to the herculean efforts of Liisa the western “origin myth,” see Limerick, Legacy
Penner to make this story known. of Conquest, 322.
86. While utilizing many sources and 94. For an important analysis of the neces-
authors, I am particularly indebted to Puri sity of considering the intersection of race and
for his details of Oregon, much of which was gender in constructing belonging, both legal
drawn from oral histories in Indian of men and social, see Nayan Shah.
who had worked in Oregon, and to Professor 95. Amy Goodman, Democracy Now, April
Ghanea Bassiri of Reed College, who initially 17, 2012, available at [Link]
alerted me to the presence of Punjabis in early [Link]/2012/4/17/ap_wins_pulitzer_for_
Oregon. exposing_growth#transcript (accessed May
87. See Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing 2, 2012). The U.S. government detained and
The Past: Power and the Production of History interrogated over a thousand Arabs, Muslims,
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), specific reference and South Asians in the wake of 9/11, irrespec-
to duality is at page 2. tive of their citizenship status or activities. See
88. Trouillot, Silencing The Past, 25. Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 269. On the murder
89. See James V. Walker, “Henry S. Tanner of Balbir Singh Sodhi, see “US 9/11 Revenge
and Cartographic Expression of American Killer Convicted,” [Link]
Expansionism in the 1820s,” Oregon Historical americas/[Link] (accessed May 16, 2012).
Quarterly 111:4 (Winter 2010): 416–43. See also “Stories Put Spotlight on NYPD Sur-
90. Research at The Dalles Public Library veillance Program,” Fresh Air, WHYY, available
pioneer registries and arrest records at Wasco at [Link]
County Courthouse. stories-put-spotlight-on-nypd-surveillance-
91. See Shah, Stranger Intimacy. program (accessed May 2, 2012); Is America
92. One example is drawn from my Islamophobic?”, Time Magazine, August 30,
frustrated efforts to locate Finnish Social- 2010; “Across Nation, Mosque Projects Meet
ist records from Astoria from this period Opposition,” New York Times, August 7, 2010;
and learning that much of them had been and Oregonian, February 15, 2012, C1, C3;
destroyed from, yes, being stored in a barn. Oregonian April 13, 2012, A1, A5.
I have obviously found some records re- 96. Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 229, 269, is
garding the Punjabis’ presence in Oregon. one example among many who have spoken
Overwhelmingly, these have been the result against and documented the hate crimes after
of a governmental need to track ownership 9/11 (see p. 269).
(such as land titles where Asian land owner- 97. Patricia Limerick expressed this
ship was legal), keep a count on population succinctly, describing Japanese interment as
numbers (census records), or maintain law “longstanding Western prejudice and imme-
and order (arrest or prison records). Astoria diate wartime panic made a perfectly tailored
provided some exception to this as the Asian fit” (Legacy of Conquest, 273).
Indians received more attention in the local 98. Foucault quoted by Scott, Conscripts of
mainstream press than anywhere else I have Modernity, 180. I owe a real debt to historians
found in the Columbia River communities, Joan Scott and David Scott whose use and/or
including Portland. I believe the relatively explication of Foucault managed to penetrate
more extensive and informative information my often stubborn mind.
regarding the Punjabis in Astoria’s press ar- 99. Joan Scott, quoting Foucault, “History
ticles from the times is indicative of the larger Writing as Critique,” in Manifestos for History,
argument I am making regarding that town’s ed. Keith Jenkins, Sue Morgan, and Alun
more cosmopolitan atmosphere. Munslow, (London and New York: Routledge,
93. I employ the “making of the West” with 2007), 27.

Ogden, Ghadar, Historical Silences, and Notions of Belonging 