The Poker Bride

The First Chinese in the Wild West

By Christopher Corbett
(Atlantic Monthly Press, Hardcover, 9780802119094, 218pp.)

Publication Date: February 2010

Other Editions of This Title: Google eBook, Paperback

Categories: Ethnic Studies - Asian American Studies, United States - 19th Century

“Christopher Corbett has brought home a tale delicate and sad and not a little bit heroic, and in doing so he has rescued from oblivion an extraordinary chapter of the immigrant experience in America. With The Poker Bride and his earlier reconsideration of the Pony Express, Orphans Preferred, Corbett has established himself as a fresh and thoughtful voice in the historical realm of the American West.”—David Simon, author of Homicide: A Life on the Killing Streets and producer of The Wire

“In The Poker Bride, Christopher Corbett delves deep into the soul of the real old west, using the story of one Chinese ‘sojourner’—a young woman named Polly—as the thread to link a thousand pearls of fact and lore and whatever you call those fragments of story that lie somewhere in between. All I can say is, Twain would be proud.”—Erik Larson, author of The Devil in the White City

“There is no alkali dust in these pages. The Poker Bride is a gorgeously written and brilliantly researched saga of America during the mad flush of its biggest Gold Rush. Christopher Corbett’s genius is to anchor his larger story of Chinese immigration around a poor concubine named Polly. A tremendous achievement.”—Douglas Brinkley, author of The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast

“In Corbett’s expert hands, the extraordinary story of Polly Bemis, the unlettered Chinese concubine lost in a poker game, acquires tragic grandeur without losing any of its comical unpredictability.”—Christoph Irmscher, author of The Poetics of Natural History, Longfellow Redux and Public Poet, Private Man

“Utilizing his skills as a literary detective to piece together this saga of boom times during the Gold Rush, Christopher Corbett introduces us to one of the more beguiling characters to emerge from the Wild West. He tells the story of Polly Bemis—the poker bride—with panache, sensitivity, and wondrous detail.”—Wil Haygood, author of In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis, Jr.

“The Poker Bride offers a compelling look at a largely invisible—and mostly unremembered—population of the mid-19th century American West: Chinese laborers and prostitutes. In chronicling the life of one Chinese girl who was sold into slavery, brought to Idaho, and ceded to a man during a poker game, author Christopher Corbett weaves a fascinating tale about the underbelly of the Wild West.”—Laura Wexler, author of Fire in a Canebrake

“On July 8, 1872, a young Chinese concubine arrived by horse in Idaho gold country, where a white gambler soon won her in a poker game. and so begins Christopher Corbett's amazing tale of the Chinese in the making of the American West—a slice of largely forgotten history that is by turns funny, chilling, and poignant.”—Jill Jonnes, author of Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World