Tuesday, July 20, 2004 | 8:06 a.m.
The Chinese, American Indian and white residents of a 19th-century Nevada mining town are featured in a new television documentary airing this week for a simple reason:
"They got along," said Sue Fawn Chung, a University of Nevada, Las Vegas history professor who developed the concept for "Island Mountain Days: Discovering Nevada's Chinese Miners."
The hourlong documentary airs at 9 p.m. Wednesday on KLVX-TV Channel 10 and repeats at 1 p.m. Sunday.
"It was a multi-ethnic community of Chinese, Native Americans and Euro-Americans," Chung said. "They worked together. They went hunting together. They went fishing together. It was the height of the anti-Chinese movement across the country, and yet there was this community that got along."
Island Mountain was in northeastern Elko County, about 65 miles from the town of Elko. U.S. Census records show only 79 people lived there in 1880, but 54 of them were Chinese.
Fred Frampton, an archaeologist with the U.S. Forest Service in Reno, said he learned of the site in the late 1990s after a resident reported looting. That remains a problem.
"These ruins have only been partially excavated, but in the past couple of weeks I was out there, and somebody had been digging again," he said. "It's like tearing pages out of our history book."
Frampton hoped a documentary would help educate the public about the importance of preserving Island Mountain.
He met Chung after a 1998 lecture she gave on Nevada's Chinese history, and the pair set to work on Island Mountain in 1999 with the help of volunteers from the Forest Service's Passports in Time program. Many of the estimated 20 buildings are intact.
"The roofs are collapsed and gone, of course, but the artifacts are still in the ground," Frampton said.
One of the most notable sites is that of the store run by Chinese merchant Hung Lee, the film's main character. The documentary includes interviews with Della Baker Johns, a late Reno woman whose parents were friends of the merchant. Court records show her parents testified on Lee's behalf after he was swindled by two white men.
"He wasn't allowed to testify in court because no Chinese (person) was allowed to testify against whites," Chung said.
There was "enormous discrimination against the Chinese," Frampton said. "They were burned out and run out. They were shot. They were murdered."
Most could not obtain U.S. citizenship. In Nevada they were barred from working on the railroads and mines they had helped to build decades before.
Some still could work in placer mining, in which water was forced through long ditches to extract gold ore, Frampton said.
Island Mountain served such a mine, founded by the Comstock Lode's Emanuel Penrod, who had an amiable working relationship with Lee. Chung suspects that set the tone for Island Mountain.
Island Mountain's Chinese population peaked at 250 in the late 1890s. It dwindled to fewer than 10 after 1900. But the town's amazing story remains.
"This is absolutely the first site like this (in Nevada) that has been documented," Chung said.
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