SMITH RIVER, Calif. — There’s a pretty little cemetery in California’s foggy northwest corner, where the moss-covered headstones date back to the 1860s.
Every time Karen Betlejewski visits the Smith River Community Pioneer Cemetery, she places silk flowers beside a simple granite headstone in the northeast corner. It belongs to a man she never met.
DOCK RIGG 1850 — 1919, it reads.
At the time of his death, he was said to be the only Chinese person formally allowed to live in rural Del Norte County — three decades after white residents there and in neighboring Humboldt County had forced out their Chinese neighbors in a series of violent purges.
They called him Dock Rigg — the surname of his employer — but government papers say his name was Oo Dock. He worked as a cook and ranch hand for two prominent families in the Smith River Valley who arranged for him to work on a ranch just over the Oregon line until the racist fervor calmed enough for him to quietly return.
Dock’s flower-adorned grave in this town of 1,200 people stands as a humble monument to the quiet, extraordinary life of a man who persevered through an ugly — and often-overlooked — time in California history, when Chinese immigrants were banned, Chinatowns were razed, and white mobs beat and murdered Chinese residents.
Like Rigg, a handful of Chinese laborers stayed in Northern California after the purges, living quietly in very rural areas, said Jean Pfaelzer, a historian who sees echoes of the forced removals in today’s roundups and deportations of Latino immigrants by the Trump administration.
“Think of all the parents not sending their children to school right now and people not showing up to work. They’ve been scared to live their full lives,” said Pfaelzer, the author of “Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans.”
“History is smacking us in the face again. The purges of the Chinese people should be on our mind right now during this era of cruel forced deportations of both undocumented and documented migrants and American citizens.”
In the Del Norte County Historical Society Museum, which Betlejewski manages, a thin manila folder contains a handful of documents that detail the few known details about Dock. They describe a man with a good sense of humor who was kind to visiting children and pushed them around in wheelbarrows for fun.
“Dock was a lovable fellow and well known throughout the area for his humor, his good cooking, and his hospitality to the travelers who passed through,” reads one brief first-person account of a woman who knew him in Oregon.
But another document in his file, referencing his return to California, hints at his isolation: “It is reported that he never left the ranch in all the years he worked there.”
In 1882 — amid an economic downturn during which non-white migrants were widely blamed for stealing jobs and suppressing wages — the U.S. passed the federal Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred immigration from China.
In the remote towns of rural northwest California, Chinese immigrants toiled in redwood logging camps, laundries and restaurants. They worked as nannies and household servants. Some were former gold prospectors priced out of work because of a predatory state tax on foreign miners.
The purges of Chinese residents here began in earnest in 1885, in the Humboldt County town of Eureka, 100 miles south of Smith River.
That February, a white Eureka city councilman who lived near the local Chinatown, was walking past the neighborhood. Shots rang out, allegedly between two Chinese men, though details are scant. A stray bullet killed the councilman.
An angry mob of more than 600 white people filled the streets, said Pfaelzer. A gallows was erected; an effigy of a Chinese man swung from a noose.
Someone suggested slaughtering the Chinese, but that was deemed un-Christian, Pfaelzer said. Others said they should burn Chinatown, but its scrap-wood buildings belonged to a white man, since Chinese people were not allowed to own property.
Instead they appointed a committee of 15 men to go into Chinatown and order everyone to leave. The sheriff commissioned wagons to gather their belongings. Armed vigilantes roamed on horseback.
The next morning, some 300 Chinese people were marched to the wharf and loaded onto steamships. They were shipped to San Francisco, where no one knew they were coming, Pfaelzer said. They disembarked and fled.
The purge, which became known as the “Eureka method,” was hailed by white people as nonviolent and copied across California — including in Del Norte County, where Dock lived.
In the weeks after the councilman’s death, Crescent City — the Del Norte County seat with a thriving Chinatown — every steamship that left the local port held Chinese residents from the area. Hundreds were forcibly shipped out, according to Pfaelzer.
Like all Chinese residents who arrived in the U.S. before the Chinese Exclusion Act, Dock had to obtain and carry a Certificate of Residence to avoid deportation. Dock’s 1894 certificate, signed by a collector of internal revenue in Portland, Ore., lists his occupation as a cook, and his complexion as “dark.”
Dock, whose birth year engraved on his tombstone is a guess, was a child when he arrived in the U.S. He worked in gold mines throughout California and southern Oregon before landing in Del Norte County.
Here, he worked for cattle ranchers John and Ann Rigg. And for their friend and business partner, Raleigh Scott, who ran a sheep ranch in neighboring Curry County, Oregon, where Dock hid after the purges.
Scott — a county commissioner and state lawmaker in Oregon — inherited the Riggs’ ranch in Smith River after their deaths and moved onto it with his wife, Nettie, and Dock.
Dock died in Scott’s home in 1919. He never married, never had children, and, it is said, rarely, if ever, ventured off his employer’s property.
In recent years, officials in several California cities have acknowledged and apologized for historical wrongs against Chinese people.
In 2021, Antioch and San Jose apologized for burning their Chinatowns in the late 1800s. San Francisco in 2022 apologized for, among other racist acts, barring Chinese children from public schools. And Los Angeles is working on a memorial to commemorate an 1871 massacre in which at least 18 Chinese people were fatally shot or hanged.
In Eureka, a group of Asian American residents and volunteers called Humboldt Asians & Pacific Islanders in Solidarity (HAPI) has spent years telling the story and building tributes to the town’s long-gone Chinatown.
In Eureka’s Historic Chinatown — which, today, is a downtown business district with banks, parking lots and no trace of the neighborhood that once stood in its place — there are now signs describing the expulsion, as well as a mural and renamed roadway honoring local Chinese American pioneers.
After raising hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants and donations, HAPI hopes to break ground this year on a monument to the dark chapter in Eureka history, said Amy Uyeki, a member of HAPI’s steering committee.
Uyeki said the stories of people who lived through the expulsions, including Dock, are still being unearthed by researchers and volunteers. The individual stories, she said, are powerful — and were too long overlooked.
“Having those names, knowing what they did, that they existed as people, that makes a huge difference,” Uyeki said. “Then they’re not just a group of anonymous people. Personal stories ring true to people. They can imagine themselves as that person.”
While Eureka and other places prepare to unveil higher-profile monuments and dedications, Dock’s headstone stands in quiet remembrance of a life upended by the purges.
Last month, it was adorned with pink and white silk flowers. Betlejewski leaves them when she visits the grave of a late friend, who knew and adored Dock and demanded his photo be displayed in the history museum.
Dock’s headstone appears to have been placed around 1969, when community members brought in heavy equipment to fix up the old cemetery, which had become overgrown with berry briars, said Carolyn Spencer Westbrook, who co-wrote a book detailing the history of the cemetery and its dead.
A small wooden cross had previously marked Dock’s grave, she said, and was likely damaged during the cleanup. Community members paid for the sturdy stone headstone.
At the time of his death, it was considered a huge sign of respect for Dock to be buried in the Smith River cemetery, where there were no other Chinese people buried, Westbrook said.
“A lot of people really loved him,” she said.
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