Subject: Shanty background: Portland's Tunnels
From:
Desert Dancer
Date: 19 Feb 02 - 05:50 PM
Portland, Oregon, that is.
This past Sunday, the Arizona Daily Star (Tucson) ran an article in the Travel section that might interest shanty singers. While it lasts, here's the link, so you can see the pictures.
Here's the text, for future reference:
PORTLAND'S SHANGHAI TUNNELS Subterranean maze offers real peek into city's not-so-proud past By Mary L. Peachin ARIZONA DAILY STAR Sunday, 17 February 2002
Our small group of five huddled in a narrow, covered alleyway off Davis Street in downtown Portland, Ore. Michael P. Jones, curator of the local Cascade Geographic Society, held court. He described a little-known legacy of the city's not-so-proud past: the Shanghai Tunnels - a Victorian-era network of subterranean passageways.
The tunnels' name gives a clue to their past. From 1870 to 1917 - especially when labor was in short supply - thousands of Portland-area men were drugged and kidnapped by operatives known as crimps. The men were captured and loaded onto ships bound for Shanghai, China. When they awoke, stranded at sea, they were forced to work as crewmen in a kind of indentured, seafaring servitude known as Shanghaiing. In the practice's heyday, thousands of men a year were reported missing and presumed sold into such slavery.
Jones discovered the tunnels almost half a century ago. As a child, he spent a lot of time with his foster brother, Tom Taylor. The two boys regularly visited Tom's father, a resident in one of the city's old hotels. Over several visits, they became friendly with the old men who spent their days there. "I just about drove everyone out of the lobby with my endless questions," he said. "Listening to these old people was better than reading any history book."
One day an old man, known to the boys only as "Captain Grump," told Jones that if he really wanted to know Portland's history, he should explore its Underground. "Follow me," the man said, pointing his cane to the hotel floor, where some oak boards lay under a loose covering of tin. The boys did, and he led them into a dark basement with a pack of matches and a brief word of advice: "Don't make any turns until you reach the Willamette River."
To this day, Jones devotes time to studying, excavating, restoring and exploring the city's Shanghai Tunnels. The network of basements and passages spans nearly five miles of the city's downtown, from the Willamette waterfront west to what is now North 23rd Street - underlying today's Old Town, Chinatown and Union Station.
At its height, shanghaiing was a sordid, yet thriving business. At first, ships' captains went to the law enforcers when their men went missing, but the often corrupt officials responded with denial, claiming that the men were simply enjoying themselves in the city's many saloons and bordellos. The captains ended up having to pay anywhere from $25 to $50 to retrieve each of their men. Eventually, the captains learned to cooperate with this corrupt system of "protection." In those days, seamen were not paid until the end of their three-year tour of duty. Less-than-honest captains could have their men shanghaied before they were paid, and pocket a share of the crimps' fees.
The city proved itself an ideal center for shanghaiing, Jones explained. It offered "corruption, victims and an underground system to hide the men." And Portland's freshwater port meant no barnacles to clean off incoming ships - and a faster turnaround for captains wanting to make a clean getaway.
From bad to much, much worse
The lives of the captured men began badly - and got worse. Recent captives were placed in unlit, underground holding cells furnished with only a bucket. In one cell, a dead rat rotted on the window. Jones pointed out rotting shoes at various spots on the room's dirt floor. It seems that broken glass was scattered around the floor, and the men left shoeless. If one should escape, the captors reasoned, he would be moving slowly and could be easily traced.
In the next room was a wooden stage, where captains came to select and purchase the drugged sailors. As our group moved farther into the tunnels, Jones continued to regale us with more stories of the past, drawn from his lifelong passion - local oral history.
As the years passed, shanghaiing dropped off, but the Underground retained its dangerous flavor, housing opium dens and then Prohibition-era speakeasies and houses of prostitution. The tunnels even served as a hideout for Chinese immigrants facing discrimination.
We moved along the narrow passageways, entering a low-ceilinged room where Jones pointed out hand-cut masonry and wooden support beams crafted by the Chinese.
Above an arch, the initials KKK were etched in stone. The sordid history of the Underground includes stories of the "anti-coolie" league, a precursor of the hate group, whose members, from the 1880s to the 1920s, harassed and even killed local Chinese immigrants. Both the immigrants and the Ku Klux Klan met in these tunnels.
Jones got much of his information from the older residents of Portland, including a few who remember the tunnels well. Frank Hammond - one of the few shanghaied men ever to survive the six-year trip to China and successfully return to Portland - contributed many details and stories.
Ghostly experiences reported
Though he maintains that he doesn't believe in ghosts, Jones told of many visitors reporting paranormal experiences in the tunnels. Years ago, some missionaries befriended a prostitute named Nina, offering to help her leave prostitution if she could provide information about the Underground, the crimps and the captive sailors held in cages under the city. Nina gave the missionaries the information they requested. Two nights after they went to the police, however, she was found dead at the bottom of an elevator shaft. Many visitors have told of seeing or feeling Nina's presence (and others') in the Underground's alleyways and stairways - a hand brushing against them, the smell of pipe tobacco, mysterious voices.
Our group huddled even closer together, crouching to protect our heads from overhead pipes lining the low ceilings, and training our flashlights on the uneven path.
Another musty room featured a Victorian-era "fainting sofa" on wheels, surrounded by a pile of rusted bedsprings. The springs were most likely from mattresses the crimps placed under the trapdoors to catch drugged sailors, who had been treated to a drink full of opium knockout drops.
Jones told more classic tales of shanghaiing days. Some sailors went drinking at the Snug Harbor saloon. Peering down a stairwell, they spotted 10 open barrels of whiskey - and promptly rounded up their friends to partake in the discovery. A while later, the infamous crimp Joseph "Bunco" Kelly discovered the men passed out on the floor. On closer inspection, he realized they were dead - having mistakenly drunk embalming fluid from the mortuary next door. Kelly sold the dead sailors for an extra $5 a head, promising the captain that the men were so "dead drunk" he wouldn't have to worry about them waking up and jumping ship en route to the Pacific.
By 1898, when the rolls of shanghaied men reached 1,500, wary sailors began using a buddy system, with one sober man keeping an eye on his shipmates. But even though most bars had a urinal trough (and no reason to leave the premises), men continued to disappear through "deadfall" trap doors in the saloon floor. Jones demonstrated one of these doors, pulling a handle that dropped a stuffed effigy from above onto an old mattress. Some saloons had as many as 12 deadfalls, allowing crimps to "harpoon" dozens of men each night. When they woke up on the ships, shanghaied men were considered the lowest of the low. "Not even the rats were lower," Jones noted. And if a ship ran out of food, the captain would serve up some "long pork" - meaning that one of the shanghaied men would be killed and cannibalized.
A fitting return
The final room we entered was the beginning of an area known as the Catacombs. It housed a wooden, cigar-store Indian, which stood more than 7 feet tall. Jones told us one last story: Apparently, Kelly sold the carefully wrapped wooden statue to a gullible captain, who was willing to pay the inflated price of $75 based on Native Americans' reputation as hard workers. Kelly warned the captain not to wake the man until he got to the Pacific. When the ship reached the ocean, the captain tried to arouse his captive, and found out that he'd been cheated. He angrily tossed the carving overboard. The Indian washed ashore at Astoria, Ore. - and now is on proud display in its original home, the Portland Underground.
* Mary L. Peachin is a Tucson-based adventure travel writer and photographer.
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