Butte’s Chinese Cemetery
Butte, Montana featured the largest Chinese community in the Rocky Mountain region, totaling almost 1,000 inhabitants in the 1890s. Known as “The Richest Hill on Earth,” Butte grew dramatically during the late 19th century due to the vast stores of precious metals in the area. While many Chinese immigrants who came to America sought riches in mining, Chinese workers were prohibited from laboring in Butte’s mines until the 1940s. Instead, they ran dozens of laundries and restaurants in the city. They had extensive garden complexes that provided fresh vegetables to Butte, they cut timber in the surrounding mountains to feed the smelters of the city and provide stability for the underground mines. Several doctors specialized in traditional Chinese medicine, serving both Chinese and non-Chinese customers. The labor provided by Butte’s large Chinese community was crucial for the functioning of the city and the region.
In death, Butte’s Chinese community used a section in the southwest corner of Mt. Moriah Cemetery. Funeral processions from Butte’s Chinatown to the cemetery, more than two miles away, drew the attention of non-Chinese onlookers. White reporters noted the sights: the religious regalia worn by mourners and the paper with holes in the center strewn along the funeral procession; the sounds: the music and ritual wailing; and the smells: the food and drink left at the grave site to appease spirits and the recently departed.
What also caught the attention of non-Chinese Montanans regarding Chinese American burial traditions was the temporary nature of the interment. For Overseas Chinese at the time, they preferred to have their bones exhumed and returned for reburial in their ancestral village, where descendants could tend to the grave and honor their ancestors. To aid in this process, graves for Chinese individuals were often more shallow than non-Chinese burial sites. In 1901 a non-Chinese undertaker in Butte reported that “a Chinese grave was not to be dug so deep as the grave in which the body of a Caucasian is interred. In a couple of years now, the Chinese undertaker will come to Butte and remove the decayed remains of all Chinamen buried in our cemetery.” A report on the process in German Gulch in 1874 described the process by which “the dead are disinterred, the flesh scraped from the bones and these are . . . sent to the Flowery Kingdom for a final interment.”
Not everyone approved of Chinese Montanans’ cultural tradition of exhuming and returning bones of deceased countrymen to China for reburial. Montana’s first attorney general, Henri Haskell, thought this practice was evidence of Chinese immigrants resisting becoming part of American culture. Haskell remarked: “The Chinese are not bona fide residents in any sense of the word; they will not even permit their bones to have sepulture in our soil.” This remark ignored the many legal restrictions on Chinese immigrants, including the ban on Chinese residents of the U.S. becoming naturalized citizens, the anti-miscegenation act that prohibited Chinese Montanans from marrying anyone not Chinese, immigration restrictions that made entry of Chinese women almost impossible, and the many restrictions on occupations and land ownership they faced in Montana. Quon Loy, the unofficial mayor of Butte’s Chinatown, responded to the sentiment expressed by Attorney General Haskell. Quon noted that “the bodies of his countrymen are shipped back to China for the same reason that the bodies of eastern people, who die here, are sent back East, that they can be laid beside relatives.” Quon Loy also led the fight against the 1892 Geary Act which pitted him against Attorney General Haskell and others who sought to exclude and even expel Chinese residents from the American West.
Since it was the expectation that remains would be exhumed and returned for reburial in ancestral villages, it was common that wooden headboards would be used to mark burial sites in the American West. Each headboard indicated the individual buried at the site, the date of death, and the name of the ancestral village. Temporary by nature, these wooden headboards were tossed aside after serving their purpose and are lost to history. As exhumation and return for reburial became either less needed or complicated by other factors, Chinese Montanans began investing in headstones to permanently commemorate the individual buried at the site. By the early 20th century, some Chinese Montanans had succeeded in having children in Montana, who since they were born on American soil were American citizens. Thus, descendants were present to honor and tend to the graves of ancestors, lessening the need for return to China for such tending. Additionally, global disruptions caused by World War II made shipment of remains back to China difficult. For these reasons, most of the Chinese headstones found at Butte’s Mt. Moriah Cemetery are from after the start of World War II.
In the southwest corner of Mt. Moriah Cemetery, Butte’s Chinese residents built a funerary burner to conduct burial rites. A newspaper from the time noted: “At the cemetery, that portion set apart for the heathens, another crowd had congregated including a bus load of Chinese who had gone out to prepare for the burial. There were three express wagons filled with the dead man’s effects and offerings which were being placed in a crucible and burned, all around which tapers were lighted and incense was burning.” Similar to the funerary burner in Helena’s China Row Cemetery, this site was a center of ritual observances not only for individual burials, but for key annual observances including Qingming (Tomb Sweeping) Festival.
Noted Sociologist and member of Butte’s Chinese American community Rose Hum Lee commented on the importance of Tomb Sweeping Festival and the difficulties maintaining this tradition as the Chinese community in Butte decreased in the 1930s and 1940s. Lee noted the role of the guardian of the Chinese Temple in Butte, often called the “Joss House,” during the spring Tomb Sweeping Festival: “When the community was large, there were sufficient individuals, relatives to the deceased kinsmen, to accompany the guardian of the Temple . . . to the Chinese cemetery twice a year, as these were two of the important sacred events of the community. . . . Now the guardian performs these rites unaided. . . . [He] addresses the dead souls and begs their pardon for not being able to bring their kinsmen.” Each spring, Butte’s Mai Wah Society leads the Tomb Sweeping Festival to care for the headstones in the Chinese section of Mt. Moriah Cemetery. Volunteers clean the headstones and the grounds, learn about the history of Butte’s Chinese community, and give offerings to those who have gone before.
The headstones pictured below are from the Mt. Moriah Cemetery in Butte, Montana. Each of these has been translated and the home village in southern China located. For details on each the location in Butte, see the map linked here. For the locations of the home villages in southern China, click here (blue markers indicate home villages for members of Butte’s Chinese community).
