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The late 1800s were a tough time to be Chinese in Oregon. Welcomed into the state in the railroad-building years when the demand for cheap muscle was limitless, they were, by the early 1880s, starting to face widespread resentment. The language barrier was high enough to make it very hard to assimilate. Towns and cities started passing “sundown laws” requiring Chinese residents to be off the streets at nightfall. The Chinese Exclusion Act was passed, and then renewed. By the mid-1880s the Chinese residents of Oregon all knew the justice system was virtually rigged against them. They could be robbed, beaten, or even murdered, without the perpetrators ever being held to account, if those perpetrators were European-Americans. They were, in other words, on their own. So the frontier Chinese Oregonians did what any sensible group of people would do under the circumstances: They mobbed up. That is, of course, oversimplifying things a bit. But the similarities between a Chinese tong and a Sicilian mafia family are notable. The tongs, or “highbinder societies” as they were also called, were something like what you might get if the Crips merged with the International Order of Odd Fellows: a fraternal association based on family connections both natural and adoptive, with fierce loyalty and sometimes a disturbing willingness to spill blood. And by 1886, that had happened often enough that the dime novels of the day were already entertaining their young readers with gripping stories of “tong wars” and “white slavery.” In Portland, though, one didn’t have to be a regular Old King Brady reader to know something about “tong wars” ... (Portland, Multnomah County; 1890s) (For text and pictures, see http://offbeatoregon.com/1802c.tong-war-in-portland-averted-with-hanging-483.html)