Chinese migrants were some of the first and most numerous participants in Idaho’s 19th century gold rushes.  In mining communities across Idaho, Chinese residents often made up more than half of the local population and an even higher percentage of gold seekers.  

This presentation from Dr. Renae Campbell will focus on one such community, Southern Idaho’s Boise Basin, where a rich archaeological and historical record allows us to reconstruct what daily life was like for some of the thousands of Chinese individuals who, despite facing racial discrimination and an evolving array of exclusionary laws, established diverse lives and livelihoods during Idaho’s gold rush era. 

This program is part of the 2025 Winter Read. This program will be livestreamed and available to view later. Link forthcoming.

Renae Campbell is a historical archaeologist and the Director of the University of Idaho’s Asian American Comparative Collection (AACC), a non-profit facility dedicated to promoting research on Asian American heritage and material culture. Renae specializes in Chinese and Japanese diaspora archaeology, archaeologies of race and gender, and the history of the rural American West. In 2016, she created the Historical Japanese Ceramic Comparative Collection (www.lib.uidaho.edu/digital/hjccc/), one of the first online resources for identifying archaeological Japanese ceramics. Her 2023 dissertation, The Once Bustling Basin: A Historical Archaeology of Chinese Mining Networks in Southern Idaho, examined the multifaced relationships between Chinese merchants, miners, and trade specialists within the Boise Basin’s gold industry from 1860 to 1915. Renae is currently engaged in a multi-agency partnership to expand this scholarship by rehabilitating legacy archaeological collections from Chinese diaspora sites across southern Idaho. She is particularly interested in how these overlooked collections can contribute to broader understanding of Idaho’s pluralistic past and to community engagement in the present.