Visiting the grave of the one man who stayed

There’s a pretty little cemetery in California’s foggy northwest corner, where the moss-covered headstones date back to the 1860s.

- BY HAILEY BRANSON-POTTS

DOCK RIGG stayed in Del Norte after its Chinese immigrants were kicked out.

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.”