Old Missoula

Closing of Sam’s Café Leaves but One Chinese Family in Garden City

By Gerald G. Alquist.

Ever dwindling through the years, Missoula’s Chinese population became smaller than ever when the last Chinese restaurant in the Garden city, Sam’s café, closed its doors and the owner, H. Dirk Yue, went to Butte. The Sam Toms are the only Chinese family now residing in Missoula.

Sam’s café was located in the center of what was the city’s Chinese colony of several hundred persons in the 1880’s, after the Northern Pacific was built through this country. The Chinese were brought into the United States to work on the western part of the line, and built it using only wheelbarrows and picks and shovels. It is said that there was only one steamshovel in use then on the line between here and the Pacific coast.

After the golden spike was driven at Gold Creek, marking the completion of construction, some of the Chinese workers went back to their homes in the Orient and some were kept on as section workers, Claude Elder, Missoula business man, recalled.

In the 1880’s for a while, there were about six Chinese laundries, four Chinese stores, one of which was located on West Main street, and a joss house[1], on the upper floor of a two-story building still standing on the south side of the street in the 200 block on West Main street. All the janitoring and jobwork around the city was done by Chinese at that time.

Chinese operated two large gardens, one located where what is now the Hughes gardens and the other in the vicinity of the sugar factory, west of the city. Christmas day was waited for longingly by the youngsters, because on that day the Chinese gardeners made their last trips of the year and always brought with them Chinese nuts, candies and other delicacies for their customers.

A Chinese graveyard was started near where the Prescott school is now located. Later, the ancestral bones were dug up and returned to lie with those of their forefathers in the homeland.

Just as in China, Missoula’s Chinese made a truly impressive ceremony of a funeral. About 1892, when a prominent member of the race here, the head of the Chinese Masons, died, they had a great funeral for him with several hundred persons coming from many miles around. There were paid mourners, and a little boy grew so excited that he fell into the grave and had to be fished out. The Masonic leader was buried in the Rattlesnake valley, in the vicinity of the poor farm.

Mr. Elder Reports.

Hop Gee was a favorite restaurateur in those days, in fact, most of the cafes in the city were run by men of the yellow race. Former U. S. Representative John M. Evans, then a police judge, had a Chinese cook, as did many others of that day, including the bankers, Wolfe and Ryman, and Judge Frank Woody. The latter’s cook became the superintendent of lunchrooms for the Great Northern.

Mr. Yue operated Sam’s café under that name for 32 years, and his uncle ran it for about a decade before that, said Irvin Kohn, in whose building it was located.

Mr. Yue was not forced to liquidate, Mr. Kohn says. “He paid his rent regularly through all those years,” Mr. Kohn stated. He planned to look around in Butte, and then go to California if there happened to be nothing for him in the Copper city. He left here late in November.

Mr. Kohn judged him to be about in his seventies. He was married, but his wife never came to the United States from China, he said. He was back there twice.

Mrs. Sue Yee Tom, two of her children, Howard and May, and a granddaughter, Helen, who is Howard’s daughter, comprise the remaining Chinese family in the city. Sam Tom, her husband, died five years ago. She has lived here 52 years, coming in the early days with her parents.

The above article appeared in The Sunday Missoulian on December 22, 1940.

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Howard Tom died in 1974. An obituary for him appears below:

Howard Tom

Burial for Howard Tom, 59, Sacramento, Calif., who died May 10 of a heart attack in South Lake Tahoe, Calif., will be in Missoula Cemetery at 11:30 a. m. Friday, with Rev. Beryl Burr officiating.

Mr. Tom was born Jan. 7, 1915, in Missoula and was the grandson of pioneer families of Montana and Utah. His paternal grandfather was a Chinese immigrant and early day gold miner at Bannack City. Mr. Tom attended Lowell School and Missoula County High School. He moved to Sacramento, Calif., in 1935 where he worked as a real estate broker and with the Imperial Savings and Loan Association in Woodland, Calif. He was active in the Lions Club.

He is survived by two sons, Randolph and Philip of Sacramento; one sister, Helen Tom Gar of Seattle; four aunts and two uncles.

Pallbearers will be Phil Desarmo, John McDaniel, Lester Madsen, Verlon Cook, Russel Lindborg and Fred Madsen.

The above obituary appeared in The Missoulian on May 17, 1974.