0:03 [SPEAKER_01]: a woman adjust her child's blanket. 0:06 [SPEAKER_01]: The car is warm. 0:09 [SPEAKER_01]: The cold stove at the far end is throwing heat, and the car is seen lamp overhead, rocks with the motion of the train. 0:18 [SPEAKER_01]: Outside the window, nothing. 0:21 [SPEAKER_01]: Snow driving sideways through the dark. 0:25 [SPEAKER_01]: 20 inches on the ground and still falling. 0:29 [SPEAKER_01]: northern Ohio, the night of December 29, 1876. 0:34 [SPEAKER_01]: The Pacific Express has been slow through the blizzard, 159 passengers and crew, most of them coming back from Christmas, pressed into the wooden coaches behind two steam locomotives, 0:51 [SPEAKER_01]: the heating stoves, carousine, the rocking lamps, everything that makes the car feel safe is about to become the thing that kills them. 1:03 [SPEAKER_01]: The train reaches the Astralula River Bridge, a 154 feet of iron, spanning a gorge 76 feet 1:21 [SPEAKER_01]: 11 cars fall into the frozen riverbed. 1:25 [SPEAKER_01]: The stoves burst through the walls, the carousene ignites, and the passengers who survived the fall again to burn. 1:34 [SPEAKER_01]: 92 people died that night. 1:39 [SPEAKER_01]: It was the worst railroad disaster in the 19th century. 1:43 [SPEAKER_01]: The engineer who had warned anyone who would listen, that the bridge was going to fail, was found dead in his bedroom three weeks later. 1:54 [SPEAKER_01]: A bullet in the back of his head, the death was ruled suicide. 2:00 [SPEAKER_01]: It took 123 years for someone to open the file that proved otherwise. 2:11 [SPEAKER_01]: two states this week, two stories where the evidence existed, and the institutions whose job it was to act, chose not to. 2:21 [SPEAKER_00]: Ohio and the Pacific Northwest, a railroad bridge and a river 2:42 [SPEAKER_01]: We start in Ohio, in the worst winter of the state had seen in years. 2:47 [SPEAKER_01]: And a man named Charles Collins, who had been saying for years that the bridge was going to come down. 2:56 [SPEAKER_01]: Charles Collins was born October 31, 1821, in Brunswick, New York, a small town northeast of Albany and the Hudson River Valley. 3:08 [SPEAKER_01]: He graduated from Rinsalier Polytechnic Institute in Troy, one of the first engineering schools in the country. 3:14 [SPEAKER_01]: At a time when an engineering degree met something rare and consequential. 3:22 [SPEAKER_01]: He came to Cleveland in 1849 to help build the Cleveland Columbus in Cincinnati Railroad. 3:29 [SPEAKER_01]: Front to your work in an era when laying iron across Ohio was nation building. 3:36 [SPEAKER_01]: he rose fast. 3:38 [SPEAKER_01]: By the 1860s, Collins was the engineer in charge for the lake shore and Michigan Southern Railway, responsible for inspecting every bridge on the line. 3:50 [SPEAKER_01]: Those who knew him described a man who was competent, gentle, and well-liked in the communities he visited on inspection tours. 4:01 [SPEAKER_01]: He was not an indifferent railroad man who looked the other way. 4:06 [SPEAKER_01]: He was the man who looked directly at the problem and was told to keep walking. 4:13 [SPEAKER_01]: The problem was the astubular bridge. 4:16 [SPEAKER_01]: The design belonged to a mass of stone, the railroad's president. 4:21 [SPEAKER_01]: Stone had built one other bridge like it, at a fraction of the scale. 4:30 [SPEAKER_01]: experimental with no proven precedent at that length. 4:35 [SPEAKER_01]: Holland's and fellow engineer, Joseph Thomason, both advised against it, stone overruled them. 4:44 [SPEAKER_01]: It must have been a particular kind of dread, standing at that bridge during inspection rounds, running his hands along the iron joints, knowing what he was looking at. 4:56 [SPEAKER_01]: He told colleagues a phrase that would outlast him. 5:00 [SPEAKER_01]: This is no bridge of mine. 5:02 [SPEAKER_01]: This is the president's bridge. 5:05 [SPEAKER_01]: he tried to resign. 5:07 [SPEAKER_01]: The board refused his resignation. 5:09 [SPEAKER_01]: He was still their engineer of record. 5:14 [SPEAKER_01]: His name on every inspection report, when the bridge fell. 5:20 [SPEAKER_02]: December the 29th, 1876, a blizzard pounding Northern Ohio, the Pacific Express carrying 159 passengers, crushed the Asterbioli bridge at approximately 728 in the evening. 5:35 [SPEAKER_02]: The second locomotive reached the fast-own abutment and the 150-foot span gave way. 5:41 [SPEAKER_02]: A catastrophe was over in seconds, a 76-foot fall into a frozen riverbed, then fire. 5:48 [SPEAKER_02]: Carousine lamps and coal stoves igniting wooden coaches, survivors trapped in the wreckage burning. 5:55 [SPEAKER_02]: Rescue is working by the light of the fire itself in the middle of a blizzard. 5:59 [SPEAKER_02]: Between 92 and 98 dead, 47 identified, 48 burnt so completely they never would be. 6:08 [SPEAKER_02]: Collins travelled to Ashtabayu la, the morning after and wept at the scene. 6:13 [SPEAKER_02]: He returned to Cleveland and by early January, tended his resignation again, the board refused again. 6:19 [SPEAKER_02]: A coroner's jury convened on December 31st, 68 days of testimony, more than 50 witnesses. 6:27 [SPEAKER_02]: The Ohio General Assembly created a special legislative committee. 6:32 [SPEAKER_02]: On January 17, 1777, Colin's testified under oath before that committee. 6:38 [SPEAKER_02]: He told them the truth. 6:39 [SPEAKER_02]: The bridge was stones to design, stones had overruled his objections. 6:44 [SPEAKER_02]: The structure was experimental and deficient. 6:47 [SPEAKER_02]: On January 18, 1777, the morning after his testimony. 6:52 [SPEAKER_02]: Charles Collins was found dead in the bedroom of his house on West 3rd Street in Cleveland, a single gunshot wound to the back of his head, ruled suicide. 7:03 [SPEAKER_02]: Collins' associate Isaac C. Brough was among the first to see the death scene. 7:08 [SPEAKER_02]: He never believed it was suicide. 7:11 [SPEAKER_02]: His objections did not trigger a formal inquiry. 7:14 [SPEAKER_02]: The coroner's jewelry completed its work on March 8, 1877, nearly seven weeks after Collins was already dead. 7:22 [SPEAKER_02]: They blamed five factors, poor design, undersized members, inadequate cross-bracing, deficient 7:33 [SPEAKER_02]: A massive stone and the railroad were held responsible for the deaths of 92 people, no criminal charges followed, not for the dead passengers, not for Collins. 7:44 [SPEAKER_02]: But one year later, 1878, two medical college professors conducted autopsies on Collins' exhumed body, both reached the same conclusion, on the side. 7:56 [SPEAKER_02]: The evidence was in the angle of the bullet. 7:58 [SPEAKER_02]: Detectives who examined the trajectory, the position of the slug lodged in the wall near where Collins lay, determined that a self-inflicted wound was physically impossible at that angle. 8:09 [SPEAKER_02]: A gunshot to the back of the head at that trajectory could not have been fired by the victim's own hand. 8:16 [SPEAKER_02]: The historical events tells us who most likely killed Collins and why the system chose silence. 8:22 [SPEAKER_02]: The disaster occurred between 92 and 98 people. 8:26 [SPEAKER_02]: Families destroyed in the Christmas week of 1876. 8:29 [SPEAKER_02]: Collins' name and face were in every newspaper. 8:33 [SPEAKER_02]: Stone was insulated by his wealth, Collins was findable. 8:38 [SPEAKER_02]: The prevailing theory, a relative of one of the dead, driven by grief, tracked Collins to his Cleveland home and shot him. 8:46 [SPEAKER_02]: The political calculation that followed was straightforward. 8:49 [SPEAKER_02]: Prosecuting a grieving family member, for killing the manned, public already blamed, would have been deeply unpopular. 8:56 [SPEAKER_02]: Rolling it to suicide served everyone. 8:59 [SPEAKER_02]: Everyone except the truth. 9:02 [SPEAKER_02]: A second theory, rare road-connected interests, Collins are directed blame at stone and the corporate structure under oath. 9:10 [SPEAKER_02]: The suppression of two independent autopsy reports for over a century suggests organised concealment, not mere neglect. 9:18 [SPEAKER_02]: What is not in dispute? 9:20 [SPEAKER_02]: The physical evidence rules out so aside, two independent medical examiners confirmed it. 9:26 [SPEAKER_02]: The Ohio legislature, meanwhile, declined to act on the reform bill drafted in the wake of the disaster. 9:33 [SPEAKER_02]: A bill that would have created the state's first bridge design code, required professional oversight, and mandated expert inspections. 9:41 [SPEAKER_02]: Corporate lobbying killed it. 9:43 [SPEAKER_02]: The federal government would not create meaning for railroad at the safety oversight until the interstate commerce act of 1887 more than a decade later. 9:52 [SPEAKER_02]: Paper has a longer memory than institutions, and these autopsy reports were not destroyed, only hidden. 10:01 [SPEAKER_01]: Seven years after the disaster, in 1883, a mass of stone, the man who designed the bridge, overruled two engineers, and awarded the ironwork contract to his own brother's firm, died by his own hand. 10:19 [SPEAKER_01]: He had lived those years under professional ruin, in public scorn. 10:25 [SPEAKER_01]: No criminal charges had ever been brought against him, 10:30 [SPEAKER_01]: and then the case went quiet for a very long time. 10:35 [SPEAKER_01]: In 2001, a researcher working through historical paperwork in Cayahoga County opened a box that had been sitting in archive storage for more than a century. 10:47 [SPEAKER_01]: Inside, two autopsy reports from 1878, both concluding homicide, the bullet trajectory, the physical impossibility, 11:06 [SPEAKER_01]: The revelation made local news. 11:09 [SPEAKER_01]: No investigation was reopened. 11:12 [SPEAKER_01]: Collins' killer remains unidentified. 11:16 [SPEAKER_01]: The case sits in Ohio's cold case files, 149 years unsolved. 11:24 [SPEAKER_01]: Charles Collins is buried in an elaborate mausoleum at Chestnut Grove Cemetery in 11:36 [SPEAKER_01]: He was 55 years old, he left behind a wife and family. 11:41 [SPEAKER_01]: He had tried to do the right thing, and the system he worked with in, first ignored him, then used him, and then erased the truth of how he died. 11:52 [SPEAKER_01]: The bridge fell apart because the powerful man who designed it could not be told he was wrong. 12:01 [SPEAKER_01]: The investigation ended because the dead engineer's murder was less convenient than his suicide. 12:19 [SPEAKER_01]: Charles Collins told the truth, 12:22 [SPEAKER_01]: in the truth did not save him. 12:25 [SPEAKER_01]: His autopsy reports were hidden for a hundred and twenty-three years, because the institutions that should have acted, found his murder more convenient as a suicide. 12:37 [SPEAKER_01]: That is the question at the center of both stories tonight. 12:41 [SPEAKER_01]: Not whether evidence existed, it did, in both cases, but whether the people who held 12:51 [SPEAKER_01]: In Ohio, a rare road company, and a state government decided that an engineer's death was not worth pursuing. 12:59 [SPEAKER_01]: What happens when that same institutional and difference meets an entire group of people, who, by federal law, have already been declared less than citizens? 13:12 [SPEAKER_01]: In 1882, five years before the next story, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act 13:21 [SPEAKER_01]: the only federal law in American history to ban a specific ethnic group from immigration. 13:29 [SPEAKER_01]: It stripped Chinese workers of citizenship, of legal standing, of the right to testify and court against white defendants. 13:39 [SPEAKER_01]: What happened next, on the Snake River in 1887, was what that law 13:48 [SPEAKER_01]: Spring 1887, the Snake River cuts through Hell's Canyon, the deepest gorge in North America, deeper than the Grand Canyon. 14:00 [SPEAKER_01]: Near the mouth of Deep Creek, on the Oregon side of the river, a group of Chinese miners have spent the winter working on the banks for flower gold, 14:11 [SPEAKER_01]: months of patient physical labor, panning, salucing, extracting fine flakes from the sediment. 14:20 [SPEAKER_01]: By spring, they had accumulated gold dust, worth an estimated $4,000 to $5,500. 14:27 [SPEAKER_01]: A man named Cheyapu led the group. 14:33 [SPEAKER_01]: He and at least nine others had come from Pune County, near Canton City, China, 14:40 [SPEAKER_01]: They had been in that canyon all winter. 14:44 [SPEAKER_01]: They did not know that a gang of horse thieves had moved into an abandoned cabin half a mile downstream and had been watching them. 14:55 [SPEAKER_01]: Now I want to be honest about the geography here. 14:58 [SPEAKER_01]: This season pairs each episode with two states and this episode carries the designation of Washington. 15:06 [SPEAKER_01]: The massacre happened and will low-accounting Oregon on the Oregon side of the Snake River. 15:14 [SPEAKER_01]: But the story doesn't belong to a single state line. 15:18 [SPEAKER_01]: The miners departed from Lewiston, Idaho. 15:21 [SPEAKER_01]: The Snake River corridor runs through Idaho, Oregon, and Washington territory. 15:28 [SPEAKER_01]: The deathbed confession that would eventually document what happened was published in 15:36 [SPEAKER_01]: This is a story that belongs to the entire Pacific Northwest Frontier. 15:42 [SPEAKER_01]: The Tin Man whose name survived. 15:45 [SPEAKER_01]: Chaya Po, Chaya Soon, Chaya Yao, Chaya Soon, Chaya Chang, Chaya Ling, Chaya Chao, Chaya Chang, Hong Mung Kao, and Kong Gain. 16:01 [SPEAKER_01]: All from Poonu County, your Canton City, 16:05 [SPEAKER_01]: What is now Guangzhou, Guangdong, Providence, ten names out of a group that likely numbered 31 to 34. 16:16 [SPEAKER_01]: Southern China, in the mid-19th century, had been devastated by the Tai Ping Rebellion, one of the deadliest civil wars in human history, millions dead, millions displaced. 16:30 [SPEAKER_01]: The promise of gold across the Pacific 16:34 [SPEAKER_01]: Gom-Song, Gold Mountain, pulled men from their families and sent them east. 16:42 [SPEAKER_01]: These men operated to the Sam Yup Company, one of the Chinese six companies, at quartered in San Francisco. 16:52 [SPEAKER_01]: That organized labor provided services and tried with limited success to protect their 17:01 [SPEAKER_01]: The shared surname Chia, among the identified dead suggests most came from the same family network or village, the common pattern, men traveling together for safety and mutual support. 17:16 [SPEAKER_01]: By 1887, these miners existed in a legal void. 17:21 [SPEAKER_01]: The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 made them 17:28 [SPEAKER_01]: Oregon State Constitution barred Chinese residents from owning property or mining claims. 17:36 [SPEAKER_01]: They could not vote, they could not testify in court against white defendants. 17:42 [SPEAKER_01]: Hell's Canyon was not only where the gold was. 17:46 [SPEAKER_01]: It was distance from the violence they had learned to expect in closer settlements. 17:53 [SPEAKER_01]: Chia pose group set out from Louis to Idaho in October 1886. 17:58 [SPEAKER_01]: They couldn't know that the cliffs would narrow and the settlements would vanish as they traveled 65 miles upstream to the deepest river gorge in North America. 18:12 [SPEAKER_01]: Canyon walls rising hundreds of feet on both sides. 18:24 [SPEAKER_01]: This would be their home for seven months. 18:27 [SPEAKER_01]: They couldn't know that Bruce Evans, known locally as Old Blue, had already noticed them. 18:37 [SPEAKER_02]: Evans was a horse thief, married with two children, a known figure in Wollower County. 18:44 [SPEAKER_02]: His gang, J.T. 18:45 [SPEAKER_02]: Ty Canfield, Homer La Rue, Frank Vaughn, Azika Hughes, Evans' brother-in-law, Hirram Maynard, and Richard McMillan. 18:56 [SPEAKER_02]: McMillan was 15 years old, the blacksmith's son. 18:59 [SPEAKER_02]: They occupied an abandoned cabin half a mile downstream. 19:03 [SPEAKER_02]: They'd been watching the Chinese miners work. 19:06 [SPEAKER_02]: They knew about the gold. 19:08 [SPEAKER_02]: May the 27th 1887, can filled and larrou position themselves on the buffs above deep creek cave. 19:15 [SPEAKER_02]: Evans and Vaughan concealed below in the path of anyone fleeing. 19:19 [SPEAKER_02]: High powered rifles opened fire from the heights, driving the miners downward, directly into the guns of Evans and Vaughan. 19:27 [SPEAKER_02]: Twelve killed in the initial attack. 19:29 [SPEAKER_02]: One man survived the gunfire. 19:31 [SPEAKER_02]: He was caught and beaten to death. 19:33 [SPEAKER_02]: The gang stripped the bodies, mutilated them, threw them into the snake river, wrecked and burned the camp, stole the gold. 19:43 [SPEAKER_02]: The next day, made the 28th, 8 more miners arrived by boat. 19:47 [SPEAKER_02]: They did not know what had happened. 19:49 [SPEAKER_02]: The gang was still there. 19:51 [SPEAKER_02]: They shot all eight, bodies into the river. 19:54 [SPEAKER_02]: At least 10 confirmed dead by later identification. 19:58 [SPEAKER_02]: The evidence supports 20:05 [SPEAKER_02]: In early June 1887, Lee Shi's group traveled to Robinson, Gouch to visit Chia Poe's camp. 20:12 [SPEAKER_02]: They found three bodies in a ransacked deserted site. 20:16 [SPEAKER_02]: The rest were gone thrown into the river. 20:18 [SPEAKER_02]: They fled downstream and reported the murders to Lewiston, Idaho. 20:23 [SPEAKER_02]: Spring high water on the snake meant bodies surfaced along the lower river for months. 20:28 [SPEAKER_02]: In February 1888, the Chinese government's diplomatic correspondence to the State Department formally identified 10 victims by name. 20:37 [SPEAKER_02]: Those 10 names, Chair Po, through Kong Nang, were the only dead the system account. 20:44 [SPEAKER_02]: The Chinese six companies in San Francisco mounted their own investigation. 20:49 [SPEAKER_02]: They offered a $1,000 award, identified all seven attackers, 20:57 [SPEAKER_02]: The Chinese government's minister in Washington formally notified Secretary of State, Thomas Bayard in February 1888. 21:04 [SPEAKER_02]: This was an act of state, China demanding accountability for its nationals. 21:11 [SPEAKER_02]: The American government's response was an adequate. 21:13 [SPEAKER_02]: Frank Vaughn confessed in March 1888, an exchange for immunity. 21:19 [SPEAKER_02]: His testimony before a grand jury and March the 23rd, reduced indictments against six others, Evans, Canfield, Lourou, McMillan, Hughes and Maynard. 21:30 [SPEAKER_02]: Three fled, Evans, Canfield and Lourou, left the region and were never recaptured. 21:36 [SPEAKER_02]: Evans reportedly had community supporters in Wollower County who believed in his innocence despite the evidence. 21:43 [SPEAKER_02]: Three face trial, Macmillan, 15, used 37 and Maynard 38. 21:48 [SPEAKER_02]: The trial records tell us what happened in Enterprise Oregon on September 1, 1888, two days. 21:56 [SPEAKER_02]: The prosecution's case rested on Vaughan's testimony. 22:01 [SPEAKER_02]: The defense questioned identifications and played to the racial sympathies of the jury. 22:06 [SPEAKER_02]: An all-white jury, in a county where Chinese residents could not testify, could not vote, could not own property, deliberated briefly. 22:15 [SPEAKER_02]: Not guilty, on all counts. 22:18 [SPEAKER_02]: A witness who attended the trial later acknowledged the obvious, the jury had no interest 22:28 [SPEAKER_02]: Robert Macmillan, the boy who was 15 at the time of the massacre, died young. 22:33 [SPEAKER_02]: Before he died, he told his father the full story. 22:37 [SPEAKER_02]: In 1891, Hugh Macmillan published his son's account in the statesman, a wall of wall of Washington newspaper. 22:43 [SPEAKER_02]: The confession is the most detailed account that exists. 22:48 [SPEAKER_02]: The two-day ambush, the division of roles, those on the bluffs and those below. 22:53 [SPEAKER_02]: The beating of the last survivor, the disposal of the bodies. 22:57 [SPEAKER_02]: The theft of $5,500 in gold dust. 23:00 [SPEAKER_02]: It confirmed everything. 23:02 [SPEAKER_02]: It changed nothing. 23:03 [SPEAKER_02]: The legal case was closed. 23:05 [SPEAKER_02]: The confession was published and ignored. 23:08 [SPEAKER_02]: The trial documents went into a county safe, 23:13 [SPEAKER_02]: But in 1995, someone in Willow Air County would open that safe. 23:20 [SPEAKER_01]: Charlotte McGyver, the Walua County Clerk, was emptying an old safe to donate to the Walua County Museum. 23:29 [SPEAKER_01]: She opened it and found a cash of documents inside, grand jury indictments, depositions, note from the 1888 trial, it had been sitting in that safe, either deliberately hidden or simply forgotten for more than a century. 23:48 [SPEAKER_01]: A safe that nobody had 23:52 [SPEAKER_01]: evidence that nobody had looked for. 23:54 [SPEAKER_01]: The fine-prompted renewed investigation, our Gregory Knopes, a veteran journalist, a former reporter from the Oregonian, spent years researching the massacre and published massacre for gold, the Chinese and Hell's Canyon in 2009, through Oregon State University 24:18 [SPEAKER_01]: bringing their story to wide public attention for the first time since 1887. 24:22 [SPEAKER_01]: In 2005, the United States board on geographic names officially designated the massacre site as Chinese massacre cove over the objections of Willow County Commissioners. 24:40 [SPEAKER_01]: On June 22, 2012, a granite memorial was installed at the site, engraved in three languages, English, Ness Perse, and Chinese. 24:54 [SPEAKER_01]: The inscription reads, Chinese massacre code, site of the 1887 massacre of as many as 34 Chinese 25:09 [SPEAKER_01]: Those last five words, no one was held accountable. 25:15 [SPEAKER_01]: Of the 31 to 34 men who went into that canyon and never came out, only 10 have names in the historical record. 25:26 [SPEAKER_01]: The remaining 20 or more, no family traced, no monument inscription, no official count, even agreed upon. 25:36 [SPEAKER_01]: They were thrown into the snake river, carried downstream, and the record went silent, not because the evidence was missing, because the system that held the evidence chose not to act on it. 25:54 [SPEAKER_01]: Two cases, two states, Ohio and the Pacific Northwest, 26:01 [SPEAKER_01]: 1877 and 1887, ten years and 2,000 miles apart. 26:10 [SPEAKER_01]: In Estabula, Charles Collins was a trained engineer, a man with credentials and standing, and his murder was buried because it was politically inconvenient for a railroad company 26:29 [SPEAKER_01]: His autopsy reports sat in a county archive for a hundred and twenty-three years. 26:37 [SPEAKER_01]: A deep creek, Chia Poe, and at least nine others from Pune County, possibly more than thirty, were shot from the bluffs above their camp by horse thieves who wanted their gold. 26:52 [SPEAKER_00]: The killers were identified, confessed to, indicted, tried, and acquitted. 26:59 [SPEAKER_01]: The trial documents set in a county safe for more than a century. 27:06 [SPEAKER_01]: The evidence existed in both cases, not circumstantial, not ambiguous, autopsy reports, a sworn confession, grand jury indictments, and in both cases, the institutions that held that evidence chose not to act. 27:26 [SPEAKER_01]: This is the story America tells itself as it approaches 250 years that justice is foundational with the law protects equally. 27:39 [SPEAKER_01]: These two cases, from the same decade, from the gilded age that built the country's railroads and extracted its gold, ask a different question, not whether justice was possible, but whether the people in power wanted it, and the answer in Ohio and in Oregon was the same. 28:04 [SPEAKER_01]: The engineer who told the truth and Ohio, the miners who crossed an ocean, and worked a winter in the deepest gorge in North America. 28:15 [SPEAKER_01]: Their evidence is in the record. 28:18 [SPEAKER_01]: It always was until next time, good night friend. 28:31 [UNKNOWN]: Thank you for watching.
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