Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan
Crazy story that I read in an old coffee table book. I couldn’t find much online and the Wikipedia page was not that extensive, so I thought I’d write it up in a Medium post (it’s pretty much word-for-word from the book, so please give credit to the authors Elborough & Horsfield and buy their book if you like this story (I highly recommend it)). Also, please take note that this would be an INSANE movie script.
Prepare for M I N D B L O W N 🤯
…officials in the Canadian city of Moose Jaw continued to deny rumours of a network of underground tunnels beneath their sleepy Saskatchewan town.
← Not the actual tunnels, but definitely conveys an eerie scene, right?
Back to the story: when a section of the city’s Main Street collapsed, plunging a passing car and its stunned driver several feet below ground and exposing a section of one of the passages, it could no longer be denied. There were in fact tunnels below this sleep Saskatchewan town. And the reason behind the tunnels is even odder than the fact that they exist.
The story of the tunnels’ creation remains inextricably entwined with the passing of one of the most reprehensible laws in Canadian history: the Chinese head tax. Consequently, these tunnels are an embarrassment to the city and why their existence has been covered up.
Canada has had a Chinese community for more than 150 years. The majority of the first Chinese migrants were drawn from Guangdong province to British Columbia by the promise of gold in the feverish rush of the late 1850s.
Thirty years later, a new wave of Chinese came to Canada to work on the Canadian Pacific Railway. These newer arrivals came from their homeland or California.
Chinese railway workers were paid on average about two-thirds the rate of white navvies (navvy: navigator or navigational engineer — particularly applied to manual labourers working on major civil engineering projects). These Chinese railway workers generally got a rougher deal altogether and were given the riskiest, most backbreaking jobs e.g. blasting through solid rock with dynamite during the bitter British Columbian winters.
If these Chinese workers expected gratitude for their labours from Canadians, they were to be disappointed. To make matters worse, the Canadian economy slipped into a recession and unemployment shot up. The Chinese were accused of taking jobs from white Canadians and pushing down wages in what pitifully few positions were available. Labour unions and local politicians, pandering to prejudices for their own electoral advantage, called upon the Canadian government to impose restrictions on Chinese immigrants.
More fuel was poured onto the fire by the gutter press, which ran salacious and racist articles about seedy opium dens and oriental super-villains and used editorials to spread hysteria about a supposed ‘Yellow Peril’ to the nation’s way of life.
In this toxic atmosphere, and to its eternal shame, the Canadian government caved into public pressure in 1885 and imposed a $50 head tax on every Chinese person entering the country — a fee that applied to these nationals alone. In 1900 the fee was doubled to $100 and three years after that upped to $500 — a sum about equal to two years’ wages.
Relations between the Chinese and other residents across Canada remained tense and, it seems, in Moose Jaw especially so.
Around 1908, a group of Chinese rail workers were set upon in one of the local yards by a gang of white men. To avoid further attacks and evade the now exorbitant head tax, the Chinese went underground, quite literally digging tunnels beneath the city’s streets to hole up in until things calmed down.
Over several years these tunnels, accessible from the basements of Chinese-owned businesses, spread into an expansive subterranean Chinatown that housed whole families of immigrants, most of whom worked illegally in the laundries or restaurants above their lairs.
The situation for Mandarin-speakers in Moose Jaw was dealt a further blow in 1923 when the government passed the Chinese Immigration (or Exclusion) Act which prohibited virtually all Chinese immigration to Canada. This law also granted the police severe and extreme new powers to round up suspected illegal migrants, and the legislation would last until 1947.
This is where the story starts to get even more interesting and complex: it appears that during the 1920s the Chinese cut a deal with the American Mob, including Al Capone. Why? Moose Jaw was only 110 miles from the US border and was linked directly by the Canadian Pacific Railway, so the mob used the tunnels for storing and selling bootleg liquor during Prohibition. (Canada ended Prohibition in the late 20s, while in the US, liquor remained outlawed until 1933.)
Moose Jaw, quietly out of the way of officers of the American law became something of a resort for Chicago gangsters. Al Capone and his right-hand man, Diamond Jim Brady — whose front teeth were studded with jewels and who always wore, locals recalled, impeccable grey suits — were not infrequent visitors to the tunnels. Poker games and girls for hire added to the allure for gangsters from either side of the border…
The story sort of ends at the most interesting part. What were these tunnels like? What were these poker games and nightly affairs like? Imagine being a Chinese family living in the tunnels. Imagine being a mobster bootlegging liquor in them. All in the sleepy town of Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan.
It’s said that soon after, these tunnels seem to have fallen into a state of abeyance and lay vacant until they were restored and reopened to the public in the late 1990s.
Visit Saskatchewan soon or what?
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