Lukis Hill and his dad were driving along China Mary Road in Evanston, Wyoming, one night when they saw a woman who appeared to be walking home.
“We went to stop next to her to see if she needs a ride,” Lukis said.
And that’s when he and his dad got the surprise of their lives.
“When we opened the door, she literally started screaming at us,” Hill said. “And she was like short, tiny, like an old Chinese woman. And we had just asked, ‘Hey do you need help?’ when she started screaming, ran toward our truck, and then just disappeared.”
Both Hill and his father saw the same thing.
“My dad was like, after that, I have no clue,” Hill said. “And I was literally a child. It scared both me and him.”
Hill has since learned they aren’t the only ones to have a similar experience along China Mary Road in Evanston, and he still remembers the exact spot where they saw her.
“We saw her down at these little spots just past the little curve where the river is,” Hill said. “And we had stopped, like, right behind the shops, because we thought she needed help.”
Who Was China Mary
The first thing to know about China Mary is that it’s not a real name. People in the late 1800s in Evanston and elsewhere struggled to pronounce Chinese names, and so they often referred to the women as Mary and the men as John.
But Evanston does have a Chinese woman who became widely known as China Mary. Her name, or what we know of her real name, was Ah Yuen, or literally Miss Yuen. The rest of her name, as well as much of her history, is lost to time.
What is known is that she arrived in America in 1863, and that she was likely born between 1848 and 1854, making her between 9 and 15 when she made the long journey across the Pacific Ocean.
It was a time of upheaval and unrest in China when many Chinese men chose to immigrate to the United States, where they could find jobs in the mining and railroad industries.
Because most of these men were poor, they usually left their families behind. That, in turn, fueled a robust demand for Chinese sex workers.
The girls involved in the sex trade who fed that desire were often quite young. Some were sold by families who couldn’t afford to support them. Others were kidnapped or tricked into believing they were being brought to America as a bride.
Ah Yuen never talked about this period of her life, other than to tell a Works Progress Administration interviewer that she entered America through San Francisco and lived for a time in Denver before traveling to Bear River City in the Wyoming Territory.
But unless a woman was from a wealthy family, it was highly unusual for a Chinese woman to come to America outside of the sex trade. Yuen’s arrival also coincides with the height of Chinese sex trafficking that occurred during the 1800s.
China Mary, real name Ah Yeun, with her third husband in 1930. (Cowboy State Daily Staff) 
Ah Yuen, aka China Mary as she was known in Evanston, Wyoming. Perhaps someone paid 10 cents for this photo of her at right. (Cowboy State Daily Staff) 
(Cowboy State Daily Staff)
A Touchy Subject
One of the things people soon discover is that the subject of China Mary is a touchy one in general around Evanston.
“That’s a big (ghost) story around here,” Suds Bros. Brewery’s General Manager Rhonda Berlener told Cowboy State Daily. “And a lot of people won’t talk about it, because, I mean, there was a massacre.”
In 1868, history records show Ah Yuen had taken a job as a cook in Bear River City in the Wyoming Territory about 10 miles southeast of present-day Wyoming. The town got its start after a Salt Lake City businessman named Joseph F. Nounnan was contracted to construct the Union Pacific railroad grade in the area where it crossed the Bear River in southwestern Wyoming.
To accomplish the job, he built a supply depot and lodging for his men on a site that had been along the Overland Stage Route.
Nounnan’s location proved to be an excellent choice, and the little town quickly grew, with more Chinese workers arriving to help build the Union Pacfic’s rail line.
Yuen’s job at the time in this fledgling, thrown-together railroad city was to make huge quantities of food every day. She would have been feeding somewhere between 200 to 400 hungry Chinese men every day.
It was during this time that Yuen was witness to the Bear River City Riot on Nov. 19, 1868.
The riot was triggered after the vigilante lynching of a murder suspect who had worked for the railroad. The suspect’s friends fought back against the vigilantes, and the whole town erupted in violence.
There were several shootouts during the riot, and fires that burned most of the town to the ground, including most of the town’s government buildings.
The marshal at the time, Thomas J. Smith, was a recent appointment, but he had uncommon courage. He stood his ground against both factions and, with the help of town residents, repelled an assault on the town jail. That resulted in several deaths, earning him the nickname Bear River Smith.
But even that wasn’t enough to stop what was happening to the town. A U.S. Cavalry troop from Fort Bridger had to be sent to Bear River City to impose martial law.
In all, 16 people died that day. The town quickly cleared out after the troops arrived to restore order. All but deserted thereafter, it would never recover.
Evanston’s Chinatown
After the Bear River City riot, Yuen turns up next in Utah’s Chinatown in Park City, where she opened a shop in the 1880s, living there until her husband died, sometime around 1900, after which she moved back to Evanston.
Evanston had developed its own bustling Chinatown.
There was a barbershop, a blacksmith, several laundries, storekeepers, saloons and a general store. There were also Chinese herbalists and there was even a Joss House — a Chinese prayer house.
Evanston’s Joss House was special, one of only three in all of America at the time. The elaborately decorated temple was built in 1874 and served as an overnight hostel for visitors.
It was destroyed, along with the rest of Chinatown, by fire in 1922.
No one knows exactly how the fire started.
Fires along railroad tracks weren’t uncommon at the time, due to embers from coal-powered locomotives. Union Pacific even hired spotters to walk the tracks to douse flare-ups in certain areas.
Others, however, have contended the fire was purposely started by Union Pacific or the Chinese.
The 1922 fire prompted many of Evanston’s Chinese residents to leave, but Yuen stayed. She had married her third husband by this time, Lock Long Choong, known locally as “Mormon Charlie.”
According to locals, Ah Yuen was well-known and loved to tell stories about her time in San Francisco, Denver and Park City. She would also agree to take photos with tourists for 10 cents each — money that she used to pay local children for fish caught from the Bear River.
In a biography of Ah Yuen, “The Mysteries of China Mary,” Denice Wheeler says the Chinese woman loved to gamble and smoke opium. Because of that, as well as the history of prostitution that was hanging over her, she was never really fully accepted by the community during her life.
But when Ah Yuen died in 1939, her funeral was attended by a large number of town residents and overseen by a Presbyterian minister. She was buried in the pauper section of Evanston’s cemetery, but her grave was marked, courtesy of the city.
China Mary Road was named to honor Chinese contributions to Evanston, including Ah Yuen.
Hill doesn’t know if the ghost he and his father saw was Ah Yuen or some other Chinese woman from the time period. But some like to think it is her, haunting a road named in her honor decades after her death.
Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.
