The Missing Certificates of Port Townsend
A federal judge probes a mysterious 1,000-certificate shortfall that allowed Chinese immigrants to bypass strict exclusionary laws.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
At least one paper here is attempting to make political capital of the alleged mysterious disappearance of 1,000 certificate blanks issued to Chinamen from the Port Townsend custom house in 1885. From purported transcripts, there seems to be a gap of 1,000 certificates between numbers 2,547 and 3,548, and Chinese persons are attempting to land on numbers between those two figures.
When the matter came up yesterday in Judge Hoffman’s court, the attorney for the Chinese immigrants argued that his clients had received their certificates at Port Townsend in the proper and legal way, and if there was anything wrong about them it was not their fault. “A commission,” said the Judge, “should be sent to Port Townsend to investigate this matter and find out whether all the signatures to these certificates are in the same handwriting or not. This transcript is second-hand evidence. Let us have the original documents, and see if there is a jump in the numbers as stated there. Are they outstanding? Have they ever been issued? Is it certain that these are the seals of the Port Townsend custom house?”
Deputy Collector H. H. Scott testified that certificate No. 3,542 was one of those that mysteriously disappeared. “There is no record of any such number,” he said. The court heard testimony that about 100 Chinese persons had already been landed on certificates bearing some of the missing numbers. Special Agent of the Treasury Department, Cloud Mce, testified that he had made a minute examination of the records of the Port Townsend Custom House and concluded that the signatures on these documents were forgeries.
“The jump in numbers may be clerical errors. We have no direct and dental testimony on these points. We want more light.”
This 1887 report captures the high-stakes bureaucracy of the Chinese Exclusion era, where 'missing' paperwork became a focal point of systemic hostility. Today, Seattle’s history is still shaped by the efforts of marginalized communities to navigate and resist rigid federal immigration enforcement.
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