Infant Abandoned at Sisters of Charity Academy
A newborn child discovered on the steps of a local school is sent to an orphanage in Vancouver.
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.
The Sisters of Charity found upon the doorstep of their Academy, one morning last week, an infant child, supposed to be half-Chinese. The little stranger, we learn, has been sent to the Orphan Asylum at Vancouver, and it has since been ascertained that the mother of the child is a Chinese courtesan, living at the east end of Third street.
“The little stranger, we learn, has been sent to the Orphan Asylum at Vancouver.”
This brief, dehumanizing account highlights the precarity faced by marginalized women and mixed-race children in 19th-century Walla Walla. The use of 'courtesan' as a label reflects the era's hostile framing of Chinese women, whose lives were often documented only through police or social registers.
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