For the “Based on a Real Person / Event” category in the 2026 Winter Reading Challenge, I selected this book. Actually, I first picked it for the “Money” category since the title was an amount of currency, but I wasn’t sure that even I could stretch that to fit, and I was a little concerned that Unbroken, Lauren Hillenbrand’s take on Louis Zamperini’s life story (his own was Devil at My Heels which is also around here somewhere), would be another near 500-page book. Since the cover of this book says it’s a biographical novel, I thought it would fit its category and almost count as a two-fer.
At any rate, this novel recounts elements from the life of Polly Bemis who was a Chinese-born woman who came to America as cargo and was sold to a saloon owner in Idaho (maybe–this is a novel and it takes liberties, and the Wikipedia entry highlights some of the confirmed details and places which are in dispute). She ends up owned/freed by a neighboring saloon owner, with whom she lives for almost two decades before she marries him, and they move to a valley seventeen miles away from the town where they’d lived and operated a saloon and boarding house. They live there for a number of decades until their deaths, Charles, her husband, first and then her some years later.
The book does not have a particular overarching narrative, no book-long antagonist. The first part, when she is owned by the first saloon keeper, gets presented with her unhappiness in dealing with that and her love for first, the Chinese packer who brought her to Idaho as part of his cargo after she was bought by the saloon owner, and second, the white saloon owner next door who protected her and then wins her in a poker game (which probably did not happen but was part of her legend). Then we have a bit of, I dunno, story arc as anti-Chinese sentiment rises and falls a couple of times offstage (for the most part) until they get married and move to the ranch. And then some incidents and vignettes about ranching, Charlie getting sick, the fire at their ranch which destroyed it, Polly’s trips to larger towns and cities (in the roaring 1920s) and finallt her settling back into her ranch when friends rebuilt her a small cottage. She then dies there ten years later. The last several decades of her life are just a hop-and-skip approach, but I guess the quiet part of her life was less of a legend and probably less remembered than the later parts. Kind of like my life, too–most of my stories are from 20+ years ago because I’ve been a house tabby since then.
At any rate, it was a quick read–at 308 pages, it only took me parts of two nights to read it. Partially its the slightly wider than normal margins, but the prose is plain and readable. The author says she based the story on previous writings about Polly’s life and on interviews with people who knew Polly or people who knew people who knew Polly–Dr. Elizabeth Vandiver mentions a technical-sounding term for that, having a source that is in the third generation up (someone who knew someone who knew or saw something) in a lecture on Herodotus, but I have forgotten it by now (like most things I read or hear these days). But it is not nonfiction; it is a novel.
It looks like this novel got made into a movie in 1991, ten years after its publication–I presume they truncate and tart up the first part of the book for the film. And, apparently, that spawned a couple other books about her life–the ones I see on eBay date from after this book, so you’d have to look more closely to find the source material books.
And, apparently, the ranch on the Salmon River where she and Charlie lived is not only a historical site, but a place where you can “own” part of it and stay in guest cabins on property. It’s called, appropriately enough, The Polly Bemis Ranch, and it might prove cheaper than a Viking River cruise up the Mississippi, but maybe not–it’s a long way from civilization and reachable only by jet boat even today.
So a pleasant and interesting read about someone of local or regional importance in a place far away from here. The copy I have is a remaindered library book from the Polk County Library which I picked up on one of our only and maybe only only trip to the Friends of the Polk County library book sale in 2011. We joined the Friends of the Polk County Library based on that excursion, but so many of the friends groups I’ve joined (Webster Groves Library, Webster Groves Historical Society, Polk County Library) did not send out reminders when my memberships ended. Perhaps the Lawrence County Historical Society will be the same way, but when I visited them in 2012, I sent them an exhorbitant amount of money, and instead of giving me an annual membership at Deity-Level, they gave me the $10 annual membership into forever. I hope it’s heritable, because when my children ask, “Daddy, why is our roof made of 2 mil plastic sheeting that you stapled up there?” I will be able to point to this membership, expired membership cards from across the state, and lapsed subscriptions to newspapers from here to St. Louis on I44 and to Cape Girardeau on US60.
