This week in The Baltimore Sun, you'll find a review of “The Poker Bride,” the new nonfiction book by UMBC journalism and English professor Christopher Corbett. It's the tale of Old West legend Polly Bemis, a Chinese woman who rode into an Idaho mining camp in 1872 to become the concubine of a wealthy Chinese man – only to be lost in a poker game to a white gambler named Charlie Bemis. Here's an excerpt from Michael Sragow's review:

At least, that’s how the legend goes — and Corbett uses it, skillfully, to flesh out the gold-rush years when Chinese men flooded into the West to make money for their folks back home, and poor Chinese families sold their girls into American prostitution. Polly escaped that plight: she lived with Bemis on a remote spot on the Salmon River, married him and outlived him. When she finally wandered down into Grangeville and then Boise from her country lair, after 50 years in the high country, newspapers treated her with affection and respect. They celebrated her as a female Rip Van Winkle. But most of the time, Corbett focuses not on her uniqueness but on the experience she shared with her fellow Chinese. He illuminates a spectral strata of American history. ...

“The Poker Bride” also contains elements of myth, but at root it’s more contained and sinewy — and at its widest reach it grows even more expansive, encompassing and pertinent than [Corbett's earlier book on] the Pony Express. This book is the opposite of a melting-pot fable. The Chinese of the Gold Rush era never wanted to become part of the great American caldron. They were remote by choice (most aimed to return to the Motherland) as well as marginalized by racism. But they left a huge imprint on the Western landscape.