Pushed: Miners, a Merchant, and (Maybe) a Massacre

This book, much like Michelle McNamara’s 2018 I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, is about the author’s unfinished, obsessive search for the truth about a crime. Spagna (Mile Marker) engagingly recounts her visits to small towns in northeastern Washington State, where she interviews local experts and scours records for clues about an 1875 case that left as many as 300 Chinese gold miners dead at the bottom of a cliff. Details about what happened remain murky, but the likelihood is that they were pushed. Spagna offers three theories—no conclusions—about who the perpetrators were. For many readers, the quest to find answers is the most interesting part. Spagna’s book could be paired with Mae Ngai’s The Chinese Question, the Bancroft Prize–winning scholarly book that supplies an in-depth look at how exploited Chinese labor fueled a worldwide boom in gold extraction.