Christopher Corbett, pictured in his Baltimore, Md., office among his research materials, has just published a non-fiction book about Chinese immigration during the Gold Rush called “Poker Bride.”

Baltimore ? Imagine “McCabe & Mrs. Miller,” “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” and “Deadwood” hand-stitched together and given a novel slant as a mini-epic of Chinese immigrant life. That suggests the polyglot vitality of Baltimore writer Christopher Corbett’s new nonfiction book, “The Poker Bride.”

An unofficial follow-up to his rollicking frontier saga, “Orphans Preferred: The Twisted Truth and Lasting Legend of The Pony Express” (2003), “The Poker Bride,” a juicy combination of social history and deconstructed myth, pivots on the fact-based Old West legend of Polly Bemis. This Chinese woman debarked in San Francisco and rode horseback in a pack train to the mining camp of Warrens, Idaho, in 1872. She became the concubine of a wealthy Chinese master — and then the life partner of a white gambler from Connecticut, Charlie Bemis, who won her (many say) in a poker game.

Corbett, a veteran freelance journalist and former Associated Press writer and editor, and a professor of English and journalism at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, juggles facts and apocrypha like a master. Readers won’t mind that Polly merely hovers in the background for the book’s first half.

Corbett uses Bemis’ life to flesh out the 1849 California Gold Rush — and vice versa. “The Poker Bride” is about how the Gold Rush kept attracting miners from every land to Idaho and other states for decades. Chinese men flooded into the West to make money for the families they left behind. Poor Chinese families sold their girls into American prostitution. The rags-to-riches-to-rags stories keep the narrative vital, even enthralling. Polly’s tale keeps it from becoming grueling.

“She was lucky,” Corbett says in his sunny Baltimore home. “And the Chinese put great stock in luck.” Polly eventually went to live 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 after 50 years in the high country, newspapers treated her with affection and respect. They celebrated her as a female Rip Van Winkle, awakening to history. “The Poker Bride” is a literary and historical sleeper — a true surprise, not a snooze.

A nightmare era

Corbett, who hails from northern Maine, confesses to loving the American West as much as another son of the Pine Tree State, John Ford. “The Poker Bride” has come out simultaneously with a new edition of “Orphans Preferred,” timed to the 150th anniversary of the Pony Express. What attracts Corbett to these subjects is what historian Bernard DeVoto called “the borderland of fable.” With a mischievous glint in his eye and in his voice, Corbett says, “When you cross the wide Missouri, the stories start to get bigger, and you don’t often let the facts get in the way.”

Corbett has long been a happy wanderer through Western landscapes. Both the Pony Express and the Poker Bride took hold of his imagination during trips on the Boise-Winnemucca Stage Lines bus that ran from Osoyoos, British Columbia, to Tijuana, Mexico. The story of the Pony Express “was a whopper, like a fishing story, and that fish kept getting bigger and bigger.”

Myth enters into “The Poker Bride,” too. But at root, it’s more contained and sinewy than “Orphans Preferred” — and at its widest reach, it grows even more expansive than the Pony Express. This book is the opposite of a melting-pot fable. Most Chinese of the Gold Rush hung on to their ethnic identity. They were remote by choice, as well as marginalized by racism. But they left a huge imprint on the Western landscape.

“In some ways, it’s a small story,” says Corbett. “It’s not Gettysburg. But Polly provides a way to talk about the Chinese experience. … You read 19th-century newspapers, and you see it was truly a nightmare to be Chinese on the frontier. The Chinese were treated as figures of fun or rascals up to no good — it was said no chicken was safe from them.”

Corbett notes that Chinese in mid-19th century America — or as they were called then, “Chinamen” — were treated as freaks. The best-known ethnic Chinese were impresario P.T. Barnum’s “Siamese twins,” Chang and Eng. People stood in line half a day to see them. Savvy, literate and confident, Chang and Eng knew how to exploit, for their own good, Barnum’s exploitation of their novelty. But they sealed the public image of “the Chinaman” as someone you saw on a midway or in a sideshow.

Golden prospects

The 1849 Gold Rush was, said Corbett, “the triggering mechanism” for the mass migration of Chinese men. “The news of the Gold Rush reached Hong Kong before it reached Boston. And the Chinese wasted no time getting on the boat. They came instantly.” But as Corbett roamed the backcountry and badlands of the West, he found the remnants of their presence “melancholic.” He was researching his Pony Express book and walking through Eureka in central Nevada, “a classic boomtown,” when the poignancy hit him.

“One thing I like to do in mining towns is go walking in cemeteries,” he said, “because cemeteries are repositories of great information. People came from everywhere in the world to these places. Those old 19th-century headstones — each one has a story, and they’re often fabulous.”

After touring the main cemetery in Eureka, he asked an elderly woman who ran a store in town where the cemetery for the Chinese was located. And she said, “Oh, the bone collectors came and took them all back to China.” It was the first time Corbett heard that the Chinese repatriated the dead. “And then I found notices in newspapers, saying ‘The representatives of such and such company in San Francisco are seeking the remains of deceased (Chinese).Unlike other immigrant groups in the rural West, the Chinese came and mostly left” — even after they were dead.

But not Polly Bemis. “By the time she died in 1933,” Corbett said, “she was a local legend and she no longer spoke Chinese. Well-known people knew her. … Cissy Patterson, the celebrated newspaper heiress who was also a kind of nut, went to see her — and wrote about it!” Bemis always said that her family sold her because they were starving in a famine. “We know that this was part of the Chinese experience in the 19th century,” says Corbett. “And here we have an actual person who survived that.” Corbett realized he could connect the dots in Polly’s life with a factual saga of the Chinese who came from the Po River Delta to “the Golden Mountain” of California, through the Golden Gate.

The more established American miners and the officials they influenced restricted the Chinese to stakes that whites had already mined to a trickle. But working in groups, they were so assiduous in their sifting that they made these worn claims pay. Before they arrived en masse, Americans valued them for their industry and reliability. But as soon as they became a threat to white employment, they became the victims of “Chinese Must Go” campaigns from organized labor and individual bigots.

American fables

In China, men sneered at traditional women’s work such as housekeeping. In the United States, frozen out of other jobs, they became houseboys to oligarchs and ranchers — or else established cleaning services and cookeries at every stagecoach stop or gold camp. “There isn’t a fly-bitten town in the American West, from Cottonwood, Idaho, to Winnemucca, Nevada, that didn’t have a Chinese laundry or a Chinese restaurant,” said Corbett.

And whatever the Chinese men suffered, the Chinese women suffered worse. “There was a class system among prostitutes,” Corbett writes, “and the Chinese in the rural West were mostly at the bottom of it.” Polly probably rested at the “top of the scale of ‘fallen women’ … the mistresses, courtesans and concubines.”

But she could easily have fallen to the bottom, into “the cribs — as they were called in San Francisco — or ‘hog farms’ or ‘hog ranches,’ as they were called on the frontier.” They were “notorious dives,” riddled with disease.

Polly re-enters Corbett’s narrative in time to save readers from despair. She’s a super-competent heroine who “can fish and cook. She can even nurse Charlie Bemis back to some kind of health from a gunshot wound to the head that would have sent him to Shock Trauma today.”

Corbett posits, “There’s never a definitive version of a story like this, is there?” He savors “stories rooted in fact and layered with fabrications. Stories like this are like Paul Revere’s Ride or the Alamo. And Americans like these stories.”

With “The Poker Bride,” Corbett cements his claim as an ace surveyor of America’s borderland of fable.