Pendleton Underground tunnels were like a secret shopping mall

Sometime in 1922, a letter came in to the city of Pendleton. Enclosed with it was a bill for $45 — for a set of new Goodyear tires.

It seemed the letter writer had come to Pendleton for the annual Pendleton Round-Up and had lost both front tires to the city’s downtown potholes.

The writer also suggested that the city post warning signs at city limits reading, “If you want to experience the joys of a bucking horse, and you own no horse, just drive the streets of Pendleton.”

And indeed, Pendleton’s potholes were famous, both for their size and for their intractability. They seemed hungry; one filled them up with gravel (or, later, asphalt), and a few weeks later they were empty again, as if some night-stalking gravel thief had scooped it all out.

The locals got used to it, and tried to take it slow. But for many years, as author Rufus Crabtree recalls, “they created an obstacle course that would put even the best of drivers to the test, and put much hard-earned money in the pockets of the tire dealers.”

It wasn’t until the 1970s and 1980s, when some of Pendleton’s most intractable roadbeds got a complete rebuild, that road crews realized what the problem had been:

Tunnels. The town was honeycombed with them, running a few feet below the ground level, connecting the basements and sidewalk vaults downtown with various other places nearby.

And, that’s how the Pendleton Underground was rediscovered.

To be clear, pretty much everybody in town already knew there were tunnels under the downtown. They’d been the subject of stories, legends, and midnight explorations for decades. But, nobody had thought of there being other, undiscovered tunnels under the streets causing potholes.

Now, before we continue, I have to warn you about something. There is a duo of academic historians from an out-of-state university who are kind of on a campaign right now against what they are pleased to call “the myth of the Chinese tunnels of Pendleton.” Their motivation, as far as I can determine it, appears to be to rescue the Chinese community from hurtful racial stereotypes that might be associated with living underground in a tunnel system.

As we’ll discuss, the Pendleton tunnels were far from an exclusive Chinese thing, and most likely the only Chinese people who actually lived in them were human-trafficking victims. But, if you’ve encountered “myth-busting” stories about the Pendleton Underground, that’s probably their source.

The tunnels under Pendleton’s streets started out as storage basements under downtown buildings. The basements got connected together very early in the town’s history; when the sidewalks were installed downtown, vaults were dug under some of them to connect all the basements on the block together. Light filtered down through a series of wooden grates in the sidewalk surface (they were, of course, boardwalks at first) so that folks down below could see where they were going. Later, when concrete sidewalks were installed, the grates were replaced with blocks of prism glass, which let in more light and less rainwater. You can still see them in Pendleton’s streets today; they have turned purple from years of solar exposure, but they still illuminate the sidewalk vaults nicely.

The sidewalk vaults were like streets under the street, with plenty of headroom for even very tall people to walk upright. They provided drainage when it rained, and the light coming through the grates or prism glass was let into the adjoining basements through windows that usually were standard sash windows like the ones used above ground on houses. Some of them, the basements under businesses such as banks and taverns, were set up for high security, with bars in the windows.

There were several reasons why the basements were connected to the sidewalk vaults. For one thing, it made deliveries of anything robbers might be interested in much safer and more discreet.

But the main reason was cowboys.

Pendleton was always a cowboy town. Back in the day, when cowboys were more plentiful, rambunctious, and well armed than they are today, other Umatilla County burgs kind of outsourced their rowdy young single men to Pendleton to keep their places respectable. Hermiston and Stanfield and Umatilla were nice little residential towns; Milton-Freewater, Athena, and Weston catered to the hard-working, wide-awake homesteaders. All these towns had their saloons, and some of them had bordellos; but these “sin-industry” establishments were kept in check by laws and law enforcement. (Well, mostly. The adventures of legendary Oregon outlaw Hank Vaughan in Athena are a good demonstration that other Umatilla County towns were far from immune from rambunctiousness.)

Pendleton, though, ran wide-open at all times. It was like a cowboy Vegas.

“Saloons with free lunches opened 24 hours a day and closed for one hour on Sundays for cleaning,” Crabtree writes. “Picture women hanging out of windows begging cowboys to come upstairs; and for a few bucks you could have a hot bath, a bed to sleep in, and company for a time. All this, and no hassle from the law.”

It wasn’t until 1902 that the town council got around to passing an ordinance forbidding horse racing and cow roping on Main Street downtown. And even so, a number of the downtown saloons fought to keep things the way they were, fearing they’d lose business if cowboys couldn’t blow off steam in the street.

As it happened, the cowboys picked a new spot, close by downtown, for their racing and roping sports. The spot they picked would, a few years later, become the Round-Up rodeo grounds. But that’s a story for another time.

The upshot of all this rowdiness was that Pendleton was very much a “sundown town” back in the day. It was like an unwritten law that, especially on a Friday or Saturday night, nobody who wasn’t a young cowboy with a pistol on his hip and a bottle in his hand should ever risk being caught out on the streets of downtown after nightfall. (That’s an exaggeration, but not by much!) That was especially true for Pendleton’s “working girls,” who would be at serious risk of sexual assault, and members of the town’s rather sizeable Chinese community.

Most likely, it was the Chinese who dug the tunnels connecting the sidewalk vaults together. Of all the Pendleton residents who used the underground to get around, they were the most industrious and probably also the most motivated to avoid contact with cowboys even during the daytime. Remember that scene that was in every other Yosemite Sam cartoon, where he gets his pistols out and tries to make Bugs Bunny “dance” by shooting at his feet? Warner Brothers did not make that up. That was a real thing that happened regularly when a liquored-up cowboy came across someone he was pretty sure he could get away with doing it to. And because of the prejudice of the day, basically any Chinese person was vulnerable to this kind of bullying at almost any time.

If a Chinese fellow did press charges, the court would be very unlikely to convict unless there was straight-up murder involved. Even then, it was no sure thing. All the Chinese knew they needed to be off the streets at sundown.

So, who used the tunnels?

Well, after Prohibition was enacted in Oregon in 1915, obviously anyone interested in moving liquor discreetly around the town. A fairly credible rumor has it that one tunnel actually led to a secret entrance at the city airport.

Even before Prohibition broke out, they were in regular use by merchants who didn’t want to risk being robbed on the street; bordello girls and other working professionals at risk of being threatened and bullied; and, of course, the residents and merchants of Pendleton’s Chinatown.

There was also a tunnel for the convenience of members of the Catholic church that was built just outside city limits — Catholic missionaries from Walla Walla had antagonized the city leaders by trying to get the bordellos shut down, so they retaliated by denying them permission to build a church in town.

The tunnel network was extensive, and varied widely in quality and hazardousness. They have been compared to an underground city; but probably a better comparison would be a giant sprawling shopping mall during a power outage. Folks from one building could pass under the street and patronize businesses on the other side. Some of them even had second storefronts in the basement to cater to the underground crowd. After Prohibition, those storefronts were pretty easy to convert into speakeasies.

Pendleton had active, open bordellos going right up until the mid-1950s, most of them right downtown. When one of the girls needed something, especially late in the evening or at a time when she wasn’t dressed to go out, the tunnels were a great convenience. McCardy’s ice cream parlor’s “underground storefront” did a brisk business with the ladies of the evening, most of whom were big fans of ice cream sodas. They probably liked a little drinky from one of the saloons’ cowboy-free basement rooms from time to time as well.

Visitors to and residents of Chinatown, both Chinese and otherwise, sometimes liked to indulge in a little opium smoking, and the underground was a great place to set up a secret opium den.

In other words, the Pendleton Underground was a shadow community of folks who appreciated safety and discretion, and had a connection with one of the businesses whose basements allowed access. It’s amusing to contemplate a Friday night in Pendleton, with gunshots and thundering hooves and shouts and whoops ringing out above and a busy community of shopkeepers and working girls bustling back and forth in safety beneath the streets.

Amusing, but maybe a bit misleading. Not all the businesses under there were benevolent and fun. Especially when it came to the labor contractors specializing in Chinese workers, who — according to Crabtree — used some of the more fortified basement rooms (with bars on the windows) to imprison workers who’d signed indentured-servitude contracts with their organizations.

Today, a number of these tunnels have been reopened and cleaned up by a public-history organization called Pendleton Underground Tours. If you haven’t taken the tour, it’s very good, and the tour leaders do a really good job of balancing the history and folkloric aspects of Pendleton’s “underground shopping mall.”

(Sources: The Pendleton Story, a book by Rufus Crabtree published in 1990 by Ful House Publishing; More on the Pendleton Underground, a book by Pam Severe and Lon Thornburg published in 2003 by Maverick Publications)

Finn J.D. John teaches at Oregon State University and writes about odd tidbits of Oregon history. His most recent book, Bad Ideas and Horrible People of Old Oregon, published by Ouragan House early this year. To contact him or suggest a topic: [email protected] or 541-357-2222.