Tacoma Tunnels

The “Chinese Tunnels” are among Tacoma’s oldest legends. Depending on who you’re talking to they were for literally shanghaiing unruly customers at bars, shipping unsuspecting patrons onto a ship down on the waterfront, for smuggling Chinese workers after their expulsion from Tacoma in 1885 or as opium dens. With many theories there is very little evidence, but there are some records of the Tacoma Tunnels in the Randall V. Mills archives at the University of Oregon. 

 

Phyllis A. Harrison wrote on the Tacoma Tunnels reporting a variety of interesting things including that many people believed the tunnels were used by the Chinese population. People widely discriminated against the Chinese and believed they used the tunnels to import narcotics, mostly opium. Other motifs list the tunnel construction linked to smuggling Chinese laborers or aliens, for rum during prohibition, for drainage or irrigation, for tools, WWII detention centers, to bring brick to construction sites,  or to shanghai sailors. Though others believed they were built by White people or the railroad, with no explanation.

 

A few texts mention exploring the Tacoma tunnels, Robert Harrison said, “you crawled in through a little hole about three feet in diameter and got back in a ways and you could stand up. It was just like a room and it was dug in hard pan. And there were boards and junk in there, but it was probably stuff that kids had dragged in. In the back of the room there was another hole and you could crawl through that and that opened up into a second room that’s as far as we had courage enough to go”

 

Ronald Hume explained, “The opening to the tunnel got smaller every year. You could walk in it, then pretty soon it got to where, in another, let’s see, ten years, where you had to get on your belly and slide down in to it…. then you could get in and you could walk, and I can remember little rocks coming our and moisture dripping at time. Then you’d go back about fifty yards, which was right where the old streetcar tracks used to go over. We’d go down, we’d crawl to this room, and it was as big as this dining room here, probably, say, 12x 15 square. And then were was a tunnel that went off right, then the other one went to the left, which they say ended up under the old Tacoma Hotel… the one to the right, you could go back out, oh, I’d say 20, 30 feet, and then it was like a door, all wood, maybe two by 8’s and that stopped there. And then you could go to the left, you could do back about the same but it would just of into a funnel and it’d end.”

 

Carl Dupuis collected a description from Oscar Cayton in 1907, “we found the tunnel well constructed, timbered where the ground was soft and untimbered where it was dug through hard-pan. At two or three points the tunnel was widened sufficiently to permit the erection of bunks and there were rotted remains of wooden bunks still here. At these widened places we found several pieces of broken dishes, a few pieces of Chinese money and some paper-bound books in Chinese characters… some persons believe this tunnel extends through to the beach on the Narrows, and that it was used for smuggling Chinese and narcotics, but so far as I know no opening on the beach has ever been found that connects with this tunnel. It is my belief that it was dug by the Chinese to drain Frazier’s swamp so that it could be used for garden lands”

 

But the most sensational account comes from Mort Bunnell when he retold a story he heard from his brother, “I had a brother six years older than me. He had a friend, Mike, two years older than me. When I was about 8 or nine (in the late 20s) he told me all about exploring the Chinese tunnel, the mount of which was located right under the Tacoma Hotel and could be seen going in to the bluff. He and Mike went into the tunnel for about 6 blocks. They then came to a big room that contained a huge statue of six-armed god in from of which there was incense pot.” He also said, “they found coins, books and stuff but no one ever brought any of these to the surface.”