In Chinese American Portraits: Personal Histories 1828-1988, author Ruthanne McCunn notes that many Asian-Americans ere associated with settlement on the frontier. They might fit into Wild West tropes, including town doctors and saloon owners, but they were not the 'gunslingers' that appear in the American popular mythology.
As such, I wanted to clarify - do you mean gunslinger as in the "Wild West" trope, or armed Asian-Americans in general?
You can find Chinese-Americans around the stereotypical trappings of Old West violence. Polly Bemis, for example, was smuggled into the U.S. in 1872, most likely as a future concubine. She wound up in a mining town in Idaho, running a boarding-house/saloon with the man who eventually became her husband (not the man who purchased her). When he was shot full in the face over a dispute, she nursed him back to health.
But one of the noteworthy features of the depth of discrimination against Chinese-Americans, specifically, in the 19th and early 20th century U.S. is their systematic exclusion even from the mythmaker of American internal and external imperialism: the Wild West shows.
Although Chinese are sometimes listed in programs along with a host of other "exotic" nationalities to lure in crowds, scholars have questioned the presence of actual Chinese-Americans in the productions. While we can't rule out their presence behind the scenes, Chinese-Americans didn't really have a "place in the narrative" in the specific way that Buffalo Bill and the shows constructed nationalism and empire for their audiences. In Gordon Lillie's competing show, for example, the entire Far East got one act out of eighteen--and he was striving to set his show apart from Buffalo Bill's.
In the 1890s, as America annexed territory in the Philippines, Hawaii, and Cuba, representatives from those areas shot to prominence in the shows. Native Hawaiians initially demonstrated hula dancing in particular; it was not until the 1900s and 1910s that their cowboy skills at roping would become legendary. Filipinos, on the other hand, were initially forced into the mold of Native Americans--thrust onto horseback for riding demonstrations that had no roots in their own culture. Nevertheless, audiences initially hailed the performers as intelligent and courageous. Before the Spanish-American War, the shows actually encouraged war by talking up Cuban guerrillas as heroes.
Hawaiians, Cubans, and Filipinos featured in acts that went by names like "Strange People from Our New Possessions." (Names of acts get worse from there.) But from 1899, they were also pressed into service in a more odious role: the Spanish. Buffalo Bill in particular began to incorporate current events into his shows, keeping pace with nationalist-imperialist sentiment. The Spanish-American War was a ripe target. Neither Filipino nor Native American performers had much interest in portraying their recent or past oppressors, and by "had much interest", I mean they actively protested. But rather than look to other groups--say, Chinese Americans?--Buffalo Bill simply offered more and more money until Filipinos and Native Americans donned the uniforms of the hated Spanish.
In 1901, China came to play a role in the shows. Buffalo Bill introduced a new closing act modeled on the Boxer Rebellion: "The Battle of Tsien-Tsien" or sometimes "The Rescue at Pekin." This is the infamous act that caused Mark Twain to storm out of a New York City performance as a protest against American imperialism. Here, even when the roles were explicitly Chinese, they went to Native Americans instead.
This is not to say there were categorically no Chinese-Americans involved in criminal activity in the West. In fact, there are some wild tales connected to Chinese-American sex-trafficking and prostitution rings, although it's hard to know what's history and what's legend. The point is that there aren't really any "notable exploits" because of the systematic, purposeful exclusion of Chinese-Americans from the Wild West mythos. It did not serve the interests of white America to take note.
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Further Reading: Paul Reddin, Wild West Shows (1999) is kind of an editorial mess, but he covers the Filipino and Cuban participation angles better than many. (Scholarship on the Wild West shows understandably tends to focus on Native Americans.)
Hi, I was thinking that we'd had a thread on this subject, but this is the closest I found. Not on gunslingers specifically, but you may be interested in the responses here
Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans by Jean Pfaelzer has some sections that may be of interest to you. I don't know how academically rigid this book is, it's written as if for the general public and uses sources fairly consistently.
But, Pfaelzer outlines Chinese-American history especially in California and the Pacific Northwest, where Chinese immigrants and settlers were repeatedly pushed out of their homes and/or lynched during periodic eruptions of racial tensions. You'd probably be interested in the accounts of some of these encounters, which include Chinese Americans who are living independently off the land being regularly harassed by whites, Chinese Americans who took up arms in active protest or defense of themselves, and Chinese Americans who worked as ranchers and cowboys in (I assume) the typical sense. Even a few accounts of Once Upon a Time in the West - style slaughters of ranches.
There is a cut-and-dry example of Chinese Americans engaging in a gunfight that would only fit in the grimiest and bloodiest Western. Roughly, two rival gang leaders get into a fight over a prostitute.
Two days earlier, brokers for two Chinese companies drew their revolvers over a runaway prostitute, Ya Hit. The Los Angeles Daily reported that Ya Hit had married a Chinese man in a "Melican Marriage Ceremony... To evade paying purchase money." The Nin Yung Company claimed that it owned Ya Hit, but she had been "abducted, held, and secreted" by the rival Hong Chow Company. For years both companies had captured runaway prostitutes by forging bogus warrants for their arrests [...] often for the "theft" of themselves.
Much of the book is spent on the plight of Chinese prostitutes in America, which Pfaelzer generally outlines as an endless exploitation. She also says that the experience of Chinese prostitutes is constitutive to the Chinese American experience -- the majority of Chinese women who made it to America were either sent as prostitutes or forced into prostitution after their arrival -- and essential to how whites viewed them (partly an exotic fetish, partly as pools of crime and disease).
More on the gunfight,
Although no one was injured by the shots, both men were charged with attempted murder.
[Two nights later], shots were heard throughout El Pueblo. This time, Sam Yuen himself (leader of the Nin Yueng company) and the leader of the Hong Chow Company had fired upon each other.
Following that, a mob was stirred up (partly by police) and 17 Chinese were hanged.
You should read the book, tho, if you're interested, it's one of the few I've stumbled across that addresses Chinese American experience in early America in depth at all.
Was the Taiping Rebellion an impetus for large emigration?
Chinese gold prospectors in CA during the gold rush were known for two things: (1) sticking together in large groups (presumably for safety), and (2) not standing up for themselves or their property, even when in large numbers.
It was noted as remarkable in Diary of a 49er when one specific group of about 50 Chinese prospectors finally collectively bought a single gun to protect themselves from caucasian and latino bandits.
Btw.. Diary of a 49er is the only first hand account that we have of a gold prospector from the gold rush. It is a very good read, and very short. Highly recommend it