When an American Town Massacred Its Chinese Immigrants

The town of Rock Springs sprouts out of a vacant landscape of sandstone cliffs and sagebrush in southern Wyoming. It is a fading former mining town, where herds of deer now meander through the streets. A century-old sign overlooking the railroad tracks downtown reads “Home of Rock Springs Coal.” The mines closed decades ago. In the late nineteen-eighties, workers began filling the honeycomb of underground tunnels beneath the town with a cement-like grout, to prevent cave-ins. Ominous crevasses––evidence of “subsidence,” in geological parlance––recently opened in a one-acre park situated between a Catholic church and a former Slovenian community hall. State officials concluded that more grout should be injected. But, before that happens, there’s another pressing need: understanding what else lies beneath the surface.

On a chilly morning this past July, a small group bearing shovels, trowels, brushes, and other tools gathered in the park and began digging into the topsoil. In the course of several days, they excavated a series of neat squares, eventually carving out a chamber about a metre deep. They removed the dirt with buckets and poured it onto rectangular screens to be sifted. Curious neighbors wandered by.

The leader of the group was Laura Ng, a thirty-eight-year-old historical archeologist from Grinnell College, in Iowa, who specializes in the study of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Chinese migration to the United States. She wore an archeologist’s field uniform of work pants, boots, and a floppy sun hat. Ng and her colleagues were looking for artifacts left behind by Chinese residents of Rock Springs. One of their aspirations was to stumble on the flattened traces of an outhouse, with feces and trash. “That would be amazing,” she told me, explaining that refuse piles are full of clues about daily life. Ng’s team was also searching for a pancaked stratum of black charcoal—a “burn layer”––which would signal that they’d found the remnants of an atrocity carried out by inhabitants of the town.

On September 2, 1885, in one of the most gruesome episodes of racial terror in American history, a group of white miners killed at least twenty-eight Chinese residents in Rock Springs and burned down the town’s Chinese quarter. This summer, civic leaders are planning to erect a memorial, titled “Requiem,” on the wedge of land where the crew was digging, marking the hundred-and-fortieth anniversary of the massacre. Local officials had granted Ng’s team permission to excavate the memorial’s planned footprint, to make sure that the installation does not damage any buried cultural treasures.

Ng and her colleagues worked in ten-centimetre increments, digging and sifting. They were joined on most days by Dudley Gardner, a former professor of history and archeology at Western Wyoming Community College, and perhaps the world’s foremost expert on the massacre. He has spent more than four decades researching the Rock Springs Chinatown––at times overcoming residents’ reluctance to probe the past. “There were remnants of the community who remember having relatives that actually perpetrated the Chinese massacre,” he told me.

After a week of digging, Ng and her team concluded that there were few intact artifacts to be unearthed. In 1913, a school was built on the site of the former Chinatown. The school has since been razed, but the construction disturbed the soil beneath it. The group moved toward the northeast corner of the park to see if that location would prove more fruitful. A few days later, Paul Hoornbeek, an archeologist, discovered beams and timbers that were likely the remnants of a Chinese dwelling. Meanwhile, George Matthes, an undergraduate at Grinnell, found himself with the archeological equivalent of a fish on the line. “He kept finding stuff,” Ng told me. A coin, a piece of glazed stoneware, a fragment of bone. Close to a metre down, Matthes began digging through charcoal, as if he were crouched in the middle of a fireplace. He uncovered a melted glass jar, then an intact pig’s jaw. He’d found it: the burn layer. “I realized, I’m standing on top of one of the most horrible events in Wyoming’s history,” he told me.

But the archeologists had run out of time. They had funding only for a two-week-long excavation. On their final day in the field, they wrapped the timbers in aluminum foil to protect them, and laid down gardening tarps. They tossed dirt back into their holes and placed sod on top. Uncovering the past would have to wait for another day.

Violence usually has a proximate cause that is straightforward to identify—an insult, a taunt, a source of aggrievement. More challenging is tracing its larger patterns. “For historians violence is a difficult subject,” the historian Richard Hofstadter once wrote. “It is committed by isolated individuals, by small groups, and by large mobs; it is directed against individuals and crowds alike; it is undertaken for a variety of purposes (and at times for no discernible rational purpose at all) . . . it stems from criminal intent and from political idealism, from antagonisms that are entirely personal and from antagonisms of large social consequence.”

It was the promise of riches from the gold rush that first drew Chinese migrants in droves to American shores. They called the land across the ocean Gum Shan, or Gold Mountain. In 1850, Chinese arrivals to San Francisco were welcomed at a public ceremony, but as their numbers grew the sentiment toward them turned ugly. Horrific episodes of racial violence soon erupted in the minefields. California’s highest court ruled that Chinese testimony against a white person was inadmissible. Politicians, sensing an opportunity, began to call for the removal of Chinese residents.

In the eighteen-seventies, as a prolonged economic downturn shuttered businesses and idled white workingmen, the anti-Chinese movement accelerated. In 1882, Congress passed a law, later known as the Chinese Exclusion Act, that barred Chinese laborers from entering the country. But shiploads of Chinese passengers continued to journey across the ocean, finding ways around the law. Restive white workers, small-business owners, and even prominent community leaders on the West Coast soon resolved to take matters into their own hands. In February, 1885, an errant bullet from a dispute between rival Chinese factions in the town of Eureka, California, killed a white city councilman. Angry white residents banded together and forced more than three hundred Chinese people to leave town. This turned out to be the opening act of a harrowing period in American history that became known as “the driving out,” when dozens of communities expelled their Chinese residents. But the expulsions did not begin immediately. There was an interregnum, during which the fury over Chinese immigration seemed to be largely contained. Then, in September, 1885, in Rock Springs, the fury spilled over.

The story of Rock Springs, as with many places in the American West, begins with the transcontinental railroad. Previously, the area that would become the Wyoming Territory had been a transitory place that covered wagons passed through on their way west. But as tracklayers from the Union Pacific Railroad worked their way across the plains, towns began to spring up in their wake. The trains needed fuel, which turned coal mining into one of the region’s most important industries. In 1868, a fabulously thick seam of bituminous coal was discovered two miles south of a stream known as Bitter Creek. This led to the establishment of Rock Springs.

By 1875, the town’s population had grown to about a thousand, with five hundred men, mostly English, Welsh, Scottish, Irish, and Scandinavian immigrants, employed by the Union Pacific. It was a rude livelihood. The workers toiled in pairs in underground “rooms”—work areas usually forty to sixty yards long. They used picks and black gunpowder to extract the coal, which mules then hauled to the surface. The work was dangerous. In 1869, in the Avondale mine, in Pennsylvania, an underground fire killed more than a hundred workers.

In November, 1875, the standard wage in Rock Springs was four cents per bushel of coal mined, which meant workers made anywhere from two to four dollars a day. With winter approaching, company officials sought to increase production. The exact details of what came next are contested. Accounts from mine executives claim that employees rebuffed orders to step up their work. The miners contended that their wages were cut, and that the company reneged on a promise to reduce prices at the company store. In early November, miners walked off the job, and company officials acted swiftly to bring in a new workforce.

On the morning of November 13th, it was bitterly cold and snowy. Striking miners were astonished to discover soldiers from the U.S. Army disembarking from train cars, their bayonets glittering in the frosty air. “Marther alive!” one miner said. “If here ain’t the sogers!” Later that month, Union Pacific officials and the territory’s newly appointed governor arrived with a train full of Chinese miners, brought in by the contractor Beckwith, Quinn & Company. As the soldiers stood guard, mine officials put the Chinese laborers to work. They also posted a list of names of white miners who would be hired back—only a third of them—and declared that there would be no further negotiations. Work in the mines resumed with a hundred and fifty Chinese miners and fifty white miners. The company erected primitive shelters for its new Chinese employees on a sagebrush flat about a quarter of a mile north of town. White miners derisively referred to the Chinese encampment as “Hong Kong.”