In 1885, white rioters murdered dozens of their Asian neighbors in Rock Springs, Wyoming. A hundred and forty years later, the story of the atrocity is still being unearthed.
By Michael LuoMarch 3, 2025
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.
“You won’t find another apartment in the city that offers this kind of debilitating vertigo.”
Cartoon by Christopher Weyant
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.”
A. C. Beckwith, one of the suppliers of the Chinese miners, later testified that “no complaints of a serious nature” had been made about their presence. But he was likely unaware of the actual dynamics in the mines—or perhaps he was dissembling. In the summer of 1884, the Knights of Labor began organizing restive Union Pacific workers, encouraging them to walk off the job. The Knights got its start as a secretive fraternal organization in Philadelphia, but it eventually became a driving force behind the national labor movement and an ardent backer of Chinese exclusion. Terence Powderly, the Grand Master Workman of the Knights, barred Chinese laborers from the organization. (By contrast, the group actively recruited Black members.) Powderly later sought to distance his organization from the violence in Rock Springs, but he also blamed the unrest on Congress’s failure to stop Chinese immigration. “In desperation the people of the Pacific coast have petitioned and demanded of Congress to do something to enforce the law, but the Chinese still continue to come,” he wrote.
In Rock Springs, white miners asked their Chinese colleagues to join them in work stoppages, but the Chinese workers demurred. White miners typically earned a dollar more per day, but they complained that Chinese workers got the most lucrative assignments and were hired back first after a mine shutdown. By 1885, there were about five hundred and fifty Chinese workers in the mines, compared with fewer than three hundred white workers. Notices were posted in mining towns throughout southern Wyoming demanding the expulsion of Chinese residents. “Hints were thrown out that the Chinese were to be driven out of town,” O. C. Smith, the Rock Springs postmaster, later recalled. In late August, Dave Thomas, a mine boss whom Chinese workers affectionately called Davy Tom, met with an acquaintance, who would become one of the leaders of the riot. He warned Thomas that “there would be something doing.” On August 28th, John L. Lewis, a labor leader in Denver, warned Beckwith, Quinn & Company officials in a letter about a “storm that is brewing” over the “Chinese problem at Rock Springs.” In a separate letter, he pleaded with Union Pacific officials, “For God’s sake do what you can to avoid this calamity.”
On the night of September 1st, Andrew Bugas, a nineteen-year-old white miner, was at home with his cousin. A fellow-miner named Sandy Cooper showed up unannounced and asked Bugas’s cousin if he had a rifle or a shotgun. “I will furnish you with one which you must use tomorrow, for we are all going hunting and shooting all the Chinamen we see,” Cooper said. Bugas and his cousin thought Cooper was joking, but the man returned half an hour later with a heavy rifle and two boxes of cartridges. Cooper then urged Bugas’s cousin not to go to work in the morning, because it was important for white miners to be “present.” It would become clear the following day what he meant.
Leo Qarqwang knew his way around the dark passages of the mines, knew how to handle his pick. He was among the cohort of Chinese miners who had arrived in Rock Springs in 1875. (More than a hundred and fifty members of the Leo clan ultimately made their way to southern Wyoming.) Many Chinese miners had September 2nd off, in observance of a holiday. Leo, however, was working the early shift at the No. 6 mine. That morning, the temperature hovered around freezing, and a light frost covered the ground. According to Leo’s subsequent testimony, soon after he began work a gang of about fourteen white miners barged in on him and his partner with spades, picks, and shovels. They demanded, “What do you Chinamen mean by working here?” Leo offered to leave, saying, “We Chinamen do not want to have any trouble.” But the white miners set upon them. One bashed Leo in the head with a shovel, leaving him with a gash a quarter inch deep.
White miners later blamed James A. Evans, the shift foreman, and Dave Brookman, the pit boss that morning, for the dispute. By their account—contradicted by Chinese witnesses—the supervisors had assigned a room to Chinese miners which had been promised to two white men, Isaiah Whitehouse and William Jenkins. Whitehouse, a forty-five-year-old Englishman who had recently been elected to the territorial legislature, claimed that he’d started working in the room the day before but had taken the afternoon off because he felt ill. When he returned, he found two Chinese miners occupying the room. In the melee that ensued, Chinese miners working in other rooms rushed in to defend their countrymen. When the fighting was over, four Chinese miners were badly wounded; one of them later died. Several of the white miners sustained cuts and bruises.
When Evans, the foreman, finally arrived, he found the white assailants getting ready to leave the mine in pit cars. They grumbled that they were “not going to suffer Chinamen.” Evans tried to stop them, but the men walked out. One called, “Come on, boys; we may as well finish it now.”
Bugas, the young miner who’d had the perplexing encounter the night before, was in his cabin alone that morning. At ten o’clock, he saw a group of men and boys hurling stones at Chinese dinner carriers—men who carried meals on poles slung over their shoulders, to deliver to miners—causing them to scatter. Soon afterward, he watched as a brigade of sixty or seventy white men assembled nearby, most with rifles or revolvers. They headed to the Knights of Labor hall, chanting, “White men, fall in.” When they spilled out, later that afternoon, a cry went up: “Vengeance on the Chinese!” The mob took a vote and decided that the Chinese residents should be expelled. A group of seventy-five men began making their way toward Chinatown. When they encountered a group of Chinese workers along the railroad tracks, they fired wildly at them. The mob halted just outside the Chinese quarter, and a committee of three men delivered a message: residents had an hour to pack up their belongings and go. But barely half an hour later the rioters invaded Chinatown.
They came from two different directions, Chinese witnesses later said. One group crossed a plank bridge over Bitter Creek, and another advanced from the railroad tracks. A man named Lor Sun Kit was the first resident shot. A bullet pierced his back; he crumpled to the ground, wounded but still alive. The rioters shot a fifty-six-year-old miner named Leo Dye Bah in the chest, killing him. A thirty-eight-year-old man named Yip Ah Marn was also shot dead.
Five or six hundred people lived in the Chinese encampment. They fled in all directions. One witness later described the hills to the east of town as “literally blue with the hunted Chinamen.” Leo Qarqwang was getting treatment for his wounds when he saw armed men approaching. He ran toward the hills. He later compared Chinese residents to a flock of frightened sheep. He spent several days wandering through the sagebrush, with nothing to eat. Eventually, he found the railroad tracks and caught a train to the nearby town of Evanston. Many of the fleeing Chinese residents tumbled down the steep banks of Bitter Creek, splashing into the muddy water. At least one man was cut down as he struggled to clamber up the bank on the other side. His body was later found half submerged in the creek. Another man, Leo Mauwik, was shot in the arm as he fled. He didn’t stop running until about four o’clock in the morning, when he reached the neighboring town of Green River, about fifteen miles to the west.
Violence coursed through Rock Springs. A white woman—likely “Mrs. Osborn,” the owner of a local laundry—fired a revolver at some Chinese men as they fled, felling two of them. Another woman, by one account, had a baby in her arms but still managed to knock down a Chinese man running by. When her child wailed, she spanked him before turning to pummel the Chinese man.
The rioters began setting fire to buildings, and dense black smoke billowed over the area. Frightened residents dashed outside with blankets covering their heads. Rioters tossed bodies into the burning buildings. The smell of charred flesh was acrid. A gusting wind soon led to fears that the conflagration would spread through the town, and rioters suspended their torching of the Chinese huts, but more than forty still burned to the ground. Miners usually stored their gunpowder inside their homes. When the flames reached a cache, the sky would flash with a powerful explosion.
“I’m telling you, it looks really cute so far.”
Cartoon by Gina DeLuca
Ah Lee, a Chinese laundryman, had barricaded himself inside his home. Attackers broke through the roof and shot him in the back of the head. A female rioter looted bundles of laundry he had laid out for delivery. Ah Kuhn, a Chinese interpreter known for wearing a fur coat around town, took shelter in a cellar. When he emerged, several white men opened fire, and he ran in a panic, dropping about sixteen hundred dollars in gold—more than fifty thousand dollars today. He made his way to a house east of town, where a white resident gave him bread and water and allowed him to rest before he continued on his way. Several Chinese residents approached the Reverend Timothy Thirloway, who lived near Chinatown. His two daughters taught English to Chinese miners in the evenings. The fleeing residents asked if they could hide in the family’s home, but were told it would be safer if they left town. One miner, known as China Joe, hid in a large oven for three days, then sneaked out in the middle of the night and fled.
A group of rioters marched on the home of Evans, the foreman who had arrived at the No. 6 mine after the melee, and advised him to leave town. He departed that night. Next, the group visited the home of Soo Qui, one of the Chinese head men, but he was in Evanston. His terrified wife met them instead. “Soo, he go,” she said. “I go to him.” Two days later, she arrived in Evanston by train, disembarking in a colorful gown. A newspaper reporter characterized her as the “last of her race” to abandon Rock Springs and “probably the last to set foot in the place for many a long year.”
At around 7 P.M., Dave Thomas and others visited Chinatown to assess the situation. They spotted an elderly Chinese man they knew, lying in agony in the dirt. They debated whether to end his suffering by shooting him, but left him to die. The local sheriff deployed deputies around town, but struggled to muster enough men to hunt down the rioters. Throughout the night, gunfire continued, and rioters recrossed the creek to torch the remaining buildings in the Chinese quarter. The fires burned all night, bathing the town in a red glow.
In the morning, the full extent of the atrocity became clear. The flat expanse where Chinatown once stood had been transformed into a hellscape of smoldering, blackened walls, broken crockery, and other detritus. Bodies were found in the burned-out cellars, often clustered together. Some people had draped wet cloths over their heads and burrowed into the earthen walls, trying to escape the smoke and flames. Hogs feasted on a corpse that they had dragged from the ruins. “Today for the first time in a good many years, there is not a Chinaman in Rock Springs,” the town’s newspaper proclaimed. “Nothing but heaps of smoking ruins mark the spot where Chinatown stood.”
Survivors who had hidden overnight in the hills crept back to the railroad tracks near town. Union Pacific officials loaded a freight train with food and water and sent it on a rescue mission along the tracks. A man who managed to reach Green River was chased by a band of forty men until the white manager of a local hotel ushered him inside. “She cowed the mob as effectually as could a whole battery of artillery have done,” a newspaper account later said. Several hundred people eventually took refuge in Evanston. Some went to a gun store in town and bought all the revolvers in stock, in preparation for another attack.
Francis E. Warren, Wyoming’s governor, had sent an urgent telegram asking that soldiers be dispatched to put down the mob. Army officials told him to make a formal application to President Grover Cleveland. But the President was in the Adirondack Mountains, hunting and fishing with friends. After Warren sent the request, officials concluded that it was insufficient, because he’d failed to make clear that the territorial legislature—the entity normally authorized to make such applications—was not in session. The Secretary of War was also out of town, leaving his second-in-command to confer with Thomas Bayard, the Secretary of State. They decided to send two companies of troops to Rock Springs with orders only to prevent interruption of the federal mail service. When Warren arrived in town, he found the scene hard to bear. “The smell of burning human flesh was sickening and almost unendurable, and was plainly discernible for more than a mile along the railroad both east and west,” he later wrote.
Railroad officials feared additional violence. “The local authorities are wholly powerless and the City is in the hands of a mob,” one company official said. Subsequent reports noted that white miners had broken into Beckwith, Quinn & Company’s storehouse of gunpowder; that Chinese miners at a Union Pacific mine in the Utah Territory had been given twenty minutes to leave town; and that white miners in Evanston were organizing to drive out the Chinese there. In Green River, white vigilantes told Chinese residents that they were no longer welcome. Mine operations had ceased almost entirely. Nevertheless, in Evanston, Ah Say, a refined, slender man who spoke fluent English and served as the leader of the Rock Springs Chinese community, pressed company officials to put his people to work. They had lost everything—he estimated that their losses totalled about two hundred thousand dollars. They needed wages.
In Rock Springs, the local coroner summoned a half-dozen residents to conduct an inquest into the fifteen bodies that had been discovered. The jurors concluded that four “Chinamen” had died by gunshot wounds by “some means unknown to the jury” and that the others “came to their death from exposure to fire,” though their nationality was uncertain, because they’d been “defaced beyond recognition.” The rooting of hogs in a cellar led to the discovery of five additional corpses. Newspapers reported other ghastly stories. According to one account, a Chinese family of three—a husband and wife and their baby—was found in the hills. The mother and child had died, and the father had killed himself. Another report: a group of six men who had fled into the hills during the attack wandered for several days amid the sagebrush and greasewood. Without any food or water, they ate their own excrement. One by one, they died. Coyotes ate their remains. Three days after the riot, a lone survivor crept back into town, hungry and thirsty.
Railroad officials were resolute about returning their Chinese workforce to the mines. “Yield nothing to the rioters,” Union Pacific’s president told a lieutenant. On September 6th, President Cleveland finally emerged from the wilderness. Two days later, he ordered soldiers to protect Chinese miners “at all hazards.” A week after the massacre, two hundred soldiers and six hundred and fifty Chinese miners arrived in Rock Springs. A jeering crowd of white miners greeted them. Some of the dead had been buried, but other bodies remained strewn on the ground, mangled and decomposing. “It was a sad and painful sight to see the son crying for the father, the brother for the brother, the uncle for the nephew, and friend for friend,” a statement from the Chinese laborers later said. The new arrivals bedded down on sodden ground along the tracks, their campfires flickering in the night.
The first attempt to resume coal production failed miserably, as gangs of white workers stood outside mine entrances. “The Chinese are so easily frightened,” D. O. Clark, the superintendent of the Union Pacific Coal Company, later reported. “They run as soon as any one says anything to them.” Complicating matters for the mine bosses, white employees refused to work, making it difficult for coal to be hauled out, weighed, and placed on train cars. On September 19th, mine officials issued an ultimatum: if the strikers did not report to work on Monday morning, they would be fired. The day of the deadline, officials managed to re-start production in two mines. By the end of the month, two hundred and fifty Chinese laborers were back at work. The company began rebuilding Chinatown. Mine officials arranged to replace the striking white workers with a contingent of Mormons, another persecuted group.
White residents continued to harass Chinese laborers. In late October, a gang of white men attacked a railroad building west of town, driving a group of Chinese track workers into the woods. But by December there were nearly five hundred and fifty men working in the mines, only eighty-five of whom were white; the rest were Chinese. The attack had failed in its ultimate purpose—ejecting the Chinese from Rock Springs.
From the outset, Union Pacific officials recognized that the odds of bringing the riot’s ringleaders to justice were slim. Most residents were sympathetic to the white miners’ grievances. Anyone who testified also faced a threat of retribution. “I fancy it will be difficult for us to get any of them punished,” Samuel Callaway, the general manager of the Union Pacific, wrote to his bosses three days after the massacre. By September 7th, the sheriff had taken twenty-two men into custody. (He was accommodating to his prisoners, letting some stop at a nearby saloon before he locked them up.) The jailed included Isaiah Whitehouse, who had been involved in the initial brawl, in the No. 6 mine. The others were men of varying ages and backgrounds. “They would never be singled out from a crowd as rioters and murderers,” one account noted. A preliminary court hearing had to be delayed until a judge arrived, but the prisoners seemed to be in good spirits, “with no great anxiety as to the result.”
Officials from China’s diplomatic delegation in the United States made their way to Rock Springs. They found only thirteen bodies that were recognizable; the other remains, many of them just bone fragments, had been wrapped in small bundles for burial. According to Chinese witnesses interviewed by the officials, at least twenty-eight people were killed in the riot. Another fifteen or so had been injured, including some who would likely be maimed for the rest of their lives. A report on the massacre, written by Huang Xiquan, the Chinese consul in New York, contained a litany of the dead. Its function seemed to be one not only of accountability but also of memory.
• The dead body of Leo Kow Boot was found between Mines Nos. 3 and 4, at the foot of the mountain. The neck was shot through crosswise by a bullet, cutting the windpipe in two. I also ascertained that the deceased was 24 years old. His family connections have not yet been clearly made known.
• The dead body of Yii See Yen was found near the creek. The left temple was shot by a bullet, and the skull broken. The age of the deceased was 36 years. He had a mother living at home (in China).
• The dead body of Leo Dye Bah was found at the side of the bridge, near the creek, shot in the middle of the chest by a bullet, breaking the breast bone. I also ascertained that the deceased was 56 years old, and had a wife, son and daughter at home.
Huang also catalogued the financial losses sustained by the survivors, ranging from twenty-five dollars to more than two thousand dollars—roughly sixty-five thousand dollars today. “Every one of the surviving Chinese has been rendered penniless by the cruel attack,” Huang wrote. “Since the riot took place it has been impossible for them to secure even a torn sheet or any article of clothing to protect them from the cold.” A Union Pacific official who conducted an internal investigation decided that there had been no formal plot to carry out the massacre—a debatable conclusion—even if many of the white miners had hoped to expel the Chinese. Nevertheless, he called the mob’s actions “deliberate and cold-blooded.”
In early October, a grand jury met in Green River to consider indictments. More than two dozen white residents were called to the stand, but none were willing to implicate any rioters. The surviving record is contradictory about how vigorously prosecutors tried to find Chinese witnesses. The federal prosecutor for the Wyoming Territory reported afterward that local authorities had hoped Frederick Bee, the Chinese consul in San Francisco, would arrange for Chinese testimony, but none materialized. Bee, however, insisted that no one had followed up with him. “They did not want any indictments returned, thanks to the reign of terror,” he later said. The grand-jury hearing took an unexpected turn when the Reverend Timothy Thirloway, the pastor who lived near the Chinese quarter, testified that Chinese residents had set fire to the quarter themselves—a preposterous allegation. On October 7th, the grand jury issued a report announcing that it had voted to return no indictments, and castigating Union Pacific officials for “abuses” in the mines. The rioters returned that night to Rock Springs, where a cheering throng of several hundred residents greeted them.
A week later, Chinese laborers returned to Rock Springs and soon resumed coal production.Photograph from Union Pacific Coal Company Collection at Western Wyoming Community College
In late November, Zheng Zaoru, the Chinese minister in Washington, sent a forceful letter to Thomas Bayard, the Secretary of State, criticizing the judicial proceedings as “a burlesque.” He asked for restitution for the victims, pointing out that the Chinese government had paid more than seven hundred thousand dollars for losses sustained by Americans during violence in China. Bayard, in his response, made no promises, and chided Zheng’s countrymen for venturing to a “community on the outposts of civilization.” The quest to get redress for the victims ground on for months. Finally, on February 24, 1887, Congress awarded $147,748.74 to the Chinese government—a paltry sum, given the scale of the tragedy. Chinese officials in San Francisco were tasked with distributing the award to the victims. By late summer, the process was complete, but Chinese officials discovered that six claims had been inadvertently repeated. Accordingly, they returned $480.75 to the U.S. Treasury.
Chinese survivors of the massacre continued to work for the Union Pacific in Rock Springs for years, guarded by federal troops. The company rebuilt the Chinese quarter, constructing several dozen barnlike dormitories. Racial hostilities still ran through the town. On December 30, 1886, a fire broke out in the quarter. As Chinese residents struggled to extinguish the blaze, a crowd of white residents began pelting them with rocks and cut the fire hose. A contingent of soldiers drove off the white residents and saved the quarter from serious damage. After the fire, the commanding officer of the troops in Rock Springs reported to his superiors that there remained a “rough class” in the town who posed a threat to the Chinese. He said that Ah Say, the community leader, “seemed anxious about their safety.” Army officials decided that troops were no longer needed in Evanston but concluded that “it will not do” to withdraw them from Rock Springs. Ah Say had been living in Evanston with his wife and children, all American-born, but he decided to take them to China, perhaps for their safety. Several months later, he returned to Wyoming alone.
In 1894, Ah Say arranged to have a hundred-and-thirty-foot ceremonial dragon delivered for the community’s annual New Year celebration. For several years, he marched proudly at the head of the parade, dressed in a Western suit and with a cane in his hand. On the morning of January 27, 1899, he rose, took a bath, shaved off his mustache, and dressed himself in a formal Chinese gown. He summoned several close friends, including the town mayor, and left detailed instructions for who should succeed him in his various functions as the Chinese head man. That evening, he collapsed and died. Less than two months later, Army officials abruptly withdrew from Rock Springs. The decision caught Union Pacific officials off guard. One newspaper account noted, “The presence of troops has prevented any serious demonstrations against the Chinks, although scarcely a day passed without one or more of them having” their queues—traditional long braids—“clipped off or getting a beating.”
Union Pacific officials had been gradually reducing their reliance on Chinese labor. “You cannot operate a railroad successfully in the face of an all pervading public sentiment, no matter how wrong it may be,” the company president had confided to a colleague after the massacre. Yet survivors continued on with the Union Pacific well into their sixties and seventies. In 1913, the company demolished the Rock Springs Chinatown. Most of the remaining Chinese miners could no longer work. Many had become paupers. In 1925, the company decided to cover the cost of sending them home and furnishing them with a payout for their “years of faithful service.” On an evening in November, 1925, a banquet was held to honor the first group to depart. The town band performed. Afterward, the group headed to San Francisco and boarded the S.S. President Taft, bound for Asia. A septuagenarian in the group, Lao Chung, had been shot during the 1885 attack and still carried the bullet in his back.
For a few years, the company issued regular payments to the former workers. But in 1932 it cut them off without informing them. One worker wrote that the men were begging for help “before they starve to death.” In August, 1932, the last three of the company’s “Old Time Chinese” departed. “The good wishes of their many Rock Springs friends will be with them on this long journey home,” an item in the company’s employee magazine said. It went on to imagine them “talking often of Rock Springs and the friends they have left behind.” A photograph showed the men in three-piece suits, their skin weathered and their expressions neutral. A lone Chinese employee of the Union Pacific, a man named Leo Yee Litt, who worked in the No. 4 mine, remained.
In 1943, Congress finally lifted the exclusionary laws that barred Chinese laborers from entering the country. The Second World War had suddenly transformed China, an impoverished nation, into an important ally of the United States in its war against Japan. Even then, however, only a nominal number of Chinese immigrants––a hundred and five––were permitted to enter the country each year. It was not until 1965, when a sweeping new law set aside the quota system that had heavily favored northern and western European immigration, that lawmakers finally placed Chinese immigrants on equal footing with others trying to enter the country.
Historians have labored to document the bigotry and violence that Chinese immigrants endured, seeking to incorporate them into the broader narrative of America’s multiracial democracy. Chinese immigration in the late nineteenth century took place in the period after the Civil War, a time when noble visions of liberty and equality in America were foundering. The Chinese Question followed the Negro Question and coincided with the vanquishing of Reconstruction, the spread of Jim Crow, and the subjugation of Native peoples on the Western frontier. These histories continue to refract through American life today. Nevertheless, the atrocities experienced by Chinese residents of the country remain little known. In 2020, the surge in reports of anti-Asian violence that accompanied the Covid-19 pandemic brought new attention to this ugly history. City officials in San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles, and Denver have since issued formal apologies for the past treatment of Chinese immigrants. In Los Angeles, civic leaders are planning a memorial to commemorate a Chinese massacre from 1871, in which eighteen Chinese men were killed, fifteen of them hanged. In Eureka, a campaign is under way to erect a monument memorializing the former Chinatown there.
In Rock Springs, in 1986, Dudley Gardner, the archeologist and historian, helped lead an effort to install a plaque marking the location of the massacre. In 1990, workers digging a trench in the parking lot of the town’s Catholic Church discovered bottles, bones, and other traces of the former Chinatown. The following year, a team from the community college excavated the area, collecting several thousand artifacts. But the project stalled, and, last fall, Gardner delivered boxes of the artifacts to Laura Ng, so that she could finish cataloguing them. In 2023, the Rock Springs City Council approved a hundred-and-fifty-four-thousand-dollar grant for the memorial, which will feature a seven-foot statue of Ah Say. Gardner’s latest project is putting together an application for the massacre site to be recognized as a National Historic Landmark.
The promise of archeology is that it can offer insight into past lives which would be impossible to glean from historical archives. Excavations of sites in Wyoming have shown that the Chinese population there grew crops as varied as carrots, gooseberries, eggplant, and pumpkin, and raised chickens, pigs, and goats; some even had horses. Ng, in addition to her archeological work, has been searching for descendants of the original Chinese residents of Rock Springs. One evening last September, she was trawling the Internet at home when she found the LinkedIn profile of a retired sales-and-marketing executive in Reno, Nevada, whose name was Jeffrey Yee Litt. She asked if he was a relative of Leo Yee Litt, the lone Chinese miner who had continued working in Rock Springs. He responded, “Leo was my grandfather.”
That night and in subsequent conversations, Jeffrey shared the outlines of his story. He was born in New York City and grew up in Queens. His father, George, hailed from Rock Springs, but Jeffrey knew little about the town and had met his grandfather just once. He had only a dim awareness of the massacre. He told Ng, however, that his ninety-one-year-old uncle, John Yee, who also lived in Reno, might be more helpful. He was the youngest son of Leo Yee Litt.
A few weeks later, Ng flew to Nevada to meet John at his home. His caregiver greeted Ng at the door. John was in poor health, and dependent on an oxygen tank. His home was cluttered with Chinese porcelains that he’d collected. He explained to Ng that his father had worked in the tipple for the Union Pacific, helping to tip coal cars into larger rail cars for transportation. (Records suggest that Leo Yee Litt’s service with the company dated back to the turn of the century, some years after the massacre.) Around 1930, a coal car struck Leo Yee Litt in the back, injuring him, and he never worked again. John was born several years later, in Rock Springs. He attended the school that was built on top of the razed Chinatown but had no idea of the site’s history. “Seems like no one really wanted to talk about it,” he said.
John’s three older brothers served in the armed services during the Second World War. John spent two years in the Army as well, then went on to attend the University of California at Berkeley. He settled in the Bay Area, where he raised two daughters. He has six grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. As an adult, John became curious about his ancestors. He learned that his grandfather Leo Yee Litt’s father, a man named Leo Lung Man, had survived the massacre. He fled Rock Springs on foot and followed the railroad tracks until a train picked him up. He eventually went back to China. In 1983, John typed up the stories he’d collected of Leo Yee Litt’s family. Until Ng interviewed him, he’d never shared them with anyone except his relatives. It hadn’t occurred to him that others would want to hear them. “It’s one of the most important events in Asian American history,” Ng told me. “He didn’t think anyone cared.” In John’s typescript, now yellowed and brittle but preserved in a three-ring binder, he writes that the descendants of Leo Yee Litt “have not only survived, but also prevailed and excelled in spite of many trials and tribulations.” He might as well have been writing more generally about the Chinese in America. This summer, Ng plans to return to Rock Springs to keep digging. ♦
This is drawn from “Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America.”
