Rock Springs: Coal, Rails, and Fifty Nations
Near Rock Springs, Wyoming
Rock Springs began as a stage stop on the overland route. In eighteen sixty-eight, when the Union Pacific Railroad crossed southern Wyoming and needed coal for its boilers, the seams beneath this desert town made it indispensable.
The railroad recruited workers from wherever it could find them: Welsh and Irish miners, immigrants from across Europe, and large numbers of Chinese workers brought from California. At its peak the Rock Springs mines employed dozens of nationalities, enough that locals called it the Fifty-Seven Variety Town, a cosmopolitan workforce in the middle of the Wyoming desert. That diversity produced both the town's character and, in eighteen eighty-five, its worst moment: the massacre of twenty-eight Chinese miners by a white mob, one of the deadliest incidents of anti-Chinese violence in American history.
Rock Springs today is Sweetwater County's largest city, still shaped by the energy economy that founded it. Coal, natural gas, and trona, the mineral used to make glass and baking soda, which underlies much of the region in one of the world's largest deposits.
