Rock Springs Massacre: Labor, Race, and the Union Pacific
Near Rock Springs, Wyoming
On September second, eighteen eighty-five, a mob of roughly one hundred fifty white coal miners descended on the Chinese neighborhood of Rock Springs, Wyoming, and carried out one of the worst acts of racial violence in the American West.
The Union Pacific Railroad had brought Chinese workers to its Wyoming coal mines beginning in the eighteen seventies, initially as strikebreakers but later as a permanent workforce. By eighteen eighty-five, Chinese miners, many of them contracted laborers who had come to America to build the transcontinental railroad, made up a large share of the mine's workforce. White miners, who were trying to organize and were furious at the company's wage policies, directed their anger not at the Union Pacific but at their Chinese coworkers.
The flashpoint came when the company assigned a pair of especially productive coal rooms to Chinese miners rather than white miners. On the morning of September second, white miners confronted the Chinese workers underground. The dispute spilled to the surface and became a massacre. Armed mobs swept through Rock Springs' Chinatown, shooting men in the streets, burning seventy-nine homes and businesses, and driving the survivors into the surrounding hills without food or water. Twenty-eight Chinese men were killed and fifteen wounded. The rest, several hundred, fled.
The Union Pacific fired forty-five of the ringleaders but rehired most of them within weeks under pressure from the white workforce. No participant was ever criminally prosecuted. President Grover Cleveland sent federal troops to restore order and Congress eventually appropriated one hundred fifty thousand dollars to reimburse the Chinese community for destroyed property, but no measure of justice was applied to the perpetrators.
Rock Springs' Chinatown was never rebuilt. The massacre became a landmark in the history of anti-Chinese violence in the United States, and its root causes, a company that exploited racial divisions to suppress wages and undermine labor organizing, were never addressed by law.
