Rock Springs: Where the Coal Came First

You are rolling into one of the most unlikely cities in the American West. Rock Springs, Wyoming sits in a wide bowl of high desert at an elevation of about sixty-four hundred feet, surrounded by red sandstone bluffs and sagebrush flats that stretch to every horizon. Nothing about this landscape says city. And yet for a century and a half, this place has pulled people from every corner of the earth.

It started with coal. When Union Pacific surveyors pushed across southern Wyoming in the eighteen sixties, they discovered that the Bitter Creek valley sat on top of some of the richest bituminous coal deposits in the West. The railroad needed fuel. Rock Springs had it. By eighteen sixty-eight the first shaft was sunk, and the town exploded around the mine mouth. The company store, the tipple, the coke ovens, the immigrant boardinghouses, all of it rose in a matter of years on the high desert floor.

What followed was one of the most genuinely multicultural chapters in western history. Union Pacific recruited workers from all over the world, first the Irish and the Cornish, then Chinese miners arriving after the transcontinental line was finished, then wave after wave of Europeans running from poverty and conscription: Finns and Swedes, Italians and Greeks, Slovenes and Montenegrins, Poles and Russians. At its peak, the Rock Springs payroll included workers from more than fifty separate nations and territories. The town called itself the Home of Fifty-Six Nationalities, and the claim was not far from the truth.

The history here is complicated. There was community and there was violence. There was solidarity across borders and there was vicious exclusion. The coal veins that built this place are largely exhausted now, replaced by trona mining and natural gas, but the layered identity remains. You can hear it in the surnames on the storefronts and read it on the headstones in the cemetery above town.