The Home of Fifty-Six Nationalities
Near Rock Springs, Wyoming
When Union Pacific finished laying track across Wyoming in eighteen sixty-nine, the company faced an immediate problem: its locomotives burned coal, and it needed a reliable domestic supply. Surveyors had already identified massive bituminous seams in the Bitter Creek valley. By eighteen sixty-eight, before the golden spike was even driven at Promontory, Union Pacific had opened its first shaft here and begun pulling coal from the earth.
The operation grew fast. By the eighteen seventies, Rock Springs was producing millions of tons per year and the railroad had become the town's landlord, employer, and government all at once. Union Pacific owned the mines, the housing, the stores, and the tipples. Workers lived in company houses, bought on company credit, and were paid partly in company scrip. It was a company town in the most complete sense.
To fill the labor demand, Union Pacific recruited globally. The first large group after the Irish were Chinese workers, many of them veterans of the transcontinental railroad itself, who arrived in numbers in the eighteen seventies and quickly became the backbone of the underground workforce. Then the Europeans came in waves: Cornish miners who brought hard-rock expertise from England, Finns and Swedes lured by labor recruiters working the immigrant docks in New York, Italians and Dalmatians, Slovenes, Serbs, Greeks, Poles, Austrians, Russians. Each group formed its own neighborhood, its own church, its own social lodge. They lived apart, worshipped apart, and often ate apart, but they descended together into the same darkness every morning.
At its height the community claimed workers from more than fifty nations. The town adopted the slogan the Home of Fifty-Six Nationalities, a point of civic pride that papered over real tensions but also captured something genuinely true. Rock Springs was cosmopolitan in a way that few western mining towns ever were, a Babel built on bituminous coal six thousand feet above sea level in the middle of the Wyoming high desert.
