The Rock Springs Massacre: Anti-Chinese Violence and the Railroad's Wage War

On September second, eighteen eighty-five, white coal miners employed by the Union Pacific Railroad in Rock Springs, Wyoming, attacked the Chinese workers in the mines and in the adjoining Chinese neighborhood. The attack lasted several hours. At least twenty-eight Chinese workers were killed. Fifteen more were wounded. The entire Chinese residential quarter was burned to the ground.

The Union Pacific had hired Chinese workers at wages below what white union miners received, a practice common in the railroad and mining industries of the period. The disparity had produced years of tension. On the morning of September second, a dispute over which miners had rights to work a particular section of mine number six escalated. White miners left the mine, armed themselves, and returned.

No one was prosecuted for the killings. The federal government deployed troops to Rock Springs not to arrest the perpetrators but to protect the surviving Chinese workers so that they could return to their jobs in the mines. Most of them did return. They had little alternative.

The Rock Springs massacre is one of the most violent episodes of anti-Chinese violence in American history. It occurred during a period of widespread legal and extralegal discrimination against Chinese immigrants throughout the West, in the shadow of the Chinese Exclusion Act of eighteen eighty-two, which had barred Chinese laborers from immigrating to the United States. The Chinese workers in Rock Springs were there before the Act; they were trapped there after it.

Wyoming's tourism narrative has largely not included this event. WyoHistory.org and the Wyoming State Archives document it in detail. The Chinese community that existed in Rock Springs before September second, eighteen eighty-five, did not rebuild.