The Rock Springs Massacre, Eighteen Eighty-Five

On the second of September, eighteen eighty-five, a dispute inside Mine Number Six escalated into the worst anti-Chinese massacre in American history.

The immediate trigger was a fight over a working room. Union Pacific assigned coal rooms to individual miners, and two white miners claimed a room that Chinese workers were already cutting. The argument turned violent inside the tunnel. By midday, white miners had gathered on the surface, armed themselves, and marched on Chinatown, the neighborhood of roughly six hundred Chinese workers that sat in the flats below the white residential district.

What followed lasted several hours. White miners and sympathizers set fire to the Chinese neighborhood, driving residents out at gunpoint. At least twenty-eight Chinese miners were killed, the exact count disputed in subsequent investigations. Fifteen more were badly wounded. Most of the six hundred residents fled into the desert on foot, many without shoes or coats. Dozens of homes were burned to the ground. Personal property, savings, and tools worth tens of thousands of dollars were destroyed or stolen.

Union Pacific, desperate to restore production, pressured the federal government to intervene. President Grover Cleveland sent in troops to restore order and eventually required the company to reinstate the surviving Chinese workers and compensate them modestly for destroyed property. Not one person was ever charged with a crime in connection with the killings. A federal grand jury convened and adjourned without issuing any indictments.

The massacre occurred at the intersection of three forces: the long depression of the eighteen seventies and eighties that made white workers fear any competition, the Chinese Exclusion Act of eighteen eighty-two that had already marked Chinese residents as legally inferior, and Union Pacific's deliberate strategy of using Chinese labor as a check on white labor organizing. The Chinese miners had not caused those conditions. They simply bore the cost of them.

A historical marker stands near the site of the old Chinatown today. The massacre is part of the official history of Sweetwater County, though it took well over a century for that acknowledgment to arrive.