The Rock Springs Massacre of 1885

On the morning of September second, eighteen eighty-five, the coal town of Rock Springs erupted into one of the deadliest episodes of anti-Chinese violence in American history.

Rock Springs existed because of coal. When the Union Pacific Railroad pushed its transcontinental tracks across southern Wyoming in eighteen sixty-eight, it needed fuel for its engines, and the Sweetwater Basin sat on seams of it. The railroad hired whoever would work the mines cheapest and fastest, and by eighteen eighty-five more than three hundred Chinese miners labored underground alongside roughly one hundred fifty white miners. Chinese workers, recruited from California after earlier railroad work, had been brought in partly as strikebreakers during earlier labor disputes. They proved diligent, accepted lower wages, and were granted the richer coal rooms by management. White miners, many of them members of the Knights of Labor, seethed.

The trigger was trivial. An argument over who had rights to work a particular room escalated into blows. Within hours, a mob of roughly one hundred fifty white miners armed with rifles marched into the town's Chinatown district from three directions. They pulled men from their homes and shot them in the streets. Others burned to death in cellars where they had tried to hide. The mob looted all seventy-nine shacks and houses in Chinatown, then set them ablaze. Twenty-eight Chinese miners were killed, fifteen wounded, and several hundred more were driven into the desert without food or water.

Neither territorial nor federal authorities prosecuted a single perpetrator. The Union Pacific, which had helped create the racial labor hierarchy that made the massacre possible, dismissed forty-five white miners for cause, then quietly rehired most of them. President Grover Cleveland asked Congress to appropriate one hundred fifty thousand dollars in restitution for Chinese property losses. The Chinese government protested vigorously; the United States paid, but admitted no legal liability.

The Army built Camp Pilot Butte on the outskirts of Rock Springs to protect the rebuilt Chinatown, and kept troops there until eighteen ninety-eight. The massacre accelerated a broader national backlash. The Chinese Exclusion Act had passed three years earlier in eighteen eighty-two; Rock Springs confirmed for many lawmakers that exclusion should be made permanent. It was, until nineteen forty-three.