The Rock Springs Massacre of 1885

On September second, eighteen eighty-five, a mob of between one hundred and one hundred fifty white miners attacked the Chinese quarter of Rock Springs, Wyoming. By the time the violence ended, twenty-eight Chinese miners were dead, fifteen more were wounded, and every one of the seventy-nine homes in Chinatown had been looted and burned. Several hundred survivors fled into the desert with almost nothing.

The underlying tensions had been building for years. The Union Pacific Railroad had brought Chinese workers to Rock Springs in the eighteen sixties, initially as strikebreakers. By the eighteen eighties, Chinese miners were a substantial portion of the workforce, and the object of mounting resentment from white miners who blamed them for low wages and union failures. When the company assigned Chinese workers to some of the richest coal seams in Mine Number Six, the grievance boiled over.

The attack was organized. Men, women, and some children assembled at the railroad tracks. The mob split into two columns, crossing Bitter Creek by different bridges to encircle the Chinese district, cutting off escape routes before the assault began. What followed was a massacre in the full sense: men shot in the streets, homes set on fire with people still inside, bodies left in the open.

The federal government sent troops, two companies of infantry arrived within days and were soon reinforced to eight, camping between downtown Rock Springs and Chinatown for about fourteen years to prevent a recurrence. But no one was ever prosecuted. Wyoming territorial courts declined to act. The forty-five white miners the Union Pacific initially fired were rehired under pressure from their fellow workers.

China demanded reparations. The United States government paid the Chinese government one hundred forty-seven thousand dollars, a settlement framed as humanitarian rather than as an admission of legal liability, which absolved anyone of criminal responsibility for the dead.

Rock Springs has in recent years begun confronting this history directly, with memorials and public education efforts. But the massacre stands as one of the worst episodes of anti-Chinese violence in American history, born of the same forces, labor anxiety, racial scapegoating, corporate indifference, that would echo across the following century.