The Rock Springs Massacre

On September second, eighteen eighty-five, a white mob attacked the Chinese immigrant neighborhood of Rock Springs, Wyoming Territory, killing at least twenty-eight people, wounding fifteen, and burning seventy-nine homes to the ground. It was one of the deadliest acts of anti-Chinese violence in American history. Rock Springs was a Union Pacific coal town.

The railroad had recruited Chinese workers in the eighteen seventies, initially to break a labor action by white miners and later because they would work for lower wages. By eighteen eighty-five roughly a third of the mine's workforce was Chinese, most of them living in a segregated neighborhood on the west side of Bitter Creek. The immediate trigger was a dispute over mine assignments in Number Six Mine on the morning of September second.

A fight broke out underground and spread above ground. White miners armed themselves and moved through the Chinese quarter. The killing and burning lasted several hours.

The Chinese survivors fled into the desert and were found days later, many suffering from exposure and injury. Sixteen men were arrested. None were indicted.

A grand jury declined to return charges, stating that insufficient evidence existed to identify individual perpetrators, a verdict widely understood as a refusal to act. The federal government sent troops to restore order and eventually pressured the Union Pacific to allow the surviving Chinese workers to return to their jobs. The Chinese community was never compensated.

The United States government paid the Chinese government roughly one hundred forty seven thousand dollars as an indemnity, explicitly denying that the payment constituted any legal liability. The event accelerated the passage of strengthened Chinese exclusion legislation and cast a long shadow over Wyoming's labor history. It is documented in detail at the Rock Springs Historical Museum and in the Wyoming State Archives.