When Grinnell College archaeology researcher Laura Ng left Rock Springs last year, it was on a cliffhanger.
Ng and her students from Grinnell, Iowa, had spent two weeks excavating under the future site of a sculpture called “Requiem” that will mark the place where the 1885 Rock Springs massacre happened in the town’s Chinatown district.
The dig was to ensure the statue wouldn’t be burying any important cultural artifacts.
After that, she and her students started searching for the burn layer they knew had been left behind when rioters set fire to homes in Chinatown, burning it to the ground, sometimes with living occupants trapped inside.
At first, Ng thought they weren’t going to find the burn layer, but on the last day they broke through.
A melted glass jar was the first clue. Then an intact pig’s jaw. Finally, they found the burnt roof of a flattened home.
“We had found evidence of structures before that,” Ng told Cowboy State Daily. “But they weren’t burnt. They had green paint on them.”
Ng believes those likely came from the Chinatown that historical records indicate was built on top of the old Chinatown within seven days of the massacre.
Those were interesting, but finding the burn layer was the real gold to Ng and her researchers.
To find it, with one day left, was exciting. But it also meant they had no time left, so all she and her students could do was protect their find from the incoming Wyoming winter.
They wrapped the burnt timbers in aluminum foil with care, tossed dirt back into the holes they’d just made and secured everything with gardening tarps.
Expected Finds, Unexpected Truths
The mysteries hiding in the burn layer were still there when Ng and her students returned this summer.
So far, there’s been nothing particularly unexpected.
And yet, all are clues to the mysteries that surround the 1885 Rock Springs massacre that history has left for them to solve — burnt beams and broken shards, animal bones and broken doorknobs.
“The burnt beams will hopefully get analyzed with what we call dendrochronology, to get an exact time when the house was built,” Ng said.
Trash and rubbish are mixed into the remains of the burnt building they have uncovered, which is consistent with what Ng knows about the history of the site.
“Buildings were falling and collapsing during this arson fire,” she said. “And we have this theory that the whole Chinatown is completely destroyed and then kind of flattened.”
As it was flattened for the rebuild, which took place right after the massacre, nearby trash was scraped into the existing flattened structures without regard for future archaeologists and their work.
“We found animal bones, which provide information about diet and what people ate,” Ng said. “And we found a lot of bones — pig bones and fish bones, which, those are two kinds of favorite foods of Chinese immigrants.
“But we also find American butchered bones, like T-bone steak.”
There’s also a mixture of broken pottery. Broken rice bowls and other Chinese ceramics, along with fragmented white ceramics that were manufactured in America and Europe, as well as broken glass from alcohol bottles.
It all suggests the Chinese were eating a mixture of traditional and American foods, Ng said, as well as using both Chinese and American dinnerware.
It’s All Broken
Everything Ng and her students are finding at the site is broken, she added.
“I don’t want bottle diggers to come thinking they’re going to find like whole bottles or anything like that,” Ng said. “There’s no jewelry, there’s nothing valuable, monetarily. It’s all broken stuff.”
Whatever residents themselves didn’t salvage was likely flattened so that the rebuilding could begin.
But the “broken stuff” is still valuable to Ng, who specializes in studying the migration of Chinese to America in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
For her, refuse piles are full of clues about the daily lives of Chinese immigrants in America. And a thin, pancaked layer of what used to be a building, but is now black charcoal, is like gold.
“We have this system where. If you give me a small shard, I can tell you what kind of vessel it is and whether it is Chinese,” she said. “So, as long as we can kind of count how many rice bowls or how many Euro-American plates there were, then that gives us an idea of what does the dining look like for a Chinese coal miner.”
What she’s found is that the miners were using white plates made in places like Indiana or England.
“White was the cheapest type of ceramic plate you could find at the time,” she said. “So, we’re not finding, like, a lot of highly decorated, expensive ceramics.”
In that way, the tiny shards of the past so painstakingly sifted from dirt by her students are putting into focus a much bigger picture.
“You can get an idea of their spending power,” Ng said. “And maybe they’re making good money, but they’re choosing to invest it in something else, like maybe they’re investing in a diet that’s more meat based.”
Ng isn’t confining her research to the digs, either.
She’s looking up descendants, gathering their stories, and she’s traveled to China to look at immigrant home villages.
“The reason I do that is because I know that a lot of the coal miners, and even the Chinatown merchants who had stores that sold goods to coal miners, were moving back and forth between the U.S. and China,” she said. “They were investing in their home villages.
“They were sending money back to build brand-new houses. They were sending money back to basically make the lives of their families better, their wives, their children in China.”
To do that, they would make visits periodically to their homeland.
“And it’s usually for like a year,” Ng said. “And then they come back here. So, they’re consuming things both in the U.S. and in the home village.”
That’s research she’s so far done for two Chinatowns in California and hopes to do for Rock Springs and Evanston as well.
The Gold Mountain
Gold is what initially drew many Chinese migrants to American shores — gold in California, which was also drawing European migrants West, along the Oregon and other trails.
“Gum Shan,” the Chinese called America, which means “gold mountain.”
The first Chinese immigrants landed in San Francisco in 1850, and there was even a public ceremony to welcome them at the time.
But the goodwill didn’t last long.
Racial violence erupted in the minefields, and before long, California’s highest court had ruled that Chinese testimony against white people was inadmissible in court.
Politicians wasted no time in following up on the rising tide of anti-Chinese sentiment among their constituents, and the tensions continued to mount throughout the 1870s, exacerbated by a significant economic downturn.
In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, barring more Chinese laborers from entering the country for the next decade. That would be extended twice more, in 1892 and again in 1922.
Strike Breakers
It’s against that backdrop of rising national tensions with Chinese people that the massacre in Rock Springs is set.
There were particular tensions in this town, which at the time had many nationalities in one town. Turmoil amongst the different nationalities wasn’t unheard of.
There were stories of riots that broke out, including one that local legends say was broken up by one of Wyoming’s most famous outlaws, Butch Cassidy.
The tensions were caused in part by pay cuts the company made to solve its financial difficulties. That was followed up with forcing miners to shop for food, clothes and tools only at the company’s own stores, where prices were quite high.
There were strikes about the wage cuts and strikes over the requirement to shop for overpriced goods at company stores.
In 1871, the company fired the strikers and hired Scandinavian miners instead. But the Scandinavians caught on quickly, and by 1875 there was yet another strike.
The company simply repeated the same tactic that had been building tensions among disparate nationalities, this time bringing in a Chinese workforce as strike-breakers.
Language, Cultural Barriers
The Chinese didn’t share any languages with Europeans. That didn’t help build any bridges between the new workers with the old.
Nor were tensions eased when the company would only hire about a third of its former European workforce back.
The Knights of Labor soon organized Union Pacific’s remaining European workers and encouraged them to walk off the job in 1884.
After that, Union Pacific managers in Rock Springs were told by Union Pacific executives to hire only Chinese.
Chinese workers were typically excluded from joining unions at the time, and walking off the job wasn’t something that appealed to them. They were in America to make a living and send money back home to families who were counting on them.
Threatening posters started to appear in many railroad towns in the Wyoming Territory, warning Chinese workers to leave.
Labor leader John L. Lewis in Denver also wrote two letters warning both Union Pacific and the company that had brought the Chinese immigrants to Rock Springs that violence was imminent over the “Chinese problem at Rock Springs.”
“For God’s sake, do what you can to avoid this calamity,” he wrote in the Union Pacific letter.
Burning Down Chinatown
On the morning of Sept. 2, 1885, a fight broke out between white and Chinese miners in the No. 6 mine in Rock Springs. A foreman broke up the fight, but that wasn’t the end of it.
Instead, the white miners gathered on the railroad tracks near the No. 6 mine, north of Chinatown, with hatchets and guns in hand. Meetings were held, and tensions continued to rise.
By 2 p.m., somewhere between 100 to 150 white men, mostly miners and railroad workers, were converging on Chinatown from two directions.
One group marched across a plank bridge over the Bitter Creek while another tromped down the railroad tracks. Each group left a few men behind them at bridges, with instructions to prevent any nonwhites from leaving.
Some of the men split off and took up a position near the No. 3 mine. That left Chinatown nearly surrounded.
Chinese men were pulled from their homes and shot, according to historical records, while others were shot in the street as they fled the mob.
Shacks and houses were looted and set on fire. The bodies of those who had been trapped inside were later found in some of those homes, burned alive.
Gunpowder And Wyoming Wind
Many of the miners stored their gunpowder in their homes. That led to loud explosions as these houses went up in flames. Eventually, that and the wind convinced at least some of the looters they should stop setting fires. Though later, other rioters would go back to Chinatown to finish the job.
When the dust settled, at least 28 Chinese were dead, according to a historical record that wasn’t necessarily focused on an accurate accounting.
A quote from the town’s newspaper captures the mood of the time.
“Today, for the first time in a good many years, there is not a Chinaman in Rock Springs,” an article about the incident said. “Nothing but heaps of smoking ruins mark the spot where Chinatown stood.”
Smoking ruins that smelled of human flesh. That was described by Gov. F. E. Warren when he arrived.
“The smell of burning human flesh was sickening and almost unendurable,” he wrote then in his journal. “And was plainly discernible for more than a mile along the railroad both east and west.”
It Was Insane
The fight wasn’t really an innocent misunderstanding gone wrong, as portrayed at the time.
“It was instigated,” Ng said. “It started as a fight in the coal mine, but it was pre-planned by two white coal miners. And then they got everyone, I mean, somehow, even women at the massacre were, like, looting Chinatown. It was insane.”
After the incident, 22 of the perpetrators were named, Ng added, and arrested.
“But they were never charged,” she said.
There would be no justice for their crimes, even as Chinatown’s rebuilding was already underway, and the Chinese were soon returned to a town full of jeering miners where the majority of public sentiment appeared to be squarely behind them and their actions.
Federal soldiers stayed in the area for a decade or so after that, Ng added, to protect the workers from further violence.
A Statue Called ‘Requiem’
This year will be the 140th anniversary of the massacre.
Rock Springs has planned a dedication ceremony on Sept. 2, as well as a bronze statue of a Chinese miner, called Requiem, created by artist David Alan Clark. It is to be placed in the area where Ng and her students worked last year.
Professor Emeritus Dudley Gardner, who has worked on excavating Chinatowns in Evanston and in Rock Springs, told Cowboy State Daily the work Ng has done is vital to clarifying the history of what actually happened before and after the 1885 massacre.
False narratives were spun about the massacre in the newspapers of the day, he suggested, narratives that don’t speak to the actual courage of the Chinese people who chose to return to the area.
“We see archaeology as the best way to give voice to people who have been kind of voiceless within and inside of history,” he said. “The initial thing we wanted was to write a history about people who didn’t have a written history in Wyoming from a personal standpoint.”
While historians have recognized the presence of Chinese in Wyoming, Gardner said, that history hasn’t always been fair, and has often drawn from what he described as false stereotypes.
“There hasn’t been recognition of their lives, day to day,” he said. “So, archaeology can contribute to that. For example, we’ve learned what their diet and life ways were,” he said. “We’ve learned how diverse their diet was, how they imported food — fish from the Caribbean, from California, from China and from Japan, too.”
First Unionized Chinese In Wyoming
The Chinese in Evanston were also growing their own crops, and selling the crops they didn’t need to eat, helping to diversify the diet of the entire area, Gardner added.
While people at the time would describe the Chinese as “filthy,” Gardner said, the archaeological record doesn’t at all support that description.
“We analyzed everything,” he said. “There were no parasites found in the individuals we looked at. No parasites were found inside the outhouses. They had a healthy diet. In fact, in some ways their diet was healthier than the other immigrants or other workers.”
They were also a people who showed true grit, Gardner said, as well as courage.
While the union spun a story, repeated in newspapers of the day, that the Chinese had been tricked into returning to Rock Springs, Gardner said a closer examination of historical records actually shows the Chinese had choices and were not just tricked into returning.
“The Chinese became unionized in 1907,” he said. “In fact, Rock Springs became the first place in the United States where Asians were allowed into the (union).”
A jawbone found at the Chinatown dig site in Rock Springs. (Courtesy Photo) 
Even tiny shards of animal bone or ceramics can yield important clues about day-to-day life. (Courtesy Photo) 
A shard of pottery found at the Chinatown dig site in Rock Springs. (Courtesy Photo)
Stories Of Courage
The story that impresses Ng the most from Rock Springs is the man who was shot in the back but didn’t die.
“He lived with that bullet in his back until he died,” she said. “And he didn’t die until he was an old man. He continued to work for the Union Pacific coal company, and they sent him back to China to retire. In 1925, he died in China with this bullet in his back from the massacre.”
She was able to track down a descendant of the massacre, a 91-year-old man who lived in Reno, Nevada.
“I interviewed him, and I asked him, ‘Why haven’t you like, why don’t we know about your family history and your story?’” Ng said. “And he’s like, ‘I didn’t think anyone would care.’”
That’s a narrative Ng hopes her research can help change, by connecting descendants with their history, and telling their untold stories.
“There are descendants today who don’t even know that there was a China town (in Rock Springs),” Ng said. “But because of our research we’ve been able to connect their families to this history.”
There are still many questions that remain, Ng said, and she hopes she’ll be able to find funding to return for more excavations of the Rock Springs Chinatown, to preserve its history for future generations.
Contact Renee Jean at renee@cowboystatedaily.com
Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.
