Violence Against Chinese Immigrants: The Massacres History Forgot

Anti-Chinese violence in the American West was organized, widespread, and almost entirely unprosecuted — and it was happening during the same decades that produced the outlaw legends Americans celebrate. On September 2, 1885, a mob of approximately 150 white miners attacked the Chinese community in Rock Springs, Wyoming Territory — then a coal mining town on the Union Pacific Railroad. They killed 28 Chinese miners, wounded 15, and drove 550 more from their homes into the surrounding desert. They burned 79 houses in the Chinese quarter to the ground. Federal troops arrived two days later and escorted the displaced miners back to Rock Springs. No one was prosecuted. The U.S. government paid $147,748 in compensation to the Chinese government under diplomatic pressure — not to the survivors or the families of the dead, but to the Chinese government, as a diplomatic settlement between states.^1^

The Rock Springs Massacre is one of the largest acts of anti-Chinese violence in American history and one of the least-known events in the standard account of the American West.

Who the Chinese Miners Were and Why They Were Targeted

Chinese immigration to the United States began in significant numbers during the California Gold Rush, with approximately 25,000 Chinese immigrants arriving in California between 1849 and 1853. By 1860, the Chinese population of California was approximately 35,000, primarily young men from Guangdong Province who intended to earn money and return home — a pattern called sojourning that was common among immigrant communities of the period.

The Central Pacific Railroad hired Chinese laborers in 1865 specifically because they were cheaper than white workers and because railroad superintendent Charles Crocker needed a workforce that wouldn’t strike. By 1867, approximately 10,000 to 12,000 Chinese workers — about 90 percent of the Central Pacific’s workforce — were laying track through the Sierra Nevada, blasting through granite with black powder in temperatures that killed workers regularly. They earned $26 to $35 per month, while white workers on the same project earned $35 and were provided food and shelter. The Chinese workers were not provided food and shelter.^2^

When the transcontinental railroad was completed at Promontory Summit, Utah on May 10, 1869, the famous photograph of the Golden Spike ceremony included the Union Pacific and Central Pacific executives and the hired theatrical crowd they assembled. The Chinese workers who had built most of the western half of the railroad were not in the photograph. After the railroads, Chinese workers moved into mining, agriculture, laundry, and domestic service — the sectors that white workers had vacated or that white workers were unavailable for. Each of these economic niches generated its own variety of anti-Chinese violence.

The Legal System Built to Make Violence Unpunishable

California’s Foreign Miners’ Tax, first enacted in 1850, was aimed at Mexican and other Latin American miners, but was applied to Chinese miners beginning in 1852. By 1870 the Chinese were paying approximately 25 to 50 percent of all taxes collected under the Foreign Miners’ Tax, despite making up a fraction of the California population. In 1854, the California Supreme Court ruled in People v. Hall that Chinese testimony was inadmissible in criminal cases against white defendants — extending a rule originally applied to Black and Native American testimony. The ruling meant that violence against Chinese immigrants was effectively unprosecutable.^3^

The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, signed by President Chester Arthur on May 6, 1882, prohibited Chinese laborers from entering the United States and made Chinese immigrants already here ineligible for citizenship. It was the first and only law in American history to exclude a specific national group by name. It remained in force, in various forms, until 1943, when China became an American ally in World War II and repeal became diplomatically necessary. The Exclusion Act did not reduce anti-Chinese violence — it intensified it by signaling that the federal government considered Chinese immigrants a problem to be removed rather than a population to be protected.

The Massacres That Barely Made the Record

The Rock Springs Massacre was preceded and followed by comparable events that received even less attention.

The Snake River Massacre, also called the Hells Canyon Massacre, occurred in May 1887 on the Snake River near the Oregon-Idaho border. A group of seven white horse thieves led by Bruce Evans killed between 10 and 34 Chinese gold miners who had been working a placer claim. The bodies were mutilated and thrown in the river. The Nez Perce County grand jury in Idaho identified the killers by name; no one was convicted. The precise death toll is unknown because no one made a systematic effort to count the dead.^4^

The Los Angeles Massacre of October 24, 1871, resulted in the lynching of approximately 17 to 20 Chinese men and boys — accounts vary — by a mob estimated at 500 people. It was triggered by a dispute within the Chinese community in which a white bystander, Robert Thompson, was accidentally shot. The mob attacked the entire Chinese quarter, hanging victims from wagon wheels and awnings and looting businesses. Eight men were eventually convicted of manslaughter, but the California Supreme Court overturned all convictions on a procedural technicality in 1872.

The Tacoma Method — the forced expulsion of Chinese residents from Tacoma, Washington on November 3, 1885 — was organized by the city’s mayor and leading citizens, who loaded the Chinese population onto wagons, transported them to a railroad junction outside the city, and left them there. Their homes and businesses were burned the following day. No one was prosecuted. Tacoma’s mayor later celebrated the expulsion in a speech at a national mayors’ conference, calling it a model for other cities to follow.^5^

Why the Victims Have No Names

The documentary record of anti-Chinese violence is incomplete in a specific way: the victims are systematically unnamed. Newspaper accounts of massacres describe “Chinese” killed, not individuals. Court records where they exist list victims as “a Chinaman” or by number. The diplomatic negotiations between the U.S. and Chinese governments that followed the Rock Springs Massacre were conducted entirely in terms of aggregate sums owed to an abstracted Chinese nation, not in terms of the 28 individuals killed and the 550 displaced.

Some names survive. Cheong Ah Sue, listed in Rock Springs court records as a witness to the attack. Lee Ah Pang, who testified before a federal commission investigating the massacre. Wong Ah Ling, whose claim for property destroyed was documented by the Chinese consul. These names appear in federal records and in the archives of the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, which collected testimony from survivors. The names of most victims do not survive, which is not an accident of documentation but a result of choices made about who was worth documenting.

What the Western Myth Required Leaving Out

The anti-Chinese violence of the 1870s and 1880s overlaps temporally and geographically with the outlaw era that American popular culture celebrates. Jesse James’s gang was active through the same decade that Chinese workers were building the railroads. The Deadwood gold rush of 1876 occurred in a territory whose Chinese residents were simultaneously targets of the violence documented here. Tombstone, Arizona in 1881 had a significant Chinese population that coexisted uneasily with the Anglo population whose conflicts dominate historical memory.

The outlaw myth that Americans tell about the West is almost exclusively a story about white men — as outlaws, as lawmen, as victims, as heroes. The Chinese miners killed at Rock Springs, at Snake River, at Los Angeles, in the camps of California and the railroads of Nevada were participants in the same historical moment. Their violence was larger in aggregate than the outlaw violence that built the legend. Their erasure from the Western myth is not neutral. It is the myth telling you what it considers worth remembering.

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Sources:

1. Pfaelzer, Jean. Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans. Random House, 2007.
2. Chang, Gordon H. and Shelley Fisher Fishkin, eds. The Chinese and the Iron Road: Building the Transcontinental Railroad. Stanford University Press, 2019.
3. McClain, Charles J. In Search of Equality: The Chinese Struggle Against Discrimination in Nineteenth-Century America. University of California Press, 1994.
4. Harden, Blaine. Murder at the Mission: A Frontier Killing, Its Legacy of Lies, and the Taking of the American West. Viking, 2021.
5. Lee, Erika. At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943. University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

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