Main Street, Wyoming; 424; Chinese Massacre

Main Street, Wyoming is made possible in part by grants from Kennecott Energy, proud to be a part of Wyoming's future in the uranium exploration, mining and production industry, and by the Wyoming Council for the Humanities, enriching lives of Wyoming people through the study of Wyoming history, values and ideas. The success, or the dream, was "Let's go to Mei Guo.". Mei Guo means beautiful country in Chinese. Chinese. Cantonese has a different word, but Mandarin is Mei Guo - that's what the United States is literally translated as Mei Guo. So they said "Let's go to Mei Guo - beautiful country, or Old Golden Mountain, and in some ways that fulfilled a Buddhist concept of one of the seven or eight holy mountains of China. And here, we'll be able to attain our dream. So by coming to Old Golden Mountain, they came to land to them that was pure in the form of presenting opportunity and also a land without ghosts. They have a word for ghost - it's called gaoss, g-a-o-s-s. Sure, there's been 10,000 years of people living in - in the, uh, United States. The prehistoric inhabitants all the way up to the present, they died and they were ghosts if you believe in ghosts here.

But to the Chinese, the only true gaoss that could haunt them were Chinese ghosts, or Chinese gaoss, so they came to a land without ghosts. They came to a land that provided opportunity and they came to a land that was a beautiful place. [theme music plays] It gets only a brief paragraph in U.S. history textbooks. 28 people died on September 2nd 1885 when white miners went on a rampage through Rock Springs Chinatown, shooting, looting and burning. Only a brief paragraph - enough to teach a brief lesson about racism and labor strife. But it doesn't tell you anything about who

these people were, or why they're gone now, leaving only traces behind. The primary source of immigration, or the primary jump-off point, is southern China. And a lot of historians have said Guangdong Province, which most of us know as Canton. Canton is now called Guangzhou, but it's on the Pearl River in China. Um, the reason that they would come from history is that there is a shipping industry that's developed. The British have opened the ports in 1832 as a result of the opium wars, the ports are open in southern China, so they're the people who have access to foreign ships earliest, they're the people that are eventually sold out as laborers earliest. But what is the push factor? The push factor some people think is the Taiping Rebellion of the 1850s, 1860s. Some historians call this the worst civil war in the 19th century. Uh, we had in our country over 600,000 people die as combatants in, you know, in the civil war - I think that's the right figure. In China, the combat deaths, or the deaths in association with the Taiping Rebellion are in excess of a million people. The disruption, the social

disruption, the decadency of the Qing emperors, the fact that there is some impoverishment. Uh, some people say there's famine in southern China. That pushed people - that pushes people out. But I think more than anything is there is limited opportunity. Your chance of climbing up a social ladder does not exist in the 1850 China or the 1860 China that most of these Chinese people leave. The United States is the point of opportunity. They can improve their plight in life by leaving, not by staying. And oftentimes, people that immigrate to another country are not the poorest because you need a certain amount of money - you can sell your labor but you have to also have something to bring with you. And you might be an indentured servant when you come to the United States, but usually those people are upwardly mobily-minded and they're not from the poorest classes and definitely if you're starving to death, you can't board a boat. You might fear starvation and you might think that that could happen in your village, that might be a driving factor, but it's a complicated historical question as to how great the famine was and what impetus that had in the people coming to the

United States. What was there in south-west Wyoming in the way of labor to keep these industries going? See, that's the - that's the important thing is there was no labor. Labor had to be imported. So you have vast resources and some of the early explorers note that, especially U.S. Army, uh, topographic engineer, you know, the U.S. Army Corps of Topographical Engineers knows that very specifically. Rich resources, they said you need to have transportation and have people, so immediately have a boom scenario, so you have to bring in laborers. How are you going to get those laborers? Where are those laborers going to come from? A lot of people in the East are gainfully employed in the new factory systems that are burgeoning. You have Southerners that are displaced by the Civil War - they might be seeking employment, but many of those don't want to work in the coal mines. They might want to work on the railroad but they don't want to work in the coal mines. If they work for the railroad, they generally want to work on the rolling stock. They don't want to do repair work. So where are you going to find people to do the work that nobody else wants to do? Kind of like what we have today in restaurants, the washing dishes. You find those from immigrants and these immigrants, in this case, happen to be Chinese and they begin to be the predominant source of raw

labor within south-west Wyoming. So the economy in south-west Wyoming is based on actually five tiers. And those tiers are transportation - Union Pacific Railroad, mining - extraction of coal, ranching - which is a theme that goes all the way back to 1843, you have tourism - and I know that seems odd but people passing through on the continental railroad to see what the Transcontinental Railroad is like. Frenchmen leave records of this town. Everybody leaves records that pass through on the Transcontinental Railroad, even if it's nothing more than passing lights in the desert. And then, finally, you have people working in merchandising. The Chinese conserve those people in merchandising. They can become merchants themselves or work in laundries. They can open their own stores, eventually. They serve as merchandisers. They serve in the warehousing business, their service industry. They also serve tourists and they also serve the Chinese miners themselves. So you have a five-tiered economy that's pretty much intact today. Well, you realize that the - there was a feeling all over the West about the Chinese that they'd already excluded the Chinese from coming from China. And there was this feel - this prejudice all through the West.

There were riots all over, uh, various sections, like the one that - that broke out in Rock Springs, broke out over an assignment in the mine. They had changed the foreman for that day and they had to sign the mine first, the Chinese, and then they gave the thing back to the white man, or Caucasians, and when they came in - when the Chinese came back, a fight ensued and that precipated everyone's leaving the mine and the group of miners saying that they were going to run the Chinese out if they were, uh, not going to put up with them. Now, who the people were, there were - there are some discussions that some of the, uh, former union organization started the mine but, uh, there also was - was the - was the prejudice in the community. You have to look back at this - at the people who lived here and, uh, realize

that some of them came from the South and, uh, there was a sort of a prejudice about the black, although some black miners were here. Then, these other people were immigrants who came in. And, of course, other Americans who came in. And, of course, they wanted to protect their job and have their job. I mean, it - it was a difficult time working in the mine. And so, when the fights started and they proceeded to tell the Chinese to get out. In Wyoming history, there are some things that are often written about. The Chinese massacre of September 2nd 1885 is one of those events that has been written about ever since 1885. In 1886, the Union Pacific came out with an official history of the Chinese massacre. It was company sponsored. Uh, the Chinese consulate came out with a draft of what occurred here in 1885. The U.S.

government investigated. The U.S. Army investigated. The newspaper reporters for The Rock Springs, um, uh, newspaper here at the time - Rock Springs Independent, I believe it was - reported on it. All the papers throughout the United States - the New York Times, Leslie's Illustrated, Harper's Weekly - they reported on this event. Because it's been so often reported on, there is a lot of different opinions about what occurred on September 2nd 1885. The events people pretty much concur upon. They translate in several different forms. But early in the morning, uh, two miners went to number six mine which is north of Western Wyoming College, north of Interstate 80. And they found Chinamen working in their room. Now, what had happened is these miners had prepared this room to make money. You were paid by the ton that you had extracted. They go down there and find these Chinese miners ready to make extra money. Foremans were often bribed, given money, so that a person could get the best room. And when these two white miners find these Chinese miners working with a, you know, working their area in the mine, they attacked him.

Some people say that the Chinese men attacked them with a needle. A needle is not like a sewing needle but a needle is what's used to push back dynamite tubes and it's about this long, it's about a yard long, or maybe even a little longer. So the fight spilled over and they closed down number six mine, which was a mistake in retrospect. The miners in number six went to drinking and other miners from the other mines heard the same thing. The Chinese miners retreated to Chinatown, that was on the north side of town. In the afternoon - and I think that the anti-Chinese sentiment had been building up for years. In the afternoon, they decided they were going to attack Chinatown and there was folklore as to what they were going to accomplish. People whose grandfathers and grandmothers - literally grandmothers - who were involved in this event say that they were going to go take the money that the Chinese had earned and hid in the floors of their houses and take back the money that they had lost by the Chinese working in the mines here. In the process, 28 Chinese men were killed and a town was burned to the ground.

Let's talk about the events of the massacre itself. Chinese were separated from the rest of the town. They were part of the corporate limits of - of Rock Springs but it was called by the locals Chinatown. The miners line up on Bitter Creek, across Bitter Creek, and they cut off exits outside of town. They begin to fire into the buildings and they begin to light the houses on fire. There was an estimated 500 Chinas - Chinese residents and they burned the houses to the ground. The houses had these basements where people lived. They had cut these underneath the floor. A lot of them are trapped inside those floors, and suffocated. But many of them flee over what's called Burning Mountain. Now, that's a problem in the record. Which way did they run? Did they run north? Did they run south? Because the miners were coming from the south across Bitter Creek. It's more than likely that they ran north up over the ridge towards their cemetery. The cemetery sits near where the old fairgrounds is. At that point, they cross the ridge. Some of them run to the east, some of them run to the west. The reason that they do is that Union Pacific was their employer and they

had gotten the idea if they could wave down a train, that they could get a train and go to some safe haven. That safe haven was Evanston. As the Chinese fled, there was a melee that developed and some of the accounts that the Chinese give state specifically that it wasn't just men that were shooting at the Chinese, but it was women that were shooting at the Chinese, and they could name the woman, they could point out the woman. And it's interesting they don't put her name in the record but they could point out the woman who'd been shooting at him that had - had, uh, killed some of the Chinese men inside of town. They slaughtered their pigs, they slaughtered everything at the head. It was just mass destruction. It became mayhem. How many coins they ever got out of the house is not known. We do know that the Chinese fled. They've wrapped their coins in their bandanas and ran as fast as they could. Their wealth that they had stashed away, they tried to take. But of course, if you were killed in the process, or if your house was one of the - on the frontline, there was no way to get anything out of there. The massacre was, in a sense, material for the tabloids. A mob out of control, hatred and atrocities. But there's another story that doesn't get told. What were the people like who were

attacked? How did they live? Where did they live? Violence against people is easier when they are dehumanized. We could find no descendants of Chinatown's 1885 residents, so we ask Dudley Gardner about them. Well since the Chinese didn't leave written records that are readily available and since a lot of those records were sent back to Guangdong Province, we don't have access to what they thought. The archeological record provides insights into how they thought and how they acted. In fact, it's the only record that we have in some cases of illiterate Chinese. So we know how well they live, we know how wealthy they become, we know what they were eating, we know, uh, how much money they accrued in some cases. So we can take the material culture remains that they left, literally the matter that they left on the ground, and find out how well they were doing here. If you import a Tang Dynasty vase or Ming Dynasty vase, you have some money. Even if it's - it's a heirloom, that thing is worth some money here. The Qing Dynasty that we find here are worth quite a bit now, of course, but they were worth even as much back then - that was their source - source of exchange. Uh, it's

intriguing to me that they would continue bringing Chinese coins over here and use them as a source of exchange between one another. That shows, uh, a defiance of the American currency, you know? Why not use legal tender? It's intriguing. When the Chinese would bring out the famous dragon on New Year's, did the whole community participate? The Chinese did celebrate and they invited the people, the community - in fact, the - the pictures were there - show the people coming down and celebrating with the Chinese on their various - various holidays. Previous to that time, the time that they had a Joss House in Rock Springs, they would go to Evanson to celebrate. Evanson was the big Joss House and, uh, the Chinese were very, uh, cordial to the - to the people when they had their celebration. They also, I understand, sometime brought the dragon out when they had other what you would call American celebrations. The dragon supposedly was shipped out on the train

and sent to, uh, San Fran - to San Francisco. A little boy standing there asked for a souvenir and one of them took off the eyes and gave them to him and he had them - the - well, he - they were at the house until he died, and we got them from the house - they were an old family in Rock Springs. The way that you can prevent culture shock from taking place is to bring vestiges of your old culture with you to - to your new culture and try to maintain a semblance of order and - and norms. For example, as a child, you're given certain taste for food that you carry with you through your whole life. So the Chinese would eat pretty much like they had eaten in - in China. Well, that requires preparation in certain forms and fashion. It requires cooking in woks. It requires using a little bit of grease under a low amount of heat because fuel is premium in China for preparing your food. Small amounts of meats are needed. But what they need, more than anything, is fish. Now, you can get fish out of the Green River, but not necessarily all the fish that they want, so they begin to import. They begin

to import rice bowls - some that they had brought with them, but they increased the amount of rice bowls. They beginning import fish. They begin to raise hogs - pork is very important in the Chinese diet. They can feed the hogs the scraps that they have. The hogs do fairly well here and that's one thing that we do know that they are hog - they are raising hogs in Sweetwater County in the 1880s. Archaeological excavations conducted by Western Wyoming College, with Steve Creasman and Kevin Thompson in charge of those, uh, have shown exactly the amount of meat that they were consuming. They really were living fairly well. Their diet appears to be fairly stable. Now, the diet that we have is reflective of the late 19th century, early 20th, but you can extrapolate this back, and some of the historical records, it shows the same thing. They also bring with them certain types of trades and crafts - shoemaking, uh, laundering craft. They substitute - that's, you know, you don't make much money being laundered - launderer, but they - you substitute that for working in a mine. They maintain their culture, they maintain their religion here,

and their religion is what really is intriguing. They have Joss houses. They have a Joss house here in Rock Springs, they have a Joss house in Evanston. The Joss house in Evanston has been restored. This Joss house here had a resident priest, uh, which, according to the - you went to records, you went to county courthouse, uh, you went to census records, also appears to be the. But the priest - What was his function? It was to leave sacrifices or offerings for the dead. So they bring their religion with them. But the - the Chinese have a different way of worshipping God than we do. They blended their religions. Missionaries would actually come and missionize the Rock Springs Chinatown. And there are photographs of missionaries coming to convert the Chinese to Christianity. Of course, they would convert but they never gave up their older beliefs. So that was one way of maintaining their, uh, cultural norms by following their older religious beliefs here in - in Sweetwater County. So you see it in several forms - you see it in their diet, you see it in their religion, and you see it

in their cultural traditions such as the Chinese New Year. [Chinese-style music plays] When you talk about Asian cultures, you always have to look at the concept that they do believe their culture is superior. But that's not unnatural. We believe our culture is superior.

Every culture believes that their culture is superior. It becomes part of who they are. The Zuni believe that they're superior. They also believe - the Zuni Indians believe - they occupy the center of the universe. And the Hopi do the same thing - that they're the keepers of the underworld, and that the underworld has come up above in their mesas. The Chinese - the same thing. They must go back. They must go back. There is a sense of superiority in this concept, that our culture is superior. We don't want to stay here with you da bizis. Da bizi in Chinese means long nose foreign devil. And I'm told that I say that fairly well in Mandarin. But they see outsiders that way. When you go to China, you are a waiguo ren. A ren - and I'm saying this poorly in Mandarin - but ren is people. Waiguo ren is an outside person who comes there. The interesting thing about the Chinese, they are waiguo rens in Mei Guo. How do they react? How do they become outsiders in another country? They preserve their culture. They are asserting power and they are asserting themselves very vocally - maybe not

by saying anything to the miners in Sweetwater County, maybe not by articulating it to the other people living within the community, but they are asserting themselves. They're saying "I am Chinese. I'm proud of my heritage. I will contribute to this community. I'll contribute to my community at home." Death is something that's universal, so everybody's definition of death and what a massacre is - is a different definition. The Chinese were most appalled by who would do this. Who would kill them? The Americans who described the events described the scream of pigs and the burning bodies and the charred remains of individuals that were found there. The Chinese focus more on the person that was lost in the people involved in the group. And it shows a great difference between American culture, or English culture, and Chinese culture. Uh, the charred remains of individuals is what the investigators focused on, and the fact that people had been shot in the back, and the fact that, uh, people had suffocated in the houses and the descriptions of how

that was and how that one man when he cried, when his house was set on fire, come running out and upon leaving the house, they shot in cold blood as he exited the home. When the Chinese talk about it, they talk about it in the same form but in a more sterile sense. Death is something that they expected. Um, in their description of the event, they complain more about the group that caused the problem. The Americans discussed individuals and they described the conditions of those individuals as to what they found. The Chinese massacre of 1885 briefly put Rock Springs and Bitter Creek in the world's eye. But the sensational news reports didn't really tell the whole story. There was no trial. Nobody was ever brought to justice. And now, over a century later, Rock Springs historian Dudley Gardner has reopened the investigation. My mission in history is to take people who don't have the ability to write about themselves and give their labors voice - whether it be women in the 19th century who

were never sent to school and couldn't write, or whether it be Chinese who are - are illiterate in English, maybe could write Chinese - but people that didn't have a voice, my - my goal is to give voice and part of that's because my dad never finished high school, and he was a truck driver and everybody knows that everything you get is one time or another handled by a truck. And I used to always hear people say "Well, that what he does is not important, you know. It's not that big a deal." Of course, as a kid, that begins to infiltrate. As a historian, I want people to know about people that don't have a voice - whether it be a minority or an illiterate person or person working at the bottom of a coal mine - that's what my purpose is as a historian, is to give them voice. If you were to try to draw lessons for today from the events of 1885, what would they be? I always lie - like to look at the dynamics of a riot. OK, how do riots build? OK, here we have this thing that we can see this is how this riot builds. OK, what are this - what are the, uh, volatile ingredients of this riot? Misunderstanding, poor communication, um, the accelerant of alcohol, of course, in this case. And - and, of course, that's an obvious one that- that accelerant of

alcohol. Um, what are the tensions that are - are occurring? Differential in wealth or perceived differential in wealth. That really, uh, uh, troubles me about this time because technically, the white miners were as rich as the Chinese miners but there was a perceived differential. Let's storm these buildings, let's take the money that rightly - rightly should belong to us. So they're doing exactly what they did in L.A. So you can take the lessons of what occurs here when they burn the buildings in L.A, what are they doing? Are they burning a symbol? Are they burning a building? Or are they punishing the people for the Rodney King verdict? The same thing here. What are they doing? Are they burning a symbol of Union Pacific corporate power? Are they burning the building of a Chinese immigrant? What are they doing when they burn down those buildings? So you can apply those lessons of the past to the present and find out what people will do, what they're willing to do, why they're willing to aband - abandon normal social norms, um, and riot. Why do they suddenly - peaceful, law-abiding citizens - seem so prone to want to burn something to the ground? And, in this case, kill Chinese

residents. Now the one thing about this, about the Chinese massacre, if there's only 28 killed and there's 5,000 residents, there's a question that needs to be asked. Were they bent on killing the Chinese, or driving them out? You've been in the education field here. How do they teach this story in the local schools? Well, it - it was taught in the history books. It - it was taught on that, uh, you know, in that one paragraph, really, uh, with - with that, but there were so many other things in American history that you - you kind of, uh, skipped over. The - the interesting part of that was, uh, that after they gave the Chinese the rep - the payback for the - for the - for the massacre, the - the payment was used for scholarships for Chinese students. Are there any remnants of the Chinese from that era in the form of burial remains? No, the burials were all, uh, disinterred. Uh, they believe in - in Chinese culture that you have to be buried in your homeland. If you're not, you become a spirit and it's

essential. So this sounds macabre but what they would do was burying on the ridges behind us up here, they would very bury them among the ridges in shallow graves, line them with stone, and then the ants and the beetles, uh, would remove the flesh. And literally, they exhumed those bodies, scraped off the flesh, put them in vases, and sent them back to China to be interred in a proper form. They came to a land of no ghosts, and then when they took the bodies away, there would be no ancestral ghosts left in this land. So in essence, it would be perpetual land without ghosts until a new generation came that had no desire to go back to mainland China. And I always like what they call the Chinese in Beijing. Uh, the diplomats call anybody that lives in Rock Springs Overseas Chinese. They're still Zhong guo rens. They just haven't seen the light and come back. So it's still a land without ghosts, in some ways. [Chinese-style music plays] [theme music plays]

[music continues] Main Street, Wyoming is made possible in part by grants from Kennecott Energy, proud to be a part of Wyoming's future in the uranium exploration, mining and production industry, and by the Wyoming Council for the Humanities, enriching lives of Wyoming people through the study of Wyoming history, values and ideas.