The whites-mostly Irish, Scandinavian, English and Welsh immigrants-lived in downtown Rock Springs. By 1885, there were nearly 600 Chinese and 300 white miners working the Rock Springs mines. After the 1875 strike, the Rock Springs mines started up again with about 150 Chinese miners and only 50 whites. Both times, federal troops came in, and the strikers lost the struggle. In 1875, after another strike, the company brought in additional Chinese miners ready to do the same. There were strikes about wage cuts, and more strikes about having to shop at the company stores.Īfter one such strike in 1871, the company fired the strikers and brought in Scandinavian miners ready to work for less and follow the rules. ![]() To keep profits higher, the miners and their families were required to shop for food, clothes and tools only at the company’s stores, where prices were high. When the Union Pacific got in financial trouble, the railroad saved money by cutting the miners’ pay. The trains ran on coal from rich Union Pacific coal mines in Carbon, Wyoming, near Medicine Bow in Rock Springs and in Almy, near Evanston. But the new law was full of loopholes, and the immigration question was as open-ended and confusing as ever.Ĭoal was the main reason the railroad followed the route it did across southern Wyoming. In 1882, Congress finally limited the number of Chinese immigrants. There was more violence-in Arizona and Nevada as well as California. “Sojourners,” they called themselves, meaning that returning to China was always part of the plan. The Chinese still kept coming to the United States. In October 1871, when a fight broke out in Los Angeles between rival gangs of Chinese criminals, whites poured into the neighborhood and murdered 23 Chinese. In July 1870, white workers in San Francisco led large street demonstrations making clear the Chinese weren’t wanted-and should not consider themselves safe. They began, in the eyes of white workers, taking jobs away from the white men. They could afford to accept jobs at a lower rate of pay. Because their families were not with them, the men did not mind living eight or nine to a room to save on rent. In 1869, the Central Pacific met the Union Pacific in Utah, and the nation had a transcontinental railroad. Out of the 12,000 Chinese who built the Central Pacific, about 1,200 died on the job. Blasting tunnels through hard rock, cutting ledges for the railroad along cliffs and mountainsides was dangerous, difficult work. When it came time to build the transcontinental railroad east from Sacramento, over the Sierra Nevada Mountains, Chinese workers, though physically small, proved to be reliable, strong and very tough. Soon Chinese men were working alongside whites at jobs from farming to cigar‑making. If they were careful, in a few years they could save a lifetime’s fortune to take back home.Ĭalifornia welcomed them, badly needing the work they could do. In California, they could earn 10 times as much as they could earn in China. The boxcar doors rumbled open on a night in September 1885, but there were Chinese miners in the United States at least since the California Gold Rush in 1849. ![]() Until new houses could be built, they would be living in the boxcars. “angled and decomposed,” the Chinese miners reported later to a Chinese diplomat in New York, the bodies “were being eaten by dogs and hogs.”Īnd now the coal company, owned by the Union Pacific Railroad, expected the miners to bury their dead, put the memories of this abomination behind them and go back to work. These were bodies of their friends, sons, fathers, brothers and cousins, murdered by a mob of white coal miners. Some had been buried by the coal company, but these had not. Not that many-perhaps a dozen two dozen at the most. Even more horrifying, there still were bodies in what had been Chinatown’s streets. Clambering out of the cars and onto the railroad tracks, they saw that little was left of the homes they fled in panic a week before. They were right back in Rock Springs, Wyoming. Outside it was after sundown, and dark, but still the men knew immediately where they were. Then they stopped, and the sound of the boxcar doors being slid open came rumbling down the train. The 600 Chinese coal miners had been traveling all day - toward San Francisco, they had been told, and safety. Mixed with it was a sicker, sweeter smell - the smell of dead things that had started to decay. Perhaps the odor of burnt things gave the men some idea of what they were about to see.
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