Arvin Chin was born in New York City, but grew up visiting his mother’s hometown of Rock Springs every few years.
The retired anesthesiologist, who served in the Air Force, learned through family stories about a massacre that roiled the southwestern Wyoming town over a century ago. He knew his ancestors fled and survived the violence, but never expected to return to the site where it happened with other descendants.
The massacre, Chin said, “was not something that we dwelt on.”
Chin was one of hundreds gathered at a park in the middle of Rock Springs over Labor Day weekend for the 140th anniversary of the Rock Springs Chinese Massacre.
On Sept. 2, 1885, an outburst of violence in Union Pacific coal mines transformed into a white mob rioting and killing 28 Chinese coal miners and injuring 15. To this day, the massacre is one of the deadliest incidents of anti-Chinese violence in U.S. history.
Early on the last morning of a week of commemoration events, hundreds gathered around a cloth-covered monument for the unveiling of the town’s newest centerpiece. A small plaque affixed to a boulder, listing the 28 Chinese killed, already exists across the street, but on a grassy median, turned away from the road, making it easy to miss.
Following a performance of the national anthem and a series of speeches from local museum spokespersons, the event organizers tore the cloth away to reveal the bronze casting of a much more visible statue. At seven-feet tall, it depicts a distraught Chinese coal miner emerging from the ruins of the burned-down Chinatown.
Paying tribute to his home country, he holds the torn remnants of a ceremonial dragon flag in his arms. At his feet lie shattered rice bowls and broken lanterns.
Descendants uncover a buried past
Among descendants and attendees, Chin was unique in knowing this history. Most only learned recently, as was the case for event organizers Grace and Ricky Leo. The couple grew up in Rock Springs and the latter is a descendant of the survivors.
Robert Lew has a similar experience. Born in Idaho Falls and raised in California, he knew that his father grew up an orphan in Rock Springs. But he didn’t know that his family’s Wyoming ties spanned generations until a Grinnell College research team studying the massacre began connecting descendants.
“I am now 75 years old,” Lew said. “In terms of Rock Springs with my father, I’ve known most of my life. But, in terms of my great-grandfather in 1885, [surviving] the massacre, that was only two or three weeks ago.”
His daughter, Beth Lew-Williams, is an esteemed scholar of Chinese-American history and together the two learned of their family’s ties to the massacre.
Iowa-based professor Laura Ng, of Grinnell College, teamed up with Western Wyoming Community College professor emeritus Dudley Gardner, a longtime Rock Springs resident who has studied the massacre since he moved to town in the 1980s. The two spent the summer digging for the Chinatown “burn layer,” bringing in descendants as helpers, to better understand the lives of the Chinese who made homes in Rock Springs and stayed, often in the face of the violence that targeted them.
Just a few decades ago, no one openly talked about the massacre. Now, it’s covered in the school curriculum.
Those who are long past school age are also dwelling more on the dark day in the town’s past, and the resilience that emerged in the wake of it. That’s in large part thanks to Ng and Gardner’s efforts to resurface this past.
Chin said he’s glad to see awareness improving with time.
“The past,” he said, “I don’t think that’ll be repeated.”
Building a collective memory of the massacre is an ongoing process, according to Mayor Max Mickelson.
“If you go back one generation, nobody talked about it at all,” Mickelson said, including when the event organizers, the Leos, attended Rock Springs High School.
Then and now: a town of migrants
Historians say the violence stemmed from a labor dispute over who had the best access to the most lucrative work sites in the nearby coal mines.
The mob of white miners, many of them also migrants, felt exploited by Union Pacific, which had effectively turned Rock Springs into a company town. Gardner said the Chinese were hesitant to join a strike, likely because they lacked protections from a union they could not join, adding fuel to the white mob’s fire. Instead, they put trust in the company that paid them and provided housing.
“There were reasons, but there’s no justification [for] the riot,” Gardner said. “How do you forgive a person that’s just killed people randomly, wantonly, just to get their money?”
By the time the mob violence died down, only one building was left standing in the looted Chinatown. Several hundred survivors sought refuge more than a hundred miles away in Evanston’s Chinese quarter, Gardner added. No members of the mob, though widely known, were indicted.
Despite this, many Chinese stayed in Rock Springs, with some returning home four decades later, on their own terms, Gardner added. Why they chose to stay, in the face of violence, is a conundrum he hopes to answer.
In the years following the massacre, Rock Springs would go on to become one of the most diverse towns in the West, earning the moniker “Home of 56 Nationalities.”
That was no accident, Mickelson said, reflecting on his town’s journey as the weekend wound down.
“We’ve done fairly well, given my understanding of why we have so many different nationalities,” Mickelson said. “The coal company [Union Pacific] wanted to make sure that people couldn’t unionize. If you bring in folks who can’t speak to each other, that really breaks down organizing.”
Mickelson, whose town still relies on migrant labor, said Rock Springs has come a long way. Since 1924, the town has held an annual “International Day” festival embracing its immigrant heritage.
But that heritage, Mickelson said, is sometimes selectively celebrated, as immigrants are still targets. Under a second Trump administration, Sweetwater County, home to Rock Springs, has upped its commitment with Immigration and Customs Enforcement with some of the most robust police partnerships in the country. In recent months, Governor Mark Gordon activated the Wyoming National Guard to work with ICE, as did the state highway patrol.
“As someone who is a descendant of immigrants that came to this country from Europe, I find it very frustrating that as a country we have decided to take an anti-immigrant stance,” Mickelson said. His own ancestors also followed the coal to Rock Springs, working in the mines with the Chinese as early as the 1870s.
Mickelson is a self-described “old-school” Republican. He’s seen his party steer farther away from more traditional values, with the Wyoming House becoming the country’s first majority far-right Freedom Caucus. The bloc’s No. 2 platform plank is “immigration accountability.”
The mayor often feels alone critiquing the current immigration system, which he considers “broken,” with its convoluted paths to citizenship. He spoke of his friends who migrated to Rock Springs as young children and have since become citizens.
“We don’t love America any more than those people,” Mickelson said. “They worked really hard to get here.”
There are more important issues to focus on, he said.
“In a community on I-80 that has fairly substantial issues with drug trafficking, human trafficking, we have real problem areas where those resources would be better put than tracking down somebody who is here working, putting up stucco,” Mickelson said.
Since inauguration, the Trump administration has ramped up pressure on historical institutions, such as the Smithsonian and the national parks, urging them to present history that paints the country — especially its violent past — in a more positive light.
In Rock Springs, the town’s growing acknowledgement stands in contrast.
Behind the new statue, an archaeological dig has been underway this summer at the site of the former Chinese quarter. Minutes after the ceremony, Ng and Gardner are already back in the ground, searching for artifacts from the burned-down Chinatown and answering questions from attendees before they leave town.
Both lament that those who have learned about the massacre might miss the federal immigration policies that stirred anti-Chinese racism beforehand, likely fanning some of the flames that led to the mob violence.
It’s not a coincidence that most of the violence followed the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which prohibited Chinese immigration, Gardner said.
“We need real firm immigration policy that’s both a mixture of humanity and a mixture of enforcement,” Gardner said, adding that it doesn’t exist now, nor in the 1880s. “Why in the world do we keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again?”
