That’s actually not a bad idea, I think, but no possible good could come from my saying so out loud, and I simply shake my head in mock disapproval.
Admiring the varied architecture as we drive through one neighborhood after another, I remark, “This really is an amazing town, all these different styles of homes and businesses.” Bob agrees and points out Finnish, Spanish, Tyrolean, and Slovenian influences, along with places where the Italian newspaper, French bakery, Mexican chili parlor, German meat market (where Butch Cassidy worked), Jewish grocery, Greek candy shop, and Chinese pharmacy all once stood.
“When did the initial wave of Chinese immigrants arrive in Rock Springs?” I ask Bob.
“Around 1875, though some came earlier. Union Pacific brought the Chinese in after they worked on the railroads.”
“Union Pacific owned the mines along with the railroads?”
“They owned everything,” Bob says. “There used to be a U.P. billboard near here that said, ‘We have what it takes—to take what you have.’ This was for one of their hauling companies, but it might as well have been their corporate philosophy. They controlled the town.”
Before the mid-1800s conjoined twins Eng and Chang Bunker were the first and only image most Americans had of Asian immigrants. Exhibited across the country by P. T. Barnum from 1830 to 1839 as “professional freaks,” the famous brothers from Siam acquired enough wealth to purchase 110 acres of land in North Carolina, complete with slaves, and settle down with their wives. They raised twenty-one children between them; Eng fathered eleven, Chang ten. Fiercely pro-South, they each sent a son to fight for the Confederacy.
Then, beginning in 1848, thousands of Chinese men crossed the Pacific and poured into California after carpenter John Marshall serendipitously noticed some “bright, yet malleable” rocks while constructing a sawmill for his employer, John Sutter. (Ironically neither man profited from the gold rush triggered by Marshall’s discovery.)
California governor John McDougall enthusiastically welcomed Chinese immigrants as the “most worthy of our newly-adopted citizens,” and the Pacific News lauded them for “their industry, their quietness, cheerfulness and the cleanliness of their personalities.” The Daily Alta predicted that “it may not be many years before the halls of Congress are graced by the presence of a long-queued Mandarin.” (About 150 years, to be precise; in 1999, Oregon’s First District elected David Wu, who sported a hip contemporary haircut and not the braided ponytail-like queue of his forefathers.)
Far from political podiums and newspaper editorial offices, however, resentments were already festering among white prospectors furious that they had to compete with “coolies,” as the laborers were called. By 1850 tens of thousands of Chinese immigrants were not only panning for gold but tending orchards and vineyards, laying railroad tracks, working as domestic servants, and toiling in factories, jute mills, and canneries.
As their numbers surged, so did anti-Chinese hostility. Easy to identify by dress and appearance, the Chinese were despised for their willingness to perform menial jobs at low wages and were mistrusted because, instead of assimilating, they withdrew into Chinatowns—mostly to seek refuge from the very people harassing them. “As I write, news comes that in broad daylight in San Francisco, some boys have stoned an inoffensive Chinaman to death,” a disgusted Mark Twain reported in Roughing It, “and that although a large crowd witnessed the shameful deed, no one interfered.”
Other writers were less sympathetic. “The Chinese are uncivilized, unclean and filthy beyond all conception, lustful and sensual in their dispositions,” New York Tribune publisher Horace Greeley editorialized in 1854. Legislators and judges began to codify this kind of bigotry that same year, when California’s supreme court ruled that no Chinese person could testify against a white defendant because the Chinese were “a race of people whom nature has marked as inferior, and who are incapable of progress or intellectual development beyond a certain point.” In 1870 the U.S. Congress passed the Naturalization Act, prohibiting the Chinese from gaining American citizenship.
Three years later the nation’s economy plunged into what would turn out to be a six-year financial slump known as the Long Depression, casting millions from their jobs and exacerbating anti-immigrant prejudice. Pressured by the Knights of Labor, one of America’s largest labor organizations, and other powerful unions, President Chester Arthur signed into law the Chinese Exclusion Act (which expanded restrictions put forth in the Page Act of 1875), in May 1882, representing the first time that the U.S. government officially barred a specific ethnic group from coming into this country.
Bob turns off Stage Coach Road where it intersects with Springs Drive and four-wheels it along the rocky edge of an eight-foot-deep gulch covered with reeds. He rolls down his window and points to a ridge. “Right about there is where the entrance for Mine Number Six used to be.”
This would be the mine that British-born Isaiah Whitehouse walked into the morning of September 2, 1885, only to come face-to-face with two Chinese workers in his “room.” Whitehouse ordered them to leave, but they insisted it was theirs. They were both right; mine superintendent Jim Evans had mistakenly assigned them the same spot.
Hearing shouts and cursing, white and Chinese miners stormed in, armed with hammers, drills, and anything else they were able to grab. By the time several foremen arrived minutes later, one Chinese worker had been struck through his skull with a pick and another had been beaten repeatedly in the head with a shovel. After the foremen broke up the fight and let the Chinese rush their wounded off to seek medical treatment, Evans implored the white miners to resume working. They refused. “Come on, boys,” one exclaimed, adrenaline pumping, “we may as well finish it now, as long as we have commenced it; it has to be done anyway.”
Within thirty minutes “an armed body of men … [came walking] down Front Street towards the hall of the Knights of Labor, shouting, while marching, ‘White men fall in,’ ” one resident, Ralph Zwicky, later recalled during a congressional investigation into the incident. By 2:00 P.M. more than 150 men toting revolvers, shotguns, hatchets, and knives split up and headed into Chinatown. While passing the pump house for Mine #3, the first group spotted a trembling Lor Sun Kit and shot him in the back as he tried to run away. Leo Dye Bah tore off in the opposite direction—and straight into the second group, who gunned him down. Another man, Leo Kow Boot, also tried to escape but was struck by a bullet in the neck and bled to death.
“Soon the rioters came abreast of the outlying houses of Chinatown,” Mr. Zwicky further testified. “What appeared at first to be the mad frolic of ignorant men was turning into an inhuman butchery of innocent beings.… Volley upon volley was fired after the fugitives. In a few minutes the hill east of town was literally blue with hunted Chinamen.”
Chinese men and their families fled southeast to Burning Mountain and west toward Green River. Yee See Yen tried to escape across the railroad bridge but encountered an armed woman guarding the tracks. If he assumed a lady would be less likely to discharge her weapon, he guessed wrong. She shot him point-blank in the head.
Those who tried to hide in their own homes met the worst fate of all. “In the smoking cellar of one Chinese house the blackened bodies of three Chinamen were found,” a September 3 newspaper reported. “Three others were in the cellar of another and four more bodies were found nearby. From the position of some of the bodies, it would seem as if they had begun to dig a hole in the cellar to hide themselves. But the fire overtook them when about halfway in the hole, burning their lower limbs to a crisp and leaving the upper trunk untouched.”
By early evening, Chinatown was deserted. Most of the rioters, exhausted, went home for supper. Some returned afterward for a final looting and, once satisfied that all the valuables had been picked clean, torched whatever remained.
Huddled on windswept hillsides a mile or so away, hundreds of shivering Chinese men and women, many of them barefoot and underdressed, watched in disbelief as a red
glow spread across the landscape where Chinatown once stood and then gradually flickered out, consumed by the darkness.
Twenty-five bodies were recovered, but the final number of fatalities is often cited as fifty because more than two dozen who fled into the night are believed to have died in hiding. One small family perished together; the baby and mother succumbed to dehydration and exposure, and the father, surrounded by wolves, shot himself. Whether it was twenty-five or more, the September 2, 1885, Rock Springs riot remains the single deadliest attack against any immigrant group in U.S. history.
After the riot, Wyoming Territory governor Francis Warren wired President Grover Cleveland for federal troops to quell future violence and allow the Chinese to return safely, but Cleveland, vacationing in the Adirondacks, didn’t fully review the crisis until he came back to Washington almost a week later. Warren had meanwhile set out for Rock Springs himself and ordered train conductors to pick up and aid any Chinese stragglers they could find. Increasingly urgent cables from Warren finally convinced Cleveland to muster the necessary forces. Biting his political tongue, Warren thanked the president for his “prompt assistance.” Approximately six hundred Chinese survivors returned to Rock Springs on September 9, protected by 250 rifle-wielding U.S. soldiers.
Sixteen men involved in the riot were charged with homicide, arson, and theft, but the trial was a farce. Jurors included men who led the mob; the local coroner, David Murray (another rioter), claimed the cause of death to be “unknown” for many who had clearly been gunned down or burned alive; the judge purportedly was himself a Knights of Labor member; no Chinese testimony was allowed; and defense witnesses lied through their teeth. The Reverend Timothy Thirloway was among the most egregious, declaring under oath that he watched the Chinese set their own homes on fire. The Nation magazine sarcastically commended Thirloway for his “moderation” in not blaming the Chinese for causing their own deaths, either by having murdered one another or engaged in a kind of mass spontaneous suicide.
All of the defendants were acquitted and released.
Far from inducing sympathy, the riot and subsequent acquittal only encouraged mobs in other regions. Nothing reached the level of bloodshed seen in Rock Springs, but Chinese immigrants were bashed, robbed, and hounded out of their neighborhoods, particularly in California and the Pacific Northwest.
President Cleveland tried to ignore the assaults, but Chinese ministers reminded him with composed, mafioso reasoning how regrettable it would be if they had to “withdraw [their] protection” from the thousands of Americans living in China, who’d then be forced to fend for themselves against vengeful hordes. Message received, President Cleveland issued a public condemnation of anti-Chinese violence and beseeched Congress to make financial amends to the “innocent and peaceful strangers whose maltreatment has brought discredit upon the country.” Congress allotted almost $150,000 to the victims.
Standing over a narrow ravine close to where the mine used to be, I ask Bob if I can go into the gulch to take pictures.
“No problem. I can wait up here.”
Leaning back to compensate for the steep, rocky incline, I carefully make my way down. Litter is everywhere. Candy wrappers. Crunched-up soda cans. A smashed television set and rusted air-conditioning unit. Tires. As I crouch down to photograph the mine entrance from a low angle, I take a small step back, hear a snap, and shoot forward, yelling, “What the hell is that?” I’m staring at a man-sized rib cage nestled in the reeds.
Bob comes over. “Probably an antelope,” he says with a shrug, nonplussed.
“Scared the hell out of me,” I say. “Have you seen all the trash down here?”
“People use this place as a dump.”
Bob and I get back into his truck and drive over to Washington Elementary School, where Chinatown used to be. After the riot, the neighborhood was rebuilt under the watchful eye of federal troops who stayed for almost fifteen years, until they were called away to fight in the Spanish-American War. Gradually, most of the Chinese left Rock Springs, reflecting their downward population trend throughout the rest of America, too. When the 1892 Chinese Exclusion Act came up for renewal in 1902, Congress voted to make it “permanent.” (An exemption was granted in 1917 to hundreds of Chinese living in Mexico who had aided General Jack Pershing during his hunt for Pancho Villa after he invaded Columbus, New Mexico.)
Time, however, plays havoc with the whole notion of enemies; after December 7, 1941, the Japanese, who had sided with us in World War I, were now reviled, and the once-hated Chinese became our close allies. Congress repealed the Chinese Exclusion Act for good in 1943.
· · ·
As Bob drives me back to my car, I begin telling him about the other stories I’m covering on this part of the trip, such as the massacres at Haun’s Mill and Mountain Meadows, the forced sterilizations at Sonoma, and Madison Grant’s eugenics movement.
“Sounds uplifting,” he says.
“Yeah, I’m kind of struggling with that,” I confess. “But I actually think it’s a sign of strength when a nation owns up to its past mistakes instead of hiding them. I also don’t believe the darker incidents represent who we are fundamentally.”
“I don’t either. But you can’t gloss over them,” Bob says, sounding more serious than I’ve heard him before. “We get a lot of schoolkids coming through the museum, and I tell them that the problem is fear and intolerance. When people are afraid, they look for scapegoats, and often it’s minorities or anyone considered ‘different,’ even if they’re the least powerful part of a society.”
“That does seem to be the pattern,” I say.
“But we get better, and we learn.”
“Did any good come out of the 1885 riot?” I ask.
“Around 1942 the federal government told Rock Springs it was planning on putting a Japanese internment camp here.” Bob wasn’t even alive when all this happened, but his answer conveys a sense of pride in his adopted town. “Our response was that we’d seen where this kind of discrimination can lead,” he says, his mischievous grin returning. “We said no.”
DOWAGIAC TRAIN STATION
Is not this crop of thieves and burglars, of shoulder-hitters and short-boys, of prostitutes and vagrants, of garroters and murderers, the very fruit to be expected from this seed so long being sown? What else was to be looked for? Society hurried on selfishly for its wealth, and left this vast class in its misery and temptation. Now these children arise, and wrest back with bloody and criminal hands what the world was too careless or too selfish to give. The worldliness of the rich, the indifference of all classes to the poor, will always be avenged. Society must act on the highest principles, or its punishment incessantly comes within itself. The neglect of the poor and tempted and criminal is fearfully repaid.
—From the Children’s Aid Society’s 1857 annual report, written by founder Charles Loring Brace
“AT THREE A.M. the children were taken off the train and slept here,” Kay Gray tells me as we walk from the passenger platform into the quaint wood-paneled waiting room of the Dowagiac, Michigan, train depot. Although the original 1849 building was demolished in 1872, the current limestone-and-brown-brick station was erected over the same spot. “Later the next day, the children were brought to the local meetinghouse, where the Beckwith Theatre is now, for the selection process.”
“Before I forget, how exactly do you pronounce the town’s name?” I ask Kay, a grandmother and Dowagiac native who works at the local library.
“Doe-WA-jack,” she enunciates.
“And this is where the very first orphan train arrived in 1854?”
“That’s right. It all started here.”
Even by today’s standards, the numbers are whopping. Between 1854 and 1930, approximately two hundred thousand homeless children were loaded onto trains and hauled across the country in search of adults willing to take them in. This was not, however, an adoption service. Sponsors had to house the children only until they were a certain age, an
d their agreement to do so wasn’t legally binding. Some adults were motivated by pity, but, for many, the children were seen as a labor force. Those physically able to work earned their room and board by performing farm and household chores, and it wasn’t uncommon for them to be cast out after harvesting season was over. (And before child-labor laws were enacted in 1938, even five- and six-year-olds toiled long hours at dangerous jobs in mills, factories, and slaughterhouses.) Boys were preferred.
Several organizations conducted these “placing out” efforts, as they were called, but the largest and most influential agency was the New York Children’s Aid Society (CAS), founded in 1853 by a twenty-seven-year-old Yale Divinity School graduate named Charles Loring Brace. Major eastern cities teemed with indigent children, and they were overwhelming orphanages, prisons, hospitals, and asylums. Brace spearheaded an “emigration plan” to ship the kids to mostly small rural towns in the Midwest, where fresh air and hard work, he believed, would enrich their bodies and souls. The first orphan train rolled into Dowagiac on October 1, 1854.
“Landed in Detroit at ten o’clock, Saturday night,” CAS chaperone E. P. Smith wrote after the trip, “and reached [Dowagiac], a ‘smart little town,’ in S.W. Michigan, three o’clock Sunday morning.” After spending the night at the station, the children, ages six to fifteen, were lined up at the meetinghouse and examined by potential sponsors, who could then bring their child home for the day before making a final decision. Out of forty-five children brought to Dowagiac from New York City, at least eight were unable to find anyone who wanted them. Dejected, they boarded another train and had to hope for better luck in the next town.
This routine—of shuffling kids from place to place until someone picked them—repeated itself across the country. Sponsors knew when to expect the newest batch of orphans primarily through newspaper notices and public flyers. The following advertisement, posted in Illinois, was fairly typical of these announcements:
Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History Page 14