Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History (17 page)

Which is a pity because remembering places like Haun’s Mill and Mountain Meadows isn’t about casting blame or embarrassing a single
community. Rather, these tributes honor the dead and, more generally, serve as reminders of how violence begets violence and that otherwise decent and reasonable men (I’d like to give them the benefit of the doubt) can be stirred into a barbaric frenzy.

Memorializing “shameful” sites can also allow for other, more positive stories to be told. On September 11, 1999, a monument was erected at Mountain Meadows that includes this inscription:

On the day the memorial was dedicated, representatives from the Mormon Church met with descendants of the murdered Arkansans and demonstrated, through words of reconciliation and their very presence together, a powerful counterpoint to what had happened 142 years earlier.

Although no similar ceremony has taken place at Haun’s Mill, some efforts have been made to atone for the atrocities committed there as well. “In this bicentennial year,” Missouri’s governor Christopher Bond proclaimed on June 25, 1976, “we reflect on our nation’s heritage, [and] the exercise of religious freedom is without question one of the basic tenets of our free democratic republic.” On behalf of his state, Bond expressed “deep regret for the injustice and undue suffering” inflicted on the Mormons. Bond’s proclamation was among the first such apologies issued by a state, and numerous governors have since followed Missouri’s lead on such evils as slavery, segregation, and forced sterilizations.

Bond also made certain to remedy a matter left unresolved for almost a century and a half. “I hereby rescind,” he declared, “Executive Order Number 44.”

BY THE TIME
I drive into Rock Springs, Wyoming, at about 9:30
P.M.
, the only sit-down restaurant open is Bonsai, specializing in Japanese and Chinese cuisine. While waiting for my steamed chicken, I ask manager Sam Ha how many Chinese residents live in the area.

“There’s me,” he says, “my brother, one sister, my two daughters, five people from other families”—
This is going to take a while
, I say to myself—“and one, maybe two more.”

“That’s all? Only ten or twelve people out of what used to be almost twenty thousand?” Ethnic populations fluctuate in any community, but this is a steep plunge considering that Rock Springs once had its own bustling Chinatown.

He asks why I’m visiting.

“I’m researching the 1885 riot.”

He nods, but I don’t know if he’s being polite or if he’s truly familiar with the story of how at least two dozen Chinese immigrants were murdered here on that one day almost 140 years ago.

The next morning, when I see local historian Bob Nelson, I recap my conversation with Sam Ha, and Bob amends the count of how many Chinese residents live in Rock Springs, but only slightly. “I’d say the number’s about fifteen or twenty, but it’s definitely nowhere near its peak in 1885.”

Bob and I have chatted on the phone a few times, and he’s exactly as I imagined: early fifties and physically imposing with a voluble, out-sized personality to match. Even though we’ve only just met, he embraces me like an old friend, and within minutes he’s talking about his lap-band weight-reduction surgery—“I know, you don’t have to say it, I’m still fat, but you should’ve seen me before”—and then pinballs wildly from one historical topic to the next, weaving in personal anecdotes and observations, all without taking a breath. I like him immensely.

An Illinois native, Bob moved to Wyoming in 1986 and currently runs the Rock Springs Historical Museum, now housed in a Romanesque-style sandstone building that originally served as city
hall. Upon entering the museum, I’m drawn to a prominent display up front about a local meat cutter named Robert “Butch” Parker. Parker was falsely charged with stealing a drunken sheepherder’s payday coins and, after being locked up briefly, left the state in a huff, changed his last name as a tribute to an old friend, Mike Cassidy, and became a full-time outlaw.

“Is this where Butch Cassidy was jailed?” I ask Bob, while opening the heavy steel door of an old cell.

“No, Butch was held down the road. But a nineteen-year-old Dick Cheney spent the night here on a DWI charge,” Bob says, referring to the former vice president.

Rock Springs grew from a remote coal-mining camp into the “home of fifty-six nationalities” when immigrants converged on the region during the 1860s and ’70s. Looking around, I’m cheered by the black-and-white photos throughout the museum of nineteenth-century Austrian blacksmiths, kilted Scotsmen, and Bosnian jazz musicians side by side with aproned barkeeps from Slovenia and AME churchgoers, among many others, reflecting a diversity equaling that of most major cities.

Bob and I walk up to the museum’s second floor. “Here’s our main gallery,” he says as we stand in front of a bright, stately room encircled by full-sized flags from around the world—a gift from Dick Cheney, Bob informs me.

“It’s kind of inspiring,” I say, “how Union Pacific created this tiny melting pot in the heart of America.”

Bob quickly pops my happy little balloon with a pointed reality check: “U.P. brought in immigrants because they were cheaper and spoke different languages, which made it harder for them to unionize against the company.”

“Oh.”

We head back downstairs.

“There’s not much on the ’85 riot,” I say, spying a single glass case with some pottery shards and broken rice-wine jugs below a
Harper’s
Weekly
illustration depicting the violence. One Chinese man is drawn with his head flung back, arms outstretched, right at the moment he’s been shot from behind.

“No,” Bob admits, “this is all we have.”

“It’s a pretty significant event in American history.”

“Look, more should be done to remember it,” Bob says, “and I don’t think people would be opposed to putting up a marker or memorial. Usually the push comes from within the community that was victimized, and we just didn’t have that here. But we’re working on it.”

On our way to Mine #6, where the riot began, Bob wants to show me the site of the first settlement in Rock Springs. As we’re about to drive onto a private lot posted with No Trespassing signs, I ask him to stop. “I can’t go in there.”

“Why not?”

“I have a strict no-trespassing rule.”

“You are
such
a baby. Besides, I’m pretty sure I know the people who live here,” he says unconvincingly.

Bob sees my hesitation and rolls his eyes. “Fine,” he mutters, and we begin to back out. “
If
, however, one day you find that you need to go onto someone’s property to research something—and
trespassing
usually implies criminal intent—carry a leash with you. If you’re caught, just pretend you were out looking for your dog.”

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.”