Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History (18 page)

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.”

“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, and 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:

Hotels, churches, opera houses, city halls, and other spacious venues hosted the initial meet and greet. Reception committees took responsibility for spreading the word and screening sponsors, but there were no real standards or criteria. An impromptu and whimsical nature ruled
the whole affair. “The Darnells didn’t know about it until a druggist told them,” one observer recollected. “They went over and [a young boy] came up and hugged Mr. Darnell’s legs. He said no at first, but came back and said he wanted the little fat boy.”

Post-placement supervision was as lax as the matching process. Anecdotal evidence indicates that children were beaten and sexually abused, but determining exactly how many were victimized is impossible because CAS conducted no extensive long-term oversight or investigations. Left in a strange house hundreds of miles from home and often taunted by their peers, some children suffered from loneliness and emotional neglect. “They didn’t want me to call them Mom and Dad,” one young man lamented, recalling his unaffectionate guardians. Nor did they ever hug him or express any loving words to him. “Think what that does to you,” he said.