On this day in 1885, in the coal town of Rock Springs, Wyoming, white miners turned on the Chinese miners who worked the same seams. At least twenty-eight Chinese men were killed and fifteen injured. Seventy-eight homes were burned, and hundreds of people fled into the scrubland outside town. Federal troops escorted the survivors back some days later, and stayed.
The shape of it was ordinary enough to be recognised anywhere: a company that hired Chinese labour at lower wages, a grievance about work, and then a crowd with weapons. A grand jury was convened. The men were known and named in the town, and no one was indicted or tried. Congress later voted an indemnity of roughly one hundred and fifty thousand dollars to China, while declining to accept legal responsibility. Money moved; no case was heard.
The wood engraving below, published in Harper's Weekly three weeks afterwards, is how most Americans saw it. What remains beyond the picture is the coroner's record, which set down the dead as carefully as it could: some names in full, some only in part, each one a man who had gone to work that morning.
The Union Pacific line did double duty that week: coal trains carried the survivors west to Evanston, and the troops came back up the same rails a few days later to escort them home. The crews who ran those trains did what they could on short notice.
Marguerite, the men buried in Rock Springs were given the rites their communities could manage far from home, and Chinese American groups have kept the anniversary since, with offerings and the reading of the dead. A memorial stone stands in town now. Naming the partly known names aloud is itself an old and careful form of care.