These days, tour companies based out of Jackson Hole send staff to China to learn the local language and attract visitors to Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks.
This warm welcome, though, hasn’t always been the case in the state or the American West at large. In the late 19th century, exclusionary immigration policies brought labor disputes and mobs targeted the Chinese working on the railroad or in the coal mines that fueled the trains — with different violent outbursts touching nearly every state tracks passed through.
KHOL’s Jenna McMurtry sat down with the author of a new book that examines the complex history of Chinese immigrants starting more than a century and a half ago and runs into today’s aggressive immigration policies, including the Trump administration’s recent challenges against Habeas Corpus and birthright citizenship. Both have ties to one of the most violent events in Wyoming history.
Michael Luo is an executive editor at The New Yorker. His book, “Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America,” was released in April alongside recent articles in the magazine.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Jenna McMurtry: Can you explain what happened that day in early September, almost 140 years ago in 1885?
Michael Luo: The Rock Springs massacre is one of the seminal moments of Chinese American history, Asian American history and American history. In the Rock Springs Massacre, 28 Chinese miners were killed and the Chinese quarter was burned down. It’s one of the ugliest moments of racial terror in American history. The emotional heart of my book is about this period that historians know as the “driving out.”
And this is the period in 1885 and 1886, when dozens of communities in the American West drove out the Chinese from their communities. I think the count is that more than 168 communities on the West Coast did this.
It began in a community called Eureka, California, which is in the northern reaches of California in Humboldt County. And that was an incident that began when a white city council member was accidentally shot by a stray bullet when these two Chinese factions were fighting and a bullet rang out and struck the city council member and he died. The white residents in Eureka gave the Chinese community a deadline and about 300 Chinese were forced to leave, most of them left by boat for San Francisco.
Then there was a period, I call it in the book an “interregnum.” It was about six months and it seemed like this anger and vitriol towards the Chinese had been contained. That interregnum basically ended with Rock Springs, six months later.
This really haunting call went out, “white men fall in.” They went to the Chinese quarter, gave them a deadline. They said “you have an hour to leave.” They didn’t wait that long. They waited half an hour and invaded the Chinese quarter and people were shot. The quarter was burned. Just horrific scenes of just mayhem.
The Chinese fled for the hills, wandering through the hills. And then there was some rescue trains that went out to pick them up. But by the morning, the Chinese quarter had burned to the ground and there were dozens of dead.
JM: Can you talk about what happened after all this? Were the rioters held accountable? Did they achieve their so-called goal of “driving out?”
ML: They didn’t succeed, that’s the thing. There’s a lot of violence in [the book], there’s a lot of horrific incidents of violence that I tell in detail. The book is hopeful in a certain way, and that’s because I think it’s a story of resilience and persistence. The goal was to expel them from the country and expel them from these communities and they didn’t succeed. The Chinese remain; they continue to come. There’s a second generation that developed. Their numbers started to grow again in the 20th century.
In the case of Rock Springs, it’s a pretty familiar story. There were rioters who were arrested, But nobody, in the end, was punished. And this is just a refrain that happens again and again in the book.
JM: Rock Springs, when you drive in, has a sign that says, “Welcome to Rock Springs. Home of 56 nationalities. Host to all.” That’s referencing the diverse groups of migrants who were drawn and attracted to the area for work.
Sweetwater County, where Rock Springs is the seat of the county, is also spearheading some of the most aggressive partnerships with federal immigration enforcement in the country, and they recently signed a $3 million contract to do so. In the state of Wyoming, that’s a big deal because property taxes were slashed this year.
Do you feel like this is also a history of labor, where companies pit different workers against each other?
ML: This is hard to sort out. The labor movement was getting started in the late 19th century. And the Knights of Labor is a group that I mentioned, and they played a role in a bunch of these driving out episodes and were very important in the passage of Chinese exclusion. They didn’t allow Chinese immigrants to be part of the Knights of Labor. And there was this gloss of racism that was part of the formation of the Knights of Labor and its agenda. There was a dispute over productivity and who was willing to do the work.
And the Chinese were efficient and they were good at their jobs and they were productive. Do you fault the Union Pacific for bringing in these Chinese workers, is it an example of, actually, the Chinese workers are doing a better job than the white workers, or doing work that the white workers weren’t willing to do?
A lot of the newspaper coverage at the time was actually kind of sympathetic to the Union Pacific decision. And they kind of faulted the white workers.
JM: I think it’s fascinating how you’re able to go deeper and create characters out of these people rather than render them to any statistic. To that point, I’m wondering if you could also explain the title of the book, “Strangers in the Land.”
ML: I love the title of the book because I think it feels so appropriate. It comes from a Supreme Court decision in 1889. Basically the Chinese came in the gold rush for the first time in large numbers. Everyone knows about the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad; it was built by the Chinese in the 1860s. The Chinese were initially welcomed to a certain extent by city leaders in San Francisco, but as their numbers started to grow, there were ugly episodes of violence in the minefields.
It really was an economic downturn in the 1870s that really led to the anti-Chinese movement really taking off. That downturn, in the 1870s, was really serious and prolonged, and they called it the Great Depression, actually, before the Great Depression of the 1930s. In 1882, a law was passed that banned Chinese laborers from entering the country.
This is what is known as the Chinese Exclusion Act today. Chinese exclusion actually is not just one law, but it was multiple laws that were passed, that were progressively more intense.
The title comes from a decision in 1889 upholding one of these Chinese exclusion laws and Supreme Court Justice Stephen Johnson Field refers to the Chinese as unassimilable. He says that they can never assimilate with us and he refers to the Chinese as “strangers in the land.”
I also like the title because this book is not just about the Chinese in America, it’s not just about Asian immigrants. It’s the story of any number of immigrant groups who have been, who are being treated as strangers in the land.
Back then it was Chinese immigrants. Today it’s a different group of immigrants. And I think that’s our human nature. We have trouble with differences. It’s so easy when we hear people who speak a different language to treat them as strangers, and it takes real intentionality, and this is the challenge for our multiracial democracy.
