The extraordinarily violent attacks at Rock Springs…
September 1885 CE
The extraordinarily violent attacks at Rock Springs reveal a long-held hatred of the victims.
Besides those who have been burned alive, Chinese miners have been scalped, mutilated, branded, decapitated, dismembered, and hanged from gutter spouts.
The events amount to racial terrorism.
There are twenty-eight confirmed deaths, and at least fifteen miners have been wounded, but various sources assert that forty to fifty fatalities might be a more accurate number, as some of those who fled were never accounted for.
The Chinese consul in New York City will compile a detailed list of the massacre's victims.
Rumors of the return of the Chinese to Rock Springs circulate immediately after the riots.
On September 3, the Rock Springs Independent publishes an editorial which confirms the rumors of "the return", as a few Chinese begin to trickle back into town to search for valuables.
The Independent says of the return of Chinese laborers to Rock Springs, "It means that Rock Springs is killed, as far as white men are concerned, if such program is carried out."
The massacre is defended in the local newspaper, and, to an extent, in other western newspapers.
In general, however, Wyoming newspapers disapprove of the acts of the massacre while supporting the cause of white miners.
Wyoming's territorial Governor Francis E. Warren visits Rock Springs on September 3, 1885, the day after the riot, to make a personal assessment.
After his trip to Rock Springs, Warren travels to Evanston, where he sends telegrams to U.S. President Grover Cleveland appealing for federal troops.
Back in Rock Springs, the riot has calmed, but the situation is still unstable.