Expulsions, Riots, and the Violence of Removal

Chapter Opening

Chapter 5 examined how the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 built a formal federal architecture of documentation, certification, and deportation, a bureaucratic system that determined, on paper, who could lawfully enter and remain in the United States. This chapter turns to a different, and in many respects more immediate, form of exclusion: the organized, often extralegal violence through which white communities across the American West physically drove Chinese residents from towns and cities where federal law, however restrictive, had not barred their presence. Where Chapter 5's exclusion regime operated through certificates, inspectors, and courts, the violence this chapter examines operated through mobs, arson, and armed expulsion committees — a form of exclusion enacted not by federal statute but by local and regional collective action.

This chapter traces that violence across four sections. It begins with the broader phenomenon historians have called the "era of driving out," the pattern of anti-Chinese mob action, labor conflict, and local government complicity that swept the American West during the 1870s and 1880s. It then examines the single deadliest incident of anti-Chinese violence in American history, the Rock Springs Massacre of 1885, in which white miners killed dozens of Chinese miners and destroyed the town's Chinese settlement. The chapter turns next to the Tacoma Method, the organized, non-lethal expulsion carried out in Tacoma that same year, and the way other West Coast cities, including Seattle, looked to Tacoma's example, sometimes emulating it and sometimes resisting it through federal intervention. The chapter closes by surveying the wider regional pattern of expulsions, from Eureka, California, to towns across the Pacific Northwest and interior West, and asks what this violence meant for the communities the exclusion era's remaining chapters, and this textbook's Part III, examine in fuller detail.

Understanding this violence as this chapter presents it — not as scattered incidents of local disorder but as an organized, often civic-sanctioned mechanism of racial removal operating alongside the federal exclusion regime Chapter 5 examined — is essential to understanding why Chinese Americans built the defensive, self-reliant urban institutions that Part III of this textbook traces in detail.

Learning Objectives

Guiding Historical Questions

Historical Context

The expulsion violence this chapter examines did not emerge in isolation from the broader currents this textbook's earlier chapters have traced. Chapter 2 examined how Chinese labor competition, real and perceived, generated sustained resentment among white workers in the mining, railroad, and agricultural economies of the American West. Chapter 3 examined how this resentment converted into organized anti-Chinese political movements during the 1870s, movements that combined racial scapegoating with genuine labor grievance and that increasingly treated Chinese immigrants as a population whose removal, rather than mere legal restriction, was the appropriate political goal. Chapter 5 examined how this same political energy produced the federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, a law that barred future immigration but did nothing to remove the Chinese residents already living in towns and cities across the West.

This gap between federal exclusion and existing Chinese communities proved significant. The Exclusion Act, for all its bureaucratic reach, could not by itself remove Chinese laborers, merchants, and their families already residing in mining towns, railroad camps, and West Coast cities. For many white residents of these communities, whose anti-Chinese political mobilization had aimed at removal rather than merely restriction, the 1882 Act's passage did not resolve the "Chinese question" so much as redirect attention toward the Chinese communities that remained. The years immediately following the Act's passage saw an intensification, rather than a diminishment, of local anti-Chinese agitation across the West, as communities increasingly organized to accomplish through direct action what the exclusion law's forward-looking restrictions could not.

Economic conditions sharpened this dynamic. The mid-1880s brought labor unrest and economic hardship to much of the American West, particularly in mining regions where white and Chinese laborers competed directly for increasingly scarce work. Labor organizations, including the Knights of Labor, incorporated anti-Chinese agitation directly into their organizing efforts during this period, providing organizational infrastructure that in several documented instances channeled economic grievance into coordinated expulsion campaigns. The violence at Rock Springs in September 1885, examined in this chapter's second section, erupted directly out of this combination of labor competition, economic anxiety, and organized anti-Chinese sentiment, while the expulsion at Tacoma two months later demonstrated that organized civic action, rather than spontaneous mob violence, could achieve comparable ends of racial removal without comparable bloodshed.

The pattern that resulted — a wave of anti-Chinese expulsions extending from Rock Springs, Wyoming Territory, through Tacoma and Seattle, Washington Territory, to Eureka, California, and numerous smaller communities across the West during the mid-1880s — represents, as this chapter argues, an essential companion to the federal exclusion architecture examined in Chapter 5. Where federal law restricted future entry, local and regional violence addressed the presence of Chinese communities already established, and the combination of these two forces did much to determine where, and under what conditions, Chinese Americans could safely live during the decades this textbook examines.

Chronology Preview

Major People, Groups, and Places

Core Vocabulary Preview

The following key terms appear throughout this chapter. Students should understand each term before proceeding to the main sections.

The Era of Driving Out

Anti-Chinese Mobs

Beginning in the 1870s and intensifying through the 1880s, mining towns, railroad camps, and small cities across the American West experienced repeated episodes of organized mob action aimed at removing Chinese residents entirely, a pattern historians have come to call the "era of driving out." These mobs drew on the anti-Chinese political organizing examined in Chapter 3, but they pursued a more direct and immediate goal than the legislative restriction that movement had also sought: the physical removal of Chinese residents from a specific town or district, regardless of whether those residents' presence violated any federal or territorial law.

Labor Conflict

Much of this mob violence erupted directly out of labor conflict, particularly in mining regions where Chinese and white laborers competed for increasingly scarce employment during the economic downturns of the mid-1880s. The labor competition narratives and "coolie labor" stereotype examined in Chapter 2 provided much of the ideological framework through which white miners and workers understood this competition, transforming what was often a straightforward economic conflict over wages and jobs into a racialized narrative of Chinese workers as an existential threat to white livelihood.

Local Government Complicity

A recurring feature of the expulsions this chapter examines was the participation, or at minimum the tacit acceptance, of local government officials — mayors, sheriffs, and city councils — in organizing or permitting the removal of Chinese residents. This complicity distinguished the "driving out" pattern from purely spontaneous mob violence, since in numerous documented cases, including the Tacoma expulsion examined later in this chapter, local officials played leading organizational roles, using the authority and legitimacy of civic office to coordinate what amounted to an extralegal mass removal.

Forced Migration

The cumulative effect of this violence was a pattern of forced migration that displaced Chinese residents from numerous Western towns and cities, pushing many toward the larger, more defensible Chinese communities in cities such as San Francisco and Portland, where greater numbers and more developed community institutions, examined in Chapter 8, offered relatively greater protection than smaller, more isolated settlements could provide. This displacement pattern, as this chapter's closing sections will argue, directly shaped the urban concentration of Chinese America into defensible Chinatown enclaves that Chapter 7 examines as a central subject of this textbook.

Rock Springs and Anti-Chinese Mass Violence

Mining Conflict

Rock Springs, a coal-mining town in Wyoming Territory, had employed both white and Chinese miners for the Union Pacific Coal Company for over a decade before September 1885, with Chinese miners making up a substantial portion of the workforce. Tension between white and Chinese miners had built steadily over disputes concerning access to the most productive mining locations within the company's coal seams, disputes that combined genuine competition over piece-rate earnings with the broader anti-Chinese labor politics examined in Chapter 2.

Racial Violence

On the morning of September 2, 1885, a dispute over access to a coal seam escalated rapidly into organized mob violence, as armed white miners attacked Chinese miners throughout the town, killing at least twenty-eight Chinese residents and wounding many more. The violence continued through much of the day, with white miners pursuing fleeing Chinese residents into the surrounding hills and preventing many from receiving aid, producing a death toll that later investigation suggested may have exceeded the number initially confirmed.

Destruction of Chinese Settlements

Alongside the killing, white miners systematically burned the Chinese section of Rock Springs, destroying homes, possessions, and the physical infrastructure of the Chinese mining community entirely. This destruction, extending well beyond the immediate violence against individuals, ensured that the Chinese community's return to Rock Springs would require rebuilding not merely a workforce but an entire physical settlement, a burden that shaped the community's uncertain and contested return to the town in the massacre's aftermath.

National Response

News of the Rock Springs Massacre produced significant national attention and, notably, direct diplomatic concern from the Qing government, which pressed the United States for both protection of Chinese residents and compensation for the destruction and loss of life. President Grover Cleveland ordered federal troops to Rock Springs to restore order and, eventually, to escort surviving Chinese miners back to the town, while Congress ultimately approved an indemnity payment to the Chinese government, though no perpetrators of the killing were ever successfully prosecuted despite a grand jury investigation.

The Tacoma Method

Organized Civic Expulsion

Two months after the Rock Springs Massacre, Tacoma's anti-Chinese movement, led in substantial part by the city's own mayor, organized a different kind of removal: a coordinated, non-lethal expulsion of Tacoma's entire Chinese community, planned in advance and carried out with the participation of civic leaders rather than through spontaneous mob violence. This organized character, distinguishing the Tacoma expulsion from the sudden eruption of killing at Rock Springs, led contemporaries and later historians alike to treat the Tacoma expulsion as a model, one that other Pacific Northwest communities would consider adopting or explicitly resisting in the months that followed.

Forced Removal by Train

On November 3, 1885, hundreds of white residents, organized in advance by a citizens' committee, moved through Tacoma's Chinese quarter, ordering residents to gather their belongings and marching the community's several hundred Chinese residents to the Lake View railroad station, from which they were transported out of the city, many toward Portland. The expulsion was carried out without the mass killing that had characterized Rock Springs, though residents faced coercion, property loss, and the immediate physical danger inherent in a forced mass removal carried out by an organized crowd.

Destruction of Chinatown

In the expulsion's aftermath, much of Tacoma's Chinese quarter was burned, ensuring, as at Rock Springs, that the removal was not merely a temporary displacement but an attempt at permanent exclusion, one intended to prevent Tacoma's Chinese community from rebuilding or returning to the city. Unlike Rock Springs, where the Chinese mining community eventually returned under federal military protection, Tacoma's Chinese community was effectively barred from the city for decades following the 1885 expulsion.

Local Memory and Later Apology

For much of the twentieth century, the Tacoma expulsion received relatively little civic acknowledgment within the city itself, a pattern of historical silence that Chapter 14's discussion of public memory and historical recovery examines in fuller depth. Beginning in the early 1990s, Tacoma undertook a sustained process of public reckoning with the 1885 expulsion, including the establishment of a reconciliation park and formal civic acknowledgment of the expulsion's history, efforts that this textbook's final chapter treats as part of a broader pattern of local communities confronting previously unacknowledged anti-Chinese violence.

Seattle, Eureka, and Other Expulsions

Urban Mobs

In February 1886, anti-Chinese organizers in Seattle attempted an expulsion modeled explicitly on Tacoma's example three months earlier, forcibly gathering Chinese residents and attempting to place them aboard a departing steamship. Unlike Tacoma, however, Seattle's expulsion attempt met organized resistance from residents and officials who opposed the removal, producing violent clashes between pro-expulsion and anti-expulsion factions within the city itself, a division that distinguished Seattle's experience from the comparatively unified civic action that had characterized Tacoma's expulsion.

Regional Copycat Actions

Beyond Tacoma and Seattle, communities throughout the Pacific Northwest and the broader American West debated and, in numerous documented instances, carried out similar expulsions during the mid-1880s, a regional pattern that reflected the widespread reach of the anti-Chinese political mobilization examined in Chapter 3. Eureka, California, expelled its Chinese residents in February 1885 following the killing of a white city councilman, an expulsion carried out with sufficient organization and permanence that Eureka's Chinese community did not meaningfully return to the city for decades.

Martial Law and State Response

The violence surrounding Seattle's expulsion attempt in February 1886 grew serious enough that President Cleveland declared martial law and deployed federal troops to the city, a response that stands in notable contrast to the absence of comparable federal intervention at Tacoma three months earlier. This inconsistency in federal response, this chapter argues, reflects less a clear federal policy toward anti-Chinese violence than the particular political and civic circumstances of each individual case, including the degree of local resistance to expulsion and the scale of violence involved.

Long-Term Displacement

Taken together, the expulsions this chapter has examined produced a lasting pattern of Chinese displacement from numerous smaller Western communities, concentrating Chinese American population increasingly within a smaller number of larger cities where community institutions, examined in Chapter 8, and greater numbers offered relatively more effective protection against the kind of organized violence this chapter has traced. This concentration, as the chapters that follow in Part III of this textbook examine, did much to shape the urban form of Chinatown as it developed across the following decades.

Research or Library Extension