In 1885, white miners brutally murdered 28 Chinese miners in Rock Springs, Wyoming.
In 2025, producer Harrison Vijay Tsui goes to Rock Springs to unearth this dark chapter of U.S. history — and to ask: what does it cost to remember, and what does it cost to forget? We’ll hear from Chinese Americans in Rock Springs today and the descendants of the Massacre scattered across the country.
The Hustle is a podcast series about the ways immigrants navigate a changing economy — today and throughout history.
Chinese American Legacies Survive the Buried History of Rock Springs
On a snowy January day, I found myself facing a large rock wedged in between a parking lot and a Catholic church in the city of Rock Springs, Wyoming. The rock was about six feet tall and had a bronze plaque nailed to its front. I quickly wiped snow from the rock’s face, trying to make out the 28 Chinese names inscribed on it.
I had come from New York City to see this rock. It is the only memorial dedicated to the Rock Springs Massacre, one of the deadliest massacres of Chinese people in U.S. history. The names inscribed on the plate are of 28 men who were brutally killed by white miners in 1885. To me, a Chinese American man, the idea that all that was left from this horrible incident was a rock was incredibly unsettling. Stranger was the idea that out in the middle of cold and mountainous Rock Springs, Wyoming was at one point a historic community of people who looked like me.
In the small town of Cranbury, New Jersey, where I grew up, Asian American history was not taught in my school. The first time I heard of Chinese people in the American West was in a college class on Asian American literature. Our professor showed us an image of white men celebrating the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad, the first of its kind, connecting Iowa to Utah. But nowhere to be seen in the photo were the 12,000 Chinese men who built the railroad. 16 years after its completion, the railroad company, Union Pacific, was still employing Chinese men to mine coal for fuel.
Chinese workers were often paid between $1.73 and $2.00 a day, while their white counterparts were paid $2.50 to $3.00. With the influx of Chinese laborers toiling for this lower wage, Union Pacific saw an opportunity to cut everyone’s pay, including that of the white miners. The white miners took this as a threat and looked towards one of the largest labor unions at the time, the Knights of Labor, for support. The union was known for its stand on collective bargaining and for empowering workers to strike.
White miners formed a chapter of the Knights of Labor in Rock Springs. Their demands were higher pay and to eliminate the company’s requirement that miners buy food, clothes, and tools at its overpriced stores. However, the unionized workers excluded the Chinese miners from participation. They bickered with the Chinese miners, growing resentful of their language, their forever foreignness. With the way Union Pacific exploited the workers’ differences, pitting Chinese against white, it was only a matter of time before things boiled over.
On September 2, 1885, white miners instigated an attack against Chinese miners in one of the mines. An argument that started as a verbal dispute became violent when a white miner struck a Chinese miner with a heavy mining tool to the head, killing him. The white miners turned their anger on two other Chinese men, severely beating them until a white foreman broke up the fight. The white men went home, but not to cool off; rather, to gather a crowd of nearly 100 angry white men and women, all armed with guns, hatchets, and pickaxes.
The mob descended into Chinatown, brutally murdering the Chinese miners — bludgeoning, stabbing, and shooting them as they fled into the streets. The violence became so bad that President Grover Cleveland instructed federal troops to maintain order. When troops arrived, they found Chinatown in a wasteland. The once colorful buildings were unrecognizable, now charred and dilapidated.
The death count rose to 28 Chinese men, but miraculously, some survived. The National Guard instructed these survivors to board a train to the nearby town of Evanston — about an hour and a half away from Rock Springs. Once there, guards told the workers they would board another train to take them to California. But Union Pacific diverted the train back to Rock Springs and declared, “Any miner white or Chinese, not back at work by Monday morning, September 21, would be fired and never hired again anywhere on the Union Pacific lines.” Many Chinese workers stayed, fearing they had no other option.
In the aftermath of the Massacre, Congress paid $147,000 (around $4.5 million today) to the Chinese government as a reimbursement for the lost property. However, none of that money trickled directly down to the survivors still in Rock Springs, let alone to their descendants.
Since arriving in this town, I have had an eerie feeling. I tried to talk to different people about this history, and it seemed like nobody wanted to admit it happened. Many of the white residents refused to use the word “massacre” and referred to the tragedy as a “rumor.”
In my hotel room, I slept poorly, as my mind falsely equated the howling wind with cries of the massacred men. I placed an ottoman bench by the entrance to my room, fearing that the cries and the wind would blow the door down.
The next morning, I awoke groggy from the lack of sleep. The sun had vaporized whatever illusions and hallucinations I was having about the ghosts of Rock Springs. I needed to find out more about the Massacre. I wanted to learn how that history is remembered today, by the Chinese American residents of Rock Springs, and I knew exactly where to go.
The only remaining pieces of the Rock Spring’s Chinese American community are a handful of Chinese American restaurants located along Sunset Drive. Back in the 1990s in Chelsea, Michigan, my family owned a restaurant not so different from Wonderful House called Chinese Tonite. We had a regional specialty called “Almond Chicken.” The white meat chicken was pre-tenderized with cornstarch and a touch of baking soda. It was then flash fried and served with brown sauce and almonds. My family would serve this dish after Sunday services, and occasionally feed the groups of Michigan deer hunters fresh off a trip into the woods.
In Rock Springs, these restaurants served a typical Chinese American fare of egg foo young and sesame chicken, but they also carried a regional specialty called “Chili Meat,” which is a dish of ground beef in a tomato stewed gravy. I first stopped at Wonderful House, which had a teal exterior. The inside was full of photos of the owner’s family and loyal customers. An overhanging bell chimed as I pushed the door open, and I was greeted by a middle-aged Chinese woman who sat me in a booth with a window overlooking the mountains. I ordered Chili Meat, but when I asked if she wanted to speak about the town, the food, and the Massacre, she shied away, choosing instead to focus her attention on the only other diner across the room.
Throughout my reporting, I met with several descendants of the Massacre via video call. Before I even got to Rock Springs, I connected with Chuck Leo. Chuck is 78, and he had worked for Union Pacific for 38 years. But Chuck didn’t know the story of his ancestors throughout most of his working life. We met over Zoom and he spoke to me in a husky voice, proudly repping a University of Nebraska sweatshirt.
After serving in the Army, Chuck worked at Union Pacific headquarters in Lincoln, Nebraska for 30 years and eventually retired in his 60s. Like many retirees, Chuck found himself with a lot of spare time on his hands. One day, he remembered that his father and grandfather had worked in Rock Springs, so he decided to do a Google search of the town.
“I was home one day just going through the computer,” Chuck said. “I happened to key on the 1885 Massacre and I started looking through there.” He was looking at a list of names of Chinese men who had died. “They were all Leos,” he said.
He was appalled. This company — a workplace where he had felt safe and valued — had made no mention of the Massacre during his time there. In fact, on the current Union Pacific website, when one types in “Chinese massacre” or “Rock Springs Massacre,” no results come up. The closest thing is a press release from 2015, celebrating Chinese contributions to the Transcontinental Railroad. It paints Chinese miners as hard workers but fails to mention anything about a massacre.
“I just felt frustrated,” Chuck told me. “I just said, okay, that was back in 1885. I can’t do anything about that back then. I said I’m closing my feelings about this. I’m closing it now.”
As I heard Chuck tell his story, I could hear the pain in his voice. Closing my feelings is how I would approach it as well.
Throughout my reporting, I spoke with another two descendants. Ricky Leo, 67, grew up in Rock Springs and worked at his family’s restaurant, New Grand Café. He had grey hair, glasses, and a soulful voice that sounded distinctly of Wyoming.
“We mainly felt welcome because my dad was very well known in the town,” said Ricky. “He was very well liked because he made the lunch specials at the Grand Café.”
Much like Wonderful House, the New Grand Cafe served the regional specialty Chili Meat and had a jukebox downstairs. But Ricky’s family did not want him to work in the restaurant business. They supported his decision to go to college in California, which led him to a successful career as a mechanical engineer. Decades later, in his retirement, Ricky decided to go to a railroad museum in 2019 with his family.
“We went to the 150th anniversary of the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad in Utah,” said Ricky. “There was a speaker, her name was Choi Min Ho. Her talk was about Evanston and also about the Massacre.”
Well into his 50s, this was the first time Ricky ever heard about the Massacre in his hometown. “I was shocked,” said Ricky. “To find out that something like that happened in my town is really bad. And that’s why I’ve been digging more into the history to find out what happened.”
Finally, I reached out to Cheryll Leo-Gwin, 81. Cheryll’s grandfather was an herbalist in Rock Springs, but her family eventually moved to the Pacific Northwest. She grew up with a Chinese American father and a white mother. Unlike Chuck and Ricky, who found out about the Massacre later in life, Cheryll’s family had mentioned the history of the Massacre occasionally during her childhood.
“My father’s sister in law told me about Wyoming,” Cheryll said. “[She watched] wagons come into town and loading up the Chinese men into the wagons. They’d take them out into the fields. And she’d hear gunshots and they’d bring the wagons back empty and they’d come back for more.”
When she was younger, Cheryll had brushed these stories off, equating them with the same wild west folklore stories about cowboys and Indians she was often exposed to. But as she grew older, Cheryll found herself seeking out her Chinese heritage. She graduated with a fine arts degree from the University of Washington and went to an artist exchange program in China.
“I ended up working with the Chinese government to do cultural exchanges and to bring Americans to China,” Cheryll said. “That’s where I learned what it was like to be Chinese.”
After connecting with her Chinese identity, Cheryll thought back to the childhood stories she would hear of Wyoming. Only then did she understand the gravity. She realized that the people of her culture — the culture she was now finally appreciating, feeling, living, after it was dormant in her for so long — were taken out to the fields and shot.
Before I left Rock Springs, I spoke with a Chinese American high schooler at one of the restaurants. He told me that late at night, drunk townies often urinate on the memorial rock. I wondered if — in the middle of their inebriated pee — they would take a minute to read any of the writing on the rock. I wondered if the ghosts of Rock Springs would be shaking their heads. I wondered if they would be amused at how much these men could drink, all while laughing at how weak their bladders were.
“All that drinking and you couldn’t just go back inside?” I imagined one saying.
Or maybe these ghosts had free will to float around. I pictured them floating up out of the valley of Rock Springs, into the blue Wyoming sky. Some might have wanted to see what California was like. After all, they were promised a trip there back in 1885. Others might take a longer route back to China. They’d see their families again, introduce them to Chili Meat, taking with them spices and the lean yet hearty beef stew from Wonderful House.
But oddly enough, I had a feeling many would stay. They’d encounter naive reporters like myself and spook them at night, jostling our hotel room doors. Others would greet descendants like Chuck, Ricky, and Cheryll, and find themselves perplexed on how to give them emotional or spiritual closure. I wished they would give the woman at Wonderful House more comfort and confidence to speak her story to power. Until then, the memorial rock stands — to mark a history that is still revealing itself to us.
Credits
Hosted by Shaka Tafari
Produced by Harrison Vijay Tsui
Edited by Lushik Lotus-Lee
Additional editing by Mia Warren and Quincy Surasmith
Fact Checking by Julie Schwietert Collazo
Engineering by Iggy Monda and Jocelyn Gonzales
Original theme music by Gautam Srikishan
Additional music from Blue Dot Sessions
“The Hustle” show logo by Daniel Robles
Feet in 2 Worlds is supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, The Ford Foundation, the Fernandez Pave the Way Foundation, an anonymous donor, and contributors to our annual NewsMatch campaign.
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