ROCK SPRINGS, WYO — Towering plateaus dotted with sage brush and roaming wild horses surround the desert town of Rock Springs, Wyoming, with a population of about 23,000.
A short drive from Main Street, two rectangular holes form a checkerboard pattern in a grassy lawn connecting a Catholic church with a nearby schoolyard. Six Grinnell College researchers spent the summer here digging, scraping and screening the soil, most of whom have never been to Wyoming before.
The Iowa-based researchers are looking for artifacts from when a mob burned down what was once the Rock Springs Chinatown.
In 1885, labor tensions boiled over in the Union Pacific Railroad's coal mines, stemming from an argument over who had the best work opportunities. The mob, many of them European migrants, blamed the Chinese.
"And it was right here where we're standing," said Professor Laura Ng, from four feet deep in the trenches of the dig site, where she's guiding students mapping diagrams of burnt down building foundations.
After burning several blocks once made up of homes and shops, the mob killed 28 Chinese people and injured another 14, in what is one of the deadliest incidents of anti-Chinese violence in U.S. history.
"[Because of this], there's going to be a layer that is very distinctive in the archaeological record," said Ng.
In what she refers to as the "burn layer," Ng's team has found artifacts, ranging from pottery sherds, animal bones, an ornamental door handle and a wooden beam from an old building.
The town dates back to the 1860s, when Union Pacific's nearby coal deposits lured thousands of immigrant laborers to the mines and railyards as the company neared the completion of the transcontinental railroad.
As a result, Rock Springs has long proudly called itself the "Home of 56 nationalities." It's had an International Day celebration for more than a hundred years.
Rock Springs turns a corner
But now, the town is digging up this part of its migrant history and finding new ways to shed light on a dark moment in its past.
A new statue was dedicated this fall to mark the 140th anniversary commemoration already memorializing the 55 other nationalities whose labor in the coal mines also built the town.
Until recently, Rock Springs' main monument was a small plaque fixed to a boulder to recognize the 28 killed in the massacre. But it sits on a grassy median, turned away from the road that passes by the site of the old Chinatown, making it easy to miss.
Over Labor Day weekend, the town unveiled a much more prominent monument to commemorate the 140th anniversary.
"[The] bronze statue 'Requiem,' standing more than seven feet tall, depicts a Chinese miner amidst the ruins of Chinatown, holding the remnants of a ceremonial dragon flag," Rock Springs Mayor Max Mickelson read during the statue dedication. He was joined by his town council, which for the most part, supported the statue.
The town's growing acknowledgement of its past comes at an odd time for a county that voted 76% for the president in 2024, which since being reelected has tried to erase negative depictions of the country's past.
Local students, who now learn about the massacre at school, helped host the more than 200 attendees at the statue ceremony while the county's two history museums helped fundraise for the statue.
A memorial like this one is long overdue, according to the mayor.
At the same time, he acknowledges the irony of honoring the town's migrant history while Sweetwater County, home to Rock Springs, cracks down and renews contracts with ICE, the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. Wyoming's state highway patrol and National Guard followed suit earlier this summer.
"As someone who is a descendant of immigrants that came to this country from Europe, I find it very frustrating that as a country we have decided to take an anti-immigrant stance," Mickelson said.
Like 76% of the county he lives in, Mickelson voted for President Trump in 2024. But he said the crackdown wasn't what he voted for.
"We have real problem areas where those resources would be better put than tracking down somebody who is here working, putting up stucco," Mickelson said.
He'd rather see resources directed toward the drug and human tracking that have recently plagued his town.
As a self-dubbed "Old School Republican" and a critic of the president's immigration policies, Mickelson said it's an awkward time to be a member of the party.
The mayor has several friends who migrated to Rock Springs as teenagers and have since received citizenship. Immigrant labor is still important to his town, which now relies on mining the mineral trona, used in baking soda, trona mining rather than coal, with just under 20% of residents Hispanic or Latino, according to the Census Bureau.
"We don't love America any more than those people. They worked really hard to get here," Mickelson said.
Descendants of the massacre join the commemoration
This summer, Ricky and Grace Leo returned to their hometown of Rock Springs to join the archaeology dig.
Despite growing up there, it wasn't until 2019 that the couple learned about the massacre — and that they have ties to it.
"We didn't know that we were related to the people that died in the massacre," Grace said.
The massacre wasn't something the couple learned about when they attended the local high school.
A chance run in with Rock Springs archaeologist Dudley Gardner at a history conference, considered one of the experts on the massacre and western Chinatowns, turned into the Leos later becoming one of the hosts of this fall's commemoration.
At the Labor Day ceremony honoring those who died in the massacre, traditional lion dancers performed and visitors from across the country recited the names of those killed with traditional blessings. The Leo family organized lectures, ceremonial blessing rituals and cooking demonstrations ahead of the unveiling of the statue.
Ng has also made the effort to reach out to the descendants of the massacre and the survivors. At least five made it to the ceremony, the majority of whom had never heard about the massacre until recently.
Robert Lew, who lives in California, was one of them.
He knew his father grew up orphaned in Rock Springs. But only learned at 75 years old, after talking with the archaeologists, that his ancestors also made a life in the Wyoming town much earlier.
"In terms of [learning about] my great-grandfather and 1885 in the massacre, that was only two weeks ago, three weeks ago," Lew said. His daughter Beth Lew-Williams is an esteemed scholar of Chinese-American history.
While here, Lew talked with a young man from Rock Springs, who said he was glad to see his community become more familiar with the massacre.
"It's just amazing, very inspirational," Lew said, "And made me feel really good about our country."
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