In the mid- to late- 19th century, Chinese migrants arriving in the United States were targeted by white labor groups, business employers, and politicians attempting to exploit or restrict their presence. In the wake of white-led racial violence, Chinese laborers throughout the West turned to local courts and an international political landscape to seek redress and demand justice. This module examines how survivors of one of the most deadly episodes of anti-Chinese violence in U.S. history used the legal concept of indemnity to seek compensation for lost property and lives. In Rock Springs, Wyoming Territory, in 1885, after white Union Pacific miners murdered 28 Chinese laborers, drove another 500 Chinese men and women out of town, and plundered the victims' possessions, those who survived the attack petitioned President Grover Cleveland and the Chinese consul of New York for assistance. They demanded bodily protection and property compensation, and within two years, diplomatic officials were successful in securing an Indemnity Bill noting the $147,000 worth of property damage. Their efforts reveal the complexities of citizenship, race, and compensation in what historian Beth Lew-Williams calls the "Restriction Period" for Chinese immigrants.1
Chinese labor and racial violence in Rock Springs
Ah Jim, like other migrants arriving from China in this period, was born in Guangzhou, in the Pearl River Delta region of China. At the age of 19, Ah Jim left China for the U.S. seeking work, likely recruited by a labor agent. Leaving behind his wife and possibly two young children, he entered the country through California. In 1881, Ah Jim began work in Rock Springs, Wyoming Territory, as a coal miner for the Union Pacific company's coal mines, where he would labor for the next 43 years.2
Like many of his fellow Chinese miners, Ah Jim's immigration in 1881 had been permitted under the Burlingame-Seward Treaty of 1868, which codified "free migration and emigration" between the United States and China, and enabled China the "same privileges and immunities" as Western powers to establish consuls in United States port cities. The treaty protected United States trade within China's ports and cities and established mutual reciprocity between the two nations under "the most-favored nation principle." While inclusion of this principle signaled a commitment to equal treatment among nations, political supporters of the Burlingame Treaty knew such an arrangement would especially promote growing U.S. business and trade in China, as well as contribute to a steady stream of migrant labor. At the same time as the Chinese Restriction Act of 1882 (later referred to as the Chinese Exclusion Act) banned all Chinese laborers from entering the U.S. (exempting merchants and diplomats) for ten years, the many laborers like Ah Jim who were already in the United States found themselves subjected to growing anti-Chinese violence.
As with other acts of racial violence in California, Oregon, Colorado, and Washington Territory, white laborers often targeted their victims based on the perceived threat that the presence of Chinese laborers undercut their wages. On September 2, 1885, Ah Jim was working in Coal Pit Number 3 in Rock Springs when a fight broke out in a nearby worksite between Chinese and white laborers. White laborers stopped working, gathered downtown, and marched into the segregated Chinatown where they indiscriminately shot, burned, and mutilated Chinese miners as they fled from their workplaces and homes. Hundreds of Chinese residents of Rock Springs were chased out of town, returning once federal troops were ushered in to protect U.S. postal routes and halt any further property damage to the Union Pacific Company.
Invoking treaty protection and tallying property loss
In the wake of what became known as the Rock Springs Massacre, survivors and their allies were acutely aware that property value was a central concern of the federal government and employed two strategies in their justice-seeking efforts: invoking international treaty protection and making their property loss legible. A commission of U.S. officials and Chinese diplomats gathered on September 16 to assess the damage.
During this period of Chinese Restriction, because Chinese laborers were exempted from naturalization under the 1870 Naturalization Act, the Rock Springs survivors illustrate how foreign subjects relied on their status as non-citizens in their strategies for redress. In their September 18 petition that appealed to the New York consul Huang Sih Chuen, survivors in Rock Springs invoked their place as subjects of China, entitled to the "rights and privileges of the most favored nation." These petitioners and their diplomatic allies relied on the 1880 Angell Treaty, a treaty that had revised the Burlingame Treaty and stipulated that in cases of violence experienced by Chinese subjects on U.S. soil, the United States government was required to "exert all its power to devise measures for their protection, and to secure to them the same rights, privileges, immunities, and exemptions as may be enjoyed by the citizens or subjects of the most favored nation, and to which they are entitled by treaty." The petitioners argued that the U.S. government needed to "endeavor to secure the punishment of the murderers, the relief of the wounded, and compensation for those despoiled of their property."
While in Rock Springs conducting an investigation into the violence, New York consul Huang Sih Chuen worked to both document the property loss and make this loss visible to U.S. officials. In his report, Consul Chuen noted the property held in common by the victims as well as the property held individually—the total damage amounted to $147,000. For instance, while individual property loss is detailed, the report also notes the $200 owed in common in Ah Jim's coal pit.
Beyond the tallied reports, the petitioners took time to explain the circumstances through which that property was plundered. The petitioners would recall that some who "had hid themselves in the houses were killed and their bodies burned; some, who on account of sickness could not run, were burned alive in the houses." They stated that most of the Chinese who fled "[could] not gather up their money or clothing, and when the mob fired at them they fled precipitately. Those Chinese who were in the workshops, hearing of the riot, stopped work and fled in their working clothes, and did not have time enough to go home to change their clothes or to gather up their money. What they did leave at home was either plundered or burned." They noted that because on the 1st of September, the laborers had just purchased goods for the month, "this loss of property was therefore larger than it would be later in the month." The petitioners reframed their communal ownership practices in order to make their property losses legible for redress.
Indemnity: a strategy for redress
By appealing to treaty protection and presenting their accounts of property loss, their strategies would result in indemnity, a legal practice utilized in the 19th century where nations would compensate one another when foreign subjects were killed or despoiled of their property on foreign soil. Chinese diplomats reminded the Secretary of State that the U.S. had also been involved in indemnity claims with other nations. For instance, in 1859, after American missionaries were killed in China, the Chinese government disbursed nearly half a million dollars to the United States, accounting for American property loss on Chinese soil, plus interest.3 Political cartoons regarding the Rock Springs Massacre also illustrate these precedents between the U.S. and China, and the cultural understandings of indemnity.
For Chinese subjects in America, local courts were not always a viable means for redress. Days after the massacre, while Rock Springs Sheriff Joseph Young arrested sixteen white miners for "Riot, Arson, Murder, and Robbery," in connection with the massacre, no one was ever convicted. A subsequent Coroner's Inquest stated that "That Chinamen Nos 2, 3, & 4, came to their death from Gun Shot wounds the cause of same [sic] being unknown to us" and that others had died due to an "exposur [sic] to fire. the Nationality of said bodies being unknown to us as they were deface beyond recognition." The judge himself was a member of the Knights of Labor, a labor organization that viciously targeted Chinese labor, and at least one member of the jury had participated in the massacre. During the testimony, according to news reports, a witness stated that "the Chinese set fire to their own houses in order to prevent the white men from robbing them of their money."4 Instead of relying on American courts, advocating for indemnity on an international scale was a more likely way that Chinese subjects who were victims of racial violence might gain some compensation.
And while there was precedent for these payments, the U.S. did everything it could to deny responsibility at Rock Springs, while simultaneously supporting an Indemnity Bill (called the "Belmont Act") for a $147,000 payment to China. Politicians alleged that no U.S. citizens had participated in the attack, a statement easily refuted by the press and first-hand accounts of the violence. Others contended that because Wyoming was a territory, the federal government was not responsible. President Grover Cleveland stated in a speech that the nation was "under no obligation...to indemnify these Chinese subjects," but stated that Congress should pass the Bill "in aid of innocent and peaceful strangers whose maltreatment has brought discredit upon the country; with the distinct understanding that such action is in no wise to be held as a precedent, is wholly gratuitous, and is resorted to in a spirit of pure generosity toward those who are otherwise helpless." In other words, the payment was meant to emphasize the powerlessness of Chinese subjects.
Aftermath of the Rock Springs Massacre
A generation of massacre survivors would continue to work in Rock Springs, even as petitioners recalled that after the massacre, the violence at Rock Springs was so egregious that their "sleep is disturbed by frightful dreams" and they could not "obtain peaceful rest." Ultimately, subsequent national exclusion legislation fully extended the Restriction Bill including the Scott Act of 1888 and the Geary Act of 1892, resulting in total exclusion from new immigration. But Chinese laborers still remained. For the next few decades, Ah Jim was subjected to difficult working conditions and would eventually injure his left wrist when it was crushed by a coal car. In the wake of his injuries, he might have relied on local Chinese businesses including the local Chinese-owned drug store to provide assistance to "broken arm and leg remedies." In 1924, Ah Jim stopped working at the coal mines, departing three years later for China on a Union-Pacific sponsored program to pay the few remaining Chinese workers still employed by the company to leave the country.
The historical record does not reveal if the indemnity payment to China was ever disbursed to the victims of the Rock Springs Massacre. How did the indemnity payment further entrench the Chinese subject as a non-citizen in America? What does this case teach us about the relationship between property compensation, violence, and citizenship in 19th century America?
Suggested Reading
Lee, Erika. At America's Gates: Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943. University of North Carolina Press, 2007.
Lee, Erika. The Making of Asian America: A History. Simon & Schuster, 2015.
Lew-Williams, Beth. The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America. Harvard University Press, 2018.
Luo, Michael. Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America. Doubleday Press, 2025.
Ngai, Mae. The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics. Norton & Company, 2022.
Pfaelzer, Jean. Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans. University of California Press, 2007.
1. Beth Lew-Williams, The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018).
2. Letter from George Pryde to Eugene McAuliffe, July 24, 1925, Special File No. 236, UPCC Box 3, Folder 16A, Union Pacific Coal Company Records, Western Wyoming Community College, Rock Springs, Wyoming.
3. "The Chinese Indemnity Claims, Inclosure No. 3, Cheng Tsao Ju to Mr. Bayard, in U.S. Congress. House. Committee on Foreign Affairs. Providing Indemnity to Certain Chinese Subjects: Report (to Accompany H. Res. 147). 49th Cong., 1st sess., 1886. H.Rpt. 2044.
4. "A Mild Menace" The Sun, September 7, 1885, Union Pacific Coal Company Records, Box 3a, Folder 1-0001.1, Western Wyoming Community College, Rock Springs, Wyoming; Jean Pfaelzer, Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans (University of California Press, 2007); Dell Isham, Rock Springs Massacre 1885 (Lincoln City, Oregon: Dell Isham & Associates, 1985); "Childlike Chinese," Omaha Bee, September 30, 1885, Union Pacific Railroad: SG 2 President Series 1, Incoming Correspondence, Box 23, Folder 14: Labor Disputes Coal Strike, October 1885, Nebraska State Historical Society, Cheyenne, Wyoming.
Burlingame-Seward Treaty
Keeping Account