Chinese Laborers Meet Resistance in the Washington Territory

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Gong Heng San had not slept for two days. Neither had the 36 other Chinese laborers hired by L. A. and Ingelbricht Wold to pick the hops on their farm just outside a little town called Squak in King County, Washington Territory. The sleeplessness of Gong Heng San and friends was understandable; it’s difficult to rest comfortably with the threat of mob violence looming over you.

The Saturday night of the workers’ arrival, a crowd of armed men had confronted the Wolds and told them to expel the Chinese from their farm. ‘I shall either die or the Chinamen shall go, Henry Tibbetts, one of the members of the crowd, had angrily told L. A. Wold. The next night, the workers’ sleep was disturbed by reports that a second group of Chinese laborers on their way to join their countrymen at the Wolds’ farm had been turned back at gunpoint by an angry mob.

The Wolds notified the district attorney’s office in Seattle of impending violence. J. T. Ronald, the D.A., wired George Tibbetts, a Squak merchant and the local justice of the peace, for his assessment of the situation. I don’t think their [sic] will be any trouble in our little valley, Tibbetts wrote back. Their [sic] was a little disturbance at the China Camp I am told, but as near as I can find out about it-it was just for a little fun. Law and order would be maintained, Tibbetts said.

The Wolds passed on these promises to their workers. Relieved and reassured, the weary men turned in early on the night of Monday, September 7, 1885.

At about 9:30 that evening, a group of 10 to 12 men opened fire on the Chinese camp. It sounded like a China New Years, Gong Heng San said later. So many firecrackers. The Chinese fled in panic, while the mob unsuccessfully tried to burn their tents.

When Gong Heng San and a handful of the workers returned about 15 minutes later, they found their compatriot Fung Wue dead from a gunshot to the chest. A gut-shot Mong Gow lived an agonizing half hour before he too died. Yeng San, wounded in the let arm and in both legs, lingered painfully through the evening. I’ll die sure, Yeng San told Gong Heng San. I am sorry. Got a son home. Too young. No one to send him money. Come morning, Yeng San was also dead. The rest of the workers elected to return to the relative safety of Seattle.

Gong Heng San called it the night white men came to kill Chinamen, but the mob included more than white men. In a rare instance of Indian-white cooperation, several local Indians joined the attack on the Chinese. Their reason? They resented the competition from Chinese labor. Hop growers in Washington Territory had typically hired Indians to pick their crop, and now Indians and whites found common ground in their fear that low-wage Chinese labor would take away their jobs.

Only about 105,000 Chinese resided in the united States at the time of the shootings, but their presence aroused a great deal of prejudice, particularly in the West, where their numbers were highest. About three-fourths of the total Chinese population lived in California, with most of the rest scattered through Oregon, Idaho, Nevada, and Washington Territory. In Washington, the Chinese numbered just shy of 3,200 out of a total population of 67,199.

Since their first arrival on western shores in the 1860s, the Chinese had been greeted with violence by the resident Americans. In 1871, massive anti-Chinese riots convulsed Los Angeles and San Francisco, and during the Great Railway Strike of 1877, mobs burned 25 Chinese businesses in San Francisco. Denver saw a wave of anti-Chinese disturbances in 1880. And in 1885, just five days before the Squak incident, white miners rioted against the presence of Chinese laborers in Rock Springs, Wyoming Territory.

The violence at Squak differed from these other incidents because of the Indians’ participation. By 1885, the Indians of western Washington Territory no longer depended solely on hunting, fishing and gathering for their food. Nor did they receive government rations the way some reservation-bound tribes in other parts of the country did. Many of them lived off the reservations and worked for wages, a necessity because white settlers had disrupted their traditional ways of getting food. Indians worked in lumber camps, sawmills and mines, as well as in the settlers’ houses and fields.

The boom in hops growing, which took hold in the 1880s, gave Indians another potential source of cash income. In fact, by 1885, the hops harvests had become grand get-togethers for Indians all over the Northwest-a time not just for work but also for socializing. Three days after the shootings at Squak, for example, one observer found 1,000 Indian pickers-including British Columbia Indians, Flatheads and a large camp of Klickitats from east of the [Cascade] mountains-encamped at a hop ranch in Snoqualmie, north of Seattle.

The extremely low market price for hops in 1885, however, had goaded the Wold brothers into replacing their Indian pickers with Chinese. The Indians had been promised $1 per box, according to one newspaper account, but the Wolds wanted to get their crop in more cheaply. It was…generally understood, the report stated, that the Indians…would refuse to accept the reduction. The Wolds had therefore contacted a Chinese labor contractor in Seattle to provide them with a replacement work force. One Seattle newspaper described the shootings as the War of the Wages.

Word of the shootings spread quickly among the locals, who had little liking for the Chinese. A jury of inquiry was hastily impaneled by none other than George Tibbetts, the local justice of the peace, who had pooh-poohed the possibility of violence. This jury rapidly issued its official verdict: the Chinese men had died at the hands of persons unknown.

Tibbetts’ effort to sweep the case under the rug failed when an 18-year-old laborer named Sam Robertson admitted to Ronald, the King County district attorney, that he and several other men had taken part in the shootings. On October 7, with the help of Robertson’s testimony, Ronald got a grand jury to indict seven men, including two Indians, for murder.

Robertson said that about 7:30 the night of the killings, Tibbetts had stepped out of his store and fired eight shots into the air. This signal prompted the gathering of seven men, including Robertson and Perry Bayne, a local blacksmith whom Robertson named as the ringleader of the group. Each of the men carried a weapon, and Tibbetts furnished them with ammunition.

At about 8:30, the men left Tibbetts’ store and proceeded to the neighboring Indian camp. As Robertson was the only one who spoke and understood Chinook jargon, the pidgin trade language that allowed whites and Indians to communicate, he was appointed to recruit the Indians. Robertson, Bayne, and Daniel Hues visited the tents of three Indians: Jim Graham, Indian Curley and Indian Johnny. The Indians were reluctant to join in, but a combination of threats and persuasion finally convinced them to take part. According to Jim Graham, the whites had told the Indians that if they did not come along on the attack, the white men would shoot them.

The group, now grown to 10, continued on their way. A number of curious onlookers, both white and Indian, joined them, swelling the crown to about 20 people. Robertson led the way, as he was the most familiar with the area. After going half a mile, Robertson later testified, we stopped and agreed to stay together. If any man ran away and left the others, he was to be shot. Several men left the group at this point.

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