Chinese Hop Pickers Murdered by White Mob in Squak Valley
A violent, racially motivated attack on Chinese hop pickers leaves three dead as anti-Chinese hostility intensifies in the territory.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Sheriff McGraw, Prosecuting Attorney Ronald, and Coroner Dawson, who hastened out to Squak Valley on learning of the murder of the Chinese men at that point, have not yet arrived home. Saturday evening, a party of four or five white men notified the Wold Brothers that they must send the Chinese out of the valley. The Wolds protested that they could not get Indians or white men to do the work and they must have their hops picked. Sunday night, the thirty-seven Chinese encamped in the Wold Brothers' orchard were surrounded by a party of well-armed white men determined to murder them. Three Chinamen—Bak Good, Fang Kim, and Yeng Son—were killed outright, and three others were wounded. After the attack, the perpetrators fled, having failed to burn the entire camp. A coroner's jury returned a verdict that the victims died from gunshot wounds inflicted by unknown persons.
“About 10 o'clock the occupants of the camp were startled by the discharge of a volley of musketry, and they jumped from their bunks only to find that they were surrounded by a party of well-armed white men, determined to murder them.”
This event was a flashpoint in the 1885-86 expulsion movement, where organized labor and nativist groups used violence to forcibly remove Chinese residents from Washington Territory. The Squak Valley massacre, occurring near modern-day Issaquah, remains a grim reminder of how xenophobia was used to incite labor conflict in the early Pacific Northwest.
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