Vigilante Mob Targets Coal Creek Chinese Miners
A masked party of men armed with firearms forced Chinese laborers from their homes, leaving their settlement in flames.
The story, cleaned up
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Mr. William Campbell of the Newcastle coal mines returned and reported that on Friday night, at 12 o'clock, a party of masked men, some thirty or forty in number, surrounded the Chinese quarters at Coal Creek, about one mile from the Newcastle mine. By yelling and discharging firearms, they drove the sleeping Chinese from their beds. The Mongolians took to the woods for safety, just in time to see their cook house and residences one by one in flames. They were totally destroyed, together with $400 or $500 worth of stores and clothing which were in stock there by Chinese from this city to be sold to the Chinamen. The bunker, a short distance from the Chinese quarters, escaped the torches. This job is said to have been done by white men. No murder was committed, and so far as is known, none was attempted, its object being to frighten the Chinese away from the camp. These Chinamen have been employed principally as pickers in the bunkers and received $1.50 per day, their job being to separate the rock from the coal. Mr. Miller stated last evening that the Chinamen are unsuited to the work they are doing, and that white men will not do the same work for the money. However, due to the extremely low price of coal and the great competition, the company does not feel justified in increasing the cost of production one cent per ton. If this war is continued on the Chinamen who are currently employed, the company will feel justified in shutting down the mine altogether, thereby throwing hundreds of white men out of employment.
“These Chinamen have been employed principally as pickers... the company does not feel justified in increasing the cost of production one cent per ton.”
This violent episode is a brutal example of the anti-Chinese expulsion era in Washington, where economic scapegoating was weaponized to force laborers out of their jobs and homes. It mirrors a long, painful history of exclusion that defined regional labor politics in the late 19th century.
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