The Year of Anti-Chinese Agitation in King County
An 1885 review looks back on a year marked by intense, organized efforts to drive Chinese laborers out of Seattle and the surrounding coal mining districts.
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.
Historically, the year 1885 will be memorable as the year in which King County was the seat of one of the most determined and aggressive anti-Chinese movements in the history of the Pacific Coast. This movement was manifest in every portion of the county, and it would be impossible to say whether the feeling was most intense in the mining districts, in the farming districts, or in the city of Seattle. The movement, it must be confessed, was happy in its results, although at times it threatened to take on a phase which would have been in every way deplorable. As it was, however, the use of Chinese labor was discontinued in the mining districts and to a great extent also in the city of Seattle.
“King County was the seat of one of the most determined and aggressive anti-Chinese movements in the history of the Pacific Coast.”
This 1885 report documents a period of systematic exclusion and racial violence that reshaped the labor landscape of the Pacific Northwest. It serves as a stark reminder of the long, often painful, history of nativism that has periodically surged in Seattle—a city that today grapples with how to reconcile its growth with its history of exclusion.
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