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CHAPTER XXXIII

CHINESE LABOR MENACE ALARMS WHITES-SERIOUS

TROUBLE BREAKS OUT AT ROCK SPRINGS CHINESE AT WOLD'S HOP RANCH FIRED ON-MASS MEETING IN SEATTLE-TACOMA INVESTIGATES CHINESE LIVING CONDITIONS—SEVENTY-SIX SIGN ROLL OF ANTI-CHINESE LEAGUE-CITIES UNITE IN ANTI-CHINESE MOVEMENT-BITTER ATTACKS MADE IN TACOMA-PARSON MC FARLAND ATTENDS TO CHURCHLY DUTIES WEARING TWO BIG REVOLVERS-RUN ON BANKS THREATENED -HOW SECRET COMMITTEES WORKED WHISTLE SOUNDS FINAL WARNING MAYOR WEISBACH'S VIEW OF THE SITUATION-TRAIN CARRIES REFUGEES TO LAKEVIEW-MANY ARRESTS MADE-SEATTLE SHIPS CHINESE BY BOAT-SOLDIERS CALLED OUT, FIRING FOLLOWS.

The driving of the last spike on the Northern Pacific's line to Pasco threw a large number of laborers out of work, among them thousands of Chinamen. The orientals, because of a willingness to work for almost any wage, had no difficulty in obtaining employment and every coolie that found a job shoved a white man into the growing ranks of the unemployed.

Almost from the day in 1847 that Chum Wing, the first Chinaman to come to the Pacific Coast, arrived in California, the Chinese question had been a live issue. Chum Wing, intelligent and industrious, discovered gold in the hills of the southern state, and sent word of his good fortune to his home in the Celestial Empire and set in motion a herd of coolie immigrants. Aliens from other nations arriving in America become a part of the social body; but the Chinaman was different. For ages he had followed teachers who inculcated into the minds of their pupils a moral philosophy almost entirely different from that of Western peoples. Industry might be said to represent the one virtue the American. could see in the Chinaman-and because of his willingness to work for a low wage, even this, it was considered, had become perverted.

So long as John Chinaman confined his activities to his wash houses and truck patches, the white man had no serious objection of his presence in the country. The Pacific Coast offered the Chinamen opportunities of obtaining undreamed of wealth and they crossed the ocean by the tens of thousands. They extended the limits of their occupations. Employers of large numbers of laborers were more interested in the subject of profits than they were in the welfare of the men whose labor furnished those profits, and, other things being equal, the Chinaman got the job.

White labor early begun to feel this unequal competition. The Chinaman was not particular about working conditions-he would do anything, live in any kind of low habitation and eat the poorest and cheapest of food. If he received $1 a day he lived on ten cents of it and either gambled the remainder or sent it back to China. As cooks and house servants, they invaded the hotels and homes.

Pacific Coast housewives of the present day are paying for the mistake made by housewives of an earlier period when they employed Chinese men as servants. White women and girls of the Pacific Coast will do almost any other kind of work in preference to that of the household. The Chinaman has gone, but behind him he left a stigma which remains to this day-he robbed household labor of its dignity.

As early as 1877 Dennis Kearney and his sand-lotters at San Francisco started an agitation against the Chinamen. They adopted a catchy slogan-"The Chinese Must Go" and it rapidly spread until it was heard in every city and town between Mexico and Canada and as far east as Colorado and Wyoming. In fact the first forcible resistance to the orientals occurred at Rock Springs, in the latter state. Rock Springs was, and is, a coal mining town. Many Chinamen were employed there. White men' were being forced out. On September 4, 1885, they armed themselves, attacked the Chinese settlement, killed eleven and drove about five hundred out of town. The eleven dead orientals were the first victims of a race war that was to sweep westward to the Pacific and was to finally put an end to Chinese immigration.

East of the Rocky Mountain states the anti-Chinese movement caused but little comment. Congress in the early '80s passed exclusion laws, but failed to provide machinery for their strict enforcement. Eastern labor, unorganized at that time, was not menaced by the yellow man; Eastern employers with Western contracts found that same yellow man's labor profitable, and however much we may deprecate mob rule and mob violence, it seems something of the kind. is at times necessary to arouse public sentiment to a point where it will demand the righting of wrongs. Evolution oftentimes works out its problems through revolution.

At Wold Brothers' hop ranch near Issaquah, in the Squak Valley, on the night of September 7, white men and Indians made a raid on the tents of Chinese hop-pickers, killed three and drove the rest into the brush. For months the Chinese question had been before the people of the territory and both employers of Chinamen and the orientals themselves had been warned of the gathering storm. The Squak Valley outbreak spread, and on the night of the IIth the quarters of Chinese miners at Coal Creek were raided, one was choked and the shacks and clothing of about fifty others burned. At Black Diamond the Chinese were driven out and on the 20th a Seattle mass meeting adopted resolutions approving these acts.

Driven out of the smaller communities the orientals congregated in the Chinatowns of Portland, Tacoma and Seattle. Tacoma already had been wrestling with the problem. Seattle's filthy and ill-smelling Chinese quarter below the "dead line" was not a prominent feature of the landscape; Tacoma's was a bunch of rickety shacks along the watershed and the first object to attract the attention of visitors. Stories of the degenerate practices of the inhabitants of these districts were told and, from surface indications, half the truth never came to light. The Tacoma council tried legislating against the nuisance. A committee consisting of Mayor Weisbach, Rev. J. A. Ward and R. F. Radebaugh, owner of the Ledger, investigated and, June 3d, made a report that nauseated the community.' Weisbach and Ward said they both had been made ill by visiting a few of the Chinese houses. Radebaugh had not accompanied them. The

report described a horrible disregard of sewer arrangements. Men, women and children were packed away in unlighted and wholly unventilated rooms, in which bunks were built from floor to ceiling. On the walls and from the ceilings hung dried fish and other meats which gave the rooms the odor of carrion. Beneath several of the Chinese buildings were stinking pools of water.

In the washhouses the committee found the dainty garments of white women being puddled around in suds that reeked with dirt. The smell of smoking opium was everywhere. The washhouses used no machinery. The Chinese laundryman's method was to pull a garment from the boiling vat, beat it over a block, rinse it indifferently and in water not often changed, and trust to the iron to give it the semblance of cleanliness. All this and more was described in the report, which was read to a mass meeting in the Alpha Opera House, with Beverly W. Coiner presiding. The only commendable phase in the Chinese situation, according to the report, was the Methodist Mission School, on C Street, above Ninth, which was clean and bright.

At a mass meeting held six days later seventy-six persons signed the roll of an Anti-Chinese League. Mayor Weisbach was elected president. Sixty names were signed to the roll of the Knights of Labor local when it was organized on September 7th. It was believed by some that the order was preparing a countrywide revolution. It was reported that weapons in large numbers had been gathered in the hall, and there were stories of nightly drills and murderous conspiracies. These reports became so alarming that some of the moneyed interests hired detectives, who became members of the organization, and thereafter all its doings were the subject of daily reports.

Mayor Yesler, of Seattle, called a mass meeting which was held on September 23d and adopted resolutions counseling the people to observe the law and promising aid in removing the Chinese. Five days later an Anti-Chinese congress assembled in Seattle. Mayor Weisbach of Tacoma presided. The congress adopted resolutions condemning the Western Washington Congregational Association for asking the repeal of the Chinese exclusion act; asked all employers to at once discharge all Chinese and fixed November 15th as the date by which all Chinamen should leave Western Washington. The assembling of this congress marked the beginning of the breaking down of the Seattle-Tacoma fight. Large crowds of people attended the meeting and the Tacoma delegation, headed by the mayor, was given an especially enthusiastic greeting. October 3d, set as the date for ratifying the action of the congress, was observed with mass meetings by all local organizations.

In Tacoma, the attitude of the Chamber of Commerce was awaited with interest. Its members had been quarreling over the question. John Arthur and General Sprague had locked horns several times. Sprague, I. W. Anderson and others among its leaders were opposed to the proposed drive. Three sets of resolutions were presented at a special meeting called at the Tacoma Hotel to discuss the question. George Fuller's opposed the Chinese, but they also opposed coercion; Ezra Meeker's also opposed coercion and carried some reflections on the activities of Mayor Weisbach; J. E. Burns' resolutions deplored the oriental menace, blamed the poor governmental guardianship of the border, by which the Chinese were enabled to cross in great numbers, called upon the President of the United States to place a sufficient force there to stop the

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