A short drive from Main Street in Rock Springs, Wyoming, two rectangular holes, about four feet deep, form a checkerboard pattern in a grassy lawn.
The greenspace, which connects a Slovenian Catholic church with a playground, has attracted a trickle of visitors from all over the country this summer to the small city in southwestern Wyoming.
Inside the holes, six Grinnell College researchers are digging, scraping and screening the soil. Most have never been to Wyoming before.
They’re looking for artifacts from 140 years ago, when a mob burned down what was once Chinatown in Rock Springs. In the violence, the mob killed 28 Chinese migrant workers and injured another 14, making it one of the most violent bouts of anti-Chinese violence in U.S. history.
In 1885, labor tensions had boiled over in the Union Pacific Railroad’s coal mines, stemming from an argument over who had the best work opportunities. The mob, many of them also migrants, blamed the Chinese.
The mob burned several blocks that once made up homes and shops full of imported goods, later razed to the ground and redeveloped.
“[Because of this], there’s going to be a layer that is very distinctive in the archaeological record,” said Laura Ng, the Iowa-based archaeology professor leading this summer’s dig.
That layer is what’s known as the “burn layer” and it’s where Ng’s team is concentrating its efforts. It’s here they have found artifacts, ranging from pottery shards, animal bones, an ornamental door handle and a wooden beam from an old building foundation.
These artifacts tell the researchers what life was like in the 19th-century Chinatown for migrant workers, each of whom had a foot in two vastly different worlds.
For many of the Chinese, work was in Wyoming and family in China. Not necessarily a personal choice, this was more of a reflection of federal immigration laws at the time restricting Chinese immigration.
“Railroads and Chinese-American communities go sort of hand-in-hand, but also discrimination, segregation,” Ng said. Existing anti-Chinese sentiment built on the federal Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, she added, likely stirring the mob.
Descendants join the dig
Despite spending most of their youth in Rock Springs, Grace and Ricky Leo only later in life learned about the massacre — and that they have ties to it.
“We didn’t know that we were related to the people that died in the massacre,” Grace said, during the Leos’ recent return to Rock Springs to join the dig.
Although the couple now calls Thousand Oaks, Calif., home, they’ve learned more about their family’s multigenerational ties to their hometown in recent years. The massacre was not something the Leos learned in school.
At a 2019 event commemorating the 150th anniversary of the transcontinental railroad, the Leos met Rock Springs archaeologist and Western Wyoming Community College professor emeritus Dudley Gardner.
Gardner helped the Leos learn that Ricky’s father, a World War II veteran and owner of a Rock Springs Chinese-American restaurant, wasn’t the only Leo immigrant to make a life in Wyoming. Rather, it was a trend that spanned generations in the Leo family and dated back to the 1870s.
“That was very surprising,” Ricky said. “I didn’t realize there were so many members of my family that were here.”
Of the 28 killed in the massacre, 13 of them are from the Leo clan in China, a large part of that number a byproduct of Ricky’s ancestors recruiting more Chinese to come work in Rock Springs. His great-uncle was one of the survivors.
Two Rock Springs history museums mention the massacre in exhibits, though the Leos said some of it is incomplete. One suggests that there are no Chinese descendants from the massacre left in Rock Springs.
“We have to let them know that there are still descendants here,” Ricky said. Whenever the Leos are in Rock Springs, they spend time keeping up Ricky’s late father’s home, which is still in the family.
The Leos will return to Rock Springs at the end of the month to hold a 140th commemoration event to remember the massacre.
Rock Springs’ immigration past and presentThe Chinese weren’t the only migrant workers drawn to Rock Springs. The Union Pacific Railroad turned Rock Springs into a company town, pushing recruitment efforts all over the globe and earning the town the motto “Home of 56 nationalities.”
Every year since 1924, the town has held “International Day,” one of Wyoming’s only multicultural festivals, honoring the town’s long heritage of attracting migrants.
These days, Rock Springs’ penchant for industry still attracts immigrants, though today the draw has changed and the migrants far less diverse.
The railroad tracks still stand, but most travel by car on Interstate 80. Coal mining has also given way to trona.
The 2020 census shows that of the nearly 25,000 who live in Rock Springs today, 60% identify as white and 18.7% Hispanic. Only a couple hundred Asian-Americans live there today.
Rock Springs isn’t isolated from the growing national crackdown on immigrants, and in some regards, is driving it.
Sweetwater County, home to Rock Springs, became one of the earliest in the country to adopt a contract to work on behalf of ICE in 2020. Under the second Trump administration, it upped its commitment to adopt all three possible types of contracts.
Four other Wyoming counties have followed suit along with the Highway Patrol. Gov. Mark Gordon recently confirmed that the Wyoming National Guard could soon join immigration enforcement.
With the recent intensification in immigration policy, Ng described what she sees as a parallel from the past to the present: a system that lures migrants to drive the local economy without making it easy to stay.
Instead, she sees migrants being “villainized” and “criminalized.” An analysis of Wyoming data shows most arrested this year have no criminal backgrounds.
Even today, the Leos said some, including other descendants, would rather avoid talking about the massacre. Ng has heard similarly.
“Some people want to say ‘Get over it, it happened in the past,’” she said. “Why revisit something that makes America look bad?”
For Ng, the answer is simple.
“It seems like we don’t learn from history,” Ng said.
Copyright 2025 KHOL.
This story was shared via Rocky Mountain Community Radio, a network of public media stations in Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico, including Aspen Public Radio.
