Summary of The Chinese Cowboy by Zane Cooper
The specifics of the anti-Chinese movement in nineteenth century America have been
studied and debated continuously by scholars; the riots, expulsions, and injustices have become
the bulk of a rather uniform scholarly narrative. Yet, the story of the Chinese in the United
States has often appeared as a separate narrative from the history of the American Frontier, or at
the very least separate from the popular mythology surrounding the West (a collage of imagery
that includes cowboys, Indians, gunfighters, and pioneers, but rarely the Chinese). However,
western mythology played an important role in the American perception of the Chinese in the
late nineteenth-century, specifically when dealing with the nature of frontier violence.
Embellished stories about the violent, gun-slinging West, tales out of places like Dodge City and
Deadwood, invented an image of the West that influenced the American definition of the
Chinese identity. This study seeks to illustrate how the popular mythology of the American
frontier that developed in the 1870s and 1880s affected the perception of the Chinese immigrant,
and how those perceptions emerged in the context of two specific instances of Chinese
exclusion: The expulsion of the Chinese from Eureka, California by local residents in February
of 1885, and the Rock Springs Massacre that occurred later that Fall in Wyoming. Within this
context, this analysis will also address the power that popular narratives have over social change.
The incidents in Eureka and Rock Springs emerged amidst a similar set of contingencies
(labor disputes and cultural tensions), but differed in one key regard: Violence. Rock Springs
was a wholesale massacre of the Chinese by an unruly mob, while Eureka achieved a furiously
forced, but comparatively peaceable extraction of the Chinese from its borders. As is often the
case with journalism, stories about the violence in Rock Spring flooded the front pages of major
newspapers whereas the forced evacuation in Eureka received little public attention. In
accordance with this pattern, the secondary scholarship concerning Chinese exclusion has
similarly minimized the events at Eureka, and focused instead on the more pronounced, violent
episodes in order to sensualize the history of discrimination against the Chinese in the late
nineteenth century. But in doing so, scholars tend to overlook the more pressing, and slower
gestating social and political issues. Even though Rock Springs incited direct action from the
federal government in the form of troops and reparations to the Chinese government, Eureka had
a far more lasting and dynamic social and political impact within its specific region and locality.
On the eve of February 6th, 1885, a man in Eureka named David Kendall lost his life to
an accidental bullet fired by an anonymous Chinese man engaged in a fight with a rival gang
member. In response to this isolated event of random tragedy, the residents in Eureka organized
a committee to eradicate the city of Chinese residents, and within 48 hours a mob of angry
whites drove every Chinese out of Eureka, imprisoning them on barges bound for San Francisco.
After the initial expulsion, the Committee of Fifteen convened to encourage merchants to sign a
pledge that they would not employ or sell to any Chinese, and after the expulsion, the city
demolished its Chinatown.1
The expulsion made national news, but did not break headlines. Most of the subsequent
articles appeared as minor notes in the margins, stating facts with little interpretation. There
were many printed in February of 1885 throughout the nation that actually ran as reprints of the
same two paragraphs. The mere copying of text as the news moved across the country seems to
imply disinterest in further investigation and analysis of the event, the news itself diminishing as
it made its way to the Atlantic.
1
Jean Pfaelzer, Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans (New York: Random House, 2007), p.
133.
Later that year, on September 2nd, 1885, the riot against the Chinese in Rock Springs,
Wyoming, left at least twenty-eight Chinese men dead, and countless more injured and
unaccounted for. Headlines of this event spread across the whole of the United States, with the
facts and story varying widely between the eastern and western papers. Additionally, in contrast
to the lack of reactions to the expulsions from Eureka and the rest of Humboldt County, the
federal government intervened in the case of Rock Spring in order to quell the unrest.
After the massacre, the western states uniformly attempted to downplay brutality with
headlines that either diluted the severity or diverted the blame. Conversely, cities in the East
decried the violence and pronouncing harsh indictments of the massacre. For instance, the
editors of Harper’s Weekly took the side of the Chinese, characterizing them as “‘law-abiding,
industrious, and respectable’” people.2 The sudden violence in Rock Springs struck a chord with
the country that begot public outcry, official apologies from the federal government, and even
prompted the swift payment of reparations to the Chinese government totaling $147,748.74.3
Why was the expulsion of Eureka overlooked, whereas the violence in Rock Spring
enjoyed far more press and attention from both the nineteenth-century media and government?
The public response and the sweepingly apologetic government response to the Rock Springs
Massacre speak not only of concern over international repercussion, but also to the ability to
dramatize the presentation of a violent event. The grand presentation of Rock Springs as an
unprecedented act of disastrous horror is overstated for a specific reason: The story of the event
simply lent itself to sensational recreation, not unlike other stories coming out of the West at the
time.
2
Pfaelzer, Driven Out, p. 213.
The Executive Documents of the House of Representatives for the Second Session of the Forty-Ninth Congress
1886-87 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1887), p. 140.
3
The pattern of the aggrandizement of violence in the West can be seen throughout the
history of the American frontier, especially beginning in the 1870s, when western fiction began
to gain popularity, blending mythos with reality. Stories like Mark Twain’s Roughing It (1872),
and the increasing publication of western dime novels that preached tall tales of heroes and
villains in the Wild West enhanced and greatly influenced the public’s perception of the West as
a place of vice and lawlessness.4 As a result, much of the language and narrative surrounding
factual places and events in the West retain a larger-than-life, mythic element, and convey ideas
about the progress and development of the American frontier that were already entrenched in the
American consciousness well before the fateful first shot at Rock Springs.
Dodge City, one of the most epitomic towns to emerge in the Wild West, experienced a
pattern of narrative manipulation very similar to the massacre in Wyoming. As seen with Rock
Springs, variations in language appear in depictions of Dodge City. The city did not want a
violent reputation and labored intensely to attain law and order, which it eventually did in 1873
when local authorities assumed control of the town.5 In spite of the desire for civic stability,
media outlets across the country spun tales about lawlessness in Dodge.
Yet with all of the sometimes absurd claims of violence and lawlessness, the truth is that
only between sixteen and nineteen people met a violent end in Dodge during the first decade of
its existence.6 A mere handful of scattered deaths erected a monumental reputation for an
otherwise unremarkable and unimportant cattle town. The same can be said for Rock Springs,
whose journey through the annals of nineteenth-century American media assumed the role of a
similarly sinful and dangerous frontier outpost.
4
Robert R. Dykstra, “Imaginary Dodge City: A Political Statement,” in Western Historical Quarterly, Vol. 31, No.
3 (2000), p. 280.
5
Ibid, p. 280.
6
Ibid, p. 280.
Journalistically speaking, Rock Springs was a good, classic, western story. It involved
rival races in a violent clash representative of the continual savage struggle that the frontier
embodied. The language that surrounded the event transformed it from a battle between nations
into a tragedy contingent on its place on the edge of civilization. The public response to Rock
Springs, and the lack of public response to Eureka, represent the formation of a clear and
conscious mythology that connects to the broader nineteenth-century consensus of the frontier
and the Wild West. Eureka wasn’t a clear story; it was too complex to easily digest by the aloof,
eastern reader. Furthermore, the violence at Rock Springs was temporary and did not affect
further local legislation against the Chinese. If anything, the violence and the subsequent public
response resulted in arguably more freedom for the Chinese when compared with the legislative
situation in Humboldt County.
The West has always maintained its place in American history as an opportunistic
battlefield of individuality that contains elements of sin, vice, and heroics. Nevertheless, its
inherent convolution seeks to mask its true nature as a place of intense and constant racial hatred
and conflict. The Chinese immigrant is no less a part of the rugged American West than the
cowboy or the Indian, for he experienced the same narrative transformation. The fact that
contemporaries and subsequent scholars forgot Eureka amidst the turmoil of Chinese-American
history speaks not to the prominence of Rock Springs as an event, but rather the importance and
gravity of Rock Springs as a narrative, and more importantly, a western narrative firmly rooted
in American frontier themes and values.
Bibliography
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