The "Tacoma Method"
November 3, 1885 is a day for Washington State's Asian Americans to remember. On that day a mob of hundreds of men (led by a mayor, a sheriff, a fire chief, a judge and even the head of the local YMCA) rounded up about 200 hard-working Chinese immigrants and marched them to the local railroad station where they were put on a train and run out of the territory. It happened in the City of Tacoma not far from Seattle.
Chinese immigrants were present in large numbers in the Washington Territory by the 1860s. Most came north from the California gold fields to seek work in the newly discovered coal mines around Seattle. Near Seattle, Chinese were soon working in the Black Diamond, Newcastle and Renton coalmines. It did not take long before the number of Chinese miners was double the number of white miners. When gold was found in eastern Washington these immigrant miners flocked to the regions of Chelan, Walla Walla, Fort Colville, and along the Methow River in search of the “Gold Mountain.” Walla Walla's population included six hundred Chinese by 1880.
Many Chinese arrived in the Tacoma area in the 1870s to become the first non-Indian fishermen in Puget Sound and to build the Northern Pacific Railroad line from Kalama to Tacoma, which was a terminus for the China trade.
Most of the community lived on the waterfront along the Northern Pacific tracks on land leased from the railroad. Tacoma's Chinese were mostly itinerant workers seeking work as waiters, servants, launders, garbage men and as logging mill workers. They also fished, grew vegetables and raised pigs. Many stayed briefly and moved on. A few became merchants, selling mostly at first to Asians, but later on to local whites. The more established Chinese included merchants and labor contractors. Notables included: Sing Lee (arrived in Tacoma 1872), Kwok Sue (arrived 1873), Lum May (opened a store in 1874), and How Lung, who started his business in 1875.
On May 6, 1882 the Chinese Exclusion Act was signed into law. This heralded a period called “the Driving Out.” With passage of the act,
Chinese immigrants became authorized targets of violence.
When a near depression struck the nation in the mid-1880s the local logging, mining and fishing economy floundered along with the rest of the country. The Chinese, who performed menial labor that was rejected by whites before this time, found themselves envied and hated because they were working while the whites, including quite a few European immigrants, were starving.
The Chinese, and the decline in Chinese trade, were unjustly blamed for local economic ills. Across the Washington Territory the opportunists and the fearful found an easy and mutual target in the Chinese. Anti-Chinese citizens formed an “Anti-Chinese Congress” in Seattle. The Governor, Watson C. Squire, suggested to the Chinese that they "quietly withdraw," thus "thinning out their number that they will not be offensive" (UW).
In early September 1885, at a railroad work camp of Rock Springs in what is now Wyoming, but then part of the Washington Territory, an attack left 28 Chinese killed and 15 wounded. Violence quickly spread across Washington when nothing was done to apprehend the perpetrators.
On September 28, 1985 a mass anti-Chinese rally was held in Seattle that issued a manifesto for all Chinese to leave the Washington Territory by November 1st. Soon afterward two committees went house to house to deliver the manifesto.
A mob of whites and Native Americans attacked a group of Chinese hop pickers in Issaquah, King County. They killed two Chinese, wounded three and burned their tents and possessions. Another Chinese settlement in Coal Creek was raided. There the coal miners had their bunkhouse and cookhouse set afire as they slept, and the residents were assaulted when they arose in alarm. A few miles away, in the mining community of Black Diamond, a group of Chinese miners were run out of town. Their homes were looted and burned.
The city passed an edict telling everyone of Chinese origin to get out of the area by November 3rd. Four hundred Chinese fled. Little Hong Kong, a fishing village on Maury Island across the sound from Tacoma, completely vanished. About 150 Chinese either took the train south to Portland, Oregon or sailed to Victoria, B.C. in late October aboard the steamer Southern Chief. Only about 200 Chinese, mostly merchants unwilling to abandon their goods and property, remained on the morning of the 3rd. A Chinese merchant, Goon Gau, sent a telegram to Territorial Governor Watson Squire saying, “I am notified that at three p.m. tomorrow a mob will remove me and destroy my goods. I want protection. Can I have it?” (Murray Morgan, p. 244) The governor did nothing.
Upon a prearranged signal, a whistle blast from the local mills, mobs of several hundreds of men quickly gathered and marched on the Chinese that had stayed. Threatening the Chinese with weapons including guns, the mob yanked the young and old Chinese men and women, along with their children, from their homes and shoved them all into a downpour with barely any belongings. Doors and windows were smashed as men pillaged homes and stores. Historian Murray Morgan, reports one person saying, "They were herded and driven away like cattle. ... The elderly and sick Chinese were permitted to ride. The rest trudged after the wagons, wrapped in blankets against the cold rain, duffels slung on poles over their backs. Their sandals sucked mud; some took them off and went barefoot. Many were crying."
The sodden and cold Chinese were herded to a corral at 7th Street and Pacific Avenue near the Lake View railway station where they were kept without shelter from the continuing rain. Two men died of exposure and one woman went insane. Those who could afford to buy tickets on the morning train to Portland did so. A stationmaster sold 77. At around 3 AM a freight train stopped at the station and rescued all those who could not afford tickets. Early in the morning, while a few brave merchants and employees who had escaped the forced march to the station tried to save their goods, the mob burned the two Chinese settlements to the ground.
The deed was applauded in Seattle, and elsewhere in the country, as “The Tacoma Method.”
It was very effective.
Only a very few house servants remained in Tacoma protected by their employers.
The U.S. secretary of war sent troops to Seattle to prevent even more pogroms
when it became clear that the local authorities were unable or unwilling to do anything.
A report in the University of Washington’s archives indicates that the territorial governor was an accomplice to the events:
Tacoma's German immigrant mayor and merchant Jacob Weisbach (who had also arrived in the 1870s), seeing an opportunity to get rid of competing Chinese merchants, was encouraged by these acts of violence. He called together all the prominent local citizens and began planning to drive the Chinese from the city. Calling the Chinese “a curse” and a “filthy horde,” Weisbach insisted that it was natural for Tacomans to want to purge the community of them. The Tacoma Ledger newspaper published a series of racist diatribes against the Chinese. Mass meetings, often led by alocal carpenter union's leadership, played upon the economic survival fears of workers and business people to fan racial bigotry into hatred.
When the mayor and other ringleaders were indicted and sent by rail to Vancouver, WA by the army, the territorial judge, Judge Hoyt, promptly set them free on bail. They went home to a welcoming parade and treated as heroes. They later did go on trial in Tacoma, but all charges were dropped. Other than the train ride to Vancouver they spent no time in custody.
Chinese did not return to Tacoma until the 1920s when active prohibition by the city ended. Today Tacoma is the only west coast U.S. city that does not have a Chinatown.
The following sources were used to reconstruct this story:
The Chinese in America: a Narrative History; Iris Chang; Viking Penguin; 2003
Puget's Sound: A Narrative of Early Tacoma and the Southern Sound; Murray Morgan; University of Washington Press, 1979, p. 212-252
Tsai, Shih-Shan Henry. The Chinese Experience in America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986.
The Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest, University of Washington Department of History, and Matthew W. Klingle. A History Burst With Telling: Asian Americans in Washington State. University of Washington. 24, October 1998.
Report of the Governor of Washington Territory to the Secretary of the Interior I886 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1886), 875. Special Collections, University of Washington Libraries.
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