The expulsion of Seattle's Chinese community
7-9 February 1886Seattle's Chinese quarter and the Ocean Dock, King County, WA
A mob marched Seattle's Chinese residents to the docks to put them on a steamer. The governor declared martial law and the president sent federal troops, but most of the Chinese population was gone within days.
By 1885 roughly 950 Chinese people lived in Seattle, about a tenth of the city. Depression, and organised agitation by labour groups and the Knights of Labor, turned that presence into a grievance. The violence arrived first outside the city: at Squak Valley in September 1885, white and Native hop pickers fired into the tents of Chinese workers, killing three.
On the morning of 7 February 1886 a mob went house to house through Seattle's Chinese quarter, loading residents and their belongings into wagons and marching them to the Ocean Dock to be put aboard the steamer Queen of the Pacific. A judge intervened and ordered a hearing, but most of those questioned - with the mob outside - chose to go. On 8 February, as the Home Guard escorted the remaining Chinese residents, the crowd attacked; the guards fired, one man died and four were wounded.
Governor Watson Squire declared martial law, closed the saloons and imposed a curfew; President Grover Cleveland ordered federal troops, who reached Seattle on 10 February and stayed into the summer. The law arrived, in other words, and it still did not restore what had been taken: Seattle's Chinese population had collapsed, and the expulsion stood. It came three months after Tacoma had done the same thing and called it a method.
Several hundred people were put aboard ship or left in the days that followed; Seattle's Chinese population did not recover for a generation.
Sources
- Mobs forcibly expel most of Seattle's Chinese residents beginning on February 7, 1886HistoryLink.org, Washington State history encyclopediahistorylink.org
- Anti-Chinese Activism in SeattleHistoryLink.org, Washington State history encyclopediahistorylink.org
- Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese AmericansRandom House (2007)Jean Pfaelzer's study of the expulsions and massacres of Chinese communities across the American West.