Chinese Laborers Were Killed in a Regional Anti-Chinese Purge

In September 1885, Chinese laborers in the Squak Valley (Gilman district) were attacked as anti-Chinese vigilantes across Puget Sound moved from boycott to expulsion and terror. Coverage in Chicago Tribune and The Times described masked mobs burning Chinese quarters and acting “to set an example for other Chinese and for whites who might employ them,” showing the purge climate in which the Gilman attack occurred. The project record associates the event with the deaths of five Chinese laborers, including Mong Gow, Yeng San, and Fung Woey, but the surviving newspaper coverage is tangled with nearby Black Diamond expulsions and does not cleanly reconstruct the full attack. The Chicago Tribune offered evidence in a detailed article with the tagline: “Five Mongolians, Implicated in Crimes, Are Taken from Jail and Hanged." In September 1885, five Chinese workers were lynched in the Black Diamond minefields located in the Washington Territory. The mob action was part of a broader campaign to drive Chinese labor out of contested workplaces. In a lengthy article detailing three different lynching incidents across the West, the Chicago Tribune tagline for the lynching of five Chinese men at the Black Diamond Mines read: “Five Mongolians, Implicated in Crimes, Are Taken from Jail and Hanged” (September 23, 1885). The report further states that: “Later reports from the Black Diamond Mine show that there was no cause for scaring the Chinese, except to set an example for other Chinese and for whites who might employ them.” The report continued with a description of a convention convened in Puget Sound to plan ways to rid “the country of Chinese.” The mob employed lethal and infernal terror to scare Chinese laborers away. Chinese workers faced sustained pressure and violence in the Black Diamond minefields and nearby communities. Such attacks demonstrated to the Chinese community that residency and employment were conditional and revocable at any time without warning.