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The journalist Michael Llewoh has a gut-wrenching story in a recent edition of The New Yorker. It's about the Rock Springs Massacre. On September 2nd, 1885, white rioters overran the Chinese quarter in Rock Springs, Wyoming, and they took a torch to the place, killed at least 28 Chinese miners. Luo says hundreds fled Rock Springs that day.

Some died in the sagebrush wilderness.

Some managed to get aboard escape trains sent by Union Pacific.

And he told us about a week later, some of them came back, guarded by U.S. soldiers.

They returned to Rock Springs about a week later in the company of soldiers.

The scene was that some of the bodies are still not buried,

and they're being jeered by a crowd of white miners

when they arrived back in town

and their bodies still on the ground mangled and decomposing.

And there's a statement that the Chinese laborers later wrote,

and there's an element of poetry in it.

It was a sad and painful sight to see the son crying for the father,

the brother for the brother, the uncle for the nephew, and the friend for friend.

They bedded down on the ground next to the tracks.

The Chinatown that had existed had been burned to the ground.

And they were put back to work.

It took a bit because at first there were gangs of white miners that were guarding the mine entrances

and just scaring off any Chinese miners who were entering.

But eventually coal production resumed with Chinese laborers under guard from American soldiers. I looked at a lot of archival photographs researching this piece, and it's really striking.

There's these rail cars in the background, and there's kind of smoke, and there's the sagebrush kind of landscape.

If you look more closely, it looks like there are little campfires and there are images of soldiers

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