Rock Springs

A Stage Station at the Springs

The Rock Springs Coal sign arcs over downtown, and with the Sweetwater County Miner’s Memorial and the old U.P. depot it stands at or near South Main Street, in a town that began as a Union Pacific coal camp and railroad station.^2,4,5 In 1850 an Army survey party commanded by Howard Stansbury and guided by Jim Bridger made the first documented mention of coal here, reporting “a bed of bituminous coal cropping out of the north bluff of the valley.”² Ben Holladay’s Overland Stage Company built a stone station beside the springs that gave the town its name; the state preservation office’s City Hall listing dates the outpost to 1861, and the downtown district nomination dates the station to 1862 or 1863.^3,4 In 1866 Archibald and Duncan Blair set up a trading post opposite the station, and in 1868 they opened the first coal mine, just as the Union Pacific arrived.^2,3 The brothers lacked the money to keep the mine and turned to sheep ranching, and their descendants, the Hay family, built a bank that still operates.²

Coal for the Union Pacific

The Union Pacific took control of the mines in 1874, and U.P. President Charles Adams called them the “salvation of the UP; those mines saved it.”^2,4 So much coal once moved through town that winter snows turned black, and at one time more than 130 mines worked across Sweetwater County.² After a strike in 1875 the company brought in more Chinese miners, and by 1885 nearly 600 Chinese and 300 white miners worked the Rock Springs mines.⁶ The 1880 census counted 349 Chinese in Rock Springs, which the WyoHistory.org county essay calls the largest Chinatown in Wyoming Territory, and one woman, Mai Wing, among them.¹

Chinatown Burned, September 1885

On the morning of Sept. 2, 1885, a fight between white and Chinese miners in the No. 6 mine left a Chinese miner fatally wounded by blows of a pick, and a mob of miners of European descent then attacked Chinatown and burned it.^1,6 WyoHistory.org counts 28 Chinese killed, 15 wounded, and all 79 shacks and houses looted and burned, while a state marker near Sinclair gives 26 killed on September 3.^6,7 On the ninth of September the company loaded about 600 Chinese onto boxcars at Evanston, told them they were bound for San Francisco, and ran the train east instead, back to Rock Springs.⁶ Federal troops built Camp Pilot Butte between downtown and Chinatown and stayed for 13 more years.⁶ In 1886 the company began hiring miners of many nationalities, its officials contending that men who could not speak each other’s language would be less likely to unionize.¹ Rock Springs became an incorporated city on October 6, 1888, and its City Hall, begun in 1894 and in use by 1895, now houses the Rock Springs Historical Museum.^3,4,8

Fifty-Six Nations Along the Tracks

The miners came from 56 nations, and by 1911 an estimated 1,000 Tyroleans lived in Rock Springs.^2,4 In 1907 the miners struck and won, and the United Mine Workers admitted Japanese miners into the union.¹ On April 3, 1921, the A.M.E. congregation and the Second Baptist congregation of pastor J.W. Randolph laid the cornerstone of a joint church at N and Channel streets, where the Baker’s Chapel African Methodist Episcopal building is among the historic buildings still open for public use.^8,9 D. D. Spani, an architect who came from St. Louis in 1911, designed the Elks’ Lodge, completed in 1924 in an Italian Renaissance style.¹⁰ The Downtown Rock Springs Historic District, split into north and south halves by the Union Pacific tracks, holds forty-five buildings, many with Art Deco fronts below their original ornate cornices.¹¹ Coal workers made almost $8 a day in 1920, but in 1933 the Rock Springs Rocket estimated that a quarter of the population used the soup kitchen.²

Diesel, Trona, and the Bridger Boom

When the Union Pacific switched its locomotives from coal to diesel in the 1950s, all of the mines closed, and some people predicted Rock Springs would become a ghost town.^1,2 Old mine tunnels collapsed under the houses built above them, while trona mines opening in the Green River area took up many of the lost coal jobs.^2,12,13 Western Wyoming Community College was founded in 1959 with 40 students and five instructors meeting in the evenings at Rock Springs High School.² In 1971 two utilities announced the $1 billion Jim Bridger Power Plant, and as workers flooded the area the city’s 11,000 population doubled in a few years.¹² In 1977 60 Minutes came to cover sleaze and alleged corruption, and on July 15, 1978, public safety director Ed Cantrell shot his undercover agent, Mike Rosa, in a police cruiser in front of the Silver Dollar Bar.^12,13 Tried at Pinedale in November 1979, Cantrell was found not guilty after less than three hours.¹² The Rock Springs Coal sign, first raised around 1929 at the C Street crossing of the tracks, was later taken down and dumped in a field for scrap before a local group restored it to its original location.⁵