The leader of the group was Laura Ng, a thirty-eight-year-old historical archeologist from Grinnell College, in Iowa, who specializes in the study of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Chinese migration to the United States. She wore an archeologist’s field uniform of work pants, boots, and a floppy sun hat. Ng and her colleagues were looking for artifacts left behind by Chinese residents of Rock Springs. One of their aspirations was to stumble on the flattened traces of an outhouse, with feces and trash. “That would be amazing,” she told me, explaining that refuse piles are full of clues about daily life. Ng’s team was also searching for a pancaked stratum of black charcoal—a “burn layer”––which would signal that they’d found the remnants of an atrocity carried out by inhabitants of the town.
On September 2, 1885, in one of the most gruesome episodes of racial terror in American history, a group of white miners killed at least twenty-eight Chinese residents in Rock Springs and burned down the town’s Chinese quarter. This summer, civic leaders are planning to erect a memorial, titled “Requiem,” on the wedge of land where the crew was digging, marking the hundred-and-fortieth anniversary of the massacre. Local officials had granted Ng’s team permission to excavate the memorial’s planned footprint, to make sure that the installation does not damage any buried cultural treasures.
Ng and her colleagues worked in ten-centimetre increments, digging and sifting. They were joined on most days by Dudley Gardner, a former professor of history and archeology at Western Wyoming Community College, and perhaps the world’s foremost expert on the massacre. He has spent more than four decades researching the Rock Springs Chinatown––at times overcoming residents’ reluctance to probe the past. “There were remnants of the community who remember having relatives that actually perpetrated the Chinese massacre,” he told me.
After a week of digging, Ng and her team concluded that there were few intact artifacts to be unearthed. In 1913, a school was built on the site of the former Chinatown. The school has since been razed, but the construction disturbed the soil beneath it. The group moved toward the northeast corner of the park to see if that location would prove more fruitful. A few days later, Paul Hoornbeek, an archeologist, discovered beams and timbers that were likely the remnants of a Chinese dwelling. Meanwhile, George Matthes, an undergraduate at Grinnell, found himself with the archeological equivalent of a fish on the line. “He kept finding stuff,” Ng told me. A coin, a piece of glazed stoneware, a fragment of bone. Close to a metre down, Matthes began digging through charcoal, as if he were crouched in the middle of a fireplace. He uncovered a melted glass jar, then an intact pig’s jaw. He’d found it: the burn layer. “I realized, I’m standing on top of one of the most horrible events in Wyoming’s history,” he told me.