Chinese Laundry Clothing

At nine o'clock on the morning of November 3, 1885, steam whistles blew in the foundries and mills across Tacoma, to announce the start of the purge of all the Chinese people of the city. Exhibits closed and police stood by as five hundred men, brandishing clubs and pistols, went from house to house in the district center of China and through Chinese houses along the quay of the city. Sensing the storm ahead, earlier this week, about five hundred Chinese people had fled from Tacoma. The rest was given four hours to be ready to go. They desperately stuffed years of life in bags, shawls, and baskets hanging from poles shoulder - bedding, clothing, pots, a little food. At noon, the crowd began to drag Chinese laborers from their homes, looting their laundries, and throw their furniture into the street. Chinese merchants pleaded with the mayor and the sheriff for twenty to four hours to pack their boutiques.

At the beginning of the cold Tuesday afternoon armed guards herded two hundred Chinese men and women, on the docks. The governor of Washington Territory, Watson C. Squire, ignored telegrams from Chinese across the Pacific Northwest to ask him to intervene. The mayor and the sheriff hid in the town hall, the mob marched the Chinese through heavy rain at a railroad crossing muddy nine miles from the city. The wives of merchants, unable to walk on their little feet bound, were dumped into the cars.

Lake View Junction was a stop on the railroad in the North Pacific, which had been built by Chinese laborers. Some of the expelled Chinese took refuge in shelters wet storage abandoned in the stables, or inside the small station house. Most huddled outside. During the cold and rainy night, two or three trains stopped at the station. People with money paid six dollars to board the night train to Portland, Oregon. Others crowded into a freight train passing. The rest began the journey of a hundred mile south of the Chinatown in Portland, where they hoped to find refuge in a community that had refused orders from the city. For days, they were seen in the footsteps of the South. Others fled the country for Canada.

Two days later, Tacoma's Chinatown was destroyed by fire.

May Lum

Washington Territory
King County
June 3, 1886

Lum May being duly sworn on his oath, said:

I was born in Canton, China, and I am a subject of the Chinese empire. I am aged about 51 years. Have been in America about eleven years old and doing business in Tacoma for ten years. My business was that of keeping the goods, dry provisions, medicines and goods general store.

The third day of November I was staying with my family in Tacoma, at the corner of Railroad Street some distance from Chinatown. At that time, I would say there were eight hundred or nine hundred people in China and around Tacoma that. . . were expelled by the white Tacoma. Twenty days earlier on November 3, a committee of white people waiting on the Chinese in their homes and ordered them to leave the city before Nov. 3. I do not know the names of [people] white, but should recognize their faces. The committee was composed of 15 or 20 people. . . who have notified the Chinese to leave.

I asked General Sprague and other citizens for protection for me and for the Chinese people. The general said he would see and do what he could. All Chinese, after receiving the notice to quit were afraid lest their houses should be blown up and destroyed. A rumor to that effect has been outstanding. Many of them closed their houses and tried to keep abreast.

About half past 9 am in the morning of November 3, 1885, a large crowd of citizens of Tacoma went down to Ch