Chinese immigrants to the Western US were veterans of the California gold fields and the tracklaying of the Central Pacific Railroad, and they lived uneasily alongside their Anglo neighbors while the Civil War tore up the East. Many of them were invited to come live in Tacoma to help build the western side of the Northern Pacific Railroad. As the postwar economy declined, they became targets of blame by the Irish labor leader Dennis Kearney and his Workingmen’s Party, who chanted “The Chinese must go!” at their rallies. This simpleminded idea helped persuade Congress to pass the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, barring all new emigration from that country for 10 years.
Tacoma’s attitude took blunt form in The Tacoma Daily Ledger. Multiple political personas endorsed the idea of expelling their Chinese neighbors, primarily the mayor of Tacoma at the time, R. Jacob Weisbach, who convened an “Anti-Chinese Committee” on October 4, 1885. Weisbach was inspired by a prior expulsion in Eureka, California. There was “a large torchlight procession terminated in an enthusiastic meeting at the Alpha Opera house” in which multiple resolutions aimed at expelling the Chinese were put up for a vote. One John E. Burns “argued that the Chinese were not here under the Burlingame Treaty, but were here as invader.”
On November 3, 1885, at around 9:30 in the morning, a crowd of Tacoma citizens marched into Chinatown, knocked on doors and told all the Chinese that they were to leave by 1:30 in the afternoon. By the affidavit of Lum May:
They went to all the Chinese houses and establishment and notified the Chinese to leave. Where the doors were locked they broke forcibly into the houses, smashing in doors and breaking in windows. Some of the crowd were armed with pistols, some with clubs. They acted in a rude boisterous and threatening manner, dragging and kicking the Chinese out of their houses.