My reason for writing this article is to correct some erroneous statements which have been made by different persons, several having found their way into books considered reliable authority.
The agitation that culminated in the riots which commenced at Seattle February 7th, 1886, and lasting several days, began in the fall of 1885.
A general unrest existed all over the country, business was depressed, times were stringent, men were out of employment, the usual distress that goes with such periods prevailed, making it easy for designing men to organize discontented forces to attack some real or imaginary cause of their troubles, and in this section of the country where there were many Chinese employed, it was believed that if the Mongolians could be driven out of the country, more employment would be given to white labor.
The lawless element in the country had succeeded in organizing mobs and expelling the Chinese from a number of towns along the Coast and in several instances drove out some of the prominent citizens who had attempted to uphold the law. In the interior they were guilty of unsurpassed brutality. At the Rock Springs Coal Mines of Wyoming, after harassing the Chinese and driving them from one quarter to another, they shot them down in cold blood.
In the early fall of 1885, agitators began to hold meetings here. It was their intention to drive out the Chinese of Seattle about the time a similar occurrence had been planned to take place elsewhere. After the arrest of several men accused of killing a number of Chinese hop pickers while they were asleep in their tents in Wold's Hop Yard in Issaquah Valley, there was an assemblage in Seattle called an Anti-Chinese Congress which promulgated a manifesto that all Chinese inhabitants in the towns and localities represented should be compelled to depart, and committees were appointed to personally give warning to the Chinese inhabitants of Seattle, Tacoma and other places, to leave on or prior to the first day of November.
The committees in Seattle and Tacoma each consisted of 15 members. The Seattle committee included Mrs. Kenworthy, McMillin, G. Venable Smith, John Keane and a number of others, all of whom were indicted by the Grand Jury under a United States statute commonly referred to as the Civil Rights Bill.
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