#chinese-american-history

#chinese-american-history

Towering plateaus dotted with sage brush and roaming wild horses surround the desert town of Rock Springs, Wyoming, with a population of about 23,000. A short drive from Main Street, two rectangular holes form a checkerboard pattern in a grassy lawn connecting a Catholic church with a nearby schoolyard. Six Grinnell College researchers spent the summer here digging, scraping and screening the soil, most of whom have never been to Wyoming before.

The de facto local expert on Chinese American history believes a plaque should be installed here to commemorate Yick Wo, a Chinese-owned laundry business that operated at 349 Third St. from 1864 to 1886. It became the focal point of a consequential U.S. Supreme Court case, Yick Wo v. Hopkins, when the laundry's owner, a Chinese immigrant named Lee Yick, and another laundry owner, Wo Lee, resisted an unfair San Francisco laundry business permit ordinance - one emblematic of the targeted anti-Chinese hostility pervasive in the city at the time.