“how cruel.”33
Dissatisfied watching from the sidelines, she tried to help those she could.
On the Monday, two of Mrs. Squire’s acquaintances, Ching Ing and How
Ing, came to her and the mayor’s wife, asking for help. Ching Ing wished to
withdraw his deposit from a local bank before he and his wife fled Seattle,
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but he was afraid to enter the building. Despite her own fears, Ida Squire
agreed to escort the “poor frightened Chinaman.” “So we march out.
Mrs. Y[esler] first, Ching next— and I bring up the rear,” she recorded in
her diary. Luckily, the vigilantes were busy minding the wharf and “nobody
[paid] any attention to us.” “The poor fel ow [got] his money,” she wrote, “and
will go I suppose.”34
But in her diary, compassion for the Chinese is overshadowed by fear of
the “roughs.” “I get into a fearful panic, ” wrote Mrs. Squire when she heard
rumors of “lynchers organ izing in the woods.” As the unrest continued and
federal troops failed to materialize, her concern mounted. On the third day
she wrote, “Altogether I am in the most dreadful state of mind—we have so
few men— and they are getting so worn out.” It was clear to her that the
vigilantes intended to terrorize the elite alongside the Chinese. When a vig-
ilante was killed in a scuffle with the militia, she described how the Knights
of Labor made “a circus of the dead rioter,” displaying his body on a wagon
“covered with white and red—to imitate the streams of blood running down.”
As the angry funeral pro cession marched through town, Mrs. Squire looked
on with dread. When it came to the safety of her family and white elites,
she drew few distinctions between intimidation and vio lence.35
After a few days of terror, Ida Squire wanted the Chinese gone, even if it
meant sending them away herself. The vigilantes’ pro gress in Seattle had
slowed, she recorded in her diary, so “if we want [the Chinese] to go[,] we
must pay their fare— and send them ourselves.” Mrs. Squire and the white
elites of Seattle deci ded to do just that. “Our people went around collecting
the money to pay the passage,” she recalled, because the Chinese were “very
anxious for tickets” out of Seattle. Free tickets out of town were not always
enough. Most of the Chinese departed, but Mrs. Squire watched apprehen-
sively as a few Chinese merchants across the street from her hotel began to take
the boards off their win dows, opening for business again. She wrote to her
father- in- law, “They don’t mean to go— they say they may as well be kil ed here
as some other place.” Mrs. Squire bemoaned the per sis tence of these holdouts,
fearing there were “enough Chinese still left in town to make trou ble.” She
knew very well that the Chinese were not the ones making trou ble, but
nevertheless, in her mind, their presence was the source of danger.36
As Mrs. Squire hoped, by March most of the Chinese had vacated the
Puget Sound region and the crisis seemed to be at an end. Fi nally at ease,
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she had time for more practical concerns, writing to her mother- in- law to
complain that with all the Chinese laundrymen gone, she did not know
“what we will do about clean clothes.”37
Alexander S. Farquharson: “I’m Not Taking Orders”
When he established Barrel Works in 1877 in Puyallup, twenty miles south
of Seattle, Alexander S. Farquharson recruited a few skilled wheelmen, but
for the remaining unskilled jobs he hired young, white, unmarried men “of
the floating labor ele ment.” Only six weeks after the factory opened, he was
already displeased with the unreliable work of these “rough” laborers. When
he went to visit their boarding house to learn why they were behind on the
job, the answer was self- evident. Farquharson observed, “cards and whisky
over night [ were] not conducive attributes to labor, if morning was drizzly
and damp.” Surveying his hung over workmen, Farquharson quickly deci ded
he needed “a change of labor.” He traveled to Seattle, hired sixty “Chinamen”
with an English- speaking “China boss,” built rough living quarters for his
new workforce, and discharged many of his white workers. Common knowl-
edge of the day dictated that these new Chinese workers would be more
docile, servile, and cheap. Sure enough, Farquharson found the Chinese to
be “prompt, efficient and rapid, always on hand rain or shine, ready at call
night or day.” As a western cap ital ist, Farquharson was not directly invested
in the China Trade, but he sought to benefit from the resulting stream of
unskilled Chinese mi grants. He had paid his white workers two dollars a
day, but now he paid the Chinese only one. Clearly, Chinese labor was a
good deal, at least before the vio lence began.
Alexander S. Farquharson was born in Boston, Mas sa chu setts, in 1842.
His mother was the daughter of slave- owning planters in Alabama, and his
father was a retired officer of the En glish army. Farquharson attended An-
dover College until 1861, when he joined the Boston Light Infantry to fight
for the Union. His mother had strong Southern sympathies and Farquharson
himself “thought that slavery was not wrong,” but deci ded to join the Union as
much out of loyalty to his northern classmates as distaste for Southern
secession. When he was honorably discharged at the close of the war, he
found himself at a loss as to what to do next. His brother had been killed in
battle, his extended family had been pulled apart, and his mother died a few
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months after his return. He found himself “unfitted for business, restless and
dissatisfied”; he knew that he “longed for something” but did not know what.
After “having words” with his father, he deci ded to seek “new adventures
out West.” Farquharson bought a ticket for Omaha, Nebraska, the western-
most point on the existing railway lines. There, he found that extending the
railroad into Indian country and the resulting Red Cloud War “gave many
opportunities for adventure.” He learned the barrel- making trade in Kansas
City in 1870, traveled to California in 1872, and deci ded to settle in the
“wild” of Washington Territory in 1877.38
Farquharson saw opportunity in the forested land of the Puyallup Valley,
a region bordered on one side by the small town of Tacoma and on the other
by a federal reservation for the ousted Puyallup tribe. He started a barrel-
manufacturing operation, paying local farmers for cottonwood trees they
cleared from their land, and eventually employing a few hundred men.
During the 1880s, he registered as a Demo crat, but after years of feeling at
odds with his party he became a Republican.39 In 1917, Farquharson wrote
a short unpublished memoir about his time in Puyallup, including the anti-
Chinese expulsions of 1885 and 1886. In his account, which tends toward
the dramatic, he recounts incidents in brash, unapologetic style. He describes
himself as “restless, adventurous . . . gifted with attributes of making warm
friends and bitter enemies— possessed of large personal pride— too little
policy— with no tinge of hy poc risy— reckless in money affairs, careless and
indifferent as to peoples [ sic] opinions.” 40 With such a bold spirit, Farqu-
harson was not a restrained Victorian man, but neither did he view himself
as one of the irreverent roughs of the territory. Farquharson embodied a
western version of elite manliness, which combined self- righteous moralism
with brash valor.41
When Farquharson hired Chinese workers to replace white “roughs” in
1877, he faced immediate re sis tance. The white workers approached the
“China shacks” at night and shot their revolvers into the air, hoping to scare
away the newly arrived competition. When he learned of the incident, Far-
quharson told the Chinese to buy revolvers of their own and return fire if
attacked, promising to “protect them from the law.” “They did so,” recalled
Farquharson, “the second night they were attacked, they swarmed out like
a swarm of bees, and began firing in the air, it was a genuine surprise to the
Mill men, they scattered to their beds glad enough to let the Chinamen
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alone.” For the following few months the mill operated quietly, shipping
loads of barrels out of Tacoma twice a month, and Farquharson believed the
agitation was over.
In fact it was only “slumbering.” He recalled, “One after noon, the China
Boss came rushing into the office fearfully excited, saying Jim Allen, our
stave Cutter man, to whom we were paying five (5) dollars per day, an ex-
pert, had beaten one of the [Chinese] wheelman over the head with a stick
of wood, and cut and brused [ sic] him in a fearful manner.” On hearing this
report, Farquharson rushed to the mill to see the Chinese worker bleeding
from cuts on his head and his fellow countrymen congregated nearby in wit-
ness. He ordered the mill shut down, gathered the workers together, and
declared he would not tolerate such “cowardly” be hav ior. He would fire the
next man who struck a “Chinaman,” even if he had to shut down the mill
while he recruited a skilled replacement from the East. According to Farqu-
harson, the threat worked and Chinese trou bles ended for several years.42
When anti- Chinese vio lence began to sweep across Washington Territory
in the fall of 1885, two members of the Knights of Labor came to Farquhar-
son’s office, demanded that he get rid of his Chinese workers, and threatened
to burn the Chinese quarters to the ground if he did not. Farquharson’s re-
sponse was characteristically bold: “Go back to your Knights of Labor and
tell them to burn the buildings and be damned, that I’m not taking orders
from them or any body else.” In response, more Knights from Seattle and
Tacoma descended on Puyallup, surrounded Farquharson’s residence, and
began “hooting,” “howling,” and calling “bring him out, hang him & etc.”
Like Haller, Farquharson was outraged by the rioters’ violation of his
house hold, and he was prepared to mount a defense with the help of several
Winchester rifles. In his memoir he claimed, “If any attempt had been made
[to storm the house] they might have hung [ sic] me, but several of them would
have announced my coming into the other world.” After a short standoff,
the mob moved on, parading through the streets of Puyallup, before re-
turning to their homes.43
It was not until the next morning that Farquharson could see from his
win dow that the mob had hanged him in effigy, and that thirty Knights
stood guarding the scaffold. He grabbed two revolvers and told his wife he
was going to the post office to get his mail. Rose Farquharson, her eyes heavy
with tears, begged her husband not to go. But he insisted that every morning
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he went for his mail, and that today would be no exception. Years later, he
vividly recalled his state of mind as he walked into the post office: “I have
felt the blood lust to kill, in battle, it took possession of me that morning. . . .
I saw nothing, blood was boiling in my veins, not a word was spoken, not a
laugh or sneer, a pin dropped could have been heard; many a time have I
thanked God it was so, as I was ready to have dropped those letters, pulled
those revolvers and gone to shooting, I gave no thought to my life, I was
unquestionably insane, for the time being.” As he walked back to his house
with his mail, he ran into a friend who asked what the vigilantes had said
when he passed the scaffold. “Nothing,” answered Farquharson, “ those ef-
figys [ sic] hanging there have more brains than the whole cowardly crew.”
But Farquharson was not entirely foolhardy, and in the following weeks, he
stopped going out at night because he did not want “to be shot in the back
by some cowardly cur behind a corner.” 44
Soon, he heard that the rioters had forcibly driven the Chinese out of
Tacoma with “the little Sheriff of Pierce County following like a little poodle
dog, instead of giving protection.” Within days, the roughs attempted the
same in Puyallup Valley by forming a line of eighty men, marching with
fife and drum, rounding up every Chinese mi grant they could find, and
driving them through town. When they came to downtown Puyallup, the
rioters left the Chinese under guard there, and continued over to Farquhar-
son’s barrel factory, intending to enter the Chinese quarters and bring out
any men they might find.
Before they could reach the buildings, Farquharson stepped from the line
of onlookers and strode toward the leading vigilante, Dr. Taylor.45 “I want
you to understand those buildings are mine,” he said, “any man that attempts
to enter them will do [so] at his peril.” An old man from a neighboring town
walked up to him and, shaking his fist, snarled, “You’r [ sic] a China lover
are you?” Farquharson answered, “Its [ sic] none of your dam’d business what
I am, you keep your dirty fist out of my face.” Taylor asked if Farquharson
would guarantee that there were no Chinese in the buildings, but the busi-
nessman refused to make any such promise. In response, Taylor deployed
“squads” to march to each building and demand entrance. When rioters
banged on the doors without response, they “did not dare to break in”
because Farquharson threatened to have them arrested. Unwilling to test his
resolve, the vigilantes merely shouted through the closed doors that the
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Chinese had three days to leave. But the vigilantes did not return in three
days, at least not openly. In the dark of night, a bomb exploded near one of
the Chinese residences. It did little damage, at least physically.
Farquharson prided himself for single- handedly standing up to the ruf-
fians through a display of brave and righ teous manliness, but he was not im-
mune to the vigilantes’ threats. As the agitation died down, he deci ded, on
second thought, that his Chinese workforce was not worth “push[ing] the
matter to extremes.” He allowed the Chinese to remain i
n his buildings only
until preparations could be made for them to be quietly sent away. In his
memoir, he still claimed victory in the matter, declaring that the vigilantes
“did not have the satisfaction of saying they took [the Chinese] out of
Puyallup.” 46
While Farquharson staunchly opposed the expulsions, he did so because
they violated his right to control his business, not because he had uncommon
sympathy for his Chinese workers. As a veteran of both military and busi-
ness wars, he saw the Chinese as pawns in a battle between workers and cap-
i tal ists, which he was determined to win at all costs. But once he had won
the showdown and proved his courage, he realized that law and order were
better for business than cheap Chinese labor. In the face of agitation, boy-
cott, and vio lence, Farquharson and other cap ital ists found employing
Chinese workers to be untenable. Production cost was only one side of the
equation; on the other was community support, contented (white) workers,
confident investors, and reputation. If the expulsion of the Chinese meant
peace and prosperity would return to the West, cap ital ists like Farquharson
were willing to reconcile themselves to the vigilantes’ demands. And so, over
the winter of 1885–1886, Farquharson was among scores of employers who
discharged thousands of Chinese workers from the mines, farms, factories,
and railroads of the U.S. West.47
W. D. McFarland: “ There Is a Worse Evil than the Presence of the Chinese”
It was well known in Tacoma that Reverend W. D. McFarland hoped to
convert the Chinese. So when the vigilantes went door- to- door to an-
nounce the boycott of Chinese workers, they made sure to visit McFar-
land’s house. Since the reverend was out, they delivered their message to his
wife, demanding that she fire their Chinese domestic help before the No-
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vember 1 deadline.48 When McFarland returned and learned what had hap-
pened, he was outraged and announced that he would preach on the subject
the following Sunday.
McFarland was a newcomer to Tacoma when he stood before a crowded
church to deliver a sermon on the Chinese Question. Only the barest facts
of McFarland’s life have been preserved in the historical rec ord. Born in Scot-
land and raised in Baltimore, he was described as a gaunt, red- haired man
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