Railroad Workers Hanged a Chinese Cook at an Oregon Short Line Camp

In September 1883, an unnamed Chinese cook at a railroad camp near Millville was accused of assaulting a child and was chased down by local men. The San Francisco Examiner said he was “caught and immediately hanged." The Democratic Advocate added that “the graders of the road strung him up without ceremony.” The Millville lynching repeats a pattern in which an accusation of the “outraging” (a 19th-century euphemism for sexual assault) of a white woman or child served as a pretext for a summary execution. Railroad construction sites became theatres for racial terror broadcast across the United States through a network of white newspapers. The killing shows how railroad camps could become sites of instant mob justice in the anti-Chinese West.