Little Evidence of a Large Community: The Almy Wyoming Chinatown

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "In the Sticks but Not in the Weeds: Diversity, Remembrance, and the Forging of the Rural American West", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Sometime in 1869, the Almy Chinatown began to emerge; by September of 1885, it had vanished. The Chinese community in Almy may have been home to over 200 Chinese at its peak, with most of its residents working as coal miners. The coal mines at Almy were dangerous: the first Chinese coal miners to die in the mines fell victim to an accident in 1872, with another 35 miners dying in a mine explosion in 1881. Physical evidence of this historic community is scant, but the archaeological record provides the best evidence to date of where this community was located. This presentation will look at how micro-refuse found in the archaeological record helps us identify and locate communities long forgotten in the historical record.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2024   •
• In the Sticks but Not in the Weeds: Diversity, Remembrance, and the Forging of the Rural American West

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow