Page:History of Washington The Rise and Progress of an American State, volume 4.djvu/429

 the number of several hundred, and marched to the Chinese quarter, which was located on the waterfront near the Northern Pacific freight yards. They had a number of wagons with them, and as soon as the houses of the Chinamen were reached, their goods were thrown into them, while their owners were assembled in their neighborhood to be marched out of town. The day was cold and rainy. The Chinamen were greatly excited, but none of them offered any resistance. An equal number of children could hardly have been managed more easily. Several of them were old and decrepit; a few were sick, but these were forced out of such shelter as they had, and placed on the wagons with their goods. The stores and places of business such as were engaged in trade, were not disturbed at the time, but as soon as all the houses had been vacated, the evicted celestials, escorted by their tormentors, took up their line of march through the town, and out along Centre Street to Lake View, where the wagons were unceremoniously unloaded, and the owners of such goods as they contained were left on the bleak prairie, to make themselves as comfortable as they might until the following day, and it was reported that two of the sick died meantime from exposure.

On the day following this “peaceable expulsion,” as those who had planned and perpetrated it chose to call it, one of the most active promoters of the trouble wrote the governor as follows: “The Chinamen are no more in Tacoma, and the trouble over them is virtually at an end. Yesterday, they were peaceably escorted out of town, and put upon the freight and passenger trains this morning, the price asked for a special train being too exorbitant.

“The twenty-five or thirty Chinamen who were permitted to remain a day for the purposes of packing and shipping