(This article contain descriptions of anti-Japanese violence. Contemporary images and references may contain slurs.)
Before it was annexed by Spokane in 1924, Hillyard was a town in its own right. The CEO of the Great Northern Railway, James J. Hill, had chosen the spot in 1893 as the Western Regional Terminal Facility for the GNR. Soon, the place named Hillyard was the site of "huge rail yard and locomotive shops," as well as houses and businesses for the people who worked there.
1893 was not a good year for James J. Hill and the Great Northern Railway. The Panic of 1893 had thrown the country's economy into crisis, Hill had cut wages, and his laborers had gone on strike. Like many a railroad tycoon before him faced with the power of a union, Hill went in search of cheaper, non-union labor to replace his rebellious employees. He ultimately chose to bring thousands of Japanese laborers into the United States to work for the GNR.
In January of 1900, twelve Japanese men arrived to work in the Great Northern Railroad machine shop in Hillyard, Washington. This was the first time that the GNR had brought Japanese workers into this shop, and the Spokesman-Review reported that the white employees were alarmed and uneasy. It was widely thought at the time that Japanese laborers might be used for basic manual tasks, but not skilled labor. Their presence in the machine shop, therefore, represented an unexpected escalation in the "Japanese labor issue" for white railroad employees.
The new Japanese machine shop employees in Hillyard were given unused railcars “fitted up with berths, stoves, etc.” as their on-site housing. These workers were paid significantly less than their white counterparts, and a large portion of their income was automatically deducted for their room, board, and broker fees. This arrangement exacerbated the rift between the Japanese railroad workers, the other GNR workers, and the town in general. As one railroad man later explained: "One of the objections by the people living along the line of the road to the Japanese is that they do not spend any money in the country, or very little. [...] In Spokane and in Portland are big stores run by the Japanese contractors. They supply the Japanese with all they need, shipping it free of freight charge to the various points where they are employed. As a result of this the Japanese are called upon to spend little in the towns in the vicinity of which they may be working, a can of baking powder or some other small article meeting their demand for local goods."
By March, tensions in the machine shop were high. A mechanic named William Bentley simply put down his tools and walked out when assigned a Japanese assistant. His feelings about Japanese labor were echoed by the Bonners Ferry Herald, which noted in April that the Great Northern line had experienced three serious wrecks in the past three weeks. The Herald writer asserted, “Much of the trouble is laid at the door of the [Japanese] laborers. It is to be hoped the company will find it unprofitable to employ Japanese laborers.” Several other “small encounters” happened between the two groups of railroad employees in this time period, with the Japanese “invariably coming off second best."
On June 13, 1900, both groups had been dismissed for a lunch break. The Japanese workers were eating in their converted boxcar when the white workers began to throw “pieces of wood and scrap iron” at them, something they evidently did frequently. A Japanese worker was struck in the head by a piece of kindling or a rock and began to bleed. One of his colleagues stood up, picked up an ax, and began to advance upon their harassers. Several of the other Japanese workers joined him as backup. The white workers then banded together in defense, and a brutal battle ensued. The weapons used in the battle included “fists, stones, iron bolts, and clubs.” According to one source, “one of the pits in the railroad round house at Hillyard look[ed] like a dozen hogs had been killed and their blood spattered in every direction.”
The conflict further escalated when the white men retreated to the railway roundhouse. Those already in the roundhouse immediately joined the fray. In later reports, the sides in this battle were described as being equal numbers of Japanese and white men, approximately thirty on each side. However, that is almost certainly not the case. There were only twelve Japanese men hired into the machine shop, and only twelve eventually arrested in this case. They were seriously outnumbered by white railroad workers in general, and were likely also outnumbered in this fight.
The battle ended indecisively, with both sides retreating to their respective work areas and returning to their tasks for the rest of the day. Many were injured. Despite the temporary cessation of hostilities, the matter was far from settled. Although Hillyard was supposed to be a prohibition town, alcohol was flowing freely among the white railroad men that night and an angry crowd gathered in front of the Standard Hotel. The story of the earlier incident grew as it passed from person to person, and soon many people were swearing to “clean out the whole [Japanese] crowd.” The Japanese workers had retreated to the two railroad cars that they used as housing, prepared to defend themselves against the murderous mob.
Two white railroad men, an Agent Twohy and a Foreman Wilson, saw the way that the evening was going and came up with a plan to prevent further bloodshed. They hooked together an unused boxcar and engine and rushed the Japanese workers into the boxcar, then ran this improvised escape train to the Spokane station, where they explained the situation to law enforcement. The Japanese men were unloaded in Spokane and one was taken to Sacred Heart Hospital for treatment. Twohy and Wilson then ran the train back to Hillyard, joined by several sheriff’s deputies from Spokane.
Upon arriving in Hillyard, this larger posse discovered two Japanese men who had been overlooked in the train escape. They were concealed under a table in the station office, “terror written in every feature of their faces.” (In some versions, it was four Japanese men hiding in a coal chute, or four Japanese men chased by the mob into the telegraph office, where the telegraph operator defended them.) The law enforcement officers escorted these men safely out of the railyard. The remainder of the Japanese workers returned to Hillyard the next day, flanked by a special police escort.
The physical toll of this conflict was severe, but not fatal. According to a report from the next day, two Japanese men were seriously injured in the riot, including the one who had been taken to Sacred Heart. “A dozen more” were “nursing all manner of bruises and cuts, while their white opponents who were wounded in the fray are at their homes in Hillyard trying to patch up their features and bodies in order to avoid suspicion.” The hospitalized man was one T. Hashimota (sometimes given as Hashamonta or Hashamota). He had suffered severe injuries during the riot when he was struck in the head with a piece of kindling by a rioter named Haywood. Early reports suggested that he was unlikely to make it, but a report from a few weeks later indicated that he was apparently recovering well.
Over the next several days, law enforcement rounded up various combatants. While it seems like several dozen white men were involved in the riot at some point, either in the initial battle or the later mob, only five were ultimately arrested. Warrants were produced to arrest all the Japanese men “working at and near the shops of the Great Northern Railroad at Hillyard,” and twelve were taken into custody.
Several of the white railroad workers came to Spokane on the afternoon of June 15th and bailed out their incarcerated companions. The GNR machine shop responded with a lockout, posting a sign on the door that read: “Notice - Employees who remained away from their work Friday afternoon, June 15, 1900, without permission are dismissed from the service. Time checks can be had on application.” Evidently, a committee of three men had been given permission to go into Spokane and get bail bonds for the white railroad workers. An additional twenty had joined them in their errand without permission, and now were unemployed as a result. The master mechanic, one Mr. Emmerson, seemed to consider this no great loss. “The men that quit are all the unmarried men and of the transient order, working at one place for about a couple of months. Those left in the shops are our old steady hands and can be relied on. [...] Our work is well caught up with at the present time and with the men left we can keep pretty well along.”
The legal fallout from this situation was ultimately minimal. The presiding judge strategically timed his rulings so that both batches of combatants received their verdicts on the same day. Earlier in the day on July 11th, the white men were acquitted; that afternoon, while they were out celebrating their victory, the Japanese men were discharged on grounds of insufficient evidence. In other words, despite many arrests and several trials, nobody on either side experienced legal consequences for the riot. All parties eventually returned to their work in Hillyard, including most of the men who had been dismissed by the lockout.
Three Japanese labor contractors from Seattle came to Spokane on June 21st to investigate the situation in Hillyard. Their conclusions were not reported in the newspapers. A month later, the Japanese consulate in Tacoma sent one S. Takagi to investigate both the Hillyard riot and similar incidents in Montana. Takagi spoke to railroad officials, law enforcement officers, and the Japanese railroad workers. “I find that everything is now settled," he informed the Chronicle. "The Japanese and American laborers seem to be getting along and there is no more trouble between them."
Reading between the lines, Takagi's visit seems to have been mostly symbolic. His presence served to remind law enforcement and railroad officials that the Japanese government had a baseline level of interest in the well-being of overseas Japanese workers. When asked if he had spoken to the Japanese laborers directly, Takagi said, "Yes, I talked to them. They are all going about their work as if nothing had happened. I gave them some advice not to start any trouble and always to be friendly with the Americans if they could, and assured them that if they did their interest would be protected."
Of course, Takagi knew perfectly well that friendliness had nothing to do with it. The same situation was playing out everywhere along the Great Northern line, to the degree that Takagi had actually batched his visits together for the sake of efficiency. His next stop was in Montana: only nine days after the Hillyard riot, a white mob in Wolf Creek had overpowered camp guards and beaten several Japanese laborers so severely that they were hospitalized.
Even while Takagi was en route between Spokane and Helena, three white brakemen in Missoula on the Great Northern beat three Japanese railroad workers unconscious and left them on the tracks to die under the wheels of a train. In a last-minute reprieve, a white "roundhouse hostler" was alerted by the noise and dragged the Japanese men off the tracks to safety. He had to fight the brakemen himself and drive them off before he could rescue their victims. It is unclear whether Takagi also addressed this case while in Montana. Possibly he realized that if he visited the site of every incident of anti-Japanese violence on the Great Northern, he would never make it home to Tacoma.
The white employees of the Great Northern believed that their bosses were using Japanese work crews to cut wages, and they were right. In a reaction as predictable as it was illogical, they lashed out at the new hires instead of blaming their bosses. As a result, the tensions that had erupted in Hillyard would erupt again and again without resolving anything. After each incident, the surviving parties on both sides of the conflict would go back to work. They couldn't afford to do otherwise.
The Great Northern Railway, in the meantime, largely accepted these bloody incidents as the cost of doing business. It was clear to everyone that some Japanese laborers would be killed and some white laborers would be arrested, but the railroad saw this as a law enforcement matter. As a business, the only thing that the railroad needed to worry about was how to replace their missing employees and keep the trains moving. The answer was simple, and always the same: bring in more Japanese laborers.
The Hillyard riot was front page news in Spokane for a month or two, merited a brief mention in the surrounding areas, and was quickly forgotten. To most, it was just another violent but inconclusive skirmish over the issue of Japanese labor. There would be more before the year was out, and many more in the years to come. The Great Northern Railway would continue to leverage their Japanese workforce against their white workforce to keep wages low for both. It continued to employ Japanese and Japanese-American workers until early 1942, when it fired all of them in response to the Pearl Harbor attack.
In 1900, railroad employees typically worked ten hour days. A skilled white mechanic in Hillyard's machine shop would earn around $3 a day, while Japanese laborers received around $1-$1.10. At the time, James J. Hill had a personal fortune estimated as approximately $19 million dollars. By the time of his death in 1916, he would have a personal fortune of $63 million. According to a 1903 article, Hill attributed his success to, "Work, hard work, intelligent work, and then more work."
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