Enjoy Incident At Bitter Creek-91 Narrated By Craig Storti Contained In Copy

research, providing a valuable economic, social, and cultural background for not only racial context of the riot but the underlying labor movement and the Union Pacific's determination to make profits no matter what the cost.
I've seen criticism of this book that the author "justifies" the massacre because of the UP's "favoritism" toward the Chinese workers, but that's a myopic reading.
Considering how the UP and the U, S. government did nothing to compensate the Chinese worker or their families after the massacre, nor gave any concessions to the labor unions, is just further evidence of how unfettered capitalism seeks only to chew up and spit out its workers, regardless of their genetics or country of origin.


NB: This book is not written with an agenda to show how awful and racist Americans are/were: readers who go into it looking for that will be disappointed.
This is a more holistic treatment, I used this book for a US History paper I wrote on the Rock Springs Massacre because it was the only book I could find devoted to the event.
Its detailed descriptions of the settlements at Rock Springs are useful, but Storti really downplays the racial tensions that led to the riot, citing economic factors and labor conditions instead.
While this is a generally helpful source, it's misleading on that front which is especially problematic given how little scholarship there is on the massacre.
It really is unfortunate that Incident at Bitter Creek is one of the few published works on the Rock Springs Massacre available, Stortis treatment of the massacre is insensitive at best, and at times borders on antiChinese apologetics, The Chinese are secondary characters in their own massacre, White labor and the struggle against capitalist monopoly is the main character and the closest thing to a hero in the story, Shame they had to bury some pick axes in Chinese skulls, and torch their entire neighborhood,

Storti seems to avoid any Chinese primary sources, and favors secondary sources to flesh out the Chinese side of the story, As a result, there are few Chinese voices recorded in the pages of Incident at Bitter Creek, The Chinese victims are two dimensional with few exceptions, Worse still, they are largely at fault for their own murders in the narrative “the sojourner was nevertheless a willing accomplice, He knew of the storm gathering around him, the risks he took in coming to America to play the spoiler, and he came anyway”.
In the end of the book he voices a sympathy for the white miners, except for their riot, and restates his spoiler point, as if to say the Chinese had it coming for being economically exploited.


Storti also favors the idea that Chinese immigrants had no desire to assimilate into American society, and occasionally references the Chinese distaste for the American meltingpot.
He accepts

at face value that Chinatowns were the result of de facto self segregation to support their failure to adapt, and ignores the currents of racism and exclusion which pushed the Chinese into enclaves.
This is even after he discusses the Chinese Exclusion Act,

These are just a few of the problems I had with the book, The timeline is accurate I suppose,

.