The history of anti-Chinese violence in Truckee is as old as the town itself. In May 1869 innkeeper Charles Nuce forced an unnamed Chinese man accused of raping his six-year-old daughter to admit to the crime. Nuce then took the man to the Truckee River, shot him, and threw him into the current. When the man tried to crawl out of the water, Nuce struck him with a rock before pushing him back in. “Public opinion is that Nuce did his only duty,” the local newspaper reported. That same day someone shot another unnamed Chinese man in the back and robbed him.
In 1875 a fire of questionable origin destroyed Truckee’s Chinatown, causing $50,000 in damages, the equivalent of more than $1 million today. “Lucky Truckee. Chinatown Holocausted,” the headline read, failing to specify whether the town’s good fortune stemmed from white properties remaining mostly untouched, the near-complete devastation of Chinatown, or perhaps both.
By the following year, some three hundred of the town’s residents, from workers to its most prominent citizens, had formed a local chapter of the Order of the Caucasians, also known as the Caucasian League, to drive out the Chinese. Truckee gained statewide notoriety that summer when late one night seven of the group’s members, clad in black, surrounded and set fire to two cabins full of Chinese woodcutters who had refused to leave the area. The vigilantes shot at the Chinese men as they ran out of the cabin, killing forty-five-year-old Ah Ling. That fall, in a closely watched and highly publicized trial in nearby Nevada City, Charles McGlashan represented the accused men and put fifty witnesses on the stand to provide alibis for them and vouch for their innocence. The all-white jury took just nine minutes to acquit the man accused of murdering Ah Ling, at which point the prosecution dropped the arson charges against the others. Upon learning of the outcome, Truckee’s white residents rejoiced, firing a cannon for each exonerated man. McGlashan returned to town as a hero as well as an emerging figure in what would quickly become a much broader anti-Chinese movement.