Ingebright and Lars Wold were Norwegian brothers who ran a large hop farm in Squak Valley. For years, they had hired local Native laborers to harvest the crop. But in 1885, hop prices had collapsed. When the Wold brothers could not negotiate lower wages with their usual workers, they contracted with the Seattle firm of Quong Chong & Company to bring Chinese laborers who would pick for a reduced rate. On Saturday afternoon, September 5, the thirty-seven Chinese workers arrived and set up camp. That same evening, a group of local residents led by Samuel Robertson and DeWitt Rumsey confronted the Chinese workers and told them to leave. When one of the Wold brothers' employees intervened, the locals went to the Wolds directly. The brothers refused to send the Chinese away. The group left, but their warning hung in the air like smoke.

On Monday, September 7, a second group of about thirty Chinese laborers attempted to enter Squak Valley. They were met at George W. Tibbetts' store by a crowd of white and Native men who intimidated them into turning back. That night, gunmen opened fire on the tents where the original Chinese workers slept. Three men were killed. One died immediately; another, Yeng San, died the following morning. Three more men were wounded: Gong Heng, Ah Jow, and Mun Gee. Mun Gee suffered permanent injuries. The attack was part of a wave of racial violence that had been building across the Pacific Northwest and the broader West. Just two weeks earlier, the Rock Springs massacre in Wyoming had left twenty-eight Chinese miners dead. Within months, anti-Chinese riots would erupt in Tacoma and Seattle.

Under oath, Samuel Robertson admitted his role in the shooting and named the others present. A coroner's jury found that the three Chinese men had been killed by gunshot wounds inflicted by M. DeWitt Rumsey, Joseph Day, Perry Bayne, David Hughes, Samuel Robertson, and two men identified as Indian Curley and Indian Johnny, among others. At the murder trial, the defendants claimed the Chinese had fired on them first and that they had acted in self-defense. Testimony about who carried guns and how many shots were fired contradicted from witness to witness. Robertson, who initially testified against the others, was later named by the defendants as the ringleader. The jury acquitted all of them. Prosecutors then charged the same seven men, plus Tibbetts, with inciting a riot. This time, all were found guilty and fined five hundred dollars each.

The riot convictions did not stand. The defendants appealed to the territorial supreme court, arguing that the grand jury that had indicted them was improperly constituted because it included women. In January 1888, the court agreed: the law required grand jurors to be qualified voters, and women did not yet have the right to vote in Washington Territory. Every conviction was thrown out. The legal technicality underscored a bitter irony. The inclusion of women on the jury had been a progressive step in a territory that would not achieve statehood until 1889. But it became the mechanism by which the perpetrators of a racial massacre escaped punishment entirely. No one was ever held accountable for the deaths in Squak Valley.

The Squak Valley attack was one of more than 150 documented group assaults on Chinese communities across North America during the latter half of the nineteenth century. It belonged to a constellation of violence that included the Rock Springs massacre in Wyoming, the Tacoma riot of 1885, the Seattle riot of 1886, and the Hells Canyon massacre of 1887. Today, Issaquah is a prosperous suburb east of Seattle, its hop farms long gone, its valley floor covered with homes and retail centers. The events of September 1885 left few physical traces. But the story persists in court records, newspaper accounts, and the testimony of the survivors themselves, a reminder that the ground beneath an ordinary American town can hold an extraordinary weight of history.