Bitter Creek

Wyoming Territory, 1885. A coal town divided by a creek. A friendship built one word at a time. And a day that history tried to forget.

Hom Chun-Lai digs coal in the Union Pacific's No. 3 mine and counts every dollar toward one dream: bringing his younger brother across the sea. On Sundays, in the storeroom of a store on Front Street, he trades words with Tamsin Nankivell, a Cornish miner's daughter who teaches him English while he carves small wooden animals and teaches her his own characters, his on one side of a line and hers on the other.

But Tamsin's father has joined the men who meet on Tuesday nights at the Knights of Labor hall, and the town is turning. On September 2, 1885, a mob burns Rock Springs' Chinatown to the ground. Twenty-eight Chinese miners are killed. Tamsin sees who did it. Some of them sit at her own table.

When the company brings the survivors back to work under armed guard, and a grand jury prepares to declare that nobody saw anything, Chun must decide what he owes the dead, and Tamsin must decide whether the truth is worth everything she has.

Bitter Creek is a sweeping, deeply researched novel of courage, silence and the names we refuse to forget, inspired by one of the most violent and least remembered events in American history.