#3: How Chinese Americans brought America to the west
This post is part of a series of narrative articles I wrote for Nearpod, an interactive classroom tool for students. My essays were incorporated into high school history and social studies classes.
In January of 1869, Leland Stanford, former Governor of California and then-President of the Central Pacific Railroad, wrote an urgent letter to Butler Ives, an assistant engineer and surveyor with the company. “I wish a few men placed immediately on our line at the point where the U.P. line strikes east of Ogden,” Stanford implored.
By this time, Stanford had already been extremely dependent on both Chinese and Chinese American labor for his railway line, the Central Pacific, which was one of the two railroad companies building the Great Transcontinental Railroad that stretched west from Nebraska to California. Chinese and Chinese American labor were instrumental to the Railroad’s existence, and therefore to the entire settlement of the West; but this did not stop their experience as new and old immigrants from being one of heavy exploitation and discrimination.
By the time the Civil War began, Americans had already started moving westward, but settlement was difficult — the journey out to the frontier could take months and cost up to $1,000. People traveled by wagon or stagecoach, which could be dangerous, or ships that sailed around the tip of South America. So, in 1862, Congress authorized the construction of a railroad, which lasted between 1863 and 1869.
The first set of workers were largely Civil War veterans and Irish immigrants. But the railroad companies found that these workers had a fast turnover rate and greatly preferred other jobs. This was especially true for the Central Pacific Railway, whose territory included dangerous work in the Sierra Mountains. By 1865, when the Central Pacific reached the Sierras, the company was experiencing a labor shortage. An advertisement that called for 5,000 workers only got a response from a few hundred, and those that did come left quickly for more profitable work in the silver mines.
Charlie Crocker, one of the founders of Central Pacific, suggested to James Strobridge, the company’s construction manager, that the Central Pacific might employ Chinese workers. Strobridge thought that hiring non-white labor would make those currently working for him want to quit, and he also argued that Chinese men were not strong enough to do railroad construction. “I will not boss Chinese!” he said.
“They built the Great Wall of China,” Crocker said. “Who said laborers have to be white to build railroads?” This attitude would turn out to be a double-edged sword when Crocker also allowed his non-white laborers to starve when they demanded fairer working conditions, but for the time being, it convinced Strobridge. There were already many immigrants from China living in California from the days of the Gold Rush, and initially Strobridge hired about 50 of them.
Soon the majority of the workforce was comprised of Chinese Americans. “A large majority of the white laboring class on the Pacific Coast find most profitable and congenial employment in mining and agricultural pursuits, than in railroad work. The greater portion of the laborers employed by us are Chinese, who constitute a large element of the population of California,” Leland Stanford reported to Congress later that year. “Without them it would be impossible to complete the western portion of this great national enterprise, within the time required by the Acts of Congress.” Soon Central Pacific was arranging to bring immigrants into California directly from China. By the summertime, there were about 4,000 Chinese laborers employed by the Central Pacific Railroad, leading to the common sentiment that Asian immigrants were stealing American jobs — an idea that holds strong in many communities today.
These construction workers faced intense discrimination from their employers and the other workers of European descent. Unlike the Americans and Europeans, the Chinese workers had to pay for their own meals, tools, and lodging on the sites; some of them simply lived in the tunnels they were constructing instead. They also got paid less than their European coworkers initially, though their pay eventually rose. Still, by the end of the project, Chinese labor had cost the companies only two-thirds what white workers cost them.
The workers construction methods have seen significant debate. Many accounts say that people lowered ropes from the tops of cliffs with workers sitting in woven baskets, similar to construction methods used in China, and while suspended, they chipped away at the granite and planted explosives that then created the required tunnels.
But these accounts are not corroborated by official reports from engineers, newspapers, the Central Pacific authorities, or photographs (although this is not saying much, since there are also no Chinese laborers in one of the most famous photographs from the completion of the railroad, when the golden spike was drilled into the ground in Promontory). There were some reports of workers suspended by ropes, with chain-bearers signaling to those holding the ropes how to move.
Either way, the workers would have to be dangling on the rock face to chip away at it before placing the explosives there, and then were either hauled up to avoid the blast or used their feet to maneuver out of the way, both of which would have been extremely risky. One worker recalled how dangerous the blasting work with dynamite was: “Twenty charges were placed and ignited, but only eighteen blasts went off. However, the white foreman, thinking that all of the dynamite had gone off, ordered the Chinese workers to enter the cave to resume work,” he said. “Just at that moment the remaining two charges suddenly exploded. Chinese bodies flew from the cave as if shot from a cannon. Blood and flesh were mixed in a horrible mess…about ten or twenty workers were killed.”
In the summer of 1867, somewhere between mile 92 and mile 119, the Chinese workers put down their tools and went back to their camp. Coordinating through a pamphlet that was distributed amongst the laborers in Mandarin, the Chinese railroad workers began the biggest labor strike in the country at the time, against the largest engineering project in the country.
The Chinese employees of Central Pacific Railway demanded a wage increase to $40 per month, 10-hour workdays instead of 11-hour workdays, shorter hours working in the dangerous tunnels, and the right to leave the railroad for other work without getting whipped. Crocker remembered how peaceful the strike was, but he knew how much of a blow it could be — the longer they delayed work, which the majority of their workers were not touching, the less subsidy from the government they had. It was cutting into profits. Central Pacific considered hiring recently freed slaves as strikebreakers, but instead, Crocker cut off the food supply to the Chinese workers.
After eight days, Central Pacific confronted the starving workers, and insisted that they would make no concessions and threatened violence to anyone preventing workers returning to their jobs. The strike ended with none of the gains that the workers had demanded, but it did communicate to the employers that the Chinese workers knew they were being taken advantage of, challenging the assumed archetype that the companies had of a docile population that would not fight for its rights (it also challenged the impression that they created with their history of being used as strikebreakers when Irish masons walked off the job). On May 10, 1869, the Central Pacific met the tracks laid down by the Union Pacific, in Promontory, Utah. The railroad was complete.
Despite the fact that the transcontinental railroad could not have been built without people of Chinese heritage, the population continued to face fierce discrimination long after the railroad was built — California laws passed nearly two decades later (the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882) banned Chinese laborers from entering the U.S. It also made it illegal for them to vote, or become naturalized citizens, regardless of how many generations they had been living in California. The Chinese Exclusion Act remained in effect until 1943.
Since then, though, there have been efforts to commemorate their contributions. In May 2014, a ceremony was held in Washington, D.C.; the Deputy Labor Secretary Chris Lu inducted the Chinese railroad workers into the department’s Hall of Honor. In a speech on the occasion, he said that it meant that Americans were beginning to “right an old wrong.”
