Chinese workers build the Transcontinental Railroad
California History After the Gold Rush
This Labor Day, as the felon tries to purge museums of “DEI content” and whitewash history to remove any achievements of non-white men, here’s a real labor story from real labor history.
In 1863 the US embarked on the building of a project of epic, visionary proportions: a Transcontinental Railroad that would connect California and the West to the rest of the nation.
Hundreds and thousands of pioneers were dying every year on the perilous routes to the West. Only the wealthy could afford the slightly safer passage on one of the sea routes. Or the provisions, oxen, horses, wagons, that would increase the odds of survival on the land route.
A continuous, cross-country railroad would mean safe, affordable travel for the masses, and a greater equality of opportunity.
The railroad was also a critically important symbol of joining together the fractured country after the bloody divisiveness of the Civil War, and the federal government was willing to pay corporations who were up to the task handsomely for the work.
But the obstacles were daunting.
For decades legislators from North and South had wrestled over the proposed route of the railroad. The Southern slave powers fought for a Southern route that would help them expand slavery into the West. Northerners fought equally bitterly for a more central route, for economic reasons as well as to prevent the expansion of slavery.
But the physical obstacles to a central route seemed entirely impossible.
There were fewer than two hundred miles between Sacramento and the Nevada desert. But the Sierra Nevada mountain range had five hundred distinct peaks, which the U.S. Army’s engineers estimated topped eleven to twelve thousand feet.
Over a period of many years, the indefatigable engineer Ted Judah and his wife and partner Anna Judah were able to convince Sacramento businessmen Leland Stanford, Collis Huntington, Charles Crocker and Mark Hopkins (collectively known as The Associates and later The Big Four) to finance a survey to prove the viability of a Central route over the Sierras. Then the Judahs took advantage of the absence of Southern legislators in Washington during the Civil War years to lobby and win funding for an Associates-backed railroad corporation, the Central Pacific, to undertake the building of the Western half of the railroad.
The railroad was from its inception a race between two corporations: The Central Pacific Railroad Company (CPRR) of California working from the West, and the Union Pacific Railroad (UPRR) working from the East, in a competition for land grants and other funding that awarded the lion’s share of profits to whichever could lay track the fastest. The ultimate goal was to connect the existing eastern U.S. rail network at Council Bluffs, Iowa, with the Pacific coast at the Oakland Long Wharf on San Francisco Bay.
The race commenced in 1863, with a workforce composed almost entirely of white workers.
By the time the railroad was completed in 1869, 90% of the Central Pacific labor force was Chinese. And the stupendous, life-threatening task these workers undertook has only recently been recognized.
Here is part of their story.
Read After the Gold Rush from the beginning:
AFTER THE GOLD RUSH: Chapter 111
Sacramento, California: Spring 1865
The Associates
Moy Jin Mun, Moy Jin Kee, Ah Ling
Early in 1865, two thousand Irish workers signed on to the Central Pacific Railroad work roll. As CPRR Vice President and construction supervisor Charlie Crocker had maintained over and over, what he actually needed was five thousand. But he got the crews back to work on the foothills north of Clipper Gap.
Money was finally flowing in, thanks to the wagon road and the newly amended railroad bill, and the funds enabled quick progress. The all-white crews blasted, cleared forests, and dumped fill. By March the Central Pacific had reached Illinoistown. By the end of May the railroad was fifty-six miles long and earning a thousand dollars a day, hauling passengers at ten cents a mile and freight at fourteen cents a mile per ton.
Then news came of new silver strikes and suddenly mining was booming again in Virginia City Eureka, and Elko.
And once again, most of the new workers disappeared for the mines.
CPRR President, former California Governor Leland Stanford, and Charlie’s brother Judge Crocker, now heading up the Central Pacific’s legal division, had petitioned the War Department to send out five thousand Confederate prisoners of war to work on the railroad. The end of the war would put an end to that hope.
The Associates met at Stanford’s mansion to discuss the crisis.
The Stanfords’ houseboy Jin Mun hovered in the corridor, helping the men off with coats. As the Associates settled in the parlor, he brought tea in from the kitchen. It was merely a formality—the tea sat untouched on a sideboard as Jin Mun poured and served much stiffer drinks.
And listened.
Stanford had a copy of a new San Francisco newspaper, the Elevator. “This man Bell has written an editorial suggesting using freedmen on the railroad.” He lifted the paper, read aloud: "We hope contractors and managers of that work will see the importance of employing the freedmen on the railroad.... The American people owe the negro labor. They have given them freedom, he now requires labor and protection. It is said the reason why Chinamen are employed is in consequence of the scarcity of white laborers. If that is the case, it is a good reason for employing colored men; they can perform double the work of Chinamen, and are accustomed to that kind of labor— "
Hopkins interrupted, frowning. “Where does he get the idea that we are employing Chinamen?”
Crocker cleared his throat and not very subtly glanced at Jin Mun.
Stanford spoke affably. “Thank you, Jin Mun, that will be all for now.”
“Yes, Governor.” Jin Mun bowed and departed.
He stopped in the kitchen to collect another pot of fresh tea, which he took outside to the veranda. His brother, Stanford house manager Jin Kee, and Crocker’s manservant and household manager Ah Ling stood at the railing, contemplating the evening sky. Jin Mun bowed to the older men as he refilled their cups. The three stood, sipping tea.
“Big talk,” Jin Mun said.
“Velly big talk,” Jin Kee deadpanned, mimicking white men mimicking Chinese.
Ah Ling responded in kind. “Velly serious,” he intoned.
The men drank their tea, and watched the sky.
Later that night, Crocker and Ah Ling returned to Crocker’s Sacramento lodgings. Inside the door, Ah Ling helped Crocker off with his coat. Crocker walked into the parlor, sat heavily down in his favorite chair and closed his eyes.
He felt Ah Ling’s implacable presence behind him, and knew that a whiskey had just materialized on the small table beside him, as it had for the last ten years that Ah Ling had worked for him.
All right, you sly bastard.
Crocker opened his eyes and looked across the room at Ah Ling, who stood in the doorway with his arms folded into the sleeves of his tunic. His face was a careful mask.
“How much do they want?” Crocker snapped.
Ah Ling smiled.
Central Pacific Work Camp
Back at work camp, Crocker called his field construction boss Jim Strobridge in to his office, and put the flyer advertising Chinese labor down on the desk in front of him. “I want you to hire some Chinese.”
Strobridge snorted. “I will not. Can you see those puny Johns lifting a six hundred-fifty pound rail? Don’t make me laugh.”
“They’ll work for thirty dollars a month. And their own cook.”
It gave Strobridge a second’s pause. White men drew ninety: three dollars a day, and that was just to start. But then indignation rose up in him. “I will not boss the damned Chinaman. He is strange. He smells. He eats disgusting things. He is not a mason—”
“Yet apparently ‘he’ built the Great Wall of China,” Crocker pointed out.
Strobridge glared at him. “Governor Stanford says—”
Crocker cut him off. “Governor Stanford approves. Go to Auburn and hire them. We’ll start slow. Fifty of ’em. We’ll test them.”
“White men won’t work next to Chinese,” Strobridge warned.
“We’ll test them.”
For days before the test crew arrived, Strobridge’s foremen complained, reporting angry mutterings from white crews about working alongside “John Chinaman.” Chinese were all right as houseboys, gardeners. They could wash a mean shirt. But they were tiny. Far too small to do heavy work.
Strobridge assured the whites that the Chinese would have their own camp, their own cooks, and would keep to their own crew. And he suggested the white crews could put a quick end to the matter by working a little harder and faster for a few days. “Leave the coolies in the dust and the whole idea will just… go away.”
The freight cars loaded up in Sacramento and arrived at the end of the track with a test group of fifty Chinese workers. They were dressed like no work crew the foremen had ever seen, in pajama-like pants of blue cotton, tunics with billowing sleeves, dishpan-sized hats shielding their faces from the sun and white scrutiny.
From the beginning they were a unit: fifty men operating under a Chinese head man. It was the arrangement Ah Ling had brought to Crocker from the Chinese Six Companies.
The Chinese workers set up their own camp far away from the white crews, and the cooks they had brought with them prepared a meal of rice and dried cuttlefish—foodstuffs supplied by the railroad, the cooks paid for out of Chinese wages. At sunrise the crew marched together through camp, ignoring the catcalls of the white workers.
IMAGE: https://web.stanford.edu/group/chineserailroad/cgi-bin/website/virtual/assets/loma.png
They had been hired for the most menial task, clearing the roadway by filling carts with broken rock and hauling them to the fill. They got to work with picks, shovels, and wheelbarrows, and worked steadily through the day. They hauled lighter loads than their white counterparts, but more regularly, as they took no smoke breaks, nor did they waste time gossiping.
Two or three times a day a boy walked through the working men, distributing cups of hot tea from barrels hung on the bamboo pole he balanced across his shoulders.
At close of day, a skeptical Strobridge took his engineers and surveyed the portion of road cleared by the Chinese. They found the path smoother and longer than the work a white crew had done that day.
Meanwhile the Chinese crew returned to camp, where every man stripped to his birthday suit and assembled behind the sleeping tents. The cooks had laid out rows of whisky kegs filled with warm water, and arranged neat piles of towels and clean clothes. The workers washed themselves thoroughly with soap and water, dabbed on flower water, and re-dressed in clean clothes while the cooks collected the dirty clothes to wash for the next day.
The men ate their dinner of boiled rice and cuttlefish, and sat up beside their campfires, singing bawdy songs, playing games of fan tan.
The next day, goaded by Strobridge, the white crewmen cut down their own work breaks and lunch hour, and stepped up their pace. To no avail. By the end of the week the Chinese crew had built the longest stretch of grade.
And Strobridge sent a curt message to Crocker.
“Send up more coolies.”
Another crew of fifty was hired, and then another, each time with similar results. The men divided into teams of twenty-five to fifty, each with a Chinese supervisor.
Soon, agents of the Central Pacific were searching every Chinatown in the state for young Chinese willing to work for thirty a month, and paying Chinese labor contractors to find more.
Every Chinese contract stipulated that the workers would pay out of their own wages for Chinese cooks, and the railroad would pay for their required supplies: dried oysters, cuttlefish and bamboo sprouts, sweet rice crackers, salted cabbage, vermicelli, Chinese bacon, dried abalone, tea, rice, pork and poultry. Crocker gave the food contract to his brother Clark, a partner in the San Francisco firm of Sisson, Wallace & Company.
Within months there were two thousand Chinese workers on the Central Pacific’s payroll and the Associates had sent to China for thousands more.
Through Crocker’s brother Clark and the Sisson, Wallace company, of course.
Read After the Gold Rush from the beginning:
For more: Ghosts of Gold Mountain, Gordon H. Chang
Gordon Chang on YouTube: Chinese Workers & the Transcontinental Railroad