Train Dreams: The Chinese build the Central Pacific Railroad
After the Gold Rush
Train Dreams is one of the big, buzzy Netflix releases this week (nominated for Best Picture last year). The book and novella focus on the experience of a white worker (in the tree-clearing division) who labored on the railroad system. And of course the names and legends of California railroad barons Collis Huntington, Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker and Mark Hopkins are embedded in history, plastered on California’s grand hotels, museums, streets, buildings, a major US university— and hundreds of towns and cities.
But in the years just after the Civil War, the Western half of the Transcontinental Railroad was built by a labor force of mainly young Chinese immigrants, who literally and figuratively moved mountains to make the nation’s dream of a unifying railroad a reality.
One of the electrifying and horrifying set pieces of the novella and film of Train Dreams is a devastating scene which is just a glimpse of the harassment, assault, murders and outright massacre of Chinese workers by white men in the 19th and 20th century United States.
Shamefully, the white assault on immigrants has again escalated to a firestorm under this administration.
So this month it seems appropriate to review some more inclusive history of the railroad.
Read After the Gold Rush from the beginning:
After the Gold Rush, Chapter 111
Sacramento, California, 1865
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 construction supervisor Charles 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 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 to seek a quick fortune in the mines.
Leland Stanford and 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 put an end to that hope.
The Associates met at Stanford’s mansion to discuss the labor crisis.
Stanford’s teenage 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 the new Black-owned and edited San Francisco newspaper, the Elevator. “This man Philip 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— “
Mark 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.
The boy stopped in the kitchen to collect another pot of fresh tea, which he took outside to the veranda. Jin Mun’s older brother Jin Kee and Crocker’s longtime manservant 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.
Crocker opened his eyes. The whisky was there - alongside the flyer that he had lately been finding in unexpected places throughout the house. A flyer advertising cheap Chinese labor.
He looked across the room at Ah Ling, who stood in the doorway with his arms innocently folded into the sleeves of his tunic.
All right, you sly bastard.
“How much do they want?” Crocker snapped.
Ah Ling smiled.
Back at work camp, Crocker called his field construction boss in to his office, and put the flyer advertising Chinese labor down on the desk in front of Strobridge. “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.
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 —a varied and nutrition-packed diet far superior to that served to the white crews. The constant serving of tea throughout the day kept the Chinese workers hydrated and the boiling of water prevented dysentery.
Naturally, Crocker gave the railroad 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 his Sisson, Wallace company, of course.
Read After the Gold Rush from the beginning:
After the Gold Rush
is the epic story of the building of San Francisco as novelized history, told by the real people who built it, in their own words, from original source material such as newspapers, letters, court documents and the novels they wrote themselves.
Alexandra Sokoloff:
I’m a bestselling feminist crime and thriller author —but I also have a commitment and a platform to write about history that isn’t often talked about in the generalizations and most often outright whitewashing and male-washing of history textbooks.
Under this regime, working to counteract the suppression of history is more important than ever.
Why subscribe?
After the Gold Rush is a reader-supported publication. To receive a monthly roundup of new posts and support this work, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Likes, Shares and Comments are extremely helpful and much appreciated!
Finally, there’s lots of book news happening for me this month, too!
Huntress Moon, Book 1 in my California-set thriller series about a female killer eliminating men who need to be killed, is on sale in May for $2.49 on Kindle. All six books in the series are free on Kindle Unlimited.
And Book 1 of my other California-set series, Lost Highway, co-written with my Scottish crime writing husband, is available for pre-order - releasing June 23.
Thanks for checking them out!
—Alex
