What was not true about Chinese immigrants who worked on building the transcontinental railroad

The nation’s first transcontinental railroad, completed 150 years ago today at Promontory Summit in Utah, connected the vast United States and brought America into the modern age. Chinese immigrants contributed mightily to this feat, but the historical accounts that followed often marginalized their role.

Between 1863 and 1869, as many as 20,000 Chinese workers helped build the treacherous western portion of the railroad, a winding ribbon of track known as the Central Pacific that began in Sacramento.

At first, the Central Pacific Railroad’s directors wanted a whites-only workforce. Leland Stanford, the railroad’s president, had advocated for keeping Asians out of the state in his 1862 inaugural address as governor of California. When not enough white men signed up, the railroad began hiring Chinese men for the backbreaking labor. No women worked on the line.

Company leaders were skeptical of the new recruits’ ability to do the work, but the Chinese laborers proved themselves more than capable — and the railroad barons came to consider them superior to the other workers.

The Chinese workers were paid 30% to 50% less than their white counterparts and were given the most dangerous work.

My colleagues and I initiated an international research project — based, appropriately, at Stanford University — to investigate the enormous contribution Chinese workers made to the transcontinental project. It proved to be a formidable task, not least because no written record produced by what were called “railroad Chinese” is known to exist. Without letters, diaries and other primary sources that are historians’ stock in trade, we amassed a sizable collection of evidence that included archaeological findings, ship manifests, payroll records, photographs and observers’ accounts.

The material allowed us to recover a sense of the lived experiences of the thousands of Chinese migrants Leland Stanford came to greatly admire. He told President Andrew Johnson that the Chinese were indispensable to building the railroad: They were “quiet, peaceable, patient, industrious and economical.” In a stockholder report, Stanford described construction as a “herculean task” and said it had been accomplished thanks to the Chinese, who made up 90% of the Central Pacific Railroad’s labor force.

These workers showed their mettle, and sealed their legacy, on the peaks of the Sierra Nevada. Many observers at the time had assumed that Stanford and the railroad were daft for thinking they could link California with the East because an immense mountain range separated the state from Nevada and beyond. The Sierra Nevada is a rugged, formidable range, its inhospitableness encapsulated by the gruesome tragedy of the Donner party in 1847 and 1848. Trapped by winter storms in the mountains, they resorted to cannibalism.

To get to the High Sierra, Chinese workers cut through dense forests, filled deep ravines, constructed long trestles and built enormous retaining walls — some of which remain intact today. All work was done by hand using carts, shovels and picks but no machinery.

The greatest challenge was to push the line through the Sierra summit. Solid granite peaks soared to 14,000 feet in elevation. The railroad bed snaked through passes at more than 7,000 feet. The men who came from humid south China labored through two of the worst winters on record, surviving in caverns dug beneath the snow.

They blasted out 15 tunnels, the longest nearly 1,700 feet. To speed up the carving of the tunnels, the Chinese laborers worked from several directions. After opening portals along the rock face on either side of the mountain, they dug an 80-foot shaft down to the estimated midway point. From there, they carved out toward the portals, doubling the rate of progress by tunneling from both sides. It still took two years to accomplish the task.

The Chinese workers were paid 30% to 50% less than their white counterparts and were given the most dangerous work. In June 1867, they protested. Three-thousand workers along the railroad route went on strike, demanding wage parity, better working conditions and shorter hours. At the time it was the largest worker action in American history. The railroad refused to negotiate but eventually raised the Chinese workers’ pay, though not to parity.

After the Sierra, the Chinese workers faced the blistering heat of the Nevada and Utah deserts, yet they drove ahead at an astonishing rate.

As they approached the meeting point with the Union Pacific, thousands of them laid down a phenomenal 10 miles of track in less than 24 hours, a record that has never been equaled. A Civil War officer who witnessed the drama declared that the Chinese were “just like an army marching over the ground and leaving the track behind.”

Progress came at great cost: Many Chinese laborers died along the Central Pacific route. The company kept no records of deaths. But soon after the line was completed, Chinese civic organizations retrieved an estimated 1,200 bodies along the route and sent them home to China for burial.

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The transcontinental railroad’s completion allowed travelers to journey across the country in a week — a trip that had previously taken more than a month. Politicians pointed to the achievement as they declared the United States the leading nation of the world.

The transcontinental railroad has been viewed in a similarly nationalistic way ever since. Chinese workers were often left out of the official story because their alienage and suffering did not fit well with celebration. And attitudes toward them soon soured, with anti-Chinese riots sweeping the country. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 barred Chinese laborers from entering the United States and placed restrictions on those already here.

Federal immigration law prohibited Chinese citizens from becoming Americans until 1943.

As a faculty member of the university that bears his name, I am painfully aware that Leland Stanford became one of the world’s richest men by using Chinese labor. But I also try to remember that Stanford University exists because of those Chinese workers. Without them, Leland Stanford would probably be at best a footnote in history — and the West and the United States would not exist as we know it today.

Gordon H. Chang is a professor of history at Stanford University.

The Transcontinental Railroad was built by many thousands of workers from a variety of ethnic and cultural backgrounds, which created a blend of people that continues to define the nation to this day. One of the groups that literally took on the brunt of the work, were the Chinese laborers. Most of the Chinese workers, who numbered over 11,000 by the end of the project, were employed by the Central Pacific Railroad building out of Sacramento, California.

The use of Chinese labor started as an experiment. Fifty workers were initially hired, despite Nineteenth-Century stereotypes about their stamina, strength, and other traits that some thought would prevent them from completing the demanding 10-12 hour shifts of hard labor during a 6-day work week. The man responsible for the experiment was Charles Crocker, Chief Railroad contractor for the Central Pacific, who believed that the Chinese workers would be the answer to the labor problems the company faced. Many of the Central Pacific workers already employed by Crocker were leaving their jobs with the railroad to try their luck in the gold and silver rush. Labor unrest and strikes often arose in the workers' camps, which caused more headaches for the owners and construction bosses. Crocker's experiment proved successful in several ways.

The Chinese labor force easily dispelled the doubts of others by performing the tasks they were given at a good pace and with exceptional quality workmanship. In fact a crew consisting mainly of Chinese workers was eventually able to complete the task of laying 10 miles of track in one day, which is a record that still stands to this day. The Chinese workers were paid a lower rate than the other native and European workers, while often completing higher quality work and being more dependable.

In a new exhibition, the overlooked contribution of Chinese workers is being brought to the light for the 150th anniversary of the railroad’s completion

Thu 18 Jul 2019 02.00 EDT

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When one thinks of the transcontinental railroad, rarely do Chinese migrants come to mind. But in a new exhibition at the National Museum of American History in Washington, a vital revision is presented.

But this exhibition takes a different tack, tracing the forgotten Chinese workers who built the western leg of the railroad across the Sierra Nevada mountains, connecting the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroad in 1869.

“Historians have always known and written about the Chinese workers, but it’s forgotten by society,” said Peter Liebhold, who co-curated the exhibit with Sam Vong. “We’ve forgotten the contribution of these workers, and in fact, we forget the contribution of all workers. We tend to focus on the achievement of the few and not the stories of the average everyday person.”

It tells the story of Chinese workers through old maps, detailing where they worked, their labor materials – from conical hats to miner’s picks – and photos, showing the tents they lived in, their working conditions and their nomadic lifestyle.

“The artifacts on view are meant to help visitors understand how forgotten workers had to endure hazardous, unfair conditions, in addition to backbreaking labor,” said Leibhold. “The 150th anniversary is not just about completing a railroad, but the workers involved.”

Chinese workers made up most of the workforce between roughly 700 miles of train tracks between Sacramento, California, and Promontory, Utah. During the 19th century, more than 2.5 million Chinese citizens left their country and were hired in 1864 after a labor shortage threatened the railroad’s completion.

The work was tiresome, as the railroad was built entirely by manual laborers who used to shovel 20 pounds of rock over 400 times a day. They had to face dangerous work conditions – accidental explosions, snow and rock avalanches, which killed hundreds of workers, not to mention frigid weather.

“All workers on the railroad were ‘other’,” said Liebhold. “On the west, there were Chinese workers, out east were Irish and Mormon workers were in the center. All these groups are outside the classical American mainstream.”

The exhibition features a century-old pair of chopsticks, as well as canisters for tea and soy sauce. The railroad company provided room and board to white workers, but Chinese workers had to find their own meals, which were often brought to them from local merchants.

There are also miner’s picks and shovels, conical hats, as well as photos of the camp sites where the workers lived in Nevada in 1869. There are photos, as well, of the Native Americans, many of whom protested against the building of the railway in 1869, which displaced the Lakota, Shoshone, Cheyenne and other communities.

The Chinese workers were educated and organized; 3,000 laborers went on strike in 1867 to demand equal wages, as the white workers were paid double.

“They were unsuccessful because they were out in the middle of nowhere,” said Liebhold. “The railroad stopped them from getting food. That’s one way it failed.”

One telling photo on view is a shot of the Union Pacific board members sitting in a business class train car from 1869. By paying laborers a low wage, they were able to skim millions from the construction and get rich.

“Building railroads is often profitable but operating them isn’t necessarily, if you look at the history of railroads in the US,” said Liebhold. “To totally condemn the businessmen is challenging because they took huge risks raising money to build a railroad that was astronomically difficult. Many people didn’t think it was possible.”

There is one photo from 1869 that shows how the company commemorated the last hammered spike to complete the railroad, however, only one Chinese worker is in the photo. Many of the actual workers were left out.

This story could still be one which resonates with today’s America. “There’s no question this is a story about migrant labor,” he said. “Chinese workers were not citizens, weren’t allowed to become citizens. From the 1850s to 1882, they were tolerated in the US, but not accepted as peers.

“Then, there was the Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred immigrants from coming into US, unless you were a diplomat or a businessperson,” said Liebhold. “You’re always welcome if you’re affluent, then you’re allowed to come in.”

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