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to Ethnic America
Chinese Immigrants and the
Building of the Transcontinental Railroad
In 1862, in the midst of the Civil
War, Congress authorized the most ambitious project that the country
had ever contemplated: construction of a transcontinental railroad.
The price tag was immense: $136 million, more than twice the federal
budget in 1861. The challenge was enormous; 1,800 miles across
arid plains and desert and the rugged granite walls of the Sierra
Nevada and Rocky Mountains.
Two companies undertook the actual
construction in return for land grants and financial subsidies
worth from $16,000 to $48,000 a mile. The Union Pacific began
laying track westward from Omaha, Nebraska. The Central Pacific
lay track eastward from Sacramento, California. Which ever company
laid the most track would receive the largest federal subsidy.
The Union Pacific's task was easier;
two-thirds of its track was laid across plains. The Central Pacific,
in contrast, had to carve out a rail bed across the Sierra Nevadas.
The first year, it lay 31 miles of track; after two years, it
had only put down 50 miles.
The Central Pacific also faced
an acute labor shortage. In the winter of 1864, the company had
only 600 laborers at work, a small fraction of the 5,000 for which
it had advertised. And these workers were unreliable: "Some
would stay until pay day, get a little money, get drunk and clear
out," a superintendent said.
In February, 1865, the Central
Pacific decided to try a new labor pool. Charles Crocker, chief
of construction persuaded his company to employ Chinese immigrants,
arguing that the people who build the Great Wall of China and
invented gunpowder could certainly build a railroad.
Beginning in the mid-nineteenth
century, civil turmoil and poverty had led many Chinese to emigrate
to California, the "Golden Mountain." As early as 1852,
there were 25,000 Chinese immigrants in California. Most came
from China's southeastern coast. The overwhelming majority were
married men who planned to return to China. In California, the
immigrants established support networks, based on family ties
and place of origin, and found work in agriculture, mines, domestic
service, and increasingly in railroad construction.
The Central Pacific's Chinese
immigrant workers received just $26-$35 a month for a 12-hour
day, 6-day work week and had to provide their own food and tents.
White workers received about $35 a month and were furnished with
food and shelter. Incredibly, the Chinese immigrant workers saved
as much as $20 a month which many eventually used to buy land.
These workers quickly earned a reputation as tireless and extraordinarily
reliable workers--"quiet, peaceable, patient, industrious,
and economical." Within two years, 12,000 of the Central
Pacific railroad's 13,500 employees were Chinese immigrants.
The work was grueling, performed
almost entirely by hand. With pickaxes, hammers, and crowbars,
workers chipped out railbeds. Dirt and rock were carried away
in baskets and carts. Tree stumps had to be rooted out, tracks
laid, spikes driven, and aqua ducts and tunnels constructed.
To carve out a rail bed from ridges
that jutted up 2,000 over the valley below, Chinese immigrants
were lowered in baskets to hammer at solid shale and granite and
insert dynamite. During the winter of 1865-1866, when the railroad
carved passages through the summit of the Sierra Nevadas, 3,000
lived and worked in tunnels dug beneath 40-foot snowdrifts. Accidents,
avalanches, and explosions left as estimated 1,200 Chinese immigrant
workers dead.
Despite their heroic labors, California's
Chinese immigrants became the objects of discriminatory laws and
racial violence. California barred these immigrants from appearing
as witnesses in court, prohibited them from voting or becoming
naturalized citizens, and placed their children in segregated
school. The state imposed special taxes on "foreign"
miners and Chinese fishermen.
For more information on Chinese
Americans, see:
The Chinese Exclusion Act:
http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/database/article_display.cfm?HHID=419
Angel Island:
http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/database/article_display.cfm?HHID=418
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