Collection 4: "Building the Transcontinental Railroad" by Iris Chang

Crossing the continent meant braving death by disease, brigands, Native Americans, starvation, thirst, heat, or freezing.

What was needed was a transcontinental railroad to move more people west and natural resources safely and profitably to major markets back east.

The Union Pacific’s job—laying track over plains—was much easier, while the Central Pacific had to go over steep mountains. The Central Pacific engineers promised that the formidable physical obstacles could be overcome, and to a great extent, it was Chinese labor, and even, here and there, Chinese ingenuity, that helped make the transcontinental railroad a reality.

Stanford’s position on the Chinese was governed by expedience.

And, fortuitously for the Central Pacific, Sino-American diplomacy would create more favorable conditions for Chinese immigration to the United States.

In exchange for “most favored nation” status in trade, China agreed to recognize the “inherent and inalienable right of man to change his home and allegiance and also the mutual advantage of free migration and emigration of their citizens and subjects respectively from one country to the other for purposes of curiosity or trade or as permanent residents.”

In exchange for “most favored nation” status in trade, China agreed to recognize the “inherent and inalienable right of man to change his home and allegiance and also the mutual advantage of free migration and emigration of their citizens and subjects respectively from one country to the other for purposes of curiosity or trade or as permanent residents.”

The Chinese paid for their own food and cooked it themselves—they were even able to procure special ingredients like cuttlefish, bamboo shoots, and abalone.

As Lee Chew, a railroad laborer, later recalled in a spasm of national pride, the Chinese were “persecuted not for their vices but for their virtues. No one would hire an Irishman, German, Englishman or Italian when he could get a Chinese, because our countrymen are so much more honest, industrious, steady, sober and painstaking.”

White laborers began to feel that Chinese diligence forced everyone to work harder for less reward.

Eventually the white workers gave up, placated perhaps by being told that they alone could be promoted to the position of foreman.

In some places they encountered a form of porphyritic rock so hard it was impervious to frontal attack, even with gunpowder.

When everything was ready, workers were lowered in the baskets to drill holes and tamp in dynamite, literally sculpting the rail bed out of the face of sheer rock.

When everything was ready, workers were lowered in the baskets to drill holes and tamp in dynamite, literally sculpting the rail bed out of the face of sheer rock.

White workers succumbed to dysentery after sharing communal dippers from greasy pails, but the Chinese drank fresh boiled tea, which they kept in whiskey barrels or powder kegs suspended from each end of a bamboo pole.

The white men had “a sort of hydrophobia,” one writer observed, whereas the Chinese bathed every night before dinner, in powder kegs filled with heated water.

On Christmas Day 1866, the Dutch Flat Enquirer announced that “a gang of Chinamen employed by the railroad...were covered up by a snow slide and four or five died before they could be exhumed. Then snow fell to such a depth that one whole camp of Chinamen was covered up during the night and parties were digging them out when our informant left.”

Melting snow mired wagons, carts, and stagecoaches in a sea of mud.

The tedium of their lives was aggravated by the systematized abuse and contempt heaped on them by the railroad executives.

The tedium of their lives was aggravated by the systematized abuse and contempt heaped on them by the railroad executives.

“If there had been that number of whites in a strike, there would have been murder and drunkenness and disorder,” Crocker marveled. “But with the Chinese it was just like Sunday. These men stayed in their camps. They would come out and walk around, but not a word was said; nothing was done. No violence was perpetuated along the whole line.”

When the two companies came within a hundred feet of each other, the Union Pacific Irish taunted the Chinese with catcalls and threw clods of dirt.

If relations were often tense between the Chinese and the Irish, there were also moments of camaraderie.

This accomplishment created fortunes for the moguls of the Gilded Age, but it also exacted a monumental sacrifice in blood and human life.