The Sierra Nevada that King described are the principal topographical feature of the American Far West. They are a massive granite block. On the eastern front they rise from four thousand feet or more in the north to seven thousand feet or more in the south. The western face is some fifty to sixty miles broad with a gradual rise of 2 to 6 percent. The summits, many enveloped in glaciers, run from six thousand feet in the north to ten thousand feet west of Lake Tahoe in the center. There are twelve peaks exceeding fourteen thousand feet in the south.
IF California was the land of superb natural bays, gold, silver, and other minerals for the picking, fertile agricultural lands, the best weather anywhere in the continent for humans, animals, and plants, and no warlike Indian tribes to resist the coming of the Americans, it was also a land that the Americans could scarcely get to or out of because of that granite block between them and the Eastern United States. It was as if those mountains had been designed to divide California permanently from the remainder of the country. They were too big, too snowy, too steep, too rugged, too extensive, too formidable ever to be crossed easily. The mountains challenged even humans on foot, as the fate of the Donner Party (1846–47) made clear.
The idea of driving a railroad over or through the Sierra Nevada was so audacious as to suck out the breath of those who heard it discussed. The audacity of Ted Judah in proposing it, even though he had found a place where there was just one summit to cross instead of two, and of the Big Four in taking him up on it, was monumental. Nothing like it had been done, anywhere. Not east of the Mississippi River over the Appalachians. Not in Europe. Not in Asia. Nowhere. Charles Crocker, who proposed to do it, later said, “People laughed at the time of building a railroad across those mountains.”3
To get a locomotive through that granite would require tunnels. Without them, no locomotive could get over the summits, even at the passes or with switchbacks. Tunnels through granite had no precedent. To make it happen, a way had to be found. Early in 1865, the Central Pacific went to work on the apparently unsolvable problem.
First money had to be found. That seems hard to believe for a much-needed and much-anticipated railroad whose president was also governor of the state of California, a railroad with millions in bonds pledged to it from the federal government, a railroad that could sell its own stocks and bonds, a railroad that had Collis Huntington raising money in Boston and New York, but it was so. A railroad that was building in the land of milk and honey, gold and silver, needed money. Nevertheless, there was no money at the beginning of 1865, only horrendous expenses.
As soon as the UP and the CP went into the market for rail—they could use only iron made in the United States, by act of Congress as decreed in the Pacific Railroad Bills—the prices jumped 80 percent, from $41.75 to $76.87 per ton, and by 1865 had jumped again, to $91.70 per ton. Shipments via the Panama Isthmus cost $51.97 per ton, meaning that rail delivered at San Francisco cost $143.67 per ton. Then came the charges for transfer from ships at San Francisco to the lighter, then unloading at Sacramento, then for transportation up the Sacramento River.
Locomotives went up in price too. Two engines in 1865 cost the CP $79,752. The CP paid it, more or less gladly, because, as Assistant Chief Engineer Lewis Clement explained to Leland Stanford, “the power of those engines is absolutely necessary to supply materials needed for construction; without these engines there will be delay.”
As the grading and then the tracks made their way up the Sierra Nevada, the expenses increased. As Clement explained, the ground was kept bare for the graders by having half of the men shoveling snow. After storms, the entire grading force was put to work removing snow. There were many other costs, especially as the tunnels began to be driven through the granite and as part of the CP’s workforce moved east of the mountains. But there was no money, either to pay the laborers or for supplies. Until 1865, the CP operated, mainly, on the Big Four’s money or on loans. In 1863 and 1864, not a penny in aid reached the railroad.
Still it operated, even though in the winter of 1864–65 it was down to about five hundred workmen. On January 7, 1865, Strobridge placed an advertisement in the Sacramento Union: “Wanted, 5,000 laborers for constant and permanent work, also experienced foremen. Apply to J. H. Strobridge, Superintendent. On the work, near Auburn.”4
Many applied, few stayed. What the white men wanted was what they had come to California to get—riches. At around $3 per day, the CP was not offering them any riches, but they were broke. New silver strikes in Nevada promised riches. The prospective rich men needed a ride to get there and a stake to support them once there. A week’s work on the CP would suffice. So, of the almost two thousand laborers who signed up to work for Strobridge, fewer than a hundred were there after a week.5
Clement recalled that, among the laborers, “mining was more to their liking than the discipline of railroad work. They were indifferent, independent, and their labor high priced. Labor sufficient for the rapid construction of the Central Pacific was not then on the coast and the labor as it existed could not be depended upon—the first mining excitement meant a complete stampede of every man and a consequent abandonment of all work.”6
Crocker and Strobridge kept at it. By the spring of 1865, Bloomer Cut was graded and tracked.I On April 5, after two years of strife and litigation, the California Supreme Court handed down a favorable decision: it ordered the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to pay to the CP $400,000 in stock bonds as a gift, instead of the $600,000 stock subscription authorized by the citizens of the city in 1863. Thereby, the city avoided being a stockholder, which meant it could not be held liable for debts (but also could not participate in the profits). The CP had paid $100,000 to win the suit, so it realized $300,000. It was the contention of the CP, quite unprovable, that, had the full $400,000 been available in 1864, the CP could have built its track well into Wyoming.
On May 13, 1865, the same day the train began carrying passengers and freight to Auburn, Huntington sent a telegram to Stanford: “I received yesterday twelve hundred and fifty-eight thousand dollars ($1,258,000) United States bonds for account of Central Pacific Railroad of California.”7 That represented the government’s loan to the CP for work completed in 1864, from Sacramento to Newcastle. The company got bonds at $16,000 per mile for the first seven miles, where, according to geologist Whitney and President Lincoln, the Sierra Nevada began, and $48,000 per mile for the next twenty-four miles, to Newcastle. Unfortunately, the CP had already borrowed against the money. Still, it helped.
With the money and the progress, everything was looking up. That summer, Mark Hopkins wrote to Collis Huntington that business was constantly increasing (in the first ten months of 1865, the company would earn $313,404 from the mails, passengers, and freight, with an operating expense of $93,448). The workforce was up to twenty-five hundred and on the increase, despite the desertions for the mines. More iron, engines, and cars were needed as soon as possible. Hopkins thought the CP could build all the way to the Salt Lake and perhaps farther. Meanwhile, he expected it to get to Dutch Flat in 1866. And, he noted, “the public here, in Nevada and at the East begin to exhibit an impatient interest in the progress of the Pacific R.R., which we cannot afford to disregard.”8
THERE was small chance that the Big Four and their workers would disregard the sentiment. In fact, none. The CP was charging ahead. What it needed to keep up the momentum was workers. When the tracks reached Auburn, the railroad was entering the Sierra for real. By far the toughest terrain lay ahead, up to and then down from the summit. In the spring of 1865, the CP went at that problem. By June 10, the railhead was at Clipper Gap, a lumber settlement forty-three miles east of Sacramento and 1,751 feet above sea level. It was now into its assault on the Sierra Nevada. It began reaching toward Illinoistown.
THE CP had gotten that far by using its wits and common sense. In February, a month after Strobridge’s all-but-fruitless call for labor, Charlie Crocker had met with him and raised the question of hiring Chinese
. He said some twenty of them had worked, and worked well, on the Dutch Flat and Donner Lake Wagon Road.
“Stro,” as he was known to his friends, was opposed. He said all the whites currently working for him would take off, and anyway what did the Chinese know about railroad construction?9 They couldn’t possibly do the work. They averaged 120 pounds in weight, and only a few were taller than four feet ten inches. “I will not boss Chinese!” he declared.
“They built the Great Wall of China, didn’t they,” replied Crocker. Besides, “who said laborers have to be white to build railroads?”
Strobridge, still skeptical, agreed to hire fifty local (that is, living in Auburn) Chinese and try them out for a month under white supervisors.10
There were in California at that time some sixty thousand Chinese, nearly all adults and the great proportion of them males. They had come for the same reason as the whites, to make money, first of all in the goldfields. But California law discriminated against them in every way possible, and the state did all it could to degrade them and deny them a decent livelihood. They were not allowed to work on the “Mother Lode.” To work the “tailing,” they had to pay a “miner’s tax,” a $4-per-head so-called permission tax, plus a $2 water tax. In addition, the Chinese had to pay a personal tax, a hospital tax, a $2 school tax, and a property tax. But they could not go to public school, they were denied citizenship, they could not vote, nor could they testify in court. Nevertheless, they paid more than $2 million in taxes. If Chinese dared to venture into a new mining area, the whites would set on them, beat them, rob them, sometimes kill them. Thus the saying, “Not a Chinaman’s chance.”
They were called “coolies,” a Hindu term meaning unskilled labor. The British picked it up and then passed it on to the Americans, who applied it to Chinese. The politicians cursed them, vied with one another about who hated the Chinese the most, declared them to be dregs, said they worried about the terrible habits the Chinese brought with them. One of the leaders in this ranting and raving was Governor Stanford. While campaigning, he had called the Chinese the “dregs of Asia” and “that degraded race.” In 1858, the California legislature banned any further importations. Still they came.
It got so bad that a young Californian appointed to collect the miner’s tax wrote in his diary, “Had a China fight. Knocked down some and drawed out our pistols on the rest. . . . Had a great time. Chinamen’s tails cut off. Down at the Little Yuba River shot a Chinaman. Had a hell of a time.” That same tax collector later was appointed by President Ulysses S. Grant to be ambassador to Japan.11
In the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, there are Chinese-English and English-Chinese phrase books from 1867. The English-speakers learned how to say in Chinese: “Can you get me a good boy? He wants $8.00 per month? He ought to be satisfied with $6.00. I think he is very stupid. Come at seven every morning. Go home at eight every night. Light the fire. Sweep the rooms. Wash the clothes. Wash the windows. Wash the floor. Sweep the stairs. Trim the lamps. I want to cut his wages.” Two phrases that never appear in the English-Chinese book are, “How are you?” and “Thank you.”
The Chinese could learn to say in English, to employers: “Yes, madam,” “You must not strike me,” and so forth. To authorities, “He does not intend to pay me my wages. He claimed my mine. He tries to extort money from me. He took it from me by violence. He assaulted me. The man struck the Chinese boy on the head. He came to his death by homicide. He was murdered by a thief. He was shot dead by his enemy. He was flogged publicly twice in the streets. He was frozen to death in the snow.”12
White men despised the Chinese even as they used them. They constantly compared the Chinese to another subordinate group, white women. The Chinese were small, with delicate hands and hairless faces and long, braided hair. One editor called them “half-made men,” which fit nicely with their two most common jobs, laundrymen and domestic servants. But the same editor referred to their “dreadful vitality.”13
After 1858, many Chinese had come to America in response to pamphlets put out by the several companies of Chinese merchants residing in San Francisco, advertising the high price of labor. The merchant companies took their pay from a percentage of a man’s earnings, plus a large bonus. They agreed to return a man to China free of charge; in the event of sickness he would be cared for; in case of death they would send the body home to be buried in the Celestial Empire. These contracts were faithfully fulfilled. Nonetheless, the ships rivaled the slave ships for gruesomeness.
In California the Chinese could find work as domestics: cooks, laundrymen, housekeepers, gardeners, errand boys, and so on. Like most previous immigrants, they sent back to China letters to their families, urging their wives, children, parents, brothers, and sisters to come. They landed in San Francisco, which had the largest number of Chinese and was known to them in their own language as “the big city—Tai Fau—first city.” Next came Sacramento, the “Yi Fau,” or the second city. Marysville was the third city.14
In 1868, Lippincott’s Magazine ran an article on “The Chinese in California.” “The purpose of every Chinaman in coming here is to amass such a sum—trifling in our eyes—in three or four years, as in China will give him support for life.” The Chinese “toiled without ceasing.” He never spent his money. No white man could ever surpass his industry. “He may have less muscle, but by his untiring persistence he accomplishes more work than the Caucasian.” There were no clumsy men among the Chinese, who “quickly got the ‘hang’ of whatever you set them at, and soon display a remarkable adroitness.” There was a “spirit of adventure” in them, which sent Chinese to Nevada, Idaho, and Montana for work. “Every Chinaman reads and writes, and in figures he is our superior.” To some extent they adopted the American costume—pants, boots, soft hats. But never coats. The pigtail “is sacred. Never can a Chinaman be persuaded that he can survive the loss of that emblem of dignity.” The article concluded with a plea for the federal government to do something to protect the Chinese—after all, it said, there was a Freedmen’s Bureau to protect the newly freed slave.15
AFTER a month’s labor, Strobridge admitted, albeit grudgingly, that the Chinese had performed superbly. They worked as teams, took almost no breaks, learned how to blast away rocks, stayed healthy and on the job. Engineer Montague praised them and declared in his 1865 report, “The experiment has proved eminently successful.”16
The CP began to hire them locally, offering $28 a month, then $30, then $31. Those were big wages even when the men had to pay for their own food. Crocker turned to a labor contractor in San Francisco, Koopmanschap, and had him look across the state for two thousand more “coolies,” and even to import them from China if necessary. Before the end of 1865, there were seven thousand Chinese at work on the line, with just under two thousand whites.17
Lee Chew was one of them. In 1903, he wrote an autobiographical sketch for Independent magazine. As a boy, he slept with the other boys in his village, thirty of them in one room. Girls had their own house, with a room that slept forty. Lee Chew worked on a ten-acre farm where his father grew potatoes, rice, beans, peas, yams, and fruits. He went to school to learn how “the great Emperors of China ruled with the wisdom of gods and gave to the whole world the light of high civilization and the culture of our literature, which is the admiration of all nations.”
In 1860 or thereabouts, the sixteen-year-old Lee Chew went to Hong Kong with five other boys and they got steerage passage on a steamer, where they almost starved. But in San Francisco they went to the Chinese quarter and he got a job with an American family as houseboy at $3 a week. Then he got a job with the railroad that lasted three years and he saved enough money to open his own laundry.
Many years later, when Theodore Roosevelt was president, Lee Chew gave it as his opinion that the Chinese in America “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 cou
ntrymen are so much more honest, industrious, steady, sober and painstaking.”18 A Chinaman who came back to Lee Chew’s village from the United States “took ground as large as four city blocks and made a paradise of it. He had gone away from our village as a poor boy. Now he returned with unlimited wealth, made in America.”
CHARLIE Crocker claimed it was impossible to tell Chinese apart (they were just like Indians, he said). Thus, fearing paying double wages, he devised a scheme of employing, working, and paying them wholesale.19
The CP organized the Chinese into gangs of twelve to twenty men, one of whom was an elected headman, another the cook. Crocker hired Sam Thayer, who spoke a number of Chinese dialects, to teach the men something of the English language. The headman collected all the wages, giving some to the cook to purchase provisions from the Chinese merchants. Other amounts went for clothing and opium. (The Chinese laborers used the drug on Sunday, their day off, to relax.) At the end of the month, each worker got his remaining $20 or more. Each gang had a white, usually Irish, boss, and the whites usually monopolized the skilled work, such as trestling, masonry, and actual rail-laying. The Chinese did the grading, made cuts and fills, blasted, felled trees, and, most arduous of all, drilled the holes and put in and lit the black powder while driving tunnels.
In May, Mark Hopkins wrote to Huntington, “We find a difficulty in getting laborers on the RR work. Prospecting generally takes off our men.” But sixteen hundred Chinese were then employed, and “without them it would be impossible to go on with the work.”20 Crocker’s brother E.B. wrote that spring to Representative Cornelius Cole, “I can assure you the Chinese are moving the earth and rock rapidly. They prove nearly equal to white men in the amount of labor they perform, and are far more reliable. No danger of strikes among them . . . I tell you Cole we are in dead earnest about this R.R. and you take 6 or 8 men in real earnest, and if they have any brains and industry they will accomplish something.”21
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