On April 3, an early spring day in much of the rest of California, Curry encountered snow and frigid weather in the mountains. “Very cold last night, ice on water an inch thick this morning,” he recorded, and on April 7 he wrote: “The ground was white with snow this morning and the snow was falling rapidly. Pretty hard for a new camper in a muslin tent very carelessly and badly pitched. There is a prospect of a deep fall of snow. At night, the snow changed to rain during the day—a cold dismal, drenching November rain . . . The tent leaked badly and blankets became wet—everything wet and dirty. Standing by the fire to warm one’s feet incurs the necessity of a wet back.” His resolve and hope shaken, Curry confides, “I submit and commit myself to God and hope for better weather or better shelter,” but the next day is actually worse, and he fears he will get “badly sick.” Then he writes: “April 10th. Sun rose clear and bright. Snow 6 inches deep. A storm of hail, snow and rain thunder loud and reverberating grandly among the hills. Were driven to camp. News of the surrender of Lee and his army. Praise God from whom all blessings flow.”
Over the next several weeks, Curry passed through the booming town of Dutch Flat, learned about Lincoln’s assassination, and encountered Chinese, and though the weather slowly improved, he continued to suffer. He struggled with bouts of diarrhea, blistered and raw feet, and demanding work assignments. He complained about having to work through snow, being able to sleep just a few hours a night on the unforgiving ground, and fending off mosquitoes, numerous rattlesnakes, and repeated illnesses. The pious young man passed by sites with frightful names like Robber’s Ravine, Hell’s Kitchen, Dead Eye Gulch, Deserted Ranch, and Devil’s Peak, as well as a place called, embarrassingly to him, Horse Cock Cañon, so named, in his modest words, for a “perpendicular shaft of conglomerate rock.”
By mid-May 1865, he had had enough. “Curry sick,” he writes of himself in the third person. “Have decided to quit this R.R. by the first of June,” he notes, adding, “I pray that providence will follow me and sustain me as in the past, for I feel very weak.” The physical challenges of living and working in the Sierra had become too much for him. He finally ended his surveying work near the summit of the mountain range in view of Donner Lake, at six thousand feet, and the surrounding snow-capped peaks. Several months later, Railroad Chinese would arrive in the area to start the arduous work of tunneling. Returning to San Francisco to depart for home, Curry prayed “for future protection from accident and danger during the voyage.”
Though he had occupied a skilled position for the Central Pacific, five months was enough for Stephen Allen Curry. His diary includes no speculation or musing about what life would be like for the construction workers who would follow him; the struggle of his own day-to-day existence occupied him completely. He could not have imagined what winter would be like in the summit area. But surely, in a quiet, prayerful moment, he must have thought to himself: Thank God I am not a construction worker. Look kindly on those who will be.
By mid-1865, around the time when Stephen Allen Curry finished his survey of the railroad’s route into the highest reaches of the Sierra, several thousand Chinese were toiling for the CPRR far below and to the west, pushing the railway’s line across the Central Valley and toward the forbidding mountains. Many of these men had been miners in the Sierra foothills gold country, not far from the CPRR route. A growing number came directly from China, where labor agents recruited them to travel to California to work.
Practically overnight, Chinese had come to form the backbone of the railroad construction army that shaped, filled, and covered the earth and laid the bed and track, all by hand. Their early labors concentrated on stretches of line that lay well below the upper reaches of the Sierra, yet these efforts nevertheless stagger the imagination for the energy and ingenuity required to push forward.
A photograph taken over a decade after the completion of one these projects gives some sense of the scale and ambition of the CPRR even at this early phase of its construction. The iconic “Filling in Secret Town Trestle” (below) is the best-known photograph that includes Railroad Chinese workers within the frame. Photographer Carlton Watkins, who took the pictures of Chinese in San Francisco we saw earlier and was later famous for his grand images of Yosemite and other California landscapes, took this photo around 1876, when Chinese were completing in-fill work around the great trestle near Colfax that had been erected a decade earlier to span a deep ravine. Chinese are not likely, however, to have been the main workforce in its original construction, but we can see that the workers in the photograph are Chinese because of their characteristic hats. They labor alongside handcarts transporting a staggering amount of soil and rock. With a magnifier we can see that in addition to several Chinese standing in the lower left of the photo, who were likely posed, there are perhaps hundreds on the far right and in the background who are breaking down hillsides, filling carts, and pulling them to where the fill was needed. They appear to have completed an astonishing amount of work and would do even more. Eventually they completed the entire in-fill, making the wood trestle unnecessary, and it was removed.
It was hardly the only such project—or the first. In May 1865, the Chinese workers began their assault on what was called “the big fill.” Located near Auburn, it may have been the first big project tackled by many of the Railroad Chinese. Three hundred and fifty men, with thirty carts and thirty-five wagons, filled a gully a thousand feet long and fifty-three feet deep in the middle. Once the project was finished, they laid track atop its length. At nearby Wildcat Canyon, hundreds of other Chinese used wheelbarrows and hundreds of horses and carts to transport immense quantities of dirt scraped from “many acres” a “long distance away,” according to a reporter, to fill the great chasm. Massive excavations were also common throughout this section of track. Two cuts just past Clipper Gap measured four hundred feet long and fifty feet deep each. At Wildcat Summit, the cut through the earth ran 941 feet deep and required the removal of an estimated thirty thousand cubic yards of earth and rock. At Star House Gap, the cut ran eight hundred feet long and thirty-seven feet deep; at George’s Gap, the cut was 1,150 feet long and thirty-six feet deep. Huge embankments often also had to be constructed to protect these passes to keep them open. One at Wildcat Summit extended one thousand feet and stood forty-five feet high. Bridges five hundred feet long spanned steep ravines. Carpenters were mainly Euro-Americans, though Chinese also helped build the structures.
While the names and identities of nearly all of the thousands of Railroad Chinese have been lost to history, the payroll sheets of construction companies affiliated with the CPRR, though scattered and incomplete, contain tantalizing information about the identities and duties of some of the Railroad Chinese who were working for the company around this time. These payroll sheets are the closest thing we have to personnel records; from them we can find several hundred Chinese names, almost all of them labor contractors or “headmen,” and bits of information about some other individuals; we have no records listing the names of the thousands of workers in the construction ranks.
Records we do have show that Chinese worked mainly as laborers, but also as waiters, cooks, blacksmiths, and helpers of various sorts. Frustratingly, and with just a few exceptions, Chinese names are rendered in ways that make identifying actual individuals with any accuracy impossible. Few full proper names are given, and most of those are listed in an informal way that was customary for Chinese males in their home areas. For example, on “Payroll Sheet #128, April 1865,” under “China Labor,” we see this column of names, all Chinese (except for “Sisson’s,” which was the name of the largest labor contracting company):
Ah Fong’s Men
Billy Yang’s Men
Ah Gou’s Men
Che Noa
Foo Sing
Hung Wah
Sisson’s Time
Wang Wan
Ah Wy
Ah Kung
Ah Coons
Cum Sing
Hu
ng Wah
Below each of the principal entries on this list appear Euro-American names—presumably identifying supervisors or foremen attached to the contractor. Large amounts of money follow each main entry, the sums ranging from a low of just over $100 for one contractor to almost $4,000 for Hung Wah, whose name appears in two entries. Several other Chinese received over $3,000, though Hung Wah is the only one who signs his name, in Chinese, for receipt of the funds. “Paid” is simply scribbled for all the others.
All the entries on this payroll sheet appear to be for labor contractors. Indeed, up to five hundred Chinese labor contractors provided perhaps half of the five to six thousand Chinese laborers who worked for the CPRR in these first years of construction. According to extant payroll records, most appear to have been responsible for a team of twenty-five or fewer workers and may have worked alongside them. Some contractors provided several teams, while still others were responsible for hundreds of men. Among the most prominent contractors were men identified simply as Ah Fong, Ah Yow, Ah Coon, Cum Sing, and Ah Wing, but the vague rendering of their names and absence of any other identifying information make it impossible for us to know much about them, including their formal names. “Ah” was a common diminutive that Chinese used among themselves. The Chinese may not have tried to help the company understand their individual identities, or perhaps the company itself was just not especially interested in learning.
The Chinese contractor who furnished the most workers by far was Hung Wah. Although the documentation is incomplete, construction company records show that he provided just twenty workers in early 1864 and a few more in the following months. But a year later, in April 1865, the payroll number ballooned to almost 140 men. In May, the number was 250.
An early group photograph of Chinese workers in California may show one of the first Railroad Chinese, Lim Lip Hong (previous page, front row, second from the left), and others. One of them may even have been Hung Wah. Perhaps he is sitting in the center of the group.
Hung Wah’s good fortune would continue in the coming years. The number of workers under his command appears to have increased further through the rest of 1865 and into 1866. By April 1866, Hung Wah would be responsible for more than five hundred workers, according to the payroll sheet from that month. During that spring and summer, Hung Wah would provide even more workers each month, peaking at more than nine hundred workers on the July 1866 payroll sheet, almost one quarter of the total construction workforce. In that month alone, Hung Wah would receive almost $28,000 to distribute. In today’s dollars, that would be $784,000.
We know nothing about how Hung Wah handled the money that passed through his hands. No records survive of his accounting system, his management methods, the individual identities of the workers he paid, the relationships he maintained with them, or their view of him. By custom, however, the workers would have originated from the same area as Hung Wah and spoken the same local dialect. Hung Wah’s established record of steady and significant increases in his labor force also indicates that workers had confidence in his integrity and believed he would do right by them. He had developed a solid reputation and had won their trust, a fundamental element in long-term Chinese work relationships. In contrast, other Chinese contractors, because of unscrupulous business dealings and mistreatment, became targets of workers’ wrath. Chinese workers, after all, were not passive and could decide for whom they would work.
What is clear, in any case, is that many of the Railroad Chinese were businessmen comfortable with handling money, making transactions, supervising labor, and interacting with management. Those whose names appear on the aforementioned payroll sheet, for example, seem to have been responsible for teams of twenty-five to fifty workers in multiple camps, which are listed. The amount of pay issued in gold or silver computes to almost a thousand Chinese workers, assuming an average pay rate of $26 a month per worker for twenty-six days of work, from first light to sundown.
These Chinese workers deeply impressed the once skeptical leaders of the CPRR. Edwin B. Crocker, brother of Charles, retired justice of the California Supreme Court, and the CPRR’s attorney, privately provided an insider’s report on the progress of the railroad in an April 1865 letter to a close friend. Crocker wrote that Chinese then constituted a “large part” of the workforce, or approximately three thousand hands, he wrote, and “they prove nearly equal to white men, in the amount of labor they perform, and are far more reliable.” Chinese were doing “all kinds of labor, blasting, driving horses, handling rock, as well as the pick and shovel.” His friend would be “astonished,” Crocker wrote, to see the amount of work the Chinese had completed: they were “moving the earth and rock rapidly.” Moreover, they were disciplined. Crocker assured his correspondent that there was “no danger of strikes among them”—although before long, the Railroad Chinese would dispel this rosy assessment.
In a July 1865 report to stockholders, Leland Stanford himself indicated that Chinese had become “an important element of labor” for the company. A few months later, he issued an even more expansive assessment and declared they had simply become indispensable. Stanford did not characterize Chinese in the demeaning ways he had just a few years earlier when, as governor, he called for restricting them from the state. Instead, he praised their qualities and tremendous contribution to the construction effort.
In October 1865, Stanford submitted an official public report to President Andrew Johnson on the CPRR’s work as required by Congress, which had authorized public money for the Transcontinental. Thousands of Chinese, he observed, were then working for the company. “They are quiet, peaceable, patient, industrious and economical,” he wrote, and they are “ready and apt to learn all the different kinds of work required in railroad building.” Stanford concluded that not only were the Chinese becoming as “efficient as white laborers,” but also they were “more prudent and economical” and were “contented with less wages.” In contrast, white workers were not even joining the CPRR, as they “preferred employment other than in railroad work.”
Stanford also directly addressed the suspicion that Chinese were servile indentured laborers under the control of unscrupulous Chinese merchants. Such a view, Stanford adamantly maintained, was completely unfounded. Chinese leaders were “intelligent business men who promptly advise their subordinates where employment can be found on most favorable terms. No system similar to slavery, serfdom or peonage prevails among these laborers,” whose wages “are always paid in coin each month.” Stanford confidently predicted that as many as fifteen thousand Chinese would be working for the company in the next year, making it possible for the CPRR to complete its work in the time required by Congress.
Company leaders also described Chinese as engaged in a wide range of work, including the most dangerous. In his end-of-year report to the company, chief engineer Montague observed that Chinese “are becoming very expert in drilling, blasting and other departments of rock work.” In his own report, Stanford reflected on the tremendous progress made in 1865, and declared that the CPRR had completed the most challenging and dangerous work ever faced by a railroad company. The achievement was epic. For instance, “heavy rock excavations” that should have taken eighteen months to complete had “been pushed through in from four to five months” because of the “great vigor” of the effort.
In September 1865, after the line reached Colfax, fifty miles from Sacramento and at 2,500 feet in elevation, the earth presented its greatest challenge yet to the construction crews. Just east of the town, the huge, steep mountain known as Cape Horn stood in the way of the line. Surveyor Curry had helped plot the route at this site. There was no way to avoid the mountain’s intimidating presence, which is why it was named for the treacherous southern tip of South America, where the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans meet and around which all ships had to pass through dangerous waters. From Cape Horn mountain, one could also take in spectacular views of the surrounding countryside. The wild American River far below the route
of the line. One of the most vigorously debated questions in the history of the Central Pacific’s effort to get through the Sierra centers on what happened at this location.
Many railroad histories tell of Chinese lowering themselves from the top of the mountain in baskets woven from reeds and using hand tools to carve a ledge for the roadbed or hole and place explosives to blow away the stubborn rock. Hanging dangerously in the wind, with nothing but natural fibers keeping them from the void below, the Chinese, it was said, would sometimes not make it back up in time before the ferocious detonations, and they would be lost forever. This dramatic mental image was so compelling, it became emblematic of Chinese suffering and sacrifice on the Central Pacific. From Oscar Lewis, author of the influential history The Big Four, to writer Maxine Hong Kingston, in a famous passage in China Men in which her grandfather, suspended in a hanging basket, sexually engages the earth, many writers recounted the dramatic story. The baskets were also immortalized visually in paintings and illustrations.
As insistent as those who vividly relate such stories are, others vociferously challenge the veracity of these accounts. They are based on a myth, it is said, and nothing more, propagated and embellished by those who want “politically correct” history about minorities instead of the real truth. In 1927, goes the debunking argument, a public relations agent of the Southern Pacific Railroad invented the legend of the baskets to entertain travelers as they rounded Cape Horn promontory. According to this tale, Chinese were supposedly lowered in “bosun’s chairs” to work on the cliff face. Subsequent writers embellished the account over the years, with wooden chairs becoming woven baskets. The account was allegedly recycled repeatedly without firm evidence until legend became assumed truth. Confirming the debunking argument was the apparent absence of any mention of the use of baskets at Cape Horn, or anywhere else, in private correspondence, archives, or journalism before 1927. There simply was no textual or visual evidence to substantiate the claim, it was said. Moreover, the actual surface features of Cape Horn made the use of baskets unlikely, if not impossible. The mountain’s sides were not close to standing vertical but sloped in a way that would have made the use of hanging baskets impractical. There were no projecting ledges from which men could be lowered in baskets and dangle to work effectively. Another highly charged controversy associated with Cape Horn is the claim that more than three hundred Chinese fell to their deaths during the construction of the roadbed there. Firm evidence for this latter belief has yet to be found.
Ghosts of Gold Mountain Page 10