Ghosts of Gold Mountain

by Gordon H. Chang

  Food and diet were integral to the health practices of Chinese. Indeed, the lines between health maintenance, healing, and food consumption were thin, even nonexistent. According to traditional Chinese belief, tea, which the Railroad Chinese drank in copious amounts, was essential not just for hydration but for general well-being. Tea carriers brought fresh tea brewed from mountain waters in kegs to replenish large barrels and canisters for the workers along the route. Observers noted much lower instances of dysentery and other stomach ailments among Railroad Chinese because their drinking water was boiled. Soups were not just nourishing; they could also be tonics for ailments and body restoration. Chinese ladle soup spoons are among the most common items found at former campsites.

  The Railroad Chinese tenaciously maintained their preference for the flavors and food culture they enjoyed in their home villages. They drew on a well-established network of grocers, importers, and local Chinese food producers to provide familiar foodstuffs, cookware, eating utensils, tableware, and other familiar necessities. Shipping manifests, business receipts and ledgers, and the observations of writers indicate that Chinese imported not just their staple of rice but a large array of foodstuffs from their home areas not found in America. These ingredients included preserved meats; dried fish, shrimp, and other shellfish; dried legumes; different forms of dried noodles; and preserved vegetables, including dried seaweed, teas, and other desiccated foods for reconstituting. Given the problems of supply across long distances and storage, relying on dried and preserved foods would make a great deal of sense. Other commonly imported foods included condiments such as soy sauce, wines, vinegars, salted beans, fermented sauces, spices and herbs, and other flavorings. An invoice for goods received by a Chinese merchant in San Francisco in 1854 listed “oranges, pomelos, dry oyster, shrimps, cuttlefish, mushrooms, dried bean curd, bamboo shoots, narrow leaved greens, yams, ginger, sugar, rice, sweetmeats, sausage, dry duck, eggs, dry fruit, salt ginger, salt eggs.” Expensive or specialty items are found on other invoices and were used for celebrations and banquets. Treats included candied fruits and sweet spiced confections, the delicacy known as dried birds’ nests, fish fins, tamarind, bean sauces, bêche-de-mer (sea cucumber), and liquors and wines of various sorts.

  Speaker of the House Schuyler Colfax probably tasted these and other specialties during the bountiful feast he enjoyed when he visited San Francisco’s Chinatown in August 1865, after he had witnessed Chinese constructing the CPRR in the Sierra. The Chinese Six Companies hosted him and dozens of other leading political and business leaders at a “state banquet” that lasted six hours, held at the Hang Heong Restaurant on Clay Street in Chinatown. The restaurant reportedly served 336 dishes through 130 courses presented in “three acts.” The repast equaled or even surpassed what could be had in their home region. Chinese cooking ingredients, even the very rare, were not wanting in California. Some unusual items, such as bear paw, were probably even more available then in California than in southern China.

  Inventory in a Chinese store in Calaveras County, California, in 1865 included many of the items already mentioned as well as cooking oil, Chinese cigars, medicinal herbs, firecrackers, writing paper, candles, clothing, and Chinese bottles. Chinese cooks had access to traditional iron and copper pans, knives, chopsticks, ladles, tongs, mills, ceramics of many kinds, and bamboo, wood, and lacquer ware. Everywhere Railroad Chinese went for work, they consumed similar foodstuffs. Markets in Chinatowns today still carry the same items.

  Railroad Chinese likely consumed large quantities of fresh food produced by other Chinese in California and Nevada, as they had at home in the Pearl River delta. As early as the 1850s, hundreds of Chinese established fishing villages around San Francisco Bay and along the coast at Monterey and north to Humboldt Bay. The abundance of sea life would have astonished any fisherman: salmon, sturgeon, smelts, sardines, abalone, crabs, clams, oysters, and shrimp filled northern California sea waters and were there for the taking. Chinese also established fishing camps along the Sacramento River and in its delta for freshwater fish and other foods. The bounty from their enterprise exceeded local demand, and they exported highly valued dried shrimp and fish back to China.

  In the mountain areas of California, still largely pristine, fish and game, including trout, salmon, wild fowl, deer, and bear, lived in abundance. Chinese had guns for self-protection and hunting and were known to be resourceful in procuring food and developing food sourcing. To provide an ongoing source of fresh protein, a Chinese fisherman might have introduced catfish, for example, into a lake near Summit Camp where Chinese lived. Nonindigenous catfish, likely descendants of such early stock, are still found there and in other ponds along the route of the CPRR.

  Southern Chinese have the reputation of eating anything that moves, including cold-blooded snakes and any warm-blooded animal with four legs, and animal life was plentiful in the mountains. To supplement their supplies, resourceful camp cooks could have used some of their daylight hours while the workers were on the line to hunt and forage, though all the noise and commotion from construction probably scared away much wildlife. In California and Nevada, Chinese and Native people were in contact; there is evidence of exchange of local foodstuffs for Chinese ceramic ware. Given the remote and difficult conditions in which they worked and lived, the Railroad Chinese certainly must have eaten poorly at times, but probably not consistently so. Animal bone remains recovered from Chinese railroad work camps do not exhibit the heavy processing associated with starvation diets. Food supplies could actually have been ample, as it would have been in the interests of the company to provision them well, especially since the Chinese were paying for their own food. Journalists at the time often wrote that the Railroad Chinese commonly ate a more varied and better diet than white fellow workers, and possibly even better than they had in China. For at least some Chinese railroad workers, it does appear that their diet in the United States was more nutritious than in China. One forensic study of the remains of a group of Chinese railroad workers, though not on the CPRR, indicates that they had been undernourished as children and ate better in America.

  Other evidence exists that suggests that the Railroad Chinese did not just subsist but could eat well. A report in 1870 claimed that the rations for Chinese railroad workers per diem, per man, were two pounds of rice; one-third ounce of tea; one pound of beef, pork, or fish; one-third pound of vegetables; and a small quantity of lard or oil. These “rations” may have been the maximum amount a Chinese could purchase from the company store, not what the men actually consumed, which would have been considerably more than they would have eaten at home. A pound of meat per day in the Pearl River delta was unheard of. Poultry, an item for special occasions in China, was regularly available to the Railroad Chinese. Indeed, the availability of good food may have served as an incentive to join the construction effort. Their food may have far exceeded in quantity and quality what miners scattered throughout the mountain areas in small camps consumed.

  California Chinese farmed and grew produce for their compatriots and for the general market wherever they went, including in Nevada. Hundreds of Chinese raised vegetables, hogs, and poultry in the 1850s and 1860s in the Sacramento area and in the mountains. In 1860, Chinese operated thirty-six truck farms in Placer County, more than half of the total number for the county. In 1870 there were sixty-three. A map locating Chinese truck farmers operating in 1870 shows that scores farmed all along the route of the line: the location of clusters of these Chinese farms reads like a train schedule: Sacramento, Newcastle, Auburn, Clipper Gap, Colfax, Dutch Flat, and nearby Grass Valley and Nevada City, and then Truckee, where Chinese cultivated small farms right next to the railroad line. They grew vegetables, including Chinese vegetables from seeds brought from China, for summer and fall consumption but also crops that could be consumed throughout the harsh winters. In Truckee they cultivated cabbage, turnips, carrots, parsnips, beets, and onions, all of which was cold-stored. Chinese also became familiar
with American canned goods, evaporated milk, meat cuts, wheat flour, brandy, whisky, gin, ham, lard, mustard, salad dressing, and bouillon. Bottles of Lea & Perrins Worcester sauce abounded at Railroad Chinese camp sites.

  Their meals invariably attracted the attention of non-Chinese who were unfamiliar with their food and style of eating. Journalists reported seeing the Railroad Chinese having their breakfast of congee with vegetables; they used chopsticks and carried their own mess kits. Sketches of them in their work camps show them cooking in woks and eating fresh-caught fish. Their heavier meals likely consisted of stews of root crops from local sources, soups, and stir fries enlivened with garlic, fresh and preserved vegetables, bits of cured meats, salted fish, or other seafood, and other Chinese ingredients from home. Old fire pits include rocks arranged to hold iron woks, and recovered butchered animal bones display traditional cutting techniques using Chinese cleavers. Some recipes might pass for Chinese food available in America today, but the daily repasts were probably quite different, given the rough conditions and availability of ingredients.

  When he was a youngster, “Pappy” Clay spent much time among Chinese railroad workers, and later, when elderly, he fondly recalled having meals with them. He described one dish that he frequently enjoyed and described in interesting detail. He remembered that the Chinese cooks built their own ovens and cooking areas in the dirt banks alongside the tracks.

  Each cook would have the use of a very big iron kettle hanging over an open fire and into it they would dump a couple of measures of Chinese unhulled brown rice, Chinese noodles, bamboo sprouts and dried seaweed, different Chinese seasonings and American chickens cut up into small pieces including, heads, legs, and all plus more water than what would seem necessary and still the kettle would be only half full. When the cook stirred up the fire the concoction began to boil, then the rice would begin to swell until finally the kettle would be nearly full of steaming nearly dry brown rice with the cut up chickens all through it.

  Each worker then ladled the meal into a “big blue bowl” and used chopsticks to down it all. They drank plenty of tea on the side.

  On special occasions, however, the Railroad Chinese would have enjoyed celebratory repasts of meats and specially prepared treats. The workers would have expected these from their district associations or employers as part of their due. Chinese cooks at the summit area constructed fire pits that accommodated woks and ovens large enough to roast whole pigs, a Chinese celebratory favorite.

  Provisioning the Railroad Chinese was itself a profitable business. Though no specific evidence as to the practices of labor contractors such as Hung Wah has been found, information from journalists and from the archives of other Chinese labor contractors suggests that the contractors made money not just by bringing workers to employers but also in supplying food, opium, liquor, and other commodities to them. In Auburn, Hung Wah had been a labor contractor as well as a merchandiser of goods. He sold food, and perhaps provided cooks who handled and prepared the food, to his contract workers, producing a steady cash flow. Other Chinese labor contractors operated similarly, preferring to make money mainly from provisioning rather than by taking larger percentages from wages. Unlike suppliers of European immigrant labor on the East Coast, who usually took a cut from wages or a flat rate for each worker supplied, the large California companies that recruited thousands of Chinese workers for the CPRR appear to have operated more like their Chinese contractor counterparts.

  The Sisson, Wallace Company, for example, became the largest contracting company for the CPRR. It had been founded in Sacramento in 1857 as a general merchandising and Chinese import enterprise and in 1866 began to recruit workers in China for the CPRR. The company had offices in Hong Kong, San Francisco, Truckee, and other towns along the route. It asked for relatively little compensation for the actual contracting service but required that it control provisioning of food and supplies. Keeping the cost of supplying workers low encouraged the company to hire greater numbers. Profits could then be made from providing tools, clothes, liquor, opium, and food to the workers. The arrangement was lucrative, especially for the Crocker family, which benefited at each level of the operation. Charles Crocker, a director of the CPRR, also headed its main construction company, Crocker Construction. As a boss of one company, he therefore essentially paid himself as the head of the other. It in turn worked with Sisson, Wallace, a labor contracting and supply company. Workers purchased supplies from its stores. Clark W. Crocker, one of Charles’s brothers, became a chief partner of Sisson, Wallace. Labor provision was adjunct to, and supportive of, provisioning. Merchandising goods to sell to newcomers looking for gold was the way the CPRR directors all first became successful in California, after all.

  The business records of a man named Ah Louis, who in the 1870s became the most important Chinese labor contractor along the central coast of California, show a similar pattern of operation. Ah Louis had been born in the Siyi and arrived in San Francisco in 1861. He worked in Oregon for a few years, including possibly as a railroad worker, and then settled in San Luis Obispo. There he went into the business of labor contracting. He was responsible for recruiting hundreds of Chinese workers for the Pacific Coast Railroad, which extended into southern California. He also sold groceries and supplies to the contracted workers. He may have even offered them what might be called a “full meal plan,” in which he charged them for the food and its preparation, or a “partial plan,” whereby he supplied raw foodstuffs.

  The Railroad Chinese were frugal and resourceful in shaping implements for their daily use from discarded materials. Objects from labor camps found today include storage containers, funnels, strainers, and even bean sprout germinators made from reused metal. There are gaming pieces fashioned from recycled materials. They used their ingenuity to craft things they apparently had difficulty obtaining. Railroad Chinese, however, were also surprisingly wasteful: the astonishing array and quantity of discarded artifacts indicate that living in scarcity was not their lot, at least a good part of the time. Commonly found at the sites of former railroad camps are many discarded personal items, such as Chinese-made toothbrushes, which first originated in fifteenth-century China, fashioned from boar’s bristles threaded through holes in flat bone handles. Metal buttons and buckles, straight-edged razors, clasps, and brads, as well as Chinese fasteners indicate that the Railroad Chinese wore a combination of Western and Chinese clothing and footwear, especially American leather and rubberized work boots. During the winter they wore thick coats, probably woolen, mittens, and heavy scarves, all items they would not have had in China.

  A vast quantity of items related to health has been found at former Chinese labor camp sites too. Small glass vials held pills, powders, or oils, such as peppermint, common in Chinese health practices. Larger bottles held tonics that were to help blood circulation, energy flow, and digestion. Special wines infused with natural ingredients were taken to remedy stomach pain, indigestion, weak appetite, depression, or irritability. Railroad Chinese complemented their traditional remedies with Western patent medicines made from herbs, minerals, water, alcohol, and opiates. They used plasters, poultices, and Chinese and Western drinking alcohol for therapeutic uses, such as for skin, muscle, and internal injuries and massage. Scrapers of various sorts were used to move internal body energy and relieve ailments. Qing dynasty coins abound and were used as gaming pieces and talismans but also in folk remedies. Practitioners knowledgeable in Chinese medicine frequented the camps and knew how to use such implements and materials. Opium paraphernalia, such as pipes and storage tins, is also evident at the camps. Miners and Railroad Chinese paid cash for the highest-quality opium. Chinese wording on the label of an opium tin from approximately 1859 found at a campsite guarantees that the product was top quality and not “fake goods” from smugglers. The maker requested of the customer, “Please recognize our trademark.”

  Railroad Chinese even ate from ceramics that originated in their home region. Chinese ceramic pots
herds found along the route of the Transcontinental can be traced to specific kilns seven thousand miles away in the Pearl River region. The ceramics exhibited familiar bright glazes in a variety of colors and traditional designs, including blue on white and luminous blue-green. Almost all items carried decorative motifs of lovely flowers, elegant bamboo, and even auspicious words and symbols. One of the most commonly seen is “double happiness” (xuangxi), which is made by doubling the single character for “happiness” (xi). The symbol was commonly associated with marriage celebrations and with good times generally. This ceramic ware served more than utilitarian purposes, as the simply made and familiar rice bowls, ceramic spoons, teacups, and food storage containers materially and psychically linked the workers to home and hearth.

  Despite the seeming abundance and uniformity of material objects, an individual worker occasionally would try to identify an item as his own by “pecking” his name or a unique symbol into the thin glaze. Sometime in the late 1860s, a Railroad Chinese at the summit used a sharp implement, perhaps a nail, to carefully mark his rice bowl with a well-formed character, xing, the word for apricot. At some point the bowl was broken, or perhaps it no longer served his needs and he discarded it, to be found 150 years later lying right on the surface of the ground.

  Material objects also tell us a great deal about the immaterial, spiritual concerns of the Chinese migrants who worked on the Central Pacific Railway. Chinese were deeply spiritual and believed in the ubiquity and influence of ghosts and spirits. Ghosts could be responsible for much of the misery of life. They might cause accidents, illness, and even death. In more formal religious terms, the Railroad Chinese believed in a variety of local Siyi deities and aspects of Buddhism and Taoism. Great historical personages could also become demigods. Religious rituals to honor ancestors and appease spirits structured the rhythm of life in southern China, and the Railroad Chinese continued their traditions in California. They built temples and altars everywhere they went as soon as they arrived. Though there are no direct descriptions of religious observances by Railroad Chinese while they were living along the construction line, observations about their practices in San Francisco and other towns in the late nineteenth century are common. The reports from different locations and times describe very similar practices.