But what did Hung Wah and thousands of other Railroad Chinese do with all their hard-earned pay? Unlike workers on the Union Pacific, who received their pay in paper currency, Railroad Chinese insisted on receiving gold coins. They were familiar with and trusted gold and silver, the other precious metal they knew. Paper currency was just paper to them. The coins probably came from the federal mint constructed in San Francisco in 1854, which processed California gold that Chinese miners themselves had helped gather. Did the Railroad Chinese stash the coins in hiding places in their campsites? Did they carry them on their person as they worked? Did they entrust the gold to contractors for safekeeping? Did they periodically transport it to towns where a Chinese merchant or a branch of Wells Fargo, one of the early banks in the West, held it for them? We have no record of where this immense amount of money was kept safely for future use, including for sending remittances back to families in China who were becoming increasingly dependent on the income. It is ghost money.
Chinese folklore is full of stories of the righteous bravery and honor of an upright general or official who was wrongly treated but finds a way to gain redress and make things right. An actual episode in 1867 in California inspired a populist version and remains one of the most outstanding and intriguing of the many dramatic moments that punctuate the CPRR construction effort—the mass collective action taken by thousands of Railroad Chinese in June 1867. It is known as “The Strike” and was the largest, or certainly close to it, workers’ strike against a private employer to take place in America to that date. And it was undertaken in the most difficult of conditions. Despite its significance, historians have paid only occasional and limited attention to understanding it. Respected studies of the American labor movement do not always even acknowledge its existence. This erasure is emblematic of the obscuring of the Chinese in the country’s record generally and helps perpetuate the one-dimensional view of the Chinese in nineteenth-century America as marginal at best or simply a tractable, victimized workforce devoid of personality and agency.
When the strike is mentioned in historical writing, the story usually emphasizes the desperation of the Chinese. The workers, it is said, were driven to act because of the horrible conditions of their work. Crocker, years later when he was interviewed about the episode, boasted that it was his toughness and resolve that forced the Chinese to return to work. The strike “failed” in achieving its demands, in his telling. His account, the prevailing one, is the familiar trope of an employer breaking a strike because of his determination to maintain full control and authority. The actual story of the 1867 strike, however, is much more intriguing.
Insights into the thinking of top company leadership as found in their private correspondence and other documentation offer a picture substantially at odds with Crocker’s self-congratulatory version. The company actually had little understanding of what it faced in the standoff with the Chinese, whose leadership, organization, thinking, and aims were a complete mystery to the CPRR. Its management never did understand why the workers acted when they did, what their purposes were, and the reasons for their decision to end the strike. It all remained incomprehensible to Crocker and the rest of the company leadership even after the workers returned to the line.
The Railroad Chinese had certainly wanted change, but they acted to take advantage of their relatively strong, not weak, position. The company was in shaky financial condition, and it was no secret that it had become fully dependent on Chinese labor. Without it, the company would flounder, and perhaps even crash. Thus, it was the company’s vulnerability, not desperation among the Chinese, that lay at the heart of the strike story. This is clear from letters the principals sent privately to one another beginning in early 1867 and then throughout the strike in June.
In early February of that year, E. B. Crocker again wrote Collis Huntington about continuing labor needs. There were just not enough men to work in the Truckee area. One reason was that the Chinese, far from being subservient and at the beck and call of the company, were away celebrating the Chinese New Year, the most important festival for Chinese. Fortunately, Crocker wrote, the holiday “is just over” and “we look for them to be coming along from [it] pretty fast.” But the company still had far fewer workers than it needed, and it is clear that the Chinese were not a workforce at the mercy of the CPRR. They had their ways too, and the company had become reliant on them. Crocker reminded other company leaders about the superiority of the Chinese tunnelers compared to the Cornish miners. The Chinese “beat them right straight along—day in & day out.” The Chinese “can’t be beat,” and they cost about half as much as white workers, too.
In early April, independent news reports publicly disclosed the CPRR’s continuing efforts to increase its workforce; it was “offering work to any number of Chinamen.” Company agents had combed through the mining regions of California to find willing and able Chinese and hoped that up to twenty thousand of the “prospective unbleached American citizens” would join the construction effort within the month. Such wild optimism would not be realized.
A month later, Crocker expressed frustration and some concern in his letters to Huntington. The weather remained challenging, with heavy snow as late as April making progress difficult. “Providence seems to be rather against us,” Crocker confessed. But there was hope on the horizon: “The prospect seems favorable for getting a large force of chinamen,” he wrote on April 27. On May 16, he noted that their work on the line had also impressed others who had come to inspect the construction effort. “Several of our largest Capitalists have been over the road recently,” wrote Crocker, and “they all express their astonishment at the magnitude of the work already finished, and at the comparatively low cost. The cheapness is due in a great measure to the low price of Chinese labor. It is opening the eyes of our business men to see the readiness with which this class of cheap labor adapts itself to the construction of railroads.” Awareness of the obvious value of Chinese labor in both cost and productivity was moving beyond the CPRR leadership. Chinese themselves were not unaware of the importance of their own labor power.
A week later, Crocker again expressed concern over continuing problems in advancing the construction. Snow still impeded work between Cisco and Truckee. And “another difficulty begins to appear—a want of men,” he wrote. The company was still “scouring the state” for workers, “but they come in very slow.” The problem, according to Crocker, was that Chinese were finding other, more attractive opportunities. “The truth is the Chinese are now extensively employed in quartz mines & a thousand other employments new to them. Our use of them has led hundreds of others to employ them—so that now when we want to gather them up for the spring & summer work, a large portion are permanently employed at work they like better.” Ironically, the qualities of the Chinese workers that the company so valued and publicly praised were making them highly desirable to other employers, and unavailable to the company.
The press noted the movement of Chinese, not just away from railroad work but out of the state of California altogether. In the first half of 1867, the Daily Alta California reported, thousands of Chinese had departed for work in Idaho, Montana, and Nevada, where wages were known to be higher. Another issue privately worried company leaders. Leland Stanford wrote to tell Mark Hopkins what he had learned from a friend and from his own personal Chinese contacts: that there was widespread unhappiness among the Chinese workers contracted under “Sisson,” likely referring to the Sisson, Wallace Company. Stanford does not say why the Chinese were unhappy with Sisson, but it was not good news.
Within days of writing to Huntington in mid-May, Crocker and the other principals took the radical step of voluntarily raising the wage rate of the Chinese by more than 13 percent to attract more workers. Crocker explained to Huntington, who kept a close watch on the company’s purse strings, why they had to act: “The question whether we can get all the chinamen we need is very important, & we have concluded to raise their wages from $31 t
o $35 per month & see if that will not bring them.” The company, which had been paying Chinese half as much as white workers, hoped that increasing pay would also stop Chinese from leaving the line for work elsewhere. Crocker bluntly predicted that the company would “find that our supply will be short unless we do something.” With the wage hike, the company estimated that its Chinese workers would make $10 more a month than in mine work, a premium of 40 percent. The preemptive wage increase, however, had only limited and disappointing success. Hopkins soon informed Huntington that it would be “impossible” to continue the work without the Chinese, and even with the pay raise, they “are coming in slowly.”
In early June, E. B. Crocker’s anxiety about failing to reach construction goals in the Sierra because of “the scarcity of labor” appears to have heightened. He wrote Huntington that the Chinese workforce was “not now increasing & the season has come when it ought to increase.” The Chinese were being drawn elsewhere where their work was “lighter than ours . . . [E]verybody is trying them & now we can’t get them.” The company still hoped that the wage increase would attract more workers, but Crocker was not at all confident. “We fear we shall not be able to get this large force [into the Sierra], but intend to do the best we can.” Crocker ended his sober letter by reiterating his deep concern to Huntington: “The future is rendered more uncertain from the scarcity of laborers, & the extent of this scarcity we do not know now.” Desperate, the company appealed to the federal government to send “5,000 negroes to work building the road.” The news went public, revealing the dire circumstances of the company. Its severe labor needs were open and obvious.
Then, on Wednesday, June 19, a massive accidental tunnel explosion occurred a mile north of Cisco. According to a news report, it took the life of a “white man Burns, having a wife and family at Cisco,” and “five Chinamen,” who were “blown up” and “horribly mangled.” The thunder from the disastrous explosion reverberated for miles up into the foothills, heard no doubt by the omnipresent Railroad Chinese.
On June 24, at the height of the construction season, precisely when the company most hoped to make rapid progress, three thousand Railroad Chinese, in a fully coordinated and informed effort, put down their tools and refused to work. From Cisco to Truckee, almost thirty miles, Chinese at scores of sites and in hundreds of teams stopped working in unison. One news report called it “the greatest strike ever known in the country.”
In this bold act of resistance, the strikers may have been inspired by a smaller labor stoppage by fellow Chinese railroad workers in California nearly a decade prior. It was said that in 1859, an unscrupulous Chinese contractor withheld the wages due 150 Chinese who were working on a rail line near Sacramento, before the CPRR. They rebelled, attacked the contractor’s assistant, and threatened him with violence. The frightened clerk took refuge in the station house and was saved only by the arrival of the local authorities. Through the years, Chinese workers, long after the incident had passed, likely told and retold this story of strength through collective action.
If the Railroad Chinese were influenced by recent history, the CPRR was blind to it. The company was completely unsuspecting and unprepared for the sudden mass action. The strike involved “all” the Chinese in the summit area, according to Mark Hopkins. It was disciplined and methodical. How they planned, communicated, and coordinated with one another, however, is not known at all. A news report at the time spoke of a flyer that circulated among the Chinese just before the strike, but considerable deliberation and planning must have taken place long in advance of the walkout. Reaching unity in purpose, in specific demands, and in the timing of action among three thousand workers spread along miles of construction work and living camps was a stunning accomplishment.
Why the Railroad Chinese chose the specific date to go out is also unclear, but Chinese cosmology is likely to have played an important role. Chinese did not undertake any major life actions without divining heaven and earth. The strike began just days after the summer solstice, the longest day of the year and the peak time for male energy, as the sun represented this male energy and the moon female energy. It was thus the time for action and struggle that also corresponded with what may have been the strongest bargaining position the Railroad Chinese had ever occupied, for if the CPRR did not get through the Sierra summit soon, it faced financial ruin. The reported Chinese flyer may actually have circulated on the day of or the day after that year’s solstice, late evening on Friday, June 21, and just days after the Cisco tunnel explosion. It was the Year of the Rabbit, according to the Chinese zodiac. Saturday and Sunday may have been used for final communication and organization. The actual strike began on June 24, Monday, the start of the workweek.
The exact demands the Chinese advanced are not entirely clear, as we know them only from English-language news accounts, which themselves are not fully consistent. The basic demands appear to have been wage parity with white workers, which meant an increase in wages to $40 per month, reduced workdays from eleven to ten hours in the open (some news reports mentioned a demand for an eight-hour workday), and shorter work shifts in the tunnels. The Sacramento Daily Union also reported that the workers protested “the right of the overseers of the company to either whip them or restrain them from leaving the road when they desire to seek other employment,” though this claim is not corroborated elsewhere, and it was well known that Chinese workers regularly left the line for other employment. The strike apparently was not the first or last work stoppage by Chinese. According to the memoir of an associate of Strobridge, the construction boss had dealt with Chinese refusing to take shifts in Summit Tunnel work several times before the strike.
An agitated Strobridge wired Charles Crocker with news of the walkout: the “chinamen have all struck for $40 & time to be reduced from 11 to 10 hours a day.” White workers reportedly continued to work. Crocker rushed out from Sacramento to go to the line and handle the matter personally. He and the other principals of the company immediately saw this confrontation as a showdown. Hopkins wrote Huntington that if the Chinese “are successful in this demand, then they control & their demands will be increased.” He still wanted to believe, however, that the situation “will be controlled by us.” He reminded Huntington that “when any commodity[?] is in demand beyond the natural supply, even Chinese labor, the price will tend to increase.” Hopkins also expressed hope that five thousand freedmen would soon join the company workforce to use against the Chinese. They never arrived.
The Chinese strike continued, with the workers peacefully encamped and living on gathered supplies. On June 27, E. B. Crocker wrote again to Huntington and tried to explain what was going on from his point of view. “The truth is they are getting smart,” he confessed in a remarkably revealing comment. It was known that the company was facing an acute labor shortage and “the prospect has been that we were not likely to get what we wanted.” He acknowledged, “Who has stirred up the strike we don’t know, but it was evidently planned and concocted.” And most concerning to Crocker were the implications of this confrontation: the company “cannot submit to it—for they would soon strike again, & we would always be in their power.” Crocker, in desperation, asked Huntington to get as many new workers as possible to come out. “The only safe way for us is to inundate this state and Nevada with laborers, Freedmen, Chinese, Japanese, all kinds of laborers.” The company could put five thousand of them to work immediately.
E. B. Crocker wrote to Huntington again the very next day to report that his brother Charles had met personally with some of the leaders of the Chinese workers, including possibly Hung Wah, and informed them in no uncertain terms that the company would not pay more than $35 a month. He claimed that Charles had conversed directly with the Chinese in their “language,” apparently a pidgin. Labor contractors, headmen, and workers all seemed to be united. No divisions among them at this moment were evident to company leaders. In a stunning expression of militancy and a demand for equality, strike lea
ders told Charles Crocker, in his words, “Eight hours a day good for white man; all the same good for Chinaman.” But Charles would not have it and supposedly told the strikers, “John Chinaman no make laws for me; I make laws for Chinaman. You sell for $35 a month, me buy; you sell for $40 and eight hours a day, me no buy.” Taking a hardline position, in his view, was “the only way to deal with them.” E. B. Crocker confided to Huntington that “this strike of the chinamen is the hardest blow we have had here . . . If we get over this without yielding,” the shaken Crocker wrote, “it will be all right hereafter,” but the outcome was completely uncertain. He again urged Huntington to “do what you can to get laborers sent here from the East.” Hopkins also pressed Huntington once more to bring freedmen out to California. “A Negro labor force will tend to keep the chinese steady, as the chinese have kept the Irishmen quiet.” Making use of racial and ethnic differences within the workforce had become a familiar employer weapon.
When histories mention the strike, the cited evidence comes largely, and unquestionably, from Charles Crocker, a problematic source. He later praised the Chinese for their discipline and orderliness during the strike, which is consistent with his observations elsewhere and reinforces his reputation as commander over his workforce. But other evidence sharply contrasts with the commonly circulated image of compliant Chinese. A brash young visitor from France, Comte Ludovic de Beauvoir, who was then touring America as part of a voyage around the world, personally witnessed the strike and saw that the Chinese were far from quiet. After describing the daunting work of building the railroad and the indispensability of the Chinese workers, de Beauvoir reported that the Chinese, while retaining many aspects of their traditional social organization and culture, had also quickly learned, in his opinion, “the worst part of Anglo-Saxon civilization,” and that was the “strike.” Why he thought Chinese independently knew nothing of collective action is unclear, other than that he himself was ignorant of Chinese life. But because the company refused to comply with their demands for a wage increase, he wrote, the Chinese “left their pickaxes buried in the sand and walk around with arms crossed with a truly occidental insolence.” The French visitor included an etching of these rebellious Chinese that is sharply at odds with American images of inoffensive Chinese. De Beauvoir’s depiction is of men who were arrogant and swaggering, evidently feeling very much empowered (below).
Ghosts of Gold Mountain Page 17