Then, after a week, the strike ended. The company had lost eight precious days of work. E. B. Crocker described to Huntington what he believed had transpired—the Chinese labor agents themselves had stopped supplying the workers with goods and provisions, and “they really began to suffer”—though Charles Crocker later claimed that he was the one who had had the food supplies stopped. “None of us went near them for a week,” E. B. Crocker confided to Huntington. “We did not want to exhibit anxiety.” This most telling comment reveals the very real private apprehension of the company leadership and their fear that they could not keep it secret from the Chinese. But then, Charles Crocker, E. B. Crocker wrote, “went up, & they gathered around him & he told them that he would not be dictated to, that he made the rules for them & not they for him.” He also said that if they returned to work immediately, the company would not dock their wages for striking. If they refused, they would get no pay at all for June. The parties negotiated, with the Chinese asking for some concession in the length of the workweek or even a small increase in pay, but Charles Crocker still refused to budge. His position, according to E. B., was clear: by standing firm then, the company would prevent future strikes. Most of the Chinese decided to return to work, though some did not and threatened, it was alleged, “to whip those who went to work & burn their camps.” Divisions among the Chinese had emerged, but Charles Crocker promised to protect those who resumed work. He pledged that his own security force would “shoot down any man that attempted to do the laborers any injury.” He also had the local sheriff and armed guards on hand to ensure that there would be no fighting among the workers. It was a tough negotiation. The strike had completely exhausted Charles, according to his brother. They knew it had been a showdown.
The company never learned who organized and led the strike. Hopkins privately and wildly speculated that “chinese gamblers and opium traders” who were prohibited from the line had instigated it. That thousands of Chinese would have listened to such elements is improbable. But Charles Crocker wondered if agents from the UP were responsible for the unrest in an attempt to gain an advantage in the competition with the CPRR. One news report declared that “Designing White Men” were responsible for “instigating” the unrest. Again, these were dubious explanations. Company confusion about the Chinese and their action clearly reigned. The company did not even listen to itself: the letters among the principals show that they had a good sense of why the Chinese struck. The workers and the principals both knew that the labor shortage had placed the company in a difficult position. The strike exploited the CPRR’s vulnerability. The Railroad Chinese, as E. B. Crocker had acutely observed, “had gotten smart.”
Historical accounts that rely on Charles Crocker’s public version of events reproduce a story that every boss tries to construct when confronted by worker adversaries: the employer must be unrelenting toward the challenge to authority and appear to be in full control. The message was critical to send to strikers but also to the curious public, including investors, who might have wondered about management control and the financial prospects of the company. The CPRR, highly dependent on public funding and private investments, was itself deeply invested, literally and figuratively, in its public image as an enterprise in sound condition and on track in its construction objectives. Charles Crocker had compelling reasons to appear tough and diminish the position of the Chinese. As the company knew, this was not just a showdown with the workers but also a make-or-break fight for its reputation and its very existence.
Though the company did not concede to the strikers’ demands, it would be a mistake to conclude, as most historical accounts do, that the Chinese “lost.” The workers, in a well-coordinated effort involving thousands, spread over miles of the train line, had defied the company, and it is clear from the internal record that the Chinese collective action had deeply shaken the principals. They had also gotten bad press. The company leadership would not forget the confrontation and realized that the workers could never be taken for granted. What is more, it appears that the company also quietly improved pay following the strike, at least for skilled and experienced Chinese workers, over the subsequent months. Wages for them went above $35 a month. Three years earlier, when Chinese first began working on the CPRR, their pay had been $26 a month. For some, it jumped 50 percent higher.
Did the Chinese themselves see the strike as a failure? Again, we have no firm evidence, but they could have believed that the effort itself, and not necessarily achieving its demand, was the important thing. The strike might be understood as being as much, or even more, a clash of cultural logics rather than an incident seen in standard Western labor-management terms. Collective action could be an important expression of will, a matter of achieving “face” and self-respect. The specific outcome was less significant than the act of defiance itself.
The self-discipline and organization of the striking Chinese did in fact favorably impress the railroad leadership. Sometime after the strike ended, Charles Crocker spoke about the conduct of the strikers. His words actually revealed a respect for their resolve and manner, for, unlike others, who would descend into “murder and drunkenness and disorder,” Crocker said, the Chinese were entirely different. For them, it was “just like Sunday all along the work,” which the no-nonsense Crocker meant as a compliment to their sobriety and seriousness. There was no violence or carousing. The Railroad Chinese, in protest as at work, were earnest and self-respecting.
After the strike ended, work resumed quickly to the satisfaction of the company. On July 6, E. B. Crocker reported to Huntington that “the Chinese are working harder than ever since the strike,” and he thought there would be no further troubles. He believed they had been embarrassed by the whole episode, though he gave no specific evidence to support his comment. Significantly, recent arrivals from China were coming in good numbers. “Matters here begin to look more encouraging,” Crocker wrote. “There is a rush of chinamen on the work. Most of the fresh arrivals from China go straight up to the work. It is all life & animation on the line.” This last comment suggests another reason why the Railroad Chinese may have struck when they did. That the company’s effort to recruit workers in China was achieving success was likely well known. Many new workers were on the way, and their arrival would weaken the bargaining position of those currently working. Best strike before the newcomers came on line.
Three weeks after the end of the strike, the company appeared pleased with the situation. E. B. Crocker reported that he was happy to show visiting officials from Washington that “construction [was] progressing rapidly.” The “heavy work” toward the Summit Tunnel “is well started & as fast men come on they are put upon this portion.” At the summit, the tunnels were nearly “all worked out during the winter,” and now the men were “working upon the open cuts & the rock is rapidly disappearing.” The work in the Truckee Canyon was nearing completion in excellent shape. And perhaps most important, “the laborers are working well” and seemed satisfied with their wages. Moreover, new recruits were arriving “from China in large numbers. The greater part of them immediately go to work on the railroad,” and “the prospect is that we shall soon have all that we can work to advantage.” Crocker reported that a federal official, a Mr. Johnson, “was highly pleased with the character of the work, & all he saw & his report to the Secretary of the Interior will be all that we can ask.”
Railroad Chinese finally punctured the mountain on August 3, 1867, allowing “daylight,” or rather really just air, to break through the long, dark tunnel, though more months of steady work, including through a second terrible winter, were needed to complete the excavation, form the roadbed, and lay track. Passenger trains would not safely pass through the tunnel until June 1868. “A wonder” is what the Daily Alta California declared Tunnel No. 6, or “The Great Bore,” in November 1867, when the work was finally done. California should “well be proud that such a triumph of labor and skill has been executed in our own State and country.”
The labor crisis appeared to have ended—but then in the fall, E. B. Crocker again reported to Huntington that workers were not joining the line as quickly as before. “We have barely got men enough” to finish the work between Cisco and the summit, he wrote. Moreover, “a great many chinamen went back to China” recently. Among them were several of the leading Chinese labor contractors who had been supplying workers. Before they left, however, they said they would encourage “a large immigration to come over & work on the road next year.” Crocker optimistically expected that they would “induce thousands to come over.” Other agents of the company, and the Chinese handbills, would also follow up to attract further numbers, and the company worked with the steamship companies to offer “favorable arrangements” to bring workers over. “We want 100,000 chinamen here,” Crocker declared, “so as to bring the price of labor down.” Huntington replied that he was in full agreement about encouraging immigration but went even further: “I like the idea of your getting over more Chinamen; it would be all the better for us and the state if then should a half million come over in 1868.” The entire population of the state of California in 1860 was under 400,000.
In important respects, “The Strike” resembles the prototypical modern workers’ collective action. Employees presented demands to their employer for improvements with remarkable coordination and discipline that threw company officials into consternation but also earned their grudging respect. The strike also bore features of Chinese historical social action. They timed their action to correspond with an auspicious cosmological moment, and they conducted themselves with dignity. The long aftermath of the strike is also telling. Chinese workers on later railroads and other construction projects resorted to work stoppages and other disruptions of work with notable regularity. In August 1869, Chinese workers near Stockton, California, stopped working because of nonpayment of wages. In the 1870s, a thousand Chinese worked in the Santa Cruz Mountains, south of San Francisco, building rail lines for transportation to the coast and for exploitation of timber resources. As they had done on the Transcontinental, they graded, tunneled, and laid track. Many were probably veterans of work on the CPRR. During four years of labor, they impressed their employers as hardworking and honest but not docile. When mistreated or abused, the Chinese workers responded to defend themselves, sometimes violently, as reported in the local press. Memories of “The Strike” must have been strong. Chinese workers elsewhere regularly used work stoppages as a weapon. In 1875, three thousand Chinese workers in the Tehachapi Pass near Los Angeles struck over mistreatment. They had become veterans of class struggle. Action did not always have to end with achieving a material result. Sometimes it was enough to make a statement and display a righteousness that would one day be remembered and honored.
Observers who came to see the work being done by the Railroad Chinese in the High Sierra were not always respectful of the workers themselves—but they were uniformly impressed by the results. In the fall of 1867, Robert L. Harris, a green easterner and future railroad engineer, traveled along the CPRR construction route and left a memorable record of what he witnessed. Harris rode the line from Sacramento to Cisco and then hiked for the next three days up and over the summit. He found the scenery sublime but the ravines and steep cliffs terrifying. He encountered Chinese workers everywhere and in one instance stumbled across a crew of sixty who were scrambling for safety, just because, it seemed, of a few loud reports eight hundred feet away. He scoffed at the “frightened haste of these stupid fellows,” as he put it, for running from noises he thought inconsequential. But then a white foreman quickly pulled Harris under cover just as a “big blast” boomed with “a sound as of thunder.” The experienced Chinese knew the earlier noises had been warning explosions. “A young volcano showered its stones in the air,” Harris wrote, “rending trees, tearing the ground, and falling about and over our hiding place.” He was glad to leave his hiding place alive and uninjured. Chastened, he later arrived at Summit Camp, where he bedded down for the night, and even though he was exhausted, “the dull boom of blasts in the tunnel, three hundred feet distant” awakened him. Chinese workers were still working.
At another location, Harris reported on blasting to clear the route along a perilous cliff. One operation required three massive explosions to destroy a granite outcrop. He watched workers drill down eight feet, and then after several small explosions had widened a seam, they put in an immense load of powder. The huge explosion that followed tore “three thousand tons of granite” from “their long resting-place,” he wrote. One seventy-ton boulder settled a third of a mile away. Another rock weighing 240 pounds was thrown clear “over the hotel at Donner Lake—a distance of two-thirds of a mile.” The writer had never seen such destruction and was glad to escape from the ominous tunnels and explosions, despite the stunning scenery of the High Sierra.
E. B. Crocker also visited the summit area in the fall of 1867 and witnessed the Railroad Chinese at work. What he saw made a deep impression on him and he privately shared his experience with Huntington. Crocker wrote that he was “perfectly astonished” to see the great progress in the “hard rock work.” The skill of the Railroad Chinese fascinated him, their effort “done up scientifically,” in his words. Mentioning no white supervisors or engineers directing the work, Crocker described an episode similar to the one Harris depicted. The Chinese “work the rock up to a face, then go back 3 to 4 feet from the face, put in a hole 12 to 20 feet deep, fill it with powder, which is only powerful enough to ‘spring a seam,’ cracking the rock enough so that powder can be poured in.” Chinese then “put in powder by the keg, from 1 to 50 kegs according to its size. The effect is to blow the greater part of the rock clear over the cliff & out of the way. It is a sight to see these heavy seam blasts go off. It makes the earth shake like an earthquake. But the result is that the rock rapidly disappears & begins to look quite like a R.R. there.” Crocker’s privately shared account not only provides a vivid sense of the demanding and dangerous work that Chinese completed but also reveals once again how deeply their work impressed company leaders.
After the hard winter of 1865–66, the company principals realized that they needed a radical alternative to protect the miles of laid track and roadbed from heavy snows and avalanches or progress would be delayed by weeks in the main construction season. This realization was sped along by another bout of awful weather. During the winter of 1867–68, snow became so compacted that twelve of the largest locomotives coupled together could not clear the track. Banks of the stuff froze to a depth of ten to thirty feet. The engines backed up and then slammed ahead at the white mass but made only a few feet of progress. The wear and tear on the machines and track worried the company management, and they stopped the frustrating assault. At great expense of money and time, thousands of Railroad Chinese had to use picks and shovels to remove snow and ice before track work could resume.
The company developed a radical idea to solve the problem, and it too would involve Chinese: they would help build miles of snow sheds to protect the line. Arthur Brown, the engineer responsible for the effort, thought the expense of building miles of wood structures was “appalling and unprecedented in railroad construction,” yet the company decided there was no alternative.
The previous summer, the company had directed its workers to build test structures that covered five miles of the roadbed. The longest shed was half a mile in length. At the start of the work season in the spring of 1868, the company assigned 2,500 workers, mainly Chinese, to complete thirty more miles of structures. The sheds usually had open sides but with gabled roofs to keep the snow from building up and crushing the structure. Snow galleries were similar but had roofs that slanted up in the direction of the mountain slope so that accumulated snow would slide off. The interior of the sheds measured sixteen feet wide by seventeen and a half feet high to accommodate the trains. The galleries were about the same size but could have wide roofs, some extending a hundred feet or more up the sl
ope of the mountain so that snow could move down the mountain and over the structure. In total, when completed in 1869, sheds and galleries extended thirty-seven miles in length and had used 65 million feet of timber and nine hundred tons of bolts and spikes.
Chinese were linked to this effort in different ways. They graded, dug foundations, and assisted the carpenters. They also helped indirectly. The structures required an enormous quantity of wood, much of it logged and shaped right in the Sierra from hastily constructed mills along the route. They used huge saws to make the planks, and also produced cordwood and charcoal for locomotive fuel. One reporter told of seeing dozens of sawmills and swarms of “laborers of every nationality and hue—Europeans, Americans, Africans and Asiatics (the latter immensely preponderating in number)—engaged in cutting down and preparing the timber for the road.” Hundreds of Chinese stayed on as woodworkers in the mountains and in Nevada after the completion of the line.
The company realized, however, that the wooden structures that protected the tracks themselves required their own protection. Winds and snowslides swept away structures or damaged them so badly that the debris created new problems. The horizontal pressure from snowdrifts snapped supports. The snow could move like a glacier with relentless force and carry away trestles and other structures. At some locations, workers erected embankments and walls that extended the slope of the mountain so that snow would slide up over the sheds. In other locations, they built massive retaining walls against snowbanks that could reach eighty feet in height. Engineer Lewis M. Clement reported that at one stretch of the line workers built retaining walls protecting four miles of the track.
Ghosts of Gold Mountain Page 18