Ghosts of Gold Mountain

by Gordon H. Chang

  What happened to these many words written long ago? Arson, pillaging, and the willful destruction of Chinese belongings by hostile nineteenth-century mobs in America help explain the absence of an archive, as do losses during these immigrants’ many forced moves, ruin from earthquakes and fires such as at San Francisco in 1906, and the cruel devastation wrought by the many wars, civil upheavals, and revolutions in their land of ancestry. The habitual belittlement of their lives, and thus their archive, also deprived us of much of their record. Few, except perhaps their descendants and the exceptionally curious, wanted to know about the lives of Chinese laborers in America during the decades that have elapsed between their time and ours.

  This presents a formidable challenge to the historian today: How does one give voice to the voiceless? How does one recover a sense of lived experience if there is nothing from the central actors themselves?

  As a Chinese American, I had wanted to know about the Chinese builders of the Transcontinental ever since I was a youngster, but it was not until recently that I had the opportunity to engage in a sustained effort to recover their history. An international research project at Stanford that I helped establish and then co-direct took up these challenges and for more than six years conducted the most thorough study to date of the experience of Chinese road workers in North America. Scholars in North America and Asia and from disciplines ranging from history and American studies to archaeology, anthropology, and cultural studies scoured archives, family collections and memorabilia, government records, business papers, and archaeological reports, in English, Chinese, and other languages, to locate as much relevant material as possible. We also conducted oral histories with living descendants of railroad workers to learn about memory within families. This book draws significantly from the tremendous efforts of scores of scholars, students, and researchers around the world.

  Though difficult, a recovery of a lost past is possible if imaginative efforts are made to understand the rich and expansive historical materials that do exist. Nineteenth-century writers wrote extensively about the Chinese, and their observations can be read in ways that move the Railroad Chinese from being objects for journalistic observation into the active center of the story. Years of dedicated research have also revealed substantial new documentation and sources in archives and libraries. Some of this rich material had simply been ignored as insignificant or bypassed as too challenging to use. Previous writers interested in the railroad had little or no familiarity with the history of Chinese American life and the wide array of sources from other dimensions of Chinese history in America that could be used to understand the railroad experience. There is Chinese-language material here and in China that was never consulted in any previous railroad book published in the United States. For example, poetry and folk songs express hopes, dreams, fears, and tragedy and offer insight into emotions and feelings. Railroad Chinese closely associated with other Chinese in California who wrote about their own lives, and this material provides further texture and context. Stories about the trials and tribulations of railroad workers circulated widely among the Chinese and, through repeated telling within families and community, have come down through the years to us today.

  There is extensive business documentation, including payroll records and private correspondence and notes among the railroad magnates. From these we learn names, job categories, pay rates, labor organization, and the relationship of Railroad Chinese with the CPRR. We learn about working conditions and developments as the line pushed forward. We have photographs of the railroad’s construction and can see actual images of the workers. Furthermore, in recent years, professional archaeologists have gathered an enormous amount of material culture left behind by the workers, which provides fascinating insight into their quotidian lives and the larger networks of their existence that connected them to their home villages and Chinese settlements throughout America.

  Being attentive to the physical world of the Railroad Chinese—geographic location, terrain, weather conditions, and the natural and built environment—helps to capture a plausible sense of what the Railroad Chinese saw, felt, and experienced. While building the Central Pacific Railroad, they toiled outdoors, moving from the lush Central Valley of California, through the forests and canyons of Gold Country in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, up into the high country of indomitable granite mountains, and then into the high deserts that seemed to stretch toward eternity in Nevada and Utah. Though long separated from them by the passage of time, we can recover a bit of what they encountered in the rural towns and wilds of California and what they felt out in the open during frigid winters and broiling summers, if we make the effort and use our empathetic imaginations.

  The variety of historical materials that we do have, pieced together and used in creative ways, helps us reconstruct the story of the Railroad Chinese. Above all else, though, appreciating their elusive history begins with our placing ourselves in their position, at the very center of the telling, and trying to see the world from their points of view. Only by doing so can we begin to fully respect, and honor, their profound humanity.

  This effort to recover their history begins with the origins of the Railroad Chinese in distant rural villages located in the Pearl River delta near Guangzhou (Canton) in southern China. They were “Cantonese” (a term commonly used to refer to an array of different regional and ethnic groups in southern China), who engaged in one of the great diasporas in human history. Numbering in the millions, they traveled across vast oceans to destinations in South America, the Caribbean, the Pacific, Southeast Asia, and North America, where, beginning in the early 1850s, one stream of this great migration became miners, farmers, fishermen, merchants, and railroad workers throughout California—or Gold Mountain, as they called it—and the entire American West.

  The story then moves to the early experiences of Chinese in California, and to their lives and labor during the years they worked for the CPRR. This forms the core of the book. From the booming port city of San Francisco, where the vast majority of the Railroad Chinese disembarked, we will follow them across California’s Central Valley to Sacramento, where the first tracks of the Central Pacific were laid, and then to Auburn, nestled in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountain range, where Chinese began to work for the railroad company en masse. Their numbers grew steadily as the line pushed farther east, deeper and higher into the Sierra. By the literal and figurative climax of the CPRR’s journey over the Sierra, the completion of the Summit Tunnel near Lake Donner and Lake Tahoe, the Chinese formed roughly 90 percent of the company’s workforce. It is no exaggeration to say that the effort could not have been completed without them. They labored—and died—among the peaks of the Sierra in some of the most extreme conditions imaginable. And when the work there was done, they continued eastward, into the tumbling hills of Nevada and the flat, baking expanse of Utah. By the time the CPRR united with the UP at Promontory Summit, hundreds—perhaps even thousands—of Chinese had died over the five years of the construction effort. Their industry, sacrifice, and contribution attracted great national attention, and for a moment it appeared that Chinese might be allowed to establish their place in the American family. Through the rest of the nineteenth century, thousands of Railroad Chinese dispersed throughout the United States and Canada, including for work on scores of other railroad construction projects. They began to settle in large cities and small towns throughout the United States. The moment of possibility for them, however, was short-lived. Chinese came to be seen as racial inferiors and competitors for work. Terrible violence and expulsion from America would be the bitter reward for their labor.

  Thousands were driven out of the country and went elsewhere in the world for work and survival. Many returned to their homes in what became known as “railroad villages” because of their connection to the work of railroad construction. Those who stayed here helped establish the foundation for what we now call Chinese America. They built communities wherever the railroad co
uld take them, opening the way for their compatriots who followed them across the country. Descendants of the Railroad Chinese are found everywhere here and around the world today.

  Who were the Railroad Chinese? What did they do on the Transcontinental line? What were their ways of work and life? Ghosts of Gold Mountain speaks to these basic questions, as well as to more specific questions that have long intrigued those interested in the Railroad Chinese: How many toiled on the line? What kinds of work did they do? Did they actually suspend themselves in woven reed baskets down sheer cliffs to blast open the roadbed around mountains? What did it take to tunnel through the Sierra Nevada? What about the legendary strike of 1867, when three thousand Chinese put down their tools and confronted the railroad barons? Why did they strike, and what was the result of their collective action? How many Railroad Chinese died: several score, hundreds, thousands? How did America treat them after the rail line was completed? What is their place, and legacy, in the sweep of American history?

  Central to this examination is the role of chance in the lives of the Railroad Chinese. Their lives were replete with choice, circumstance, accident, and luck, both good and bad. They may have believed in fate, as humans are wont to do, but their lives were filled with the unknown, including high risk to life and limb. They went out from their homes in south China seeking a livelihood, and even good fortune, but they also knew that life was precarious. Tragedy, injury, and violent death in the nineteenth-century Pacific and western United States were commonplace. Disease and mistreatment on the high seas in transit took many lives, as did villains in California who despised Chinese and targeted them for plunder and sport. Avalanches and snowslides swept countless Chinese down into Sierra canyons, and nitroglycerine accidental explosions could vaporize them. Political demagogues, after the work was done, campaigned for the exclusion and expulsion of Chinese from the nation, and scores of Chinese died in mob lynchings, arsons, and shootings. A high possibility of being killed by nature or at human hands was an assumed risk for the Railroad Chinese. Though they did not use the term, they constantly faced “a Chinaman’s chance,” a well-known phrase in the American racial lexicon that spoke to the precarity of Chinese life here.

  Yet thousands upon thousands of the Railroad Chinese persevered. While most did not find their personal Gold Mountain, many did forge meaningful and productive lives in America. Some prospered and returned to China as heroes. One was the great-grandfather of Lily, who coined the term “Railroad Chinese,” who brought a non-Chinese bride back with him from America. Many years later, Lily herself, of mixed racial heritage, emigrated to America, a place her family still called “home” after more than three generations of separation. Others prospered and stayed in the United States, where they helped form the beginnings of Chinese America. Recognition of their achievements is long overdue: their legacies should be honored and their spirits propitiated. The lost souls of those who died during the construction of the railroad, and the neglected lives and experiences of those who survived deserve nothing less. For while theirs is the story of ghosts past, in the present it is also an experience that resonates very much with the living. It is an epic story of dreams, courage, accomplishment, tragedy, and extraordinary determination.

  1

  Guangdong

  In the second reign year of Haamfung, a trip to Gold Mountain was made.

  With a pillow on my shoulder, I began my perilous journey.

  Sailing a boat with bamboo poles across the seas,

  Leaving behind wife and sisters in search of money,

  No longer lingering with the woman in the bedroom,

  No longer paying respect to parents at home.

  —CANTONESE FOLK SONG, MID- TO LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY

  THE LANGUID BLUE SKIES AND THE GENTLE GREEN AND BROWN farm landscape reflect little of the human turmoil embedded in the place that the Railroad Chinese called home in southern China. In contrast with the natural beauty of the land are hundreds of multistory brick and stone structures called diaolou that rise far above the verdant treetops. Villagers constructed them as watchtowers and fortresses against the endemic banditry that plagued the region in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Today these structures are dramatic reminders of a long history of human suffering that defines this part of southern China.

  By the tens of thousands beginning in the early nineteenth century, the people of this densely populated region, not much larger than seventy-five square miles, left for futures that would forever change families, ancestral village patterns of life, and the distant lands where they eventually settled. Far removed from the seat of imperial power in China’s distant north and from the traditional centers of Chinese high culture and commerce, the “four counties,” or the Siyi, an enclave along the southern coast of China, was their place of origin. An estimated one quarter of the population of just one of these counties, Taishan, or about 200,000 residents, left their homes in the nineteenth century for destinations overseas. Common farming folk though they may have been, the people of the Siyi, through their energy and enterprise, transformed places distant from their modest villages, homes, and farms. The diaolou, largely financed by funds sent back by successful Chinese overseas to protect their families that remained, are themselves evidence of the fidelity to home and the interconnectedness of the local and the distant.

  The Siyi counties in the nineteenth century were Xinning (known later as Taishan), Kaiping, Enping, and Xinhui. They were among the most densely populated of the fifteen counties that made up the great province of Guangdong. With some 25 million in total population in the mid-nineteenth century and with a long coastline, Guangdong was the most strategically and politically important province in southern China. Almost all of those who came to the United States from China in the nineteenth century hailed from Guangdong.

  Hills buffered the counties from the rest of the province, with the small settlement of Hong Kong to the east and the great city of Guangzhou to the north. Reclamation, with earth and rock along the many waterways and marshes that ran through the alluvial plain, enlarged the lands available for settlement and farming.

  The soil of the Siyi is fertile, water from rainfall and myriad flowing waterways is plentiful, and the climate is inviting for the cultivation of rice, the staple of wet agriculture. A bright jade green color dominates the patchwork of tens of thousands of small family farms. Green was the color of growing rice, the waxy leaves of citrus and other fruit trees, the mulberry leaves fed to silkworms, and the palms whose durable fronds were used for weaving baskets, fans, furniture, and hats. Green was the color of the leafy vegetables and root crops that, along with foodstuffs from small freshwater ponds and the ocean, formed the distinctive local diet. Bamboo, the stuff of a thousand purposes, was everywhere.

  The Siyi are part of the spreading delta formed by the plentiful waters of the Pearl River and adjunct waterways, known as the Dong, Xi, and Bei rivers, which flow from distant reaches in the west to the South China Sea. The Siyi lie roughly along the same latitude as southern Florida and, in feel and appearance, are akin to the lands in the vast spread of the Mississippi River delta. In fact, many Chinese settled in the Deep South after the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad because of its climatic and topical similarity to home. So too did they settle in the humid farm region of California’s Sacramento River delta, where the waters begin to merge with San Francisco Bay. The people of the Siyi were sun and water people, both in their native lands and abroad.

  The lands of the Siyi had been settled and intensely cultivated for a thousand years, and Americans encountering China in the early nineteenth century took note of the region’s bounty. The Reverend William Speer, a well-known American missionary who resided for many years in the Pearl River delta, tried to describe it for folks back home. He fondly evoked its many villages “embowered in bamboo” and “a species of banyan and other trees,” he wrote, that “meet the eye on every hand.” Speer respected the sophisticate
d agricultural skills of the Siyi Chinese. “The level portion of the soil,” he wrote, “is cultivated as only the Chinese know how to do in order to obtain the utmost possible returns from Nature. The view appears like a great garden bounded by ranges of hills.” Extensive, undisturbed stretches of vegetation had long since disappeared, as they were cut away for human use over countless generations. Much of the wildlife in the farm areas had either been consumed or been driven away long ago.

  The village was the nexus of life in the region. Modest coarse brick homes were clustered close together, with buildings sometimes sharing common walls. Families lived in intimate proximity to one another, with farmland lying away from the villages, unlike in America, where farmers usually lived far apart on their own land. Active social interaction, including the sharing of rumors or news about opportunities, was thus a feature of daily life and habit. The Railroad Chinese continued to enjoy this conviviality in America.

  The next settlement might be an hour away by foot along dirt paths or by boat on small channels of water. A bit farther was the market town, a busy place of basic commerce, simple entertainments, and political and cultural life. “The narrow streets of the towns,” Speer witnessed, “are densely crowded with men following every trade and means of procuring a subsistence which the necessities of human nature can suggest.” The people Speer saw were traders, merchants, shopkeepers, artisans and craftsmen, peddlers, laborers, actors, healers, pawnshop dealers, moneylenders, cooks, butchers, weavers, artists, papermakers, makers of handicrafts and goods for local use and export, gamblers, and vagabonds. They were rich, poor, and middling, and varied in culture, education, and background. Such was the diverse social profile of those who left for America.