Ghosts of Gold Mountain

by Gordon H. Chang

  The photography and writings of Chinese residents of San Francisco such as Lai Yong offer a colorful glimpse into the flourishing community that migrants like Huie Kin and J. S. Look—as well as countless Railroad Chinese—would have found when they first stepped onto California soil. So too does the dispatch from Atlantic Monthly writer Albert S. Evans, whose report on cargo of the steamship Great Republic upon its arrival in the city in 1869 provides vivid detail into that most important dimension of Chinese migrant life: diet. The items off-loaded from The Great Republic included coffee from Java, firecrackers, rhubarb, silk, and tea as well as other food items commonly enjoyed by Cantonese. There were tons of rice, dried fish, cuttlefish, “sharks’ fins,” and “preserved fruits, salted melon-seeds, dried ducks, pickled duck’s eggs, cabbage sprouts in brine, candied citron, dates, dwarf oranges, ginger, smoked oysters, and a hundred other Chinese edibles and table luxuries.” Railroad workers far distant from San Francisco would eventually partake of some of this comfort food from home.

  Another keen observer of the Chinese newcomers was a young attorney and writer named Daniel Cleveland, who had recently arrived in California. The drama of the growing presence of Chinese inspired him to complete several studies about their entry into the state and the implications for the country. He sent one of his reports to the U.S. minister to China, who found it so useful he then forwarded it to William Seward, the secretary of state. Cleveland’s private report was careful, factual, and decidedly sympathetic to the Chinese. He condemned the endemic violence and the overt social and legal prejudice against them. He believed that the Chinese deserved justice and that they would greatly benefit the country. Cleveland then completed a comprehensive four-hundred-page study on Chinese in California, which he hoped to publish but never did. It is unclear why, but the handwritten manuscript contains many keen firsthand observations, including an extended description of the landing of Chinese in San Francisco sometime in late 1868 or early 1869.

  The treatment Cleveland described was considerably more brutal and controversial than anything experienced by Huie Kin and Look or observed by Evans. Cleveland reported that before any Chinese migrants were permitted to leave their vessel, labor contractors and their agents came on board to sort through the mass of passengers. Those identified as arriving through the “credit ticket” system, he wrote, in which the expense of transit would be deducted with interest from future wages, “are taken possession of by their white owners, and are treated like slaves, watched and guarded, until they reach the end of their journey, and are delivered to the Railroad Company.” One scene especially disturbed him:

  [I] once saw a mulatto man, a petty officer on one of these boats, who had perhaps been a slave himself, taking advantage of his little brief authority to lord it over the poor Chinese. He maltreated them with a rough tyranny and keen relish as though it afforded him intense satisfaction to find human beings helpless enough to submit to his domination. The Chinese as helpless as a flock of sheep, look the picture of misery and despair, as they are huddled together upon the deck of the tug-boat listless and aimless, impotent against the force which keeps them in confinement. A small squad of resolute white men, armed with heavy bludgeons, which they are not slow to use, keep vigilant watch over the Chinese to prevent their escape.

  As Cleveland’s report continues, after being taken by small boats directly from San Francisco Bay and then upriver to Sacramento, the men were forced into railroad boxcars, whose doors were closed and then locked by white overseers to prevent escape. “If they were culprits who had committed some heinous crime,” Cleveland noted, “they would not be more closely guarded and harshly treated.” During the ride, he says, some managed to open the doors and jump out to escape, but died when they hit the ground. The rest presumably wound up working for the Central Pacific. It was a terrible beginning for their lives in America.

  The experience of arriving in America varied for individual Chinese, including those bound for railroad work. From the descriptions and recollections that we have, some, like Huie Kin, were exhilarated, while others, like Look, could find humor in the challenge of entering a new country and seeing new people. Others encountered an unanticipated nightmare. All faced great uncertainty. Few, if any, were prepared for what they would experience next.

  3

  Central Pacific

  We young Chinese saw many strange things; the most remarkable being the steam-engine. We were told that those iron rails running parallel for a long distance were the “fire-car road.” I was wondering how a car could run on them, and driven by fire, too, as I understood it, when a locomotive whizzed by, screeching and ringing its bell. That was the first iron-horse we had ever seen, and it made a profound impression on us.

  —YAN PHOU LEE, IN JAPAN ON HIS WAY TO THE UNITED STATES, SEEING A STEAM ENGINE FOR THE FIRST TIME, CA. 1871

  When Huie Kin stepped onto the pier in San Francisco in the summer of 1868, ten thousand Railroad Chinese were already toiling to get the line of the Central Pacific Railroad through the formidable High Sierra, the peak elevations of the great mountain range that runs like an indomitable spine down eastern California. The company had brought them onto its workforce four years earlier, and now they made up 90 percent of the massive army required for the construction project. At one moment in time, it appeared that Chinese were historically destined to become the most important migrant workforce in the western United States in the nineteenth century. China’s population was huge and hardworking, and travel across the Pacific took about the same amount of time as getting from the East Coast of America to California.

  China was embedded in the very vision of the Transcontinental itself when it first appeared as an entrepreneurial ambition in the 1840s. The most prominent early promoter of the idea was Asa Whitney, a prosperous merchant and a relative of Eli Whitney of cotton gin fame. Asa Whitney had traveled to China in 1842 and very quickly enriched himself in the lucrative export trade. After just two years, he was wealthy enough to retire from work and returned home convinced that America’s future lay in developing its commercial and cultural ties with Asia, China in particular. He energetically campaigned for the construction of a rail line to facilitate that trade.

  As Whitney and other early boosters of a transcontinental railroad envisioned it, the line would span the three-thousand-mile-wide continent, link the country’s heartland with the Pacific, and interconnect the commerce of the two great oceans of the world at a time when rail lines ran no more than a few hundred miles at most. Whitney’s argument for the transcontinental line invoked a vision of providential destiny. In 1849 he declared: “The change of the route for the commerce with Asia has, since before the time of Solomon even, changed the destinies of Empires and States. It has and does to this day control the world. Its march has always been westward, and can never go back to its old routes . . . Through us [the United States] must be the route to Asia, and the change to our continent will be the last, the final change.” The nation would become, in Whitney’s view, the literal physical link connecting the mythic West (white America and Europe) to the East (China and the rest of Asia). Tens of thousands of inspired supporters across the country campaigned for his project and pressed Congress to back the plan. Among those who shared the vision was a young Leland Stanford in upstate New York, who listened as Whitney sought to persuade Leland’s father to join his crusade for the rail line.

  Other continental expansionists hailed the possibilities of American control of the Pacific, as Manifest Destiny, the conviction that the United States was meant to expand westward, grew ever more common. Chief among them was the insistent Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton. In the 1850s Benton endorsed efforts to construct rail lines across the country and envisioned massive Chinese immigration to supply the anticipated labor needs of the American West. The Chinese, he believed, were essential if the country was to attain full economic and historical greatness. In an improbable flight of fancy, Benton was so convinced Chinese w
ould soon become such a vitally important element in America that widespread marriage between the “yellow,” as he called them, and the “white” must occur. “They must talk together, and trade together and marry together,” he declared. “Commerce is a great civilizer—social intercourse as great—and marriage greater.”

  Similarly, William Speer, the early American missionary in China who returned to work among Chinese in America, saw their arrival here as monumentally important and providentially ordained. Their coming to America, he declared with no sense of exaggeration, was “excelled in importance by no other event since the discovery of the New World.” Speer was convinced that the Chinese would make enormous contributions to the country's development, including to railroad construction. In January 1855, The Oriental, which Speer founded as one of the first Chinese-language periodicals published in the United States, predicted that soon “the boundless plateaus of the Western half of this continent, now desolate and almost unpopulated by any but the savage and scarce improvable destroyers of the buffalo, will be scattered with busy lines of Chinese builders of iron roads, that shall link the two oceans, and add to the wealth and comforts of the dwellers upon either shore.”

  Later in 1855, one early Chinese resident in the Sacramento area, a man identified as Sam Mill and elsewhere as Lam Tai-san, constructed a fully functioning miniature steam engine that could run on a track. Its display deeply impressed the public. The local newspaper called Mill “an ingenious builder” and reported that his work had been completed in an “exceedingly creditable manner.” The model locomotive was twenty inches long, with a boiler, furnace, cylinders and pistons, and two sets of driving wheels. More than a colorful story, the account expressed genuine respect for the “Chinaman,” as Mill was called, and is evidence that Chinese newcomers possessed notable technical abilities. They were not unskilled laborers alone. The Reverend William Speer, with relish, offered praise: “This Chinese locomotive and railroad were the first on the Pacific Coast!”

  Not just in prediction and modeling but in actual practice, Chinese were early railroad workers in the New World. They may have worked in railroad construction in Cuba in the late 1840s and in Panama in the early 1850s. In 1854 the New York−based Panama Railway Company brought a thousand men from southern China to Panama to construct a trans-isthmus line. When the project failed because of ghastly working conditions—50 percent of the Chinese died from accidents, disease, and suicide—the railroad company sent the survivors to Jamaica and may have sent some to California.

  Chinese began to work on real railroads in California in the late 1850s. In 1858 the Sacramento Daily Union reported that the California Central Railroad Company had hired fifty Chinese to work on its line in the Sacramento area and found them “very good working hands.” They toiled from “sunrise until sunset,” and, noted the paper, “the experiment bids fair to demonstrate that Chinese laborers can be profitably employed in grading railroads in California.” At about the same time, Chinese also worked on a line that ran from San Jose to San Francisco, which is now the oldest line in continuing operation west of the Mississippi River.

  Chinese in California, then, were already much more familiar with railroads than their compatriots in China. Few knew anything about them. The first lines were not constructed in China until the late nineteenth century, but descriptions of the “fire wagon” filtered back from Chinese returning from work abroad. These workers actually learned about railroads before scholars or officials in China. One of the first of these elite Chinese to see a train and write about it was a Manchu official known as Zhigang, who traveled overseas. He formed part of the Burlingame delegation, the first Chinese diplomatic delegation to come to the United States, in 1868, and a few years afterward published portions of his diary. His description reveals his fascination with the iron machine as well as his simple understanding of modern technology.

  On April 16, 1868, he recorded that in the United States he “rode a fire-wheeled vehicle for the first time.” The train was light, he wrote, “steady, and faster than Liezi [a legendary Daoist adept at] riding the wind.” His effort to describe the train followed:

  It is constructed like a wooden house twenty or thirty feet wide and three times as long, with rows of seats, two columns of eight, each of which holds three persons, making [room for] forty-eight people in all. On both sides are rows of windows with three layers of glass, cloth curtains, and wooden shutters for protection against wind, rain, light, and dark. Each carriage has four iron wheels. In front is the fire-wheel engine wagon with a driver and behind him two coal-wagon workers . . . The front wagon burns coal, heating water to produce steam, which goes through a tube to a compartment, causing a rod to expand and contract, which moves the wheels, which makes the train go . . . The speed of the train is double that of a steamboat, for a railroad takes much less power compared to paddling water.

  Zhigang’s description of the track, rails, and iron wheels are similarly simple, and he also notes the requirements for constructing the actual line: it “must be built straight” and “level,” and “a tunnel must be built whenever a mountain is encountered, and a bridge whenever water is encountered.” Zhigang does not mention seeing any of the Railroad Chinese then hard at work completing the very tasks he described, but it is likely that he did while traveling from San Francisco to the East Coast.

  Political figures had at first publicly complimented the arriving Chinese. In January 1852, Governor John McDougal praised them before the state’s legislature as among “the most worthy classes of our newly adopted citizens, to whom the climate and the character of California were peculiarly suited.” He cited their industry and the value of their labor and considered offering economic incentives to increase their immigration. Even without such incentives, Chinese soon accounted for almost 20 percent of the working population in California. Some had distinguished themselves in local enterprise and established good reputations as trustworthy and capable businessmen, and many white employers continued to respect Chinese workers over the years.

  Yet these “newly adopted citizens” found themselves living and working alongside many other Californians who had no interest in getting along with the newcomers. White southerners with strong racial prejudices, as well as anti-slavery, anti-black “Free Soilers” from the North, made up much of the state’s young population. A wildly popular Massachusetts send-off song to those departing for California in the Gold Rush went:

  O! the land we’ll save, for the bold and brave—

  Have determined there never shall breathe a slave;

  Let foes recoil, for the sons of toil

  Shall make California GOD’S FREE SOIL.

  Suffering racial prejudices that festered throughout the country, Chinese came to be seen as a distinctly anomalous presence, even among the polyglot population that streamed into the state to seek their fortunes. Hostile descriptions emphasized the differences in their bodies and facial features, dress, language, customs, food, and behavior. Agitators accused Chinese of selfishly exploiting the state’s natural resources and, as an allegedly servile workforce, undercutting the livelihood of white workers and their families. Culturally and racially, Chinese were condemned as unsuitable to become Californians, despite what McDougal and others had claimed. The Chinese presence in California became the most incendiary political and social issue in the state for the better part of the nineteenth century.

  Anti-Chinese music, which voiced this prejudice, became a staple in western American popular culture. One song written in the mid-1850s and handed down through the years went:

  John Chinaman, John,

  But five short years ago,

  I welcomed you from Canton, John—

  But wish I hadn’t though;

  Oh, John, I’ve been deceived in you,

  And in all your thieving clan,

  For our gold is all you’re after, John,

  To get it as you can.

  Lyrics of songs might not just be about
Chinese but were also directed at them. The threatening chant of an energetic expulsion song went:

  Get out, Yellow-skins, get out!

  Get out, Yellow-skins, get out!

  We’ll do it again if you don’t go,

  Get out, Yellow-skins, get out!

  Elite political support for this sort of ugly sentiment came from McDougal’s successor, John Bigler, who reversed his predecessor’s position and called for restricting Chinese entry into the state. In the spring of 1852, just a few months after McDougal’s praise of Chinese, Bigler declared that he favored an array of taxes levied exclusively on the Chinese, including a Foreign Miners’ Tax and head tax, and other measures to harass them out of the state. Chinese heard themselves described as slave-like “coolies,” inassimilable, and damaging to the state’s social “tranquility” and prosperity. (Not coincidentally, when civil war broke out a decade later, Bigler, a Democrat, would declare his sympathy for the Confederacy.)

  One of the most eloquent Chinese responses to Bigler came quickly from San Francisco resident Norman Asing, a businessman originally from the Pearl River delta who claimed U.S. citizenship and was a prominent community leader. Writing in eloquent English for the Daily Alta, Asing condemned the governor’s remarks as contrary to the history, practice, and law of the United States. Immigration, Asing maintained, had helped make the country great and respected in the world. Moreover, the Chinese were not a “degraded race,” as Bigler had charged. Chinese respected honest labor and worked in many decent occupations, “following every honorable business of life.” America, Asing declared, ought not to be a country with a racial hierarchy, a land with, in his words, an “aristocracy of skin.”