Ghosts of Gold Mountain
Page 8
A decade later, Chinese again heard from the state’s top political figure that they were unwelcome. This time the ugliness came from California’s first Republican governor, and the future president of the Central Pacific Railroad: Leland Stanford. In his gubernatorial address in 1862, Stanford called for dramatic measures to address the “Chinese question.” Attracting settlers to help populate the large state was of preeminent importance, he declared, but they had to be the right sort of people. “The settlement among us of an inferior race is to be discouraged,” he urged, claiming that “Asia, with her numberless millions, sends to our shores the dregs of her population.” Unless strong measures were taken soon, the governor averred, the state’s very future would be jeopardized. Stanford branded Chinese “a degraded and distinct people” who exercised “a deleterious influence upon the superior race” and repelled “desirable immigration.” He announced his eagerness to seek government action. Warm applause from the gathered throng in the state assembly chamber greeted these infamous anti-Chinese remarks, which today are still his best-known comments on the Chinese.
His expressed sentiments were apparently politically motivated and pandered to popular prejudices; in his own home and personal life Stanford actually maintained close and even affectionate relationships with Chinese. Even as he publicly denounced Chinese, Leland and his wife, Jane, quietly maintained warm ties with them. In the summer of 1861, the couple purchased a ramshackle mansion in downtown Sacramento and staffed it with several Chinese workers, including a cook named Moy Jin Kee, who introduced his younger brother Moy Jin Mun to the couple. Jin Mun, who had recently arrived from China, also began working for the Stanfords. According to several accounts, Jane Stanford, childless at the time, became especially fond of the teenager and proposed to adopt him into the family. Jin Kee opposed the idea because Jin Mun’s parents were still living in China, and because of the racial divide. Though never adopted into the family, Jin Mun remained close to the Stanfords. When he left their employ in the mid-1860s, Jane gave him a gold ring with his name engraved on it for remembrance. Jin Mun cherished the keepsake, according to the biographical information provided by his son, and proudly wore it for the next seventy years until his death in 1936. According to family history, Jin Mun worked as a foreman for Chinese workers on the Central Pacific Railroad in the 1870s.
Jin Kee, for his part, played a critical role in the life of the Stanford family. In 1862, the same year as Leland’s inaugural address in which he expressed support for efforts to rid the state of Chinese, Jane Stanford developed a serious pulmonary infection that threatened her life. Western medical practices failed to improve her condition, but Jin Kee introduced her to Yee Fung Cheung, a Chinese traditional doctor who had arrived in California in 1850 and lived in the Chinese quarter of Sacramento. Yee used herbal remedies to treat Jane and restored her to full health. Yee himself later treated Chinese and white workers on the Central Pacific Railroad and became one of the most prominent and legendary Chinese medical practitioners in California.
In business, too, Stanford was not as ill-disposed against Chinese as his widely circulated public political position suggested. In just a few years it would be Stanford himself, as the president of the CPRR, who would be responsible for attracting more Chinese to America than any other single individual. What is more, throughout his life Stanford directly employed hundreds of Chinese on his many private and commercial properties around California, including at his stock farm in Palo Alto—the future site of the university that carries the Stanford name today. Ultimately, the political vitriol that Stanford directed toward Chinese migrants may simply have been the result of political calculation—a sadly familiar tactic, even at that stage in American political history. At the end of his life, Stanford rued his earlier prejudice against Chinese and expressed sincere respect for their industry and character. They had, of course, helped him become one of the richest men in the world.
The sectional conflict over slavery blocked progress in realizing Asa Whitney’s dream of a rail line that spanned the continent. A transcontinental line would accrue enormous benefits to those along its route. Not only would there be huge federal subsidies and land grants to support its construction, but also states along the line would gain decisive economic, social, political, and strategic advantages. The railroad would be able to move people, equipment, and supplies longer distances and more quickly than ever before. The division between North and South, however, complicated all national politics. A divided Congress could not agree on any of the five proposed routes ranging from north to south. But the secession of southern states that precipitated the Civil War in the spring of 1861 finally allowed Washington to authorize the railroad’s construction along a northern route that the South had opposed.
In July 1862, President Abraham Lincoln, who had been a lawyer for a railroad company early in his career, signed the Pacific Railway Act, selecting the CPRR and the UP to complete the first transcontinental railroad. The act pledged financial support in the form of land grants, bonds, and loans to the project. The two companies came into immediate competition with each other, as their present and future income and profits derived substantially from government support and anticipated income from passenger and freight traffic. Control of the line, including critical decisions on the specific route, depended on the amount of track a company laid. The federal government hoped that this competition would make construction more efficient and hasten the date of its completion, but it also encouraged financial malfeasance, slipshod work, political intrigue, bribery, and industrial sabotage. Eventually, the two railroad companies obtained more than 175 million square miles of public land in subsidies, and tens of millions of dollars in government support that supplemented private financing. The government’s enormous expenditure of public funds in ways that were never fully clarified resulted in the great Crédit Mobilier scandal in the 1870s, which came to symbolize Gilded Age business-government corruption.
The UP line started near Omaha, the termination of the existing lines from the east. Construction did not begin in earnest until after the end of the Civil War, which released thousands of men for work. The UP hired army veterans, freed blacks, Irish and other European immigrants, and Mormons. The terrain they faced stretched over the slopes of the plains states, along river channels, and through Rocky Mountain passes. Supplies to build the line, including iron, tools, train engines and cars, and food, traveled relatively easily along established rail lines.
The almost 1,800 miles of track that the two companies would lay seemed an outsized ambition. It was the second-largest construction project in the world, after the Suez Canal, which was being constructed in Egypt at the same time. The Sacramento Daily Union provided figures to dramatize the immensity of the challenge just for the Central Pacific line. The newspaper calculated that laying track from Colfax, fifty-five miles north of Sacramento, where the line actually began, to the Great Salt Lake region in Utah, where the CPRR and UP might meet, would “require fifty thousand tons of iron, chairs and spikes, and one million one hundred thousand ties.” A single train that could transport all the necessary iron would be twenty-eight miles in length, pulled by 416 locomotives. If one added the ties to this train and the additional locomotives, it would be fifty-two miles long.
That the CPRR would make it to Utah was not a given at all, and many were skeptical that it would even make it out of California. The construction challenges were staggering, including dramatic changes in elevation along the planned route in the Sierra: from just about sea level at the start in Sacramento, the line would rise more than seven thousand feet at Donner Summit after just one hundred miles. Extreme weather conditions in the higher elevations prevented work for as much as half the year, and laying roadbed through granite mountains required tunneling through the hardest rock. Almost all major construction supplies, including iron rails, spikes, connections, explosives, engines, and cars, had to be carried by ocean ships from the East all the way down
past the tip of South America and up to California.
Aside from the landscape and scope of the project, the difficulties of financing, scale, distance, politics, and the concurrent raging Civil War appeared insurmountable to many at the time. And above all, the fundamental and basic amount of human energy required to construct the line—that is, the elemental muscle, blood, sweat, and labor needed to make a way for a steam train to travel across the country—remained the most critical variable in the entire enterprise. Without the workers, there would be only debt and aspiration.
The CPRR would require massive numbers of workers, thousands upon thousands. They would be among the first industrial proletariat in America: paid with wages for their skills in metalwork, carpentry, explosives, earthmoving, timber clearing, water control, and drayage. All work, including forging the roadbed, tunneling, and laying the line would be manual. There were no steam shovels or mechanical earthmovers on this massive construction site, no power drills or tunneling machines, no motor vehicles to transport workers and materials other than on the completed sections of the rail line, no hydraulic pile drivers or diesel lifts. Work would take place out in the open, in all seasons and under all conditions except the most extreme. Living, for the workers, would also be out in the open for most of the year, except when they were furloughed because of the weather. The Pacific Railway would quite literally be “hand-made.”
Governor Leland Stanford, who soon became the president of the CPRR, broke ground in January 1863 in a grand ceremony along the Sacramento River. Assuming office in 1861, Stanford had lobbied vigorously for federal government support for the construction of a transcontinental rail line. At the same time, he and the other Big Four established the CPRR in June 1861, anticipating the federal government’s decision to back the project. A year later, President Lincoln signed legislation authorizing construction and providing limited financial support for the CPRR and UP, but work had not started because of difficulties in obtaining enough initial funding for the enterprise. Stanford and the other leaders of the CPRR were thought to be “a little off,” even “insane” in thinking they could complete their portion of the task. Many thought that the company might reach the nearby foothills at the base of the Sierra, but it would never get through the formidable Sierra Nevada mountain range itself. Geography was one matter, and the lack of sufficient capital was another; but more challenging still was the shortage of labor.
Today, a memorial mural at the Sacramento site where Stanford turned the first spade to begin work depicts a few Chinese in the crowd, acknowledging their eventual role in the construction effort. In reality, the CPRR leadership, because of their racial prejudice, which they openly expressed, initially wanted only whites in their workforce. Just a few hundred white men responded to the CPRR recruitment efforts, however, and they soon proved unreliable; when word of a new strike of gold spread, they walked off the job. “It was impossible to get white labor,” according to Lewis M. Clement, one of the principal engineers on the CPRR. The Union Pacific after the end of the Civil War tapped a robust labor market. The Central Pacific, by comparison, had almost none to draw from.
In part because of this lack of sufficient reliable white workers, the initial construction on the CPRR proceeded very slowly. In the first year and a half of effort, from January 1863 to June 1864, the CPRR line extended only as far as the small town of Newcastle, just thirty-one miles from Sacramento, and below a thousand feet in elevation. The High Sierra was not even in sight. The CPRR leadership had to consider radical measures. They thought about using Confederate prisoners even as the Civil War still raged. Later they wondered whether thousands of freedmen from the South could be brought west, or Mexicans brought north, to meet their immense need for workers.
The CPRR’s labor predicament was no secret, even to Chinese. Sacramento’s Chinese quarter sat just blocks from the site of ground-breaking and the CPRR’s base of operations. The daily press closely followed the project and its problems, and those Chinese who kept up with current events must have wondered about the implications of the labor shortage and the possible opportunities for themselves. They likely discussed such things in their restaurants, associations, and gathering places. The ethnic news network throughout the state was well developed. Chinese household servants, of whom there were plenty in the residences of the railroad directors, would have been privy to frustrated private conversations about the company’s problems. One of these inner sanctum workers was a man known as Ah Ling, a trusted and intelligent manservant of Charles Crocker. There is conjecture, even among Crocker’s own descendants today, that it was Ah Ling who suggested employing Chinese on the railroad sometime in late 1863 or early 1864.
When Charles Crocker, or his brother E. B., raised the idea of using Chinese to other CPRR leaders, its audacity outraged and divided them. James Strobridge, the field construction supervisor beneath Crocker, pushed back. “I will not boss Chinese,” Strobridge declared. Crocker was insistent, supposedly saying, “Did they not build the Chinese wall, the biggest piece of masonry in the world?” He then directed Strobridge to go to the town of Auburn to find Chinese workers.
Auburn, nestled in the western foothills of the Sierra Nevada thirty-five miles northeast of Sacramento, was on the CPRR route, but the completed portion of the line had not yet reached it. Strobridge knew the area well, having lived, married, and done business there for years before he went into railroad construction work. He may not have wanted to hire Chinese to work the CPRR line, but if he had to do it, he would have known that he could find them there.
The destinies of Strobridge, the CPRR, and Chinese in America converged and forever changed in Auburn, for it was there that Strobridge met a Chinese labor contractor who could provide him with workers. He was known as Hung Wah.
This was almost certainly not his actual name, even though it also appeared in the census record, which rendered it with Wah as the surname. The Chinese characters for Hung Wah, as we know from the court documents and his signature on later CPRR payroll records, are not words used for the name of a person. They were likely a designation for his business. “Hung Wah” translates roughly from Chinese as “working together harmoniously,” nicely capturing the ideal of the organic social relationship Chinese employers would want to have with those they paid. Mistaking the title of a business for the name of the Chinese proprietor was common.
According to a brief news report in April 1931, when he passed away, Hung Wah was born in 1835 and, taking his chances, came to the United States in 1850. One of the first from the Siyi to arrive in Gold Mountain, he made his way, perhaps with relatives, to Auburn, in the heart of California’s gold country. Census records, though often inaccurate, offer a possible glimpse into his background: the 1860 census identifies Hung Wah as being twenty-nine years old at the time and his occupation as “miner.” He is described as “Mongolian” and is listed as having been born in 1831, not 1835, as given later. He lived with three other Chinese men: Sing Wah, twenty-four years of age; Sung Wah, age thirty-three; and Ki Sung, thirty years of age. Their appellations, likely an inaccurate rendering of their true Chinese names, and their ages suggest they were closely related — brothers or perhaps cousins. They lived next door to other Chinese. What these records fail to capture, however, is that Hung Wah was ambitious and entrepreneurial; he would make his fortune not in mining but in providing workers to those who needed them
In the two years after the 1860 census, Hung Wah, no longer a worker himself and with some command of English, became a major supplier of Chinese labor to projects in Auburn, an early center of mining activity in the Mother Lode, as the gold country was called. Chinese had been a prominent part of the town’s population since its founding soon after gold was discovered in nearby Coloma in 1848. In the 1850s, as many as 3,500 Chinese lived in neighboring Dutch Flat, making up more than half of the town’s population and 30 percent of Auburn’s population, or three thousand of the town’s ten thousand residents. The American R
iver and other gold-bearing waterways that abounded in the area attracted thousands from around the world. Roads connecting it to other mining towns made Auburn a transportation hub, and it became the county seat for Placer County. The Chinese may have found promise in the name “Placer,” as it invoked the dream of gold: a “placer” is a rich deposit of minerals, including gold. Fertile farmland also lay close by. The town, at an elevation of 1,200 feet, saw little winter snow. It was a good place to live for both practical and symbolic reasons, and Chinese remained until they were driven out by the upsurge in the anti-Chinese violence of the late 1870s.
Chinese had arrived to prospect the rivers and streams in the area and also hired themselves out to work for whites and other Chinese on small and large mining operations. They frequently worked in teams on claims abandoned by white miners and, as in a cooperative, shared the proceeds. The work often involved skills that would later qualify and prepare them for railroad construction.
They even settled in neighboring areas with fearsome names like Rattlesnake Bar, Murderer’s Bar, and Poverty Bar, “bar” referring to a gravel formation in a river. Nearly all these towns in the Mother Lode had a Chinese quarter with stores, restaurants, boardinghouses, gambling and meeting halls, brothels, temples, and even theaters for touring opera troupes from China. In the 1850s, Chinese accounted for 30 percent of Placer County’s population.