Ghosts of Gold Mountain

by Gordon H. Chang

  Chinese also patronized white-owned businesses, rented property from whites, and entered into commercial relations with them. The local newspaper encouraged whites to enjoy the shows at the Chinese theater, despite the language and cultural barrier. Stories in the press also circulated about the luck of some Chinese in making their fortunes. One fellow reportedly found a sixteen-pound lump of gold worth $3,300 near Auburn. The story no doubt stoked envy. The fellow immediately left for home, where he would receive a hero’s welcome and inspire others by his good fortune to try their own chances in California. In the winter, when outdoor work could not be done, Chinese from surrounding areas swelled the town’s Chinese population. Chinese also became local farmers and grew fruit and vegetables, such as beans and tomatoes, for the miners and others. In the 1850s and 1860s, Chinese established themselves as an integral, though largely separated and tenuous, part of Auburn life.

  The region also experienced ugly anti-Chinese violence from its earliest days. In 1853, in neighboring Nevada County, “Ling Sing (a Chinaman),” as the record constantly refers to the miner, was shot fifteen to eighteen times in the back by a white man. Court documents tell of his brutal death at the hands of George W. Hall and two accomplices who wanted Ling Sing’s belongings. A district court first convicted Hall of murder on the testimony of several Chinese eyewitnesses, but Hall appealed and took the case to the California Supreme Court. The court did not deny the facts of the crime but threw out the verdict, citing a state statute that forbade the testimony of non-white people in cases involving whites. Hall walked away a free man, and People v. Hall stayed on the books for twenty years before it was overturned. Where Ling Sing is buried is not known.

  Violence against Chinese soared. With dramatically curtailed legal protection, Chinese became easy targets for robbery and abuse. Daniel Cleveland, the early acute observer of Chinese life in California, condemned the discrimination. “In no other civilized country,” he informed top officials in Washington, D.C., “would the Chinese be debarred from the right of testifying against those who had wronged them in person or property.” He believed that hundreds of Chinese had been brutally murdered in the state, with the perpetrators known and unpunished.

  In this volatile environment, Hung Wah still managed to establish himself as a person of importance and standing. In 1862, a year or more before Strobridge approached him in Auburn, he became embroiled in a conflict among several white businessmen who wanted to undertake a large gold mining operation in one of their claims along the American River. The specifics of the dispute are obscure, but the summary of the civil proceedings provides fascinating information about Hung Wah. Court documents show that Hung Wah contracted with one of the involved parties to provide and supervise up to 150 Chinese workers to build and operate long flumes to wash huge quantities of gravel to extract gold. In return, Hung Wah was to receive a stunning 60 percent of the gold dust collected from the operation. Presumably he paid the workers from his share, which the principals must have expected to be significant, given the scale of the operation. Also, Hung Wah was to receive an additional small percentage held by the principals to cover provisions before the ore could be collected, amounting to thousands of dollars in cash. Differences over expenses incurred in supplying the Chinese workers appear to have been at the center of the conflict among the business partners. In the court proceedings, Hung Wah’s comments are summarized in English, with no mention of the use of an interpreter. Although he signed his business agreement “Hung Wah Company,” in clearly written Chinese characters, evidence suggests that he had a decent command of English, including written English. He had legal representation and appears to have represented in turn many other Chinese who had observed the signing of the contract and were eager to join his crew.

  The court documents indicate that Hung Wah enjoyed the respect of the involved parties as well as of the court itself. Perhaps most surprising is repeated mention that Hung Wah operated a store and lived with a “family,” though the reference may have been to male relatives, not to a wife or children, as there is no evidence that he was married. Chinese males married both Chinese and non-Chinese females in America, though not in great numbers, and would formally record the union. In these years, usually only financially successful Chinese in California could afford to have families, sometimes even financing the travel of an arranged bride from China.

  In August 1863, a few months after Leland Stanford broke ground for the CPRR operation, Hung Wah advertised his labor contracting services in the Auburn newspaper. He declared in English, “I will furnish any number of Chinese laborers to work on Rail Roads, Wagon Roads, or Mining Claims,” doing so “at the lowest cash rates.” Hung Wah claimed that he had “experience in the business” and access to “facilities” to obtain “any required number of men.” Notably, he deliberately listed “rail roads” first among the construction projects. His claims were bold, but he backed them up by providing the name of William McDaniel, a prominent local businessman Hung Wah had worked with, as his reputable reference.

  It may have been McDaniel, who was widely known for having close dealings with Chinese, who introduced Hung Wah to construction supervisor Strobridge. Or perhaps Strobridge, who had his own personal ties to Auburn, had simply read Hung Wah’s advertisements in the local paper. It was likely during Strobridge’s visit to Auburn when Hung Wah and Strobridge met. Regardless of how the two men found their way to each other, one thing is certain: their meeting quickly led to a mutually beneficial business relationship that had historic consequences.

  The January 1864 payroll record of the CPRR is the first firm evidence of Chinese joining the construction effort. Years later, Charles Crocker recalled that the company began to hire first “50 Chinamen” and then “50 more” and “50 more,” and put them to work just north of Auburn on what was known as the Dutch Flat–Donner Lake Wagon Road, which the CPRR would use for access. On the payroll record, Hung Wah signed his name in Chinese as receiving almost $675 for “Chinese laborers” and “per diem,” which may have been expenses for supplies and food for about twenty-five workers. Hung Wah and a man named Ah Toy, who is listed as a supervisor, are the only Chinese names on the roll. The next month they appear again as receiving similar amounts. The names of the individual workers on the line are lost forever. But the legacy they were about to forge remains with us to this day.

  At first, the CPRR put the handful of Chinese laborers to work on light grading, but they worked so well, the company quickly hired more and more until they became the main construction force. By early spring 1865, two to three thousand Chinese worked the line, largely recruited from among the Chinese already living in the state. Many more would join them soon.

  These workers greatly outnumbered the eight hundred white employees who were supervisors over the Chinese, teamsters, craftsmen, and laborers, too. The Chinese impressed their bosses back in Sacramento, who initially paid them on average $26 a month in wages, about a dollar a day, with one day off from work each week. They paid for their own room and board and lived together in temporary outdoor camps that moved along with the line. The company, in its need to attract workers, believed its pay was better than what the workers received in mine labor. It was, however, less than what the CPRR paid white workers, who received perhaps 30 percent more in wages. This race-based differential was common practice at the time. White workers, even laborers, were paid significantly more than Chinese, who still found the work attractive. The wages they received were much higher than what they could make in China. Gold Mountain had become not only a place where good fortune might be found in the ground, if one was lucky, but also a place where attractive wage-paying work could be had almost without limit, at least until white labor targeted Chinese as competitors.

  The leadership of the CPRR knew they needed an army of muscle to complete the construction task before them, but at this early stage of the project, they could not anticipate how difficult the work would become and how many worker
s they would require. The general route up from the Central Valley was not a mystery, but the upper reaches of the Sierra were not well known. The engineers learned about the topography and geology as they went along. There was no firm, detailed blueprint. Surveying and determining the actual route had to be done as the construction army advanced. And few had seen, let alone lived through, the winter snow season in the high country. None could know that the winters in the next two years would in fact be among the worst in history. None had any inkling of the extraordinary measures the Railroad Chinese would have to take to build, and survive, through the extreme conditions that lay just ahead. No one in the world had ever tackled, or even seriously imagined, what was required to tunnel through mountains of defiant granite and construct a roadbed through frozen ground, ice, and forty-foot snowdrifts. Nothing prepared them for the challenge of building and then protecting a vulnerable ribbon of rail through the mountains. Would the Railroad Chinese have continued to work for the CPRR if they had known that killer snow and landslides would sweep many of them away, taking their young lives?

  All this was to come.

  The country traversed by the CPRR in its first year and a half of work was the most hospitable it would face, but progress had been pitiful. The CPRR line had advanced less than fifty miles, and the High Sierra, the company’s greatest challenge, was still off in the distance—a towering wall that blocked the western line of the railroad from the vast expanses of Nevada and Utah, where the two halves of the Transcontinental were to connect. The terminus where the CPRR and UP would meet was undetermined and dependent on work yet to be completed. Their business resources, finances, influence and power, and future profit depended entirely on the miles of track they could claim. Nothing was certain except the relentless press of competition between the ambitious leadership of the two railroad companies to have their workers lay as much track as possible, as quickly as possible. Whether the CPRR’s Railroad Chinese would succeed in conquering the Sierra Nevada was yet to be seen.

  4

  Foothills

  [In late January] a black bird, called by us wu-hou, because its cry was like that, came about this time, and also the cuckoo. The black bird would call “Wu hou, wu hou,” and the cuckoo would reply, “Ko kung ko ch’o, ko kung ko ch’o,” which the farmers thought sounded like “Everybody work, everybody dig.”

  —HUIE KIN, Reminiscences

  The route of the central pacific rail line through California traveled across some of the most varied and dramatic landscape anywhere in the world. The CPRR’s starting point along the Sacramento River lay a bit above sea level in elevation. The air in summer there is stifling, thick with moisture from the surrounding waterways. Just one hundred miles northeast lies the start of the granite mountains of the Sierra Nevada range, among the most rugged in North America. The pass over Donner Summit, named for the ill-fated party trapped by winter snows in 1846, lies at over seven thousand feet in altitude. Surrounding peaks are even higher, at more than nine thousand feet. The air is thin and challenges the lungs. The rail line had to overcome this intimidating barrier to reach the eastern side of California and beyond to the expansive high plains and deserts of Nevada and Utah.

  In summer, gentle grasslands blanket the area around Sacramento, but eastward the landscape quickly changes to oak-and-shrub-covered hills that yellow in the dry heat. Farther on at the lower elevations of the Sierra, cooler temperatures encourage vast, dense stands of pine, fir, and other conifers. Overhead, the High Sierra soars above the tree line. The scenery becomes rugged, with barren rock and shrubland. High mountain meadows and thousands of snowmelt pools and lakes form stunning vistas. Tahoe, the Washoe Indian name for the largest alpine lake in North America, lies there.

  The Central Valley can have heavy rain but rarely sees snow. Snowdrifts at the higher elevations rise twenty to forty feet or more in winter and cover the ground well into summer, which can also see ferocious wind and thunderstorms. Snowstorms as late as July are common in the Sierra. Through the changing seasons along the route of the railroad in California alone, the Railroad Chinese faced frigid temperatures and towering snowdrifts; vast fields of deep mud and slush that made walking, let alone the use of horse-drawn carts, almost impossible; and blazing sun, especially at the higher altitudes.

  Spectacularly beautiful scenery and plentiful wildlife accompanied the intimidating terrain and climate. Great populations of bears including grizzlies at the time, wild sheep, deer, and fish lived in abundance in the hills, mountains, and waterways. Small mammals, birds of great variety, rattlesnakes and other reptiles, brilliantly colored butterflies, wasps, and bees entertained, nourished, and tormented those who lived in the wilds. The Railroad Chinese had never encountered flora and fauna as rich and as varied back in their homeland.

  The railroad, as no other manmade machine did to the same extent, challenged and disrupted this natural environment. The steam engine, with its noise, fumes, and insatiable appetite for fuel, vanquished the stillness of mountains and forests. Track sliced through and permanently scarred the land. The railroad invaded, and ended, the isolation of wilderness.

  Though a railroad conjures images of continuous linear movement and of the predictability of terminals and schedules, constructing the iron road was a very different reality. Building the Pacific railway was discontinuous, disconnected, erratic, and unpredictable. The construction schedule was punctuated with delays, work in fits and starts, frenetic activity interposed with halting progress, gruesome deaths and constant danger, and disruptive human behavior from top to bottom. Problems with securing funding, the vagaries of weather, the indomitable and imposing topography, the unpredictability of the supply chain from iron to food, changes in engineering, routes, and work plans, calculating and disputatious leadership, and the challenges of quality and quantity of labor were the only constants. There was nothing simple, smooth, or predictable about this construction effort, the most massive to that point in American history.

  When they were put to work for the CPRR in early 1864, the Railroad Chinese set about laying a line that had been only generally mapped earlier by surveyors and engineers. They favored making the route as straight and level as possible and with a steady rise up the elevations that locomotives could handle. Nature had to be shaped, cut, filled, packed, and bridged. The line had to twist and wind gradually around unavoidable topographical obstacles. The Railroad Chinese, using only picks and shovels, wheelbarrows, carts, and horses, cleared the dense brush and forests, graded, cut through steep rises and hills that blocked the straightaway, filled deep ravines, laid down the ballast, set the ties, and spiked the iron rails. They used blasting powder to crack stone and packed earth. With hands and muscle, they moved thousands of tons of earth, gravel, and rock. Weather conditions allowed them to work at the lower elevations almost throughout the entire year. Ahead, though, lay the perilous work of getting the line around soaring cliffs, across plunging ravines, and through the intimidating granite of the Sierra Nevada. The immensity of the challenge that landscape and weather would present far exceeded anything that the workers, and the directors of the company, could conjure in their wildest imaginations.

  No account of the experience of working on the line for the CPRR by a Chinese is known to survive. We can only imagine what the lived experience may have been like, but the diary of a young Union Army veteran who arrived in San Francisco by ship from New York in December 1864 provides a rare sense of the challenges of living and working on the line, even for one who occupied the relatively privileged position of a member of the railroad’s professional engineering staff. Stephen Allen Curry, who was deeply devout and a sensitive observer, hoped he would find rewards that would make his perilous journey to California worthwhile. After landing, he quickly made his way to Sacramento, where he met Leland Stanford and engineers Samuel Montague and Lewis Clement, who hired him to join their staff. In February 1865, about a year after Hung Wah and his compatriots had started work on the CPRR,
Curry was sent out to help plot the line through the mountains. As dramatic and beautiful as California’s scenery and wildlife were, they could not compensate for the terrible living conditions he would have to endure. The description of the difficulties Curry recorded in his journal only begins to suggest what the construction workers’ diaries might have told us if they had survived.

  On his way to the high country in early March, Curry stayed for a few days near Illinoistown, soon renamed Colfax, on the route of the line. It lay at 2,400 feet in altitude fifty miles from Sacramento. Curry walked or rode on horseback much of the way, as the completed rail line was still far from reaching the town. “Weather showery. Some snow on the ground, roads terribly muddy . . . Wet feet for two or three days has given me some cold.” After a week’s stay at Shake Shanty, the name of the rough cabin in which he lived with fellow engineers for several weeks, he writes that he is already “lonely and sad.” As one who had endured the Civil War, Curry had experienced hardship before, but nothing had prepared him for his work surveying the railroad route. “What a home for white men,” he wrote.

  In late March 1865, he added a long entry to his diary about an especially difficult workday a few miles east of Illinoistown. “Yesterday morning we began putting reference points near ‘Cape Horn,’” he wrote. “It was a difficult job, and almost perilous. The bluff stands at an angle of 70°, and where the line runs it is more than 1200 feet above the bed of the north fork of the American River, which runs and roars at its base.” Chinese would soon be working at this dangerous location, which became the focus of one of the most controversial episodes in the construction history of the railroad.