Ghosts of Gold Mountain

by Gordon H. Chang

  The issue of the baskets is another matter, however. Recently overlooked accounts from long before 1927 contain firm evidence that substantially supports the claim that Chinese did in fact use ropes and chairs as well as woven baskets in construction work in the Sierra. Whether these instances took place at Cape Horn or at other nearby locations is not clear, but the “baskets story” is now more compelling than ever. It is not mere legend, as some skeptics argue.

  An 1869 tour book by a traveler who took the Transcontinental Railroad soon after it was completed described encountering Cape Horn and related what he was told: “When the road was in course of construction, the groups of Chinese laborers on the bluffs looked almost like swarms of ants, when viewed from the river . . . When the road-bed was constructed around this point, the men who broke the first standing ground were held by ropes until firm foot-holds could be excavated in the rocky sides of the precipitous bluffs.”

  Several accounts written in the 1870s provide similar descriptions of the Chinese laborers held up by ropes so they could create footings for work on the roadbed around an area that appears to be Cape Horn. One describes the Chinese being lowered five hundred feet down from the top of a cliff, with 1,200 feet of void below them. Frederick A. Bee, a prominent businessman who also was in the railroad business, testified in 1876: “I have built railroads. I have hung them [Chinese] over the sides of rocks where no white would trust himself, as the Pacific Railroad Company has done.”

  One of the first mentions of the actual use of baskets was in a volume published by “Nelsons’ Pictorial Guide-Books,” a respected travel series. The Central Pacific Railroad: A Trip Across the North American Continent from Ogden to San Francisco, published in 1870, provides a vivid description of the Cape Horn area. According to the guide, a traveler at Cape Horn sees “one of the wildest and most magnificent ravines in the Sierra Nevada. The [American] river is here confined between two perpendicular walls, each about 2000 feet in height, which are washed perpetually by the boiling waters, and leave not an inch of ground for the foot of the would-be explorer.” The traveler goes on to say:

  The swiftness with which the train flies down this tremendous incline, and the suddenness with which it wheels round the curves, produce a sensation not to be reproduced in words. The line is carried along the edge of declivities stretching downwards for 2000 or 3000 feet, and in some parts on a narrow ledge excavated from the mountain side by men swung from the top in baskets. The speed under these conditions is well calculated to try even the steadiest nerves. And as we sweep past each rugged height and grisly precipice it is impossible not to be stirred in one’s inmost soul by the grandeur of the moving spectacle.

  The most stirring description of the construction at Cape Horn comes from a young woman, Isabella L. Bird, who traveled across the country in 1873 and wrote private letters to her sister about her experiences, which were later published. One letter includes this striking account of the high point of her trek through the Sierra:

  The light of the sinking sun from that time glorified the Sierras, and as the dew fell, aromatic odours made the still air sweet. On a single track, sometimes carried on a narrow ledge excavated from the mountain side by men lowered from the top in baskets, overhanging ravines from 2000 to 3000 feet deep, the monster train snaked its way upwards, stopping sometimes in front of a few frame houses, at others where nothing was to be seen but a log cabin with a few Chinamen hanging about it, but where trails on the sides of the ravines pointed to a gold country above and below. So sharp and frequent are the curves on some parts of the ascent, that on looking out of the window one could seldom see more than a part of the train at once. At Cape Horn, where the track curves round the ledge of a precipice 2,500 feet in depth, it is correct to be frightened, and a fashion of holding the breath and shutting the eyes prevails, but my fears were reserved for the crossing of a trestle-bridge over a very deep chasm, which is itself approached by a sharp curve. This bridge appeared to be overlapped by the cars so as to produce the effect of looking down directly into a wild gulch, with a torrent raging along it at an immense depth below.

  In this account of what she was apparently told, Bird seems to locate the use of baskets a bit east of Cape Horn and higher up from the American River than where Cape Horn is usually placed. The photograph of Cape Horn taken several years before her journey shows the dramatic precipice of the location (below).

  But the most compelling and contemporary evidence of the use of baskets in the Sierra at large is a news account by an unidentified traveling correspondent for a Massachusetts newspaper, the Pittsfield Eagle, in 1868:

  The most thrilling scene that came under my observation was in the Sierra Nevada on the Central Pacific. Here the road is built on the side of a precipice 2,400 feet above the base, and the slope is so steep that the Chinamen who did the work were let down in baskets, and in this position drilled holes and charged them in the side of the mountains. At one time there were 460 of these charges connected by a fuse, exploded at one time. Masses of rock weighing many tons, fell to the bottom with terrific fury. When the debris had ceased to fall, the echoes were still reporting among the distant hills. So stunning was the shock that I would never willingly witness the like again.

  Half a dozen other newspapers in the East also published this account in its entirety, bolstering its credibility. No past or present challenge to this widely circulated report has been found, further supporting its veracity.

  Lastly, the topography made the use of baskets impracticable, some have argued. A view of Cape Horn today shows that the slope is only about 45 degrees. The report of chief engineer Montague, the chief engineer of the CPRR, however, presented a very different picture of the physical conditions as he saw them in 1864. Cape Horn, he wrote, “is a precipitous rocky bluff, about twelve hundred feet in height above the American River.” Furthermore, “the dip of the ledge,” he observed, “is about seventy-five degrees, or nearly perpendicular.” Construction of the roadbed, according to the engineer, would therefore “necessarily be mostly an excavation” to form a ledge cut into the rock face, since building retaining walls around the rock would be “unsafe” and “impractical.” Several months later, Stephen Allen Curry, the young surveyor, described the slope of Cape Horn very much as did Montague. Curry estimated the incline at 70 degrees. The large difference in estimates of the incline of the slope at Cape Horn might be explained by human intervention: over the 150 years since the work was completed, railroad companies have remade the area several times, significantly altering its incline and shaping it into its present appearance.

  Though there are still questions about exactly where and when the “baskets” were used, the use of them by Chinese laborers in constructing the rail line at a perilous location in the Sierra cannot be dismissed as myth. Several narratives from the time explicitly describe Chinese using what are identified as “baskets” in the Cape Horn area. There is also firm evidence of the use of baskets in railroad construction elsewhere after the Pacific Railroad was completed, most notably on a portion of the South Pacific Coast rail line through the rugged Santa Cruz Mountains that Chinese worked.

  The mystery around the use of baskets by the Railroad Chinese is ultimately about the details of their use, not about the actual occurrence. They may not have “dangled” over ledges, for example, but may have used them to sled down unstable slopes that made firm footing impossible. It is a shame that there are no photographs to prove how and when they were deployed. Few photographs of the CPRR construction effort show laborers actually at work. Yet these images still attest to the extreme danger and hardship the Railroad Chinese faced as they drove deeper and deeper into the Sierra Nevada.

  Around the same time that Chinese began joining the CPRR in large numbers, the company hired a capable photographer named Alfred Hart to document and publicize the company’s work. The railroad was far removed from the daily reality of most Americans, and the company believed visualizing the work was of vit
al importance not just for the public’s edification but for company business. Public officials, investors, future freight customers, and prospective passengers had to be able to see the wonders of the Far West and the accomplishments of the railroad company. It was helping transform the nation.

  Hart, who had come to California from Connecticut shortly before the CPRR began its work, captured hundreds of images of the construction effort from 1864 to 1869. He was also a portrait artist, yet he did not photograph any individual Chinese, or any other identified worker, for that matter. Groups of forlorn Paiutes and Shoshones appear in some of his work, faces clearly presented but identified only by a tribal name in the photo title, and in a few stills he depicts Jane Stanford boating on Donner Lake or Leland Stanford at the events at Promontory Summit. But for the most part, in Hart’s images other humans and work animals are largely ciphers, distant figures with indistinct facial features. The only function of their physical bodies in the frame is to help viewers appreciate the phenomenal magnitude of work and the daunting challenges of location and environment. Many photos contain no humans at all but just buildings, trestles, railcars, and other human-made products that display the dramatic imprint of the company on a landscape that defied the imagination of those who had not witnessed it in person.

  Despite—or perhaps because of—the fact that his compositions prioritized the construction and scenery over CPRR laborers, Hart’s work impressed company officials. E. B. Crocker, who became his good friend, reported to Huntington in New York that Hart’s railroad images were “universally admired” in California. The company sent many of them to Huntington for his use in raising capital.

  The photos could not have failed to impress easterners. Hart’s pictures were among the first to capture the rugged, brutal, and majestic scenery of the California mountain region. In time, as work on the CPRR line progressed, he would share with a rapt nation images of some of the most distant and treasured vistas: the High Sierra, the summit and Donner Lake region, and the broad deserts and plains of Nevada and Utah.

  Groups of Chinese are clearly visible in many of Hart’s images and may appear in many others even if they cannot be clearly distinguished through the crowds, shadows, or distance. Though it was not Hart’s evident intention, his images today provide stirring visual entry into the environment and conditions of life on the construction line.

  Photography was still in its technological infancy. Hart used glass plate negatives, a stereograph box camera with a manual lens cap, and a spindly mount to hold his fragile equipment. These features effectively determined his decisions about subject matter, location, time of day for shooting, season, and even captions. He had to consider lighting, accessibility to locations for himself and his equipment, work schedules, and of course his own safety. He had to avoid or minimize taking photos where there was vigorous movement: humans toiling, machines operating, lumbering work animals, trees shaking in the wind, and of course falling rain, sleet, snow, and darkness. Running water in streams and rivers emerged as ribbons of white gossamer. His lenses allowed him, it appears, to take only limited medium-range or distant images. He captured much that is arresting, but he could photograph only a minuscule amount of what he witnessed.

  Hart’s work nevertheless stimulates the imagination to consider what it might have been like to work on the line. In “Blasting at Chalk Bluffs Above Alta—Cut 60 Feet Deep,” taken sixty-five miles from Sacramento, and “Bank and Cut at Sailor’s Spur—80 Miles from Sacramento” (both below), dramatic scenery towers over the scores of workers who are transforming the earth. In one photo, they cut away a towering hillside to make way for the line; in the other, an incomplete raised roadbed rises from two directions to cross a deep ravine. Humans had to move a staggering amount of earth and stone to carve the line through dense, virtually untouched evergreen forests and imposing landscape. Too far removed from the camera, the individual workers are obscure, but their clothing and hats identify them as Chinese.

  Scores of Chinese workers who appear in these photos use hand tools, carts, and work animals. As with almost all the photos containing Chinese, they appear to be working in isolated teams, and only a few white workers or supervisors are occasionally visible. Other photos show white workers together exclusively. The workforce in these photos was segregated.

  Little sense of human energy comes from the images of the Chinese workers, who appear strangely still and distant because of the technology of photography at the time, but the massive amount of cleared ground, moved earth, and shaped roadbed evidences the stupendous effort expended when the camera was not present. Hart occasionally provided the basic dimensions of the cuts and embankments in some of the photo captions so that viewers could properly appreciate the enormous scale of the construction endeavor. His photos, however, reveal only a small portion of the actual work on the line. He could get to only a few of accessible work sites and had very little time to work. Hundreds of other important locations, with their innumerable workers, were never visually recorded.

  In some instances, the absence of humans in an image serves to accentuate the monumentality of the construction challenge. In “Horse Ravine Wall, and Grizzly Hill Tunnel—77 Miles from Sacramento” (above), a massive retaining wall, tons of moved earth, a sharp cut into the hill, and the ragged, forbidding mouth of a tunnel into the mountain dwarf a few Chinese workers, draft animals, and carts that are visible at a distance. Towering above them are jagged and unfriendly trees, ominous sentinels witnessing the violation of their land. Nothing serves to inform a viewer that hundreds of Chinese, who worked at this location before the image was captured, were responsible for the stunning transformation. The retaining wall stands mute, but its distinctive construction form of fitted stone, with no mortar, is evidence that it is the product of traditional masonry techniques brought from China. Scores of similar walls hold up the roadbed and prop up hillsides all along the line. After this photograph was taken, workers laid a solid roadbed, ties, and iron track on which a behemoth steam engine and train could safely run. The most famous of these walls remains standing today. A historical marker informs travelers now of “The Great Chinese Wall” along Highway 40, just off of Donner Summit in the Sierra Nevada.

  Captions for some photos explicitly include references to Chinese. Photo number 1129, which is probably by Hart, is titled “Wood Train and Chinamen in Bloomer Cut” (above). The photo shows Chinese on board a freight train full of wood moving through one of the CPRR’s imposing early construction challenges. An immense mound of rock embedded in natural cement near Auburn blocked the route and required a cut of one thousand feet in length and up to sixty-two feet deep. A crew of workers, European and Chinese, labored from February 1864 to May 1865 to complete the job, hailed at the time as the “eighth wonder of the world.”

  Bloomer Cut, which was completed around the time when Stephen Allen Curry resolved to quit the railroad business, may well have been the location where some Chinese first began work for the CPRR. About a score of them can be seen in Hart’s image: roughly a dozen men, standing or seated among the blocks of wood that fill the train’s hopper wagons. The Chinese man closest to the camera moved during Hart’s exposure of his glass negative, creating a ghostly presence in the reproduced image. Like so many of his brethren standing farther back in the car in this image and others, he is rendered as an apparition—a spirit wandering higher and higher into the Sierra Nevada, toward where the mountains meet the sky.

  5

  The High Sierra

  Great-Grandfather built the railroad through the Sierra Nevada in difficult seasons. Night was a time of peace. On warm nights Great-Grandfather would move away from camp to sleep, away from the night workers. There was a river nearby the camp, and farther upstream, the falls. He always walked beside the moonlit river at night, the cascading water glowing white with the reflection made his footsteps visible.

  —SHAWN WONG, Homebase: A Novel, 1979

  In the Sierra, the sky on a
crystalline clear night is spectacular, bejeweled with innumerable points of brilliant stars, the vast heavenly expanse of the Milky Way, and a moon almost too bright for the eyes. As they began their eastward ascent into the highest reaches of the Sierra in 1865, the Railroad Chinese would have looked to the phases of the moon to guide and structure the rhythm of their existence. Though they worked head-down toward the earth during the day, the Railroad Chinese looked up to the heavens at night, and especially to the moon, to determine where they were in the cycle of the passing year.

  Since time immemorial, Chinese used the waxing and waning of the moon to calculate their calendar time. As farmers, they watched the sky to know when to plant and when to harvest. They knew from the moon when to expect the four defining moments of the year: the summer and winter solstices and the spring and fall equinoxes. Each month began with a “new” moon, or no moon, and a big full moon marked the middle of the month, the fifteenth. Though not as precise as the Gregorian calendar, which is based on the earth’s revolution around the sun, the lunar calendar was simple to understand and follow. One just had to watch the skies at night and keep track of the moon’s phases.