For the Railroad Chinese, the New Year began with the second new moon following the winter solstice, the longest night of the year. This meant that the Chinese New Year usually occurred somewhere between late January and late February. Traditionally the occasion was celebrated with great delight; it was the time to reunite with family, revere ancestors, honor deities, ward off evil spirits, and beseech the gods to bestow good luck and fortune in the coming year. Chinese called these most important days the Spring Festival, chunjie, the celebration that marked the coming of spring and the promise of life’s renewal. Some Railroad Chinese traveled all the way back to China to be with family, but most stayed in California and spent the time with friends.
Qingming, the important festival back home that honored one’s ancestors, occurred after the spring equinox, but in America, where there were few burial tombs to clean, the occasion was less significant to Railroad Chinese. The time of the fall equinox in mid-September was another matter. This is when the mid-autumn festival, zhongqiujie, occurred. It was also known as the Moon Festival because of the huge harvest moon that illuminates the night sky. It would be an especially nostalgic, even sad time for the Railroad Chinese, as the full moon traditionally symbolized life’s wholeness and the joy of family. But for the Railroad Chinese isolated in the mountains of California far from home and their loved ones, the shining full moon reminded them of their separation and existential incompleteness. Were their family members, seeing the same full moon back in the village, also wondering when there would be reunion?
During the construction months from spring to fall, the Railroad Chinese could watch the gradual changes in the sky each night. One of the most prominent formations they followed illustrated the bittersweet story of the Cowherd and the Weaver Girl. The legend, which had originated 2,500 years earlier, was about two young lovers who had displeased a powerful, spiteful goddess. She banished them to the heavens, transformed them into stars, and separated them for eternity. They became what in the West are called Altair and Vega, located on opposite sides of the vast Milky Way in the night sky. During the summer, the two stars move slowly in tandem toward the vault of the sky as part of the Summer Triangle. Then in mid-August, when the stars reach their highest point, it is said that a flock of magical magpies forms a bridge that allows the two lovers to visit each other, but for just one day. The star points then start to drift down, ending the annual cycle. The Railroad Chinese would know that summer was coming to an end. And as fall approached in 1865, the change of seasons foreboded a new and arduous phase in the Central Pacific’s colossal construction project.
In August 1865, Leland Stanford hosted visiting speaker of the house and soon to be vice president of the United States Schuyler Colfax, other dignitaries, and prominent eastern journalists who had been invited to travel along the line as far as it had been completed into the Sierra and inspect the CPRR’s work. Stanford proudly described it as an effort “of great magnitude and National importance.” The official party was astounded to see thousands of Chinese working in the mountains. One eyewitness described seeing their multitude everywhere, “shoveling, wheeling, carting, drilling and blasting rocks and earth.” There were then four thousand workers in total, an estimated 90 percent Chinese and 10 percent Irish. At campsites, the travelers saw hundreds of Chinese sitting on the ground having their meals. Gulping down rice with chopsticks from bowls, they ate their repast of familiar food made by Chinese cooks with great gusto. For these visitors from the American East, these novel scenes of the unfamiliar Chinese appear to have made an impression almost as memorable as the monumental construction project itself.
In terms of quality, the work on this prodigious project, declared one leading railroad engineer who inspected the line, would “compare most favorably in every respect with any railroad in the United States.” Though it was likely not his intention, his assessment complimented the Railroad Chinese, for it was they who were largely responsible for the construction. Yet the product of their labor to this point was nothing compared to what they would accomplish next. In fall 1865, the company wanted to hire thousands more Chinese workers as the crucial assault on the High Sierra was about to begin. Getting past the summit in the next couple of years was essential if the company was to control the critical rail traffic between Nevada and California and survive financially. The CPRR sent workers to the higher elevations, where they were to carve and blast out the tunnels needed to get through the granite mountains.
After Cape Horn, the railroad route became more rugged and dangerous, with steep ravines, sharply dropping cliffs, canyons, and frigid, rushing rivers fed by the high country snowmelt. Earth and rock formations became irregular, with complex intermixed masses of ancient oceanic crust, limestone, gravel, and volcanic rock, including ever greater amounts of granite, as the elevation rose. The fields of granite become batholiths, immense spans of solid rock miles across in width. Glaciers over tens of thousands of years in the past had weathered and polished these surfaces, making them slick when any moisture touched them. Cold temperatures turned them into colossal ice cubes. Ancient glaciers had also sliced through the mountains, creating soaring, fantastical rock formations. Edges of granite split by explosions could be as sharp as knives.
The CPRR workers would have to use sledgehammers, five-foot-long steel drills, gunpowder (also known as black powder), and nitroglycerine, a liquid explosive, to attack the stubborn Sierra. As if the risk of injury in the rugged land was not bad enough, these rude tools made the job even more treacherous. Many of the Railroad Chinese, however, were probably familiar with black powder, which their ancestors had invented in the ninth century and was commonly used in fireworks, guns, and cannons back in their home region in China. An imperial gunpowder production facility began operation in that area in the early nineteenth century.
Dramatic weather changes also quickly made the already difficult construction challenge even tougher. Early torrential rains made the fall of 1865 one of the wettest on record. Carriage and cart travel over the clay soils of the foothills became impossible. Dense, clinging mud was the worst enemy of movement. Workers on foot and hundreds of pack animals had to laboriously transport supplies, even including hay for the horses, up into the snow country, where sleds could then be used. Deep mud immobilized one carriage in the middle of the Gold Run settlement for six weeks before it was extricated. Water runoff collapsed cuts, which then had to be reworked.
Snowfall began in September, and starting in October storms followed one another almost continuously for the next five months. Towering banks of snow covered the completed track and the intended route. Even five to seven coupled heavy locomotives could not drive a snowplow through the packed thirty-foot drifts. Railroad Chinese were ordered to work around the clock, day and night, to clear the track and roadbed by hand, but the snows became too heavy and the men had to move east of the summit before they could return to work in the higher elevations.
Thinking about working and living out in the open in the Sierra to build the Central Pacific for months, even years in sum, challenges even the most lively of imaginations. It does not help that we have no written records of the workers’ own experiences, nor that the company that employed them took so little interest in their day-to-day lives. By using different forms of evidence from the past in creative ways, however, we can recover portions of this human drama.
Archaeology provides one way forward. Researchers have studied thousands of objects, food remnants, fire pits, and other site landscape found at the former living encampments and work areas of Railroad Chinese. This material culture is what remains of daily life and tells us about their quotidian existence. Considered together with other bits of evidence gleaned from periodical literature, historical photography, business records, and contemporaneous personal observations about Chinese in America, it lets us begin to form some idea of what the lives of Railroad Chinese in the Sierra may have been like.
To be sure, the experience of individual
Railroad Chinese varied tremendously; there was not one Railroad Chinese experience but many. Geography, season, weather, and work demands constantly changed. Few Chinese resided and worked in one established location for more than a few weeks or a season before moving on along the line or leaving work altogether. At the summit area, where work continued for years, some may have resided in one camp for months or years. But turnover also appears to have been high, and the railroad company never wanted to keep more workers on the payroll than necessary. The company constantly moved workers to different locations to meet construction scheduling and needs. During the depths of winter, the company released workers, who would move to a nearby town or perhaps all the way back to Auburn or San Francisco. Some resided in a base location and then traveled out to work, while others moved along with the advance of the line. Most lived outside under the open sky together with those with whom they worked during the day.
Yet at all of these living sites along the CPRR, and many other railroad lines throughout the West, Chinese left an abundance of material culture that exhibits remarkable consistency. The common origin, make, and style of found ceramics, utensils, and other remains of everyday life are evidence of a well-functioning network of commodity production in China and system of distribution in America. A sophisticated trans-Pacific, trans-America supply chain linked remote and widely separated Chinese labor camps with one another and with China. The work camps of the Railroad Chinese were simultaneously dispersed, distant, interconnected, and comparably provisioned. Archaeological evidence shows that objects found on Chinese railroad workers’ campsites in California were often like those used in their home villages and produced in the Pearl River delta. Identical or similar items related to diet, medical care, and leisure activity can be found in California, Nevada, Utah, Montana, Idaho, Oregon, Washington State, Texas, and elsewhere in the West. Fully intact rice bowls, other eating ware, large food storage containers such as brown-glazed stoneware jars, wine jugs, and small vessels for foodstuffs, as well as pieces of these objects, have been gathered along multiple rail lines, their concentrations indicating the sites of Chinese labor camps long ago.
Consistency in found objects at different campsites points to comparability in ways of living, but studies of former campsites also reveal important differences. The living circumstances of different groups of Railroad Chinese could vary considerably. Duration of habitation is one variable, but arrangement was another. Some sites were well organized into distinct areas, such as for sleeping, eating, cooking, and socializing. Others appear to have been more haphazard. Some were rather small in size, accommodating perhaps a few dozen workers. Others were large. Chinese campsites in Utah ranged from a tenth of an acre to more than twenty-four acres in area. In the Sierra, Railroad Chinese usually resided in canvas tents, varying in size from some that held four persons to others that could hold as many as twelve. Some campsites are distinguished by deliberate shaping of the ground for sleeping and eating areas or by the arrangement of stones for foundations and fire pits for cooking, which can still be seen today.
Large rectangular depressions in the ground denote areas where eating and social life under tenting probably occurred. Smaller dugouts served to help shelter residents from the wind, cold, and snow. Wind, especially through passes such as at Donner, could be constant and desiccating. The unceasing flow of wind drained bodies and dried out skin. Rough foundations of gathered rock and rough tent platforms point to longer habitation. Residential segregation was the norm: Chinese and non-Chinese lived separately from each other, as indicated by the refuse collected by archaeologists. The material culture is usually clearly identified as being either predominantly from China or from the United States and Europe. Even if Chinese and whites lived on the same site, the Chinese typically lived in a section more exposed to the elements or to pests such as mosquitoes. The spatial arrangement of living reflected the general racial hierarchy and inequality enforced by the CPRR.
Observers of the construction effort sometimes provided eyewitness descriptions of these Chinese work camps. One reporter who hiked along the road under construction in 1867 described encountering Chinese so numerous they were “thick as bees.” He stumbled past one of their encampments and disabused his readers of any notion that the Chinese camp was picturesque or romantic, with “snow-white canvas” tents sitting atop fragrant pine; rather, in his demeaning words, it was more like “a collection of dog-kennels,” simply made of wood shakes and standing about four feet high, six feet wide and eight feet long.” These were likely hastily built for the short term.
Author Daniel Cleveland wrote differently in 1869 about the campsites he saw: “[The Chinese] live in little villages of cloth tents, containing from 50 to 500 inhabitants. As the work progresses, they fold up and remove their tents and establish their villages at other points along the line of the road. What yesterday was a noisy Chinese town is today but a barren waste, with only rubbish and debris to mark that it was once a settlement.” After work, once the sun had set, Cleveland witnessed a quiet scene of some charm. The tents at night, he wrote, “are illuminated with candles, and groups of Chinese can be seen gambling, smoking opium, visiting or engaging in household labor.”
At Summit Camp, at more than seven thousand feet in elevation and at the crest of the route through the Sierra, Chinese lived for four years in what became a small town to complete the grueling work of boring tunnels through the granite mountains. Photographs and archaeological evidence show wooden buildings that housed them there. Photographs (below), however, could not fully record the grim conditions the workers faced, such as those they had to live through during the ferocious winter of 1867–68, when more than forty storms hit the summit. Snowdrifts rose to forty-four feet and more in height. Temperatures regularly fell to below zero Fahrenheit. Blizzard winds could hit a hundred miles an hour through the passes. The summit area is one of the snowiest places in the lower continental United States.
Snow buried not only the portals to the tunnel but entire living areas as well, requiring workers to dig tunnels through the snow to get to and from their living camps to the tunnel work in the rock. According to the chief tunnel engineer for the CPRR, John R. Gilliss, Chinese even had to live beneath the snow for months at a time. They constructed chimneys and air shafts up through the snow. Tunnels linked storerooms and blacksmith shops. Some snow tunnels were as much as two hundred feet in length and high enough to accommodate two-horse sleds that carried broken rock out of the tunnels to dump outside. Workers also hollowed out large caverns in the snow so they could build retaining walls to protect the track. They used hoists to lower wall stones down through shafts in the snow to men working beneath. Sudden snowslides carried many away to terrible deaths. Accounts of such brutal living and working conditions would be barely believable had the information not come from top company leaders themselves. Lewis Clement, the CPRR chief engineer, testified that management had decided tunnel work had to continue uninterrupted through the ferocious winter, in his words, “no matter what the cost.” Clement spoke primarily in financial terms, but the company’s attitude clearly had tragic human consequences. James Strobridge, the construction boss, indicated that the toll of human life during that season was staggering “In many instances our camps were carried away by snowslides,” he recalled. “Men were buried and many of them were not found until the snow melted the next summer.” In one instance, Chinese tried to escape an avalanche by taking refuge behind a protective rock. They were buried anyway under fifty feet of snow, and their bodies were not found until it melted in the spring. Revealed was the ghastly sight of dead Chinese standing, still holding their shovels in their stiff hands.
During late spring, summer, and fall, the peak work seasons in California’s mountains, the workday lasted from sunup to sundown, averaging about ten to twelve hours a day, though shifts in the tunnels were shorter because of the difficulty of the work. At the end of a day’s labor, the teams of Railroad Chinese, covered in
sweat, dust, and grime, returned together to their living spaces, washed down their bodies, as was their custom after working, rested, ate an evening meal, and perhaps smoked some tobacco or opium before retiring. Moderate opium smoking was not incompatible with labor and opium was not then illegal. Its use was not hidden from the company. The workweek ran six days, with rest on Sunday, when workers recuperated and attended to washing their clothes, grooming, and other personal matters, including tending to their queue, a long braid of hair behind a partially shaved pate. China’s Manchu rulers required men to adopt the hairstyle, and most kept it after traveling to the United States. The workers also enjoyed singing, storytelling, drinking rice wine and American whisky, and gaming, all popular leisure activities among the Chinese in California. If they were close to a town, lottery salesmen might even visit the camp to sell tickets. One could get lucky and win enough so that he and perhaps his friends could leave the line altogether.
Potent odors permeated Railroad Chinese campsites. Scores, if not hundreds, of workingmen lived in close proximity. Privies were nearby and crudely made. Meat and fish were butchered out in the open, food was cooked outdoors in woks, and water was boiled at smoky fire pits that burned constantly. An evening meal might feature salted fish, a favorite dish with a pungent aroma that attracted Siyi people as much as it repelled non-Chinese. The blue smoke from strong tobacco and opium hung over the site and mixed with the sweet aromas of alcohol. Chinese herbal remedies made with herbs, bark, seeds, roots, and dried insects and animals slowly steeped in open pots set among coals, releasing vapors ranging from musty to stomach-turning. Body sweat, unwashed work clothes, socks, boots, well-used bedding, and old canvas tenting produced additional smells that assaulted the nose. Crisp, clean mountain air was found elsewhere, away from the camp.
Ghosts of Gold Mountain Page 12
