Figurines and images of the same deities existed in all the Chinese temples spread throughout California. Among the most common were the fierce lord Guan Gong, derived from a Han dynasty general and possessing courage, strength, and integrity, and Guan Yin, the goddess of mercy and compassion. Worship and respect for departed elders also held a central, almost daily place in Siyi lives. Incense, candles, figurines, and symbolic worldly items such as food and money for use in the afterlife filled altars, including some simple ones constructed in worker camps. Worship was conducted largely without formal clergy or spiritual authorities. Some Railroad Chinese may have performed rituals for their ancestors at the end of every day. But it was the elaborate Chinese festivals that caught the attention of non-Chinese who tried to make sense of the emotion, music, rituals, food, incense, and fireworks that periodically overwhelmed the California towns inhabited by Chinese.
Gui jie or zhong yuan jie, the Hungry Ghost Festival, which occurs on the fifteenth day of the seventh lunar month (mid- to late August) was an especially important one. Loud, raucous, scary, and playful, the festival occurs over several days, culminating in a great evening event. It held special cosmological and existential significance for the Railroad Chinese as the festival sought to appease despondent spirits stranded in the netherworld. They had received no proper burial or had died tragically, and thus could not eat (in Chinese tradition, souls still need to eat, which is why altars always have food) or enjoy restful peace. They were rootless, homeless. Railroad Chinese knew many from among themselves who had perished under tragic or unfortunate circumstances, including while working to build the CPRR.
In mid-August 1868, Railroad Chinese, perhaps Hung Wah himself, participated in gui jie in Grass Valley, a town close to the rail line. In the 1860s it had established itself as the spiritual center for Chinese in the surrounding gold mining country. Local Chinese had built temples for worship and for conducting the annual festivals that structured the Chinese year. Hung Wah may have known about the event weeks or even months in advance, as local leaders would have begun fund-raising for the activities in midsummer. A subscription of twenty-five cents would provide a Railroad Chinese special access to ceremonies. There would be plentiful food, cultural performances, and rituals performed by priests from San Francisco. In early August, local Chinese would have begun to practice their musical instruments for festival performances; the white population could not have avoided hearing the loud and unusual sounds in the evenings. Special pavilions and stages were constructed to hold elaborate presentations that had little in common with familiar Christian practices.
Entering town, Hung Wah would have quickly encountered its Chinese quarter all lit up with a multitude of oil-burning lamps, Chinese lanterns, and candles. Lights and hundreds of colorful paper images of wild animals, devils, and gods decorated the streets. After sunset the unhappy ghosts were to come up from the world below to wander the land and molest the living. Small fires were fed with ritual paper items made in the form of money and valuables to appease the spirits. The local Chinese temple was festooned with rich tapestries, decorations, and calligraphy with propitiating inscriptions. Elaborately detailed, constructed deities large and small abounded: some ten feet tall, ferocious and threatening, others showing a benevolent demeanor. A huge god reigned over his court. Frightening images of displeased ghosts appeared everywhere, with long, thin necks because they were unable to eat on account of their misfortune. Flickering light from altar candles and lamps exaggerated their threatening features and made their shadows dance. Heady incense and smoke filled the air and disoriented the unaccustomed visitor. Spiritual leaders were dressed in white robes with hoods made of light blue satin covering their heads. They engaged in long, mesmerizing incantations, while discordant music from Chinese reed and string instruments, cymbals, and drums filled the air. Chinese men sang in a mournful nasal falsetto.
A reporter noted that the whole scene was “brilliantly illuminated” and “festive,” with the “strange and weird music” heard throughout the entire city all day and night. In a special display stall, a woman sat, her face covered with thick white makeup as she wept tears of red blood for the wickedness of the human world. A noble white horse inhabited one stall; in another a ghoul held forth in court. The music, rituals, offerings, and decorations aimed both to please and to distract the wandering ghosts. Colorful paper boats, both miniature and full-size, might be brought to a nearby river or spring, where they would be set on fire and sent off to the netherworld. And then there was food, always food. Food was left for the ghosts and deities, and the general public, Chinese and white, was well fed too. Long tables groaning with roast pig, chicken, and other Chinese specialties ran down the street through the center of town. The festival ended with the dispatch of a big demon, his manifestation draped with firecrackers and a rocket placed along his spine. The local community assembled their own fireworks from black powder, the same kind used on the railroad. These were ignited, blasting him to pieces and sending his remains into the sky. The world of the living was rid of him for another year, the ghosts propitiated. As one white American who witnessed the festival wrote, “I have crossed the Sierras and passed safely around ‘Cape Horn’ and attended services in the Mormon Tabernacle, but none of these sights were so wonderful as the Chinese camp meeting.”
The rituals of gui jie held a much deeper meaning than the viewer then could have known. For Chinese, more tragic than dying in a foreign country, was to die and not have one’s remains returned to ancestral soil. Becoming “an abandoned soul and wild ghost” (guhun yegui) was a fate worse than death itself. One would be tormented for eternity, bereft of proper interment and spiritual succor from one’s descendants. The Ghost Festival was meant to appease and distract such suffering spirits.
Old-time Chinese Americans to this day continue to recount haunting stories of death long ago in the mountains of California. One story tells of places in the Sierra where, when the night is dark and cold winds blow, one can hear the wailing ghosts of Chinese railroad workers who died during the construction effort. They are lost, suffering, and still seeking a way home to find eternal peace. Others who died had their remains returned, and they are content, but these forlorn spirits are the ghosts of those whose bones were never found, never repatriated. It is in the bones where the soul resides. The forsaken ghosts are doomed to wander Gold Mountain forever. They will never return to their home villages to rest among kith and kin. The Hungry Ghost Festival is the time to comfort them.
And what comfort some of these tragic spirits would need.
6
The Summit
my brother and i
he barely 20 and i, 25 had survived harsh winters
digging under tunnels of snow
lowered in baskets
we chopped holes in granite cliffs
setting dynamite
that tore a road out of sheer rock
many of our friends died
—FROM ALAN LAU, “WATER THAT SPRINGS FROM A ROCK,” 1991
On a sultry fourth of July, 1866, the city of Sacramento celebrated the ninetieth anniversary of the American Revolution in grand fashion. Special activities around the city began just past midnight with ringing bells, exploding fireworks, and illuminated displays, some with Chinese paper lanterns. Then, at 9:00 a.m., as a formal parade started to march through town, a long Central Pacific train pulled into the city’s station, carrying 1,600 passengers from Newcastle, Auburn, Dutch Flat, and other points east along the line, according to news reports. Among those who enjoyed the pleasant train ride—and a warm welcome from the Sacramento spectators—were scores of Chinese railroad workers. Wearing their work clothes, they rode in the parade as part of the CPRR procession in seven horse-drawn carts, standing and sitting amidst wheelbarrows, picks, and shovels. A banner proclaimed, “Pacific Railroad Laborers Ho for Salt Lake, 1876.” Spectators warmly welcomed the CPRR unit, and a local reporter noted that the highly visible Chinese i
n the contingent were worthy representatives of “the army” that was then laboring in the Sierra.
Charles Crocker addressed the gathered crowd. He proudly announced that “the iron horse was now puffing his nostrils at an altitude of over 3,600 feet above the level of the sea” and was within twenty-three miles of the summit. If all went well, he optimistically predicted, the line would reach the eastern side of the Sierra by January, and in two years the line would arrive at the Great Salt Lake. Just how significantly he had underestimated the challenges of getting through the summit and the deserts of Nevada and Utah, Crocker could not yet know.
Huzzahs to the republic and its noble ideals rang out throughout the celebration, which highlighted the victory of the Union in the Civil War, which had concluded just a year earlier. Speakers hailed the end of the curse of slavery and urged support for freed people and their welfare. Speakers reminded audiences that black and white soldiers had fought together and that “all men are created free.” In San Francisco, where the largest celebration occurred, one prominent orator called for liberty for all, explicitly including “negroes and Chinese.”
The Railroad Chinese were becoming recognized, and honored, as the builders of the “grand Pacific Railroad,” which was “belting East and West together in one fraternizing tie,” as one speaker put it. According to the Six Companies in San Francisco, approximately one quarter of all the Chinese then in California, 58,000 in total, were employed by the CPRR or on “other public improvements.” In fact, the terms “Chinese” and “railroad worker” were becoming synonymous, and the possibility that Chinese could be accepted as a worthy element in the still emerging American nation seemed real indeed.
By the time this Independence Day celebration took place, the CPRR line actually extended as far as Dutch Flat (3,144 feet in elevation), sixty-seven miles from Sacramento. From there, the army of thousands of Railroad Chinese, using hundreds of twenty-five-pound kegs of blasting powder every day, continued to make steady progress up and up through locations with picturesque names like Green Bluffs (seventy-one miles from Sacramento), China Ranch (seventy-six miles), Blue Canyon (seventy-eight miles), Lost Camp (eighty miles), Emigrant Gap (eighty-four miles from Sacramento and 5,200 feet in elevation), and then, in late November, Cisco, ninety-two miles from the starting point at almost six thousand feet above sea level. The town boomed as a key base for railroad operations farther up into the Sierra. The company constantly ran one hundred locomotives and hundreds of cars along the completed track to bring materials, supplies, and workers to the different construction sites where work continued concurrently. From Cisco as the terminus, pack animals and human labor had to transport construction materials and supplies off-loaded from the train up into the high elevations and beyond.
The dramatic contrast between the beauty of the land and the ferocious efforts of the workers to push the line forward touched the company’s usually no-nonsense chief engineer for tunneling, John R. Gilliss. In a report several years later to other professionals, he vividly recalled one special experience. One evening in late 1866 after snow had fallen, he went for a walk in the summit area. The path was “strangely beautiful at night,” he said. “The tall firs, though drooping under their heavy burdens, pointed to the mountains that overhung them, where the fires that lit seven tunnels shone like stars on their snowy sides.” As Gilliss described it, “the only sound that came down to break the stillness of the winter night was the sharp ring of hammer on steel, or the heavy reports of the blasts.” The Railroad Chinese night shifts were hard at work in those tunnels.
In a formal report about the company’s work in 1866, CPRR president Leland Stanford, whose prose was usually turgid and uninspired, described the impressive progress in uncharacteristically forceful and evocative ways. The construction work, he emphasized, was “the most difficult ever yet surmounted by any railroad in the United States, if not in Europe,” and with no exaggeration, Stanford called the effort “a herculean task.” The geography was imposing. Track had to be laid over country that was “rugged and rocky, upon a steep mountain side, and up by deep ravines, requiring a continued succession of deep cuts and high embankments, many of which had to be protected by heavy stone walls.” Moreover, “large and long culverts of stone” had to be built “to pass the torrents of water which fall in the mountains.” Rock of the “hardest kind” was required for building these projects.
Ever watchful of the budget, Stanford also stated that the work was costly, as the company had to pay in gold for “all labor.” He was referring, of course, to the Chinese. Still, the advance had not been as great as hoped because of the inadequate quantity of black powder on the West Coast and the company’s “inability to procure as many laborers as we wished and expected.” (All the powder made on the West Coast at the time came from the California Powder Works near Santa Cruz, which began operations in 1864. Here too there was a Chinese connection: all of its 275 workers were Chinese.) The company had wanted to hire as many as fifteen thousand workers but succeeded in attracting only ten thousand, for there were other job opportunities for them. Those who had signed on to the CPRR were “kept constantly at work during the spring, summer, and fall months.” Through the current winter, the company, according to Stanford, continued to employ six thousand men, with thousands of others furloughed until the spring. With the summit still more than fifteen miles beyond Cisco, the company was trying to arrange to bring on twenty thousand workers to assault what he called “the hardest of granite, ironstone, and trap” during the coming year before yet another winter set in. Railroad Chinese were responsible for completing almost all of the work Stanford described. The company’s very existence had become dependent on them.
While Stanford wrote his report in the comfort and security of his home and office in Sacramento, thousands of Chinese were then living in caverns excavated beneath snowdrifts so they could continue to work on tunnels through the granite. Thousands of others worked east of the summit in what was called Truckee Canyon, where the winters were less severe but the work was still dangerous and daunting. Dense forests blocked the route. Workers had to fell and then blast out the stumps of huge pines, up to eight feet in diameter. The frozen-solid ground defied the graders. All materials, including locomotives, train cars, and tons of iron, had to be hauled over the summit on sleds to supply workers eastward. But tunneling at the summit was the most perilous of all the construction challenges in building the railroad. The assignment bordered on the inhuman and required superhuman effort to complete.
The decision on how to get the line through the towering Sierra was not easily made. Would the line roughly follow the dramatic surface contours of the mountains, through multiple tunnels that had to be carved through solid granite? A train would have to wind through the canyons, snake along jagged cliffs, traverse steep ravines, go up and down sharp inclines, navigate twisting switchbacks, and pass through mountain tunnels. Workers would face years of scorching summers at high altitude and horrendous Sierra winters. The line would have to go right through the area where the doomed Donner pioneering party was snowbound for almost four months. Stranded, some in the group had resorted to cannibalism to survive. Knowing this history, the CPRR leadership at one time seriously considered the possibility of avoiding those dangers by boring a single tunnel all the way through the Sierra! As envisioned, it would have been five miles in length, thirty-two feet high and sixteen feet wide, as much as one thousand feet below a surface route. The entry point would have been south of Donner Summit and the exit at Cold Stream on the Nevada side. It was estimated that the tunneling would cost $1 million a mile in mid-nineteenth-century U.S. dollars. There is no indication whether the company gave much consideration to what the workers would have faced laboring in that endless monstrous tube. The company eventually opted for the least bad of the options. It rejected the five-mile tunnel idea and decided on a surface route that still required fifteen shorter excavations through the mountains.
Rai
lroad Chinese had bored five tunnels before they reached the greatest challenge, Tunnel No. 6, or Summit Tunnel, located 105 miles from Sacramento. Seven other tunnels follow over the next eight miles. Two more lay farther east near the Nevada border. Most of the tunnels were not straight but curved, which made the challenge even more demanding and difficult. Tunnel No. 13, for example was 870 feet in length with a sharp curvature. When the bores that had been started at either end met in the center, they were just slightly parallel, only two inches from meeting head-on. The competing Union Pacific had only four tunnels to excavate, and they were much shorter and went through less dense material. The total length of the CPRR tunnels was three and a half times the length of the UP tunnels. But most of the CPRR tunnels required no framing with timber, as the rock was absolutely solid. In all fifteen tunnels, the “laboring force was entirely composed” of Chinese, except for a handful of whites at one tunnel. The Chinese in the summit area numbered up to nine thousand, according to engineer Gilliss, who praised the Railroad Chinese, calling them “as steady, hard-working a set of men as could be found.”
Ghosts of Gold Mountain Page 14
