Ghosts of Gold Mountain

by Gordon H. Chang

  The most dramatic example of one of these Chinese retaining walls, which still stands, is located between Tunnels No. 7 and 8 at the summit. A steep ravine cleaved the planned road and it had to be spanned. Railroad Chinese built an immense retaining wall up the ravine to create a roadbed using stone excavated from the tunnels. Begun in the fall of 1867, the work was stopped by winter snows. It resumed early the next spring, though tall snowdrifts continued to blanket the area. Workers bored tunnels under the snow to the base of the ravine, where they brought excavated stone and built upward. Using chisels and a masonry technique employed in China, they hand-cut the granite to make blocks forty to fifty inches long and twelve to twenty inches tall. Smaller pieces fit in the gaps. The whole effort was a giant three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle, with stones interlocking to hold together. No mortar was used. The wall is almost two hundred feet long and seventy-five feet tall and shaped like an inverted pyramid, though deepest at its base set into the mountain. There it is eighty-two feet deep compared to seventeen feet at the top. Hidden from view is a stable rock culvert to divert water. Amazingly, 150 years later it remains not just standing but solid, a marvel of construction. Similar hand-carved rock walls built by Chinese from that era are still found all around northern California today. In 1984 the Truckee-Donner Historical Society named it the “China Wall of the Sierra” and laid a plaque to commemorate the achievement. The wall stands as evidence, according to the plaque, of the “Asian ‘Master Builders’ who left an indelible mark on the history of California and the West.”

  Such accolades came at great cost. Company leaders rarely spoke directly about the risks their workers faced, but comments about the construction effort and journalists’ reports include many references to tremendous dangers from accidents and horrific working conditions. Engineer Gilliss, for example, recalled the terror of snowslides. During winter in the Sierra, slides were so frequent that work at the surface often had to be suspended. Wooden structures could not provide safety: avalanches swept “over the shanties of the laborers” and buried them. The snowslides were “rapid and noiseless” and would sweep away entire teams of men. He recalled that at Tunnel No. 10, a slide killed fifteen or twenty Railroad Chinese in just this way. (Chapter 10 will examine death on the line in depth.)

  A New York reporter recorded his impression on encountering the High Sierra: at Crested Peak, “the rugged precipice towers above you a thousand feet, with its shattered sides looking dreadfully as if they wanted to drop an immense fragment of rock on your head.” Nevertheless, “Chinese courage,” as he put it, rose to the occasion and attacked the cliffs. In the winter, though, work became “impossible,” he wrote. “Avalanches accumulate on crested peak, and breaking away, no one knows when, come crashing down the mountain side.” Twenty years after the winters of the late 1860s, Alfred E. Davis, a longtime California businessman and railroad executive himself, tried to describe the frightful winters in the Sierra to those who had not experienced them firsthand in the years before the railroad. Travel through the high country was almost impossible because of the winds, accumulated snow, and the omnipresent dangers. “Great bodies of snow” hung on slopes and avalanched down unpredictably. The challenges to construction at the time were “almost impossible to measure,” he said. “Think beyond human calculation.”

  Even snow at rest could maim. As late as the spring of 1868, many Railroad Chinese refused to work in the summit area because of the blistering intensity of light reflected from the snow. Mark Hopkins privately reported to Huntington that the only Chinese who did work were those, in his words, willing to go “blind & [have] their faces pealed [sic] and seared as though they had been scalded in the face with scalding water.” E. B. Crocker reported similarly to Huntington, saying that the “snow had blinded a good many, & we have had to buy up all the cheap goggles in the market,” adding, “Think of that. What an item in railroad building.” Unsurprisingly, Crocker noted that many of the Chinese harbored “a horror of snow.” Despite these conditions, more than five hundred of them went out to remove the snow from the tracks in the summit area. These workers were making their mark, on astonished CPRR officials as in the stubborn granite, proving their determination to push the line through the summit.

  8

  Truckee

  The western states of America are sparsely populated for such a large land area . . . Through opening mines, exploiting wastelands, and constructing railways, cities have been gradually formed, of which the city of San Francisco is especially prosperous. All the former work was dependent on recruiting Chinese laborers and by this opportunity Chinese people could earn their living.

  —MEMOIR OF ZHANG YUNHUAN, 1886

  The summit tunnel finally opened to passengers on June 18, 1868. Its completion meant that a train could run all the way from Sacramento to Reno, Nevada, a distance of 154 miles, on “the grandest engineering feat ever attempted by man,” as the Alta California announced.

  The newspaper’s special correspondent, one of the first passengers to cross the Sierra Nevada by rail, hopped aboard the inaugural passenger train in Sacramento to make the historic journey. His eyewitness account provides a vivid sense of the extreme physical conditions the construction workers faced. Full of excitement and awe, his travelogue is also replete with references to the Chinese laborers and inspires wonder at their experiences in building the line through the Sierra.

  The writer describes the changing scenery as the steam-driven train leaves the bucolic Central Valley and passes through the towns of Newcastle, Auburn, and then Clipper Gap. Three hours after leaving Sacramento, the train passes through Colfax and navigates around the infamous Cape Horn. The roadbed is carved into the slope of the mountain, and the train needs to snake along a perilous ledge. “Nervous passengers begin to look around anxiously,” the correspondent writes, “peering with evident trepidation down into the depths below,” where a branch of the American River flows 1,200 feet beneath them.

  At Secret Town, the train reaches 2,985 feet, and peaks appear ahead that are covered with snow. Though it is mid-June, passengers soon see snow covering the ground next to the track and feel the cold air coming down from the mountains. They are thrown back in their seats by the steep climb.

  At sixty-seven miles from Sacramento, the train reaches Dutch Flat, and at Shady Run Station, the train reaches the first tunnel, seventy-five miles from Sacramento. It is five hundred feet in length and 4,500 feet above sea level. Plenty of snow still covers the ground next to the track, and soon the train passes through towering drifts, the way cleared by men working with shovels. “Chinamen are swarming all along the road,” the writer records, and “they have nearly finished their work in this vicinity and are packing up their traps preparatory to passing on over the summit” into Nevada. At more than one hundred miles from Sacramento, the train enters Summit Valley, at 6,800 feet elevation, and then it reaches Summit Tunnel, 1,659 feet in length. Great banks of snow, ice, and rock still cap the summit at more than 7,000 feet.

  At Summit Tunnel, the train must stop. Cars that have jumped the track and other obstacles on the track ahead require the writer and other passengers to disembark and walk carefully through the frigid “Great Bore.” Water pours “down in torrents from numberless crevices and seams in the granite walls and roof of the long, dark, cavernous tunnel,” adding to the passengers’ anxieties over whether they will ever arrive at their destination.

  Upon finally emerging in the open, the writer finds many Chinese teams shoveling away the snow and granite rock brought down by winter slides. The travelers must wait hours before the repairs are made on the line and they can return to a train. It makes only halting forward progress, however, with snowslides and rock still needing to be cleared from the track—and with massive snowbanks hemming the train in on both sides. Snow scrapes the sides of the train in the narrow passageway, “the closest fit imaginable.”

  They pass through more tunnels, ranging from 100 to 863 feet in length, where th
e writer sees “great masses of solid blue ice, hanging down from the walls like stalactites and stalagmites.” Finally, the train begins to descend the eastern slope of Donner Pass on the just completed rail line. It winds carefully and slowly along the “precipitous mountain-sides,” with beautiful Donner Lake below. Because of switchbacks, seven miles of track are needed to advance just a quarter of a mile eastward. Pristine deep blue Lake Tahoe comes into view to the south. Workers are everywhere, cutting trees for the timber needed for the road. The passing of this first passenger train excites even the toughened Chinese workers along the route. With the swinging of their broad-brimmed hats “and loud, uncouth shouts,” the men welcome the roaring machine. The report appears to have inspired artist Joseph Becker’s work “Across the Continent,” seen in chapter 6.

  The correspondent returns their greeting. Inspired and impressed, he praises the Chinese worker, who, “with his patient toil,” and with American energy and capital, “has broken down the great barrier [between East and West] at last and opened over it the greatest highway yet created for the march of commerce and civilization around the globe.”

  No doubt the author was thinking of sites beyond Truckee, the small mountain town just past Lake Donner into which his train chugged after leaving the tunnels and switchbacks of Donner Pass. He was certainly looking, too, beyond Reno—the terminus for this train ride, and a town that had appeared “like magic within a month” after the arrival of the CPRR. Salt Lake City, in the vicinity of which the competing railroad companies would join their lines, was still more than five hundred miles farther on, and the great centers of American commerce—Chicago, New York, Philadelphia—hundreds, even thousands of miles farther still.

  But if the correspondent’s imagination was fired by the little town of Truckee, he could be forgiven. For the settlement—which had been chosen as a forward camp for railroad workers back when the CPRR was still climbing into the western foothills of the Sierra—provided a measure of comfort and security after traversing the intimidating western slope of the Sierra. It was a place that the Railroad Chinese would have known well—a place where they could satisfy their fierce yearnings for diversion and physical release and escape the monotony and stress of their labor, beyond the few hours after work and on Sunday when they could catch some rest and while away their precious free time drinking, smoking, or gambling in their encampments. Getting to a town that offered real pleasures—comfortable lodging, good food, sex, and opium—would have been a blessing. Those diversions and more could be found in the basin below Donner Pass at Truckee.

  Truckee lay a few miles east of the summit and near the border with Nevada. Native people had long lived in the area, whose name itself may be that of an Indian chief. Located in a broad basin at six thousand feet in elevation on the eastern slope of the Sierra, Truckee enjoys pleasant weather through much of the year, ample water resources, great stands of timber, and fertile land for agriculture. For travelers coming from the east, the settlement provided welcome relief from the parched Nevada deserts and the arduous trek up the eastern slope. For those coming from the west, Truckee offered respite after crossing through the High Sierra. Close by are Donner Lake, Lake Tahoe, and several rushing rivers. Euro-Americans began to settle there following the Gold Rush, but the town took on more importance after the Comstock silver strike in 1859, as thousands traveled from California through Truckee to get to Nevada. A few years later, the CPRR made it the base of operations for its work on the long stretch between Sacramento and Reno.

  Chinese had made up a prominent part of Nevada County, where Truckee is located, as early as 1852, when they formed the largest nonwhite segment of the population—almost 18 percent of about 22,000 people, a larger number than Native Americans. Most Chinese were gold miners along the Yuba River, which flowed through the county, but there were also many merchants, launderers, farmers, and storekeepers in towns such as Washington, Nevada City, North Bloomfield, and Grass Valley. Some of the worst violence against Chinese in California had also occurred in the region. They were frequent targets for robbery, torture, arson, and murder, highlighted by the brutal killing of Ling Sing in 1854, discussed earlier in this book.

  Chinese began to settle in Truckee in the mid-1860s, attracted by the work in the growing timber industry related to the railroad and mining operations in the area. The CPRR line reached the town and made it a base of operations in mid-1868.

  Following the arrival of the CPRR line, the Chinese population steadily grew. In winter, hundreds of furloughed workers holed up there to wait out the winter storms until the next work season. Many lived in temporary or abandoned structures. One old barn collapsed under the weight of a winter snow, killing four Railroad Chinese. Others enjoyed the safety and comfort of the China Hotel in the middle of town. Some operated stores, groceries, and other establishments that catered to Chinese. One place was even known as the Oriental Restaurant. Chinese also worked for white residents, providing medical care and other services. From information in the official census of 1870, we know that Truckee was a diverse, multiracial town, with many Chinese, native-born whites, European and Canadian immigrants, a handful of African Americans, including one family with children, and mixed-raced peoples, three of whom are identified as “mulattoes” who were barbers. Four residents hailed from Mexico and one from faraway India. Described at the time as “one of the most populous and bustling places” on the CPRR line, it was a rough-and-tumble hell on wheels, as many of the towns that sprang up along the railroad line were called, with twenty-five saloons in 1868. There, high in the Sierra, it became the location of a major “Chinatown.”

  Truckee became the center of life for many Railroad Chinese during the construction in the High Sierra and then for years after the line was completed. From the mid-1860s until the 1880s, when hostile whites drove almost all of them out of town in what became the infamous “Truckee method” of expulsion, Truckee had one of the largest Chinese populations in the country. Their presence, which once appeared to be permanent, helped make early Truckee one of the liveliest towns in the state. Today it is a vacation hub, especially for winter snow sports and summer mountain recreation, but there is almost no sign, except in the local museum, that Chinese had once helped establish the settlement and had been an integral and important part of its life. Looking at Chinese life in Truckee provides a sense of the lived experiences of Railroad Chinese when they were not at work.

  In 1870, Chinese constituted at least 30 percent of the town’s total resident population of 1,580 and 45 percent of its workforce. Other sources estimated the Chinese population as exceeding one thousand. The seasons and fluctuating availability of work made the population count fluid. Hundreds of Chinese on the census rolls were identified as railroad workers, laborers, and wood choppers. They enjoyed a busy Chinese community that included their own opera theater, restaurants, barbershops, teahouses, grocery stores, boardinghouses, fraternal associations, gambling dens, herbal stores, and brothels. Some Chinese lived and worked next door to whites, while others were concentrated in a specific section of the town. A New York reporter who visited Truckee in 1869 described it as a “city of John Chinamen” with “long streets of Chinese laundries, barber stores, ten stores, peanut stands, and nondescript booths,” all “adorned” with big signs solely in Chinese. The census also listed four of the town’s five doctors as Chinese. The fifth was French. Ah Faw, Sin Wo, Kite To, and Ah Sum were thirty to thirty-five years of age and were trained in traditional Chinese medical practices. Twenty Chinese were listed as cooks, and all, or almost all, of the town’s laundrymen, vegetable farmers, and peddlers were Chinese. Others were prominent businessmen, such as Fong Lee, who had already accumulated real and personal wealth in the thousands of dollars and sported a flashy diamond ring on his hand. Chinese labor contractors advertised in the town’s English-language newspaper that they could provide any number of Chinese laborers on demand. Almost all of the Chinese residents of the town were male, with
just twenty-four listed as female, twenty-two of whom were identified as prostitutes. (It is unclear whether these are self-designations or assigned by another party.) Nine of them were identified as younger than twenty years of age, with Ah Fong and He Low Tow both listed as just sixteen years of age. The oldest was forty, but most were in their early twenties and lived in small groups in the center of town. One household included prostitutes named, curiously, Bling Gouie, age twenty, Bling Ti He, twenty-two, and Bling Gum, twenty-five, possibly all sisters. They lived together with Ah How, age forty, a “wash man.” Two white women were also identified as prostitutes but lived at different addresses.

  The Chinese prostitutes likely lived, and worked, in ramshackle, hastily constructed wood structures. These were likely sordid affairs, as they usually were in San Francisco’s Chinese quarter. Mountain town Truckee held no pleasure palaces where prostitutes dressed in silk, sweet incense filled the air of plush parlors, and customers had lots of money to spend. As in other towns in the rural and mining areas of the region, Truckee’s prostitutes had to survive under sorry, even abysmal, conditions.

  Most Chinese males ranged in age from their teens to their thirties, with the average age in the mid-twenties. Storekeepers and gamblers were older, in their late thirties and forties. One Chinese male-female couple is listed as married, and an infant, recorded as having been born in California, lived with a Chinese woman described as someone “keeping house.” The child’s name was Colfax Ah, likely in honor of Vice President Schuyler Colfax, who passed through Truckee in October 1869. He may even have witnessed the marriage of the baby’s parents. Chinese naming practices for their children in America favored auspicious names, such as those of political leaders. The youngster’s real surname, though, and his fate have been lost forever. Colfax Ah nevertheless appears to mark the beginning for Truckee’s Chinese of an American-born and permanent presence in the town. Tax assessor’s records show thirty-five Chinese property owners, mostly store owners, grocers, and herbalists. One even identified himself as a jeweler. Evidently there was a market for someone with his skills and goods. More Chinese in Truckee would also soon marry one another in Western legal and social fashion and have children there. Though Chinese continued to expand their commercial activities, most populated the ranks of wage workers at timber and railroad companies. Some even participated in Fourth of July celebrations. Truckee’s many Chinese proletarians and store owners formed a highly visible and prominent element in the community, and their future at this key junction of the CPRR appeared for the moment to be hopeful and relatively secure.