Ghosts of Gold Mountain

by Gordon H. Chang

  As they did elsewhere, Truckee Chinese enjoyed traditional leisure activities such as kite flying, music and singing, and shuttlecock kicking (jianzi), precursor of today’s hacky sack. Journalists mentioned seeing books for sale in Chinese stores and many Chinese reading during their leisure time. Fictional tales of adventure, desire, magic, spirits, and political intrigue were favorites among Chinese readers. They also wrote letters home and received mail from relatives and friends. Reading these out loud would entertain local friends.

  The most common leisure activity for Railroad Chinese was gambling. It had been an accepted part of life in southern China, especially in towns and cities, and Chinese brought thousand-year-old games with them to America. Abundant evidence of such gaming has been found at Railroad Chinese campsites, including discarded six-sided dice, playing cards, dominoes, various forms of tokens including buttons, and small-denomination coins. Some Chinese games required strategy and involved just two or three players, such as dominoes or the board games weiqi, or “Go” in the West, and “Chinese chess” (xiangqi), which is similar to present-day Western chess. These are lightweight and simple to set up, and could easily be played at a campsite. Games of chance using dice or cards invited wagering, but serious gambling required more elaborate arrangements in the social halls of Truckee.

  The most popular game for Chinese in nineteenth-century America was fantan (repeated division), which bears similarities to today’s roulette. It was simple to play, but captivating with its suspense. A croupier would dump a bowlful of tokens, such as buttons, coins, or even dried beans, onto a square cloth or mat. He would carefully remove four of these at a time with a pointed stick, but before he did so, players numbering as many as sixty would crowd around the table, placing their bets on the number of tokens, from one to four, that would remain with the last removal. Winnings were based on the odds of covering one or several numbers, minus a cut for the house, of course.

  Another extremely popular game, still widely played today, was called baige piao (white pigeon script), the forerunner of today’s lotto, keno, and even bingo. The game’s name may have come from the old practice of using homing pigeons to deliver woodblock-printed paper game sheets. These typically listed eighty different Chinese characters arranged in a grid of small boxes. Bettors would black out their choices and return the sheet to the lottery operator, who would draw tokens with characters on them from a container to determine winners, if any. (As the game became Americanized, numbers replaced characters.) It was easily and quickly played and did not require a bettor to be present at the drawing, so any number of people could bet with the use of runners. Odds heavily favored the gambling houses, which made hefty profits off the hardworking Railroad Chinese. Dens could operate all day and night and further separate workers from their savings by selling them other pleasures such as women, food, and opium. Some men became professional gamblers and are listed officially as such on the census rolls. The Chinese-owned gambling dens could also operate behind groceries and other storefronts, making the owners wealthier than selling cabbage.

  By the time the Pacific Railway reached Truckee in April 1868, one person who would have been badly in need of its diversions was Hung Wah. After enjoying a hot hand in the first half of 1866, Hung Wah suffered a devastating reversal of fortune. His numbers appear to have dropped precipitously in the late summer and fall of that year, to just a couple of hundred workers for August and September—a stark contrast to the nine hundred workers he had commanded in July. Then listings for him in the payroll record disappear for the rest of 1866, the last year for which there are extant records.

  The drop-off in Hung Wah’s business may have been temporary, but another explanation could be that he faced increasing competition from the Euro-American-owned companies that were taking over more and more of the lucrative contracting business. White-owned companies like Egbert, Booth and, most important, Sisson, Wallace accounted for a fast-growing proportion of the workers. In June 1866, Sisson received almost $61,000, which equated to about two thousand workers. An independent businessman in San Francisco named Cornelius Koopmanschap became perhaps the largest individual labor contractor in these years. Little is known about him and his operation, but he was said to have arranged for hundreds, and possibly thousands, of Chinese to come to the United States and work for the CPRR.

  Turmoil in his personal life may also have disrupted Hung Wah’s business. On the evening of January 9, 1867, his longtime Auburn business partner and friend William McDaniel was brutally murdered in the store he kept across the street from Hung Wah’s. McDaniel’s wife found her husband’s lifeless body with deep cuts to the back of his head and his neck, which severed his spinal column. She reported that she had seen a Chinese man fleeing the scene, though she did not get a good look at his face. A bloody hatchet was found beneath the body, and robbery was assumed to be the motive. The safe was open and partially emptied. Outraged local whites immediately raised $3,000 as a reward for anyone who would identify the perpetrator. Hung Wah personally took the lead among Chinese to raise an additional $1,000, and California governor Frederick Low contributed a further $500 to the reward.

  The people of Auburn, whites and Chinese alike, were deeply distraught. The local newspaper described McDaniel as one of Auburn’s “best and most estimable citizens.” All the town’s businesses shut down for his well-attended funeral. Chinese deeply mourned too. McDaniel had been friendly with many of them, and he and his family even lived in the Chinese neighborhood. To honor his death, local Chinese, likely including Hung Wah, commissioned a special large headstone for his grave site. Alongside the English inscriptions on it are Chinese characters honoring McDaniel’s memory, chiseled into the marble with skill and care. The marker remains standing in Auburn’s old cemetery, a monument to a rare moment of friendship in tragedy in early white-Chinese relations in California.

  Within two weeks of the crime, a white resident identified as a former tax collector and self-declared speaker of Chinese provided information to the police about the crime and offered a lurid account. While hidden in evening shadows outside Hung Wah’s store, the informant said he overheard men known as Ah Tom and Ah Sing surreptitiously talking about the murder. Ah Sing, identified as an employee of Hung Wah, allegedly disclosed that he had killed McDaniel. The two then separated, with Ah Tom reportedly going to a gambling house and Ah Sing to a brothel. After hearing further incriminating conversations between the men over the next two days, the informant reported to the authorities, who found McDaniel’s property hidden among Ah Sing’s belongings kept in Hung Wah’s store. At Ah Sing’s trial, Ah Tom vehemently denied that the conversations ever occurred, but McDaniel’s widow testified that it was Ah Sing whom she had seen at the scene, on the basis of his body size and “appearance in these clothes” that he wore in the courtroom. A jury soon found Ah Sing guilty of murder, and the court sentenced him to hang for the crime. Invited by the town’s sheriff, twenty townspeople, including Hung Wah himself, witnessed the execution on June 28. Just before a noose was placed around Ah Sing’s neck, he reportedly attempted to speak to Hung Wah in “broken English.” What was said has been lost to history.

  A year later, and one month after the Summit Tunnel opened for business, Hung Wah suffered further misfortune. In July 1868 a huge fire destroyed the entire contents of his shuttered store in Auburn’s Chinatown. No one was present or injured. The cause was highly suspect, for, as the local newspaper reported, the “fire was undoubtedly the work of an incendiary.” The press did not speculate about what if any connection there might have been between the fire and the McDaniel murder.

  Given his string of bad luck, it would not be surprising if Hung Wah had sought comfort in Truckee in the fall of 1868. It had been a tough work season; he would have needed time away from the line and life in the rude encampments there. To get into town, he could simply have hopped aboard a supply train that regularly went up and down the line.

  Once in Truckee, H
ung Wah would have had any number of options for taking his mind off his troubles. If he didn’t go straight to a gambling parlor, he could have visited a barber in the Chinese section of town to have a good shave, shampoo, and bath to remove the accumulated grime from his body. Having a Chinese physician, perhaps Ah Faw, attend to an ailment might be his next stop. While there, he could purchase bags of medicinal herbs and other ingredients from China for tonics he would make back at his camp. With the essentials out of the way, he might visit eighteen-year-old prostitute Ah Fong, who lived right next door to Ah Faw. He might even have paid a bit more to her keeper so he could linger a while longer to enjoy her touch and scent.

  Paying for sex probably did not trouble Railroad Chinese like Hung Wah. Even Ah Fong’s miserable life might not have given him pause. Prostitutes of all backgrounds and from around the world were everywhere in the West. Other Chinese men, even devout Christians, thought of visiting a brothel as simply “taking a rest.”

  If Hung Wah happened to visit the gambling house in Truckee, and if fortune smiled on him, he might have treated himself—and perhaps some friends—to a restaurant meal of delicacies such as imported preserved duck eggs (pidan), fresh steamed white rice with fatty pork sausage made by a Chinese butcher in Virginia City, Nevada, and just harvested bok choy (baicai), grown in town. A little dish of salty, pungent doufuru, fermented bean cake and a specialty from Siyi, might have been served as a condiment on the side. He could finish the meal with a hot bowl of “purple soup” (jicaitang), made from pork bones and seaweed, which gave it its rich, dark color. On his way back to the train line, he could even have enjoyed a few dried, sweet lychee (lizhi) imported from tropical southern China. If he were feeling generous, he could have brought black tea from his home region, packed inside a hollowed-out dried orange peel, back to camp to share with friends. It would have given them a special taste of home—memories to savor in the hard times ahead.

  Towns along the railroad route had many appealing features, but none would have excited the Railroad Chinese so much as the brothels. The reason was simple: there were no women among the thousands of Chinese who worked on the Transcontinental, and very few, other than prostitutes, lived in any of the small towns along the line.

  Payroll records, memoirs, and newspaper reportage mention not one Chinese woman working for the CPRR before Promontory. Later census rolls and the records of other railroads name a few Chinese females, including ten who lived in Truckee in 1880 and were listed as working for the railroad in undisclosed capacities, but none appear to have worked during the construction of the Pacific Railway. Physical absence from the line, however, did not mean that women were unimportant or not part of the Railroad Chinese story. They were very much a part of the lived experience of the Chinese workers, fully present in their emotions, dreams, and aspirations, as well as on occasion in their physical lives away from the rail line.

  The desperation of Chinese males for contact with Chinese females produced riotous moments such as the incident described by a reporter who witnessed the arrival of almost four hundred Chinese women on board the steamer China in San Francisco in March 1869. “Many hundreds” of Chinese men crowded the dock to watch the disembarkation and processing of the women. One by one they were brought up from steerage to the wharf, a teasing performance that only raised the men’s level of “excitement” to “its highest pitch.” The strenuous efforts of the entire police force were required to control the situation and keep the men away from the women. After disembarking, the women were segregated at one end of the dock and searched for contraband. After they received clearance, police placed them in wagons and carts to take them to different locations in the city. An officer accompanied each vehicle to protect the women, but Chinese men still tried to grab them. Loud, angry arguments that almost broke out into fighting escalated among the competing men as they tried to pull women, and the accompanying police officers, from the vehicles. Not until evening did the scene finally quiet.

  Visiting brothels was the crudest interaction Railroad Chinese regularly had with Chinese women, and indeed prostitution was a disreputable and marginal activity in China. The Reverend Otis Gibson, who had served as a missionary in China for a decade before he returned to America and worked among Chinese in California, held that the level of “chastity” in China was as high as in America and that prostitution was considered just as degrading.

  But in America, where the sex imbalance between Chinese men and women was so great, and the ties of marriage and family weak to nonexistent, frequenting prostitutes became a common activity for many Chinese men. The large amounts of ready cash they gained from mining and wage work meant they had disposable income far beyond what they ever had in China. In 1868 the Six Companies, which vehemently condemned prostitution for moral, social, and political reasons, estimated the number of Chinese prostitutes in California in the thousands. Other estimates placed the percentage of Chinese female prostitutes in San Francisco from 1860 to the early 1880s in the range of 70 to 90 percent of all Chinese females. The number of Chinese prostitutes in San Francisco in the late 1870s may have been as high as 1,200. The proportion of Chinese prostitutes in the population of small towns in the rural areas could rival that in San Francisco. Approximately 321 Chinese lived in Grass Valley in 1870, and almost all of the thirty-four females were considered prostitutes. In Nevada City in 1870, the census listed more than one hundred Chinese females living in the city, with ninety-four identified as prostitutes. Even allowing for exaggeration of the numbers because of anti-Chinese prejudices that held Chinese women to be immoral and Chinese men debased, the numbers still indicate that a very large number of Chinese women worked as prostitutes.

  Life for most of these women, who were often bought and sold by Chinese criminals, was horrible and short. Enslaved as prisoners or sold by impoverished parents in China, indentured young women were brought by traders to America, where they were treated as commercial property. Death by their own hand or from illness took many at an early age. Others found an escape either by fleeing to Christian missions for protection or by buying their way out of their condition. Some married and left the trade. In the 1870s, a young woman in her teens might be obtained in China for as little as $50 and then sold in America for $1,000. These transactions were sometimes conducted as formal business dealings, with women signing contracts stipulating prostitution work as repayment for the loan of money, passage expenses, and living costs. A prostitute could produce as much as $2,500 profit for her owner in a single year.

  In the 1870s, for example, an estimated seventy Chinese prostitutes lived in Virginia City, Nevada—almost the entire Chinese female population. Bought in San Francisco for $200, they were resold in the area of the Comstock Lode for between $800 and $1,000. The high point in numbers of Chinese prostitutes in California appears to have been the 1860s through the 1870s, during the construction of the CPRR. After its completion, the number steadily fell. The proportion of Chinese prostitutes in San Francisco in 1860 was almost six hundred out of a total Chinese female population of 681, or more than 85 percent; in 1870 there were approximately 1,500 Chinese prostitutes in a female population of 2,000, or 71 percent, and in 1880, an estimated 435 prostitutes out of 2,000 females, or about 21 percent. In Truckee, Chinese prostitutes declined in number too. The 1880 census lists none. The fall in numbers appears to have been the result of local suppression efforts and federal legislation that specifically targeted Chinese women who were suspected of being prostitutes, as well as a growing number of women who exited the trade and married (sometimes to Chinese railroad workers). From the 1870s onward, records from throughout California show that the number of Chinese, men and women, who married increased steadily.

  Though many Chinese men frequented brothels, community leaders forcefully condemned prostitution and the enslavement of women. Prostitution caused great harm, according to an alarmed Six Companies in 1868, when it published an open call to the state to find ways to suppress the acti
vity. Because of the sex business, the organization declared, “the industrious become idlers” and “the rich become poor. Poverty leads to shamelessness; shamelessness breeds lawlessness.” Crime, the group maintained, was “on the rise as thievery and robbery occur more and more, causing strife and disorder.” Prostitution, literally and metaphorically for the Six Companies, was “a disease for the country.” Ruthless criminals who controlled the trade, which was closely linked to opium and gambling, also threatened the authority of legitimate merchants. For all these reasons, the Six Companies wanted California to stop the business entirely and prevent the further entry of Chinese prostitutes into the state.