Ghosts of Gold Mountain

by Gordon H. Chang

  If you want to see your parents, turn around now

  Come back home without delay.

  If you return home too late,

  We may only meet in the after world.

  However rich you may be at that time,

  You will be facing our tombs alone and with only your sobs.

  This letter is too short for me to express my feelings,

  It’s all up to your heart whether you will listen to me.

  In home villages, folk songs also offered a way for women to express their own feelings. One vents the anger of a young wife left behind after just six months of marriage and ends with a sly warning:

  At the lunar January lantern show it is crowded;

  Men and women are watching the show eagerly.

  But I just stay in my boudoir alone, alone in the room.

  People are joyful at the lantern festival,

  But I’m gloomy with untold complaints.

  Thinking long and hard I cannot be relieved

  With tears and a desolate mood.

  One day if I become shameless,

  I will shyly peek at a handsome man.

  In songs like this, we see a hint of the tension that must have characterized the relationships between so many Railroad Chinese and their dearest friends and family back in China. No doubt many a railroad worker struggled to reconcile his sincere attachment and fidelity to family with the desire for some momentary comfort and distraction from the hardships he encountered on Gold Mountain.

  9

  The Golden Spike

  The useful and steady Chinese worker became overnight the mysterious Chinaman, an object of unknown dread.

  —HUIE KIN, Reminiscences

  The land east of Truckee changes quickly. Unlike the western slope, where the roadbed rises steadily from the Central Valley up into the summit, the eastern slope drops precipitously into the Great Basin. Contrary to popular misunderstanding, however, northern Nevada, where the line went, is not flat, open country. Nevada, which means “snow-capped” in Spanish, is the most mountainous state in the lower forty-eight states, and the rail line had to wind around the many ranges that run north-south. Thankfully, however, the CPRR could take advantage of river channels in this new terrain, especially the Truckee and Humboldt rivers, as well as gaps through the mountains. The Railroad Chinese would have no more tunnels to bore after they got out of California in the summer of 1868.

  Construction work was nevertheless tough, especially in dealing with new climatic conditions. Northern Nevada is high in elevation, with Reno at 4,500 feet above sea level. Summers are scorching, with daytime temperatures easily reaching into the nineties. Winter temperatures can fall well below freezing, though with much less snow than in California, as the Sierra Nevada catches storms coming from the Pacific. In the Humboldt River valley, the thermometer dropped to 18 degrees below zero in early 1869, freezing the ground to a depth of two or three feet. Workers had to use explosives to clear the way for the roadbed.

  As the workforce surged forward through Nevada and then into the more even, but no more hospitable, expanse of Utah, work continued on the track that had been laid for miles and miles behind them. The company divided the thousands of Railroad Chinese among many different sites, some all the way back in California, to continue to clear snow and improve the completed work. In Nevada and Utah, the company also had them work simultaneously at many sites on the route. There were no supplies readily available in Nevada, and workers used hundreds of horses and carts to transport enormous quantities of construction materials, food for humans and animals, and water over hundreds of miles of desert. Yet while they were scattered across this immense work site, Chinese continued to be the mainstay of the labor force, as new white workers kept leaving to seek elusive fortunes at the latest gold or silver strike, frustrating company leaders.

  In Utah there is high desert. Going from west to east in the direction of the Great Salt Lake, the land steadily rises toward Promontory Summit, which sits at almost five thousand feet in elevation. Harsh climatic conditions mark this grade, called the Promontory Branch of the rail line. Temperatures can range from 28 degrees below zero in the winter to as high as 106 degrees in the summer. With no available water, the soil is parched sandstone, limestone, and quartzites. Scrub brush is about all the vegetation that can survive in this desolate area where the Railroad Chinese continued to build the CPRR to meet the Union Pacific. The leaders of the two railroad companies continued to bicker and maneuver over the actual location of the spot where the two lines would finally meet. All knew that the lines were aiming for the general vicinity of Salt Lake City, and likely to its north, where the land granted by the federal government to the Central Pacific and Union Pacific was most agreeable to railroad construction, but each continued to seek an advantage over the other until almost the last moment.

  When the Railroad Chinese broke out of the Sierra in mid-1868, they pushed eastward with energies that had been concentrated in the High Sierra. From Wadsworth, just east of the base of the Sierra in Nevada, they laid track across the deserts and plains at a phenomenal rate. In ten months, from the fall of 1868 until May 5, 1869, when the line reached Promontory, the work crews laid 501 miles of rail line!

  Though they progressed more quickly than ever, work in the desert in 1868 and 1869 presented new challenges to the Railroad Chinese. Behind them were mountain tunneling, explosives, snow clearing, and retaining walls in the High Sierra. Railroad Chinese followed the route of the Truckee River as it twisted through western Nevada, but then a forty-mile gap, with no water, separated it from the Humboldt River. In between was brutally dry desert with extreme, killing temperatures. Winds could be ferocious. Many workers lived out in the open in tents, but others appear to have had the protection of prefabricated boardinghouses that the company transported into the desert. A reporter for a Reno newspaper observed a CPRR train with flatbed cars carrying a “string of boarding and lodging houses” that were one to four stories high, the tallest nicknamed “the Hotel de China,” with cooking facilities on the first floor and lodging on the upper floors. He saw Chinese peering out of the small upper windows as the passing houses swayed, mounted on a train car. Other smaller, better constructed and appointed buildings housed company officials.

  The channel of the three-hundred-mile-long Humboldt River, running from about fifty miles east of Reno through most of northern Nevada, served as the main migration route through the state. The Central Pacific followed a route that snaked around mountains and through canyons. The challenging geography required Charles Crocker himself to come out and command the mass army. In advance of the railhead, he sent three thousand Chinese graders and four hundred horses to dig and blast through the twisting canyons. They graded “Fifteen-Mile Canyon” in six weeks, “Five-Mile Canyon” in three weeks, and eight-hundred-foot-deep “Twelve-Mile Canyon” with similar efficiency. As they advanced, the masses of Railroad Chinese received praise as being “the real pathfinders of empire.” A journalist witnessed the smoke from the campfires of a thousand Chinese in their encampments along the Humboldt River valley. It was a dramatic scene but one that no photographer ever recorded. Along the way, the railroad spawned Lovelock, Winnemucca, Elko, Carlin, and other towns that eventually became home to hundreds of Chinese who worked on railroads well into the twentieth century.

  A perceptive reporter for Alta California provided a lively account of the energetic work in the contour of Nevada, a dramatic contrast to the grueling effort to get through the granite in the Sierra:

  Long lines of horses, mules and wagons are standing in the open desert near the camp train. The stock is getting its breakfast of hay and barley. Trains are shunting in from the west with supplies and materials for the day’s work. Foremen are galloping here and there on horseback giving or receiving orders. Swarms of laborers, Chinese, Europeans and Americans, are hurrying to their work . . . By the side of the grade smokes the camp fires of the blue clad laborers who could be
seen in groups waiting for the signal to start work. These are the Chinese, and the job of this particular contingent is to clear a level roadbed for the track. They are the vanguard of the construction forces.

  The reporter praises the Railroad Chinese as “systematic workers,” calling them “competent and wonderfully effective because [they are] tireless and unremitting in their industry.”

  The astonishing discipline and efficiency of the railroad workers impressed another reporter who tried to describe what he had witnessed. The CPRR workers appeared to be a veritable factory of human muscle and energy in the desert: “It would be impossible to describe how rapidly, orderly and perfectly this is done without seeing the operation itself,” he wrote. “There are just as many employed as can conveniently work, and no more.” They worked with industrial efficiency, losing no time in continuously bringing supplies and men to the line, where they toiled “with the velocity of steam.” Rail after rail was laid across the field in machinelike fashion, “the same operation repeated ad infinitum.” The company worked crews into the dark desert night, lighting the work area with sagebrush bonfires. Supply trains came along regularly to provision and feed the workers. Time was of the essence.

  They were not pure machines, however, but also insisted on observing their customs, including celebrating their New Year, beginning about February 11, 1869, much to Crocker’s frustration. A visitor to the line at this time offered a toast to Crocker over a meal that unwittingly captured his peculiar dependence on, and identification with, the Railroad Chinese. The visitor hailed the Pacific Railway and declared that it was a “piece of crockery ware made out of China.” The witty play on Crocker’s name delighted the other guests, who broke out in laughter. Yet again, it was clear even to visitors to the line how critical the Railroad Chinese were to this historic undertaking.

  The CPRR wanted to cover the hundreds of miles that stretched eastward before the railhead in order to control as much territory as possible before having to meet the UP in central Utah. Pushed to the maximum of their abilities, the workers completed miles of track in a single day, compared to just one a month on average in 1867 in the Sierra. In October 1868 the CPRR reached Winnemucca, 325 miles from Sacramento, and four months later, in February 1869, it reached Elko, Nevada, 469 miles from the start. The line soon crossed into Utah, where tough grades, canyons, and ravines complicated the route. Five hundred workers labored for two months to cover another deep depression, again called the “Big Fill,” 170 feet long and five hundred feet deep.

  Photos taken by Alfred A. Hart during this time show the Railroad Chinese at work in the Nevada and Utah deserts and plains. No longer are there dense stands of tough evergreens, granite monoliths, and immense snowdrifts, but instead vistas of endless flatland and barren hills. Hart captures the human imprint on the desolate land by including long shots of the rail line extending far into the distance and isolated worker camps by the side of the tracks. One photograph by Hart, titled “China Camp, at End of Track” (above), shows an encampment of approximately forty canvas tents alongside the track, on which the camp train appears to sit. Smoke from what may have been dining cars or Strobridge’s private residential car rises in the background. A body of water is seen at the edge of the frame. The focus, though, is on the worker encampment, which could have held seventy-five or more persons. The tents are of different sizes; one close to the camera is comparatively large and sturdy. The ties and weights holding down the canvas are even and tight. Surrounding it are several medium-sized structures that may have been used for storage and taking meals. Other tents are lightweight, with no sides. They may simply have offered protection from the strong sun. Still others appear to be A-frame tents for sleeping. They have staked-down sides and entry flaps but are insubstantial and are scattered haphazardly. No latrines or washing facilities are evident. Magnification shows perhaps twenty people milling about or sitting among the tents. It may have been Sunday, a day of no work, reserved for resting and attending to personal matters. Wet laundryhangs all around, draped over long poles, clotheslines, and tent tops. Pants, jackets, underwear, and long johns needed cleaning. The men werenot embarrassed to air their modest clothing in public. They probably did not even know a camera was present, and if they did, they would not have cared much. They knew they would soon leave, never to return to this place, and their faces cannot be seen.

  In another photograph, “Chinese Camp, Brown’s Station” (above), Hart captures a similar collection of tents on either side of the track. Washbasins and other personal effects are scattered near the tents, and in the distance a large group of workers is active. In the foreground, two or three men take shelter under an awning—seeking respite, no doubt, from the merciless sun that hung over the baking desert.

  Numerous Chinese workers appear in the distance in several of these images. In “End of Track on Humboldt Plains” (above), a location in eastern Nevada, Hart captures thirty or so workers, mainly Chinese, attending to already laid track. Perhaps they are doing repair work, as they don’t seem especially engaged, or perhaps they have just been staged by the photographer, as suggested by the presence of a woman and a youngster in the lower left. Far in the distance, one can see a fuzzy cloud of activity where workers are pushing the end of the line forward. Clearly visible in the foreground are Chinese workers attired in different ways. Some continue to wear sunhats, others not. Most appear to be wearing high work boots. Notable is the remarkable uniformity of the visible completed road work, the results of Chinese labor. The bed is firm, the ties evenly spaced and well cut. The quality of the completed work of the CPRR line was publicly known at the time to be clearly superior to that of the UP, and the craftsmanship on display in Hart’s photographs proves that the reputation was well earned.

  * * *

  In California, the Railroad Chinese far outnumbered white workers. As the route reached through Nevada and into Utah, however, the composition of the CPRR workforce changed as Native Americans and Mormons began to join. The most significant change came as the CPRR and UP converged and Chinese started to encounter Irish workers from the UP line. As they approached the meeting point, the railroad lines of the two companies ran parallel to each other in different locations, bringing the two groups into direct contact.

  In the fall of 1868, Charles Crocker estimated that ten thousand Chinese, one thousand whites, and “any number” of Native Americans worked for the Central Pacific. Crocker and other company leaders had little direct contact with, let alone understanding of, the men who were actually building the railroad for them. Crocker confessed as much when a San Francisco reporter asked him about the work in Nevada. He said that in addition to Chinese and whites, he had hired men from Native tribes in the Humboldt channel to work for the company. He admitted that he did not know how many were employed because “no list of names was kept” and the men worked in “squads and not as individuals.” Besides, Crocker ignorantly offered, “Indians and Chinese were so much alike personally that no human being could tell them apart.” Perhaps because he viewed them as racially alike, he seems to have used them similarly. To avoid making the mistake of paying an individual twice, he said, the company devised a “scheme of employing, working and paying them by the wholesale.” Overseers counted how many went to work, ate, and then returned to camp at night. The company then paid the overseer, who in turn divided up the wages among the men. Crocker proudly claimed that his method avoided “lengthy bookkeeping,” saved time, and prevented “cheating.” It was also a method that kept both Chinese and Native American workers nameless and anonymous to the company.

  Chinese and Native peoples in the American West had a close and complicated relationship. Records show more than twenty incidents in which Native Americans attacked and killed Chinese miners in the California gold country in the 1850s. When the railroad entered central Nevada, local Shoshones reportedly took potshots at the Chinese, and Charles Crocker also circulated a story about efforts by Piutes to scare Railroad
Chinese from working. He said that Native people had told the Chinese about enormous reptiles or human monsters that hid in the desert and were so large they could devour a human in a single bite. Frightened by the stories springing from the Nevada desert, a thousand Chinese supposedly deserted the line and had to be wooed back by the company. Crocker seemed to relish the story as it simultaneously highlighted Chinese ignorance and gullibility as well as Indian maliciousness.

  In contrast, other pieces of evidence suggest that Chinese and Native peoples developed cooperative, even intimate relationships. Archaeological evidence from living sites of Chinese and Native people point to trade between the two groups. Interviews with Native Americans and Chinese through the years also include stories of close, friendly interaction along the railroad that occasionally included intermarriages that produced children. An unusual and compelling story is handed down through the Lee family of New York about how their railroad worker ancestor survived an Indian attack that left many Chinese dead. He was spared as the tribal chief, who had recently lost his own son, took an interest in the strapping young Chinese man and brought him to live with the tribe for two years before releasing him.