Ghosts of Gold Mountain

by Gordon H. Chang

  Stanford and his elite party had to wait three tedious days for the UP party to arrive from the east. A collapsed bridge and torrential rains had delayed them, but their more sensational problem had been with hundreds of UP workers who had taken Thomas Durant, the company vice president, prisoner for nonpayment of back wages. He and the UP had treated their workers poorly and had engaged in financial mismanagement. The angry workers detached his “palace car” and surrounded it with armed guards. Durant had to wire for $800,000 and was warned not to seek help. If anyone came to try to release him, he was told, he would be run into the mountains and hanged or shot “with no mercy.” Durant was finally released on May 8, when he paid the workers what was due them.

  Shortly before the Promontory event, Daniel Cleveland, the writer who was fascinated with the Chinese in California, wrote about the impending completion of the Pacific Railway and its historic significance. He observed that the realization of the long-held dream of a rail line across America was the result of a “singular circumstance.” Chinese, whom he characterized as “the most conservative people in the world” because of their faithful attachment to their old ways and customs, were then building eastward and would soon meet white American workers building westward. When they met, he declared, they would have completed “the most wonderful of the progressive achievements of this marvelous age,” and “China and the United States will then strike hands, and feel more nearly drawn together in sympathy and interest than ever before.” He concluded: “It is very appropriate that the people of the two mightiest nations of their respective continents should unite in the construction of this world’s highway. May it draw and keep them close together, not only in commerce and interest, but in kindly sympathy and good offices.” The Reverend John Todd echoed the sentiments. “China is our neighbor now,” proclaimed the influential and distinguished minister, who delivered the benediction at the Promontory event. “The East and the West embrace; nay, we hardly know which is East or which is West.” And, he emphasized, “The road could never have been built without the Chinamen.”

  In contrast to these expansive and sympathetic observations, a popular local judge at the San Francisco celebration presented a Euro-American chauvinist interpretation when he credited the construction accomplishment to “our people.” In their veins, he said, flowed “the commingled blood of the four greatest nationalities of modern days,” citing the French, Germans, English, and Irish. He made no mention of Chinese or anyone other than those four groups. His comments fit easily into the general tenor of nationalist celebratory remarks and prefigured the erasure of Chinese from railroad history as the excitement of Promontory Summit faded into the past.

  Colorful descriptions of the staged activities, fawning tributes to the railroad barons, and declarations about the glowing commercial promise of the completed railroad fill the written accounts of those who were present at the Promontory Summit event. Photography supplements these texts and provides much less glamorous but fascinating perspectives on the day. The twenty-eight images taken by Alfred Hart, A. J. Russell, and Charles J. Savage on May 10 capture the forlornness of the gritty, dusty site and various scenes of listless people wilting in the sun, waiting for the event to begin. The soldiers in their heavy uniforms look bored and the onlookers curious but unanimated. Utah’s vast plains and hills stretch to the far horizon in the background, dwarfing the human assembly.

  The photographers captured a few images of the formal ceremony, but none are of much interest, and unsurprisingly few of these circulated widely afterward. Instead, A. J. Russell’s image titled “East and West Shaking Hands,” sometimes given as “Meeting of East and West,” showing two locomotives drawn up head-to-head, has become iconic. (This image is shown in the book’s introduction.) The chief engineers for the Central Pacific and Union Pacific shake hands in the center of the photo. Train engineers toast each other with bottles while perched on the front of each engine. A hundred other men look toward the glass-plate camera. The photograph has come to represent the ambitious enterprise itself and the assumed excitement of the day.

  Nowhere in the image, however, are the principals who participated in the formal ceremony. Nowhere is Leland Stanford, Thomas Durant and other UP officials, directors of either company, dignitaries and politicians, women, or the troops. The ceremony had concluded, and they all had withdrawn from the site. The hulking dark locomotives and the largely unidentified crowd remained. Russell arranged them for the impromptu shot. The background landscape is obscured. Perhaps that is why the image resonates: it seems to celebrate the machine and the everyday American, quintessential elements of the national identity outside of time and place.

  But is the scene so devoid of personality? Look closely and you can actually see men in garments indicating they were immigrants from eastern Europe, wearing hats or boots that had come from far away. Most do not appear to be railroad workers at all. They are not wearing work clothes. Other reports mention the presence at Promontory of a diverse array of the people of the West: Native peoples, Mexicans, African Americans, Mormons, and Irish, along with Chinese. But where are the Chinese, the ones who were essential in realizing this moment for the CPRR?

  Some interpret this omission as a deliberate slight, a purposeful exclusion from the historical moment. Though there is no evidence that the photographer arranged the crowd to omit Chinese, their absence has been taken as symbolic of the expurgation, or at least underappreciation, of the role the Chinese played in completing the Transcontinental. One UP official had called for taking a photograph that would show white and Chinese workers together completing the final work.

  Look even closer, however, and a ghostly figure with his back to the camera, blurred because he was moving and not standing still like the rest of the crowd facing the camera, emerges in the mid-range center of the frame. From what can be seen of his tattered and patched clothes, hat, and stature, he is Chinese. He had probably been part of the crew that had laid the last rails. One fellow has his arm stretched out and holds a hat covering a face. Might the hidden fellow have been a Chinese standing next to the moving figure? Other Chinese may be mixed in with the crowd but are obscured. Another photographer, Charles Savage, captured that same scene a few minutes apart from Russell’s and uses a similar composition. In Savage’s work, a Chinese workman with a sledgehammer clearly appears at the left edge of the frame. He looks right at the camera, curious about the goings-on. He is not the ghostly individual in Russell’s photograph, but he may have been another Chinese mixed in with the crowd.

  None of the images taken by photographers at the Promontory event reveal very much of a Railroad Chinese presence. One photograph purporting to show Chinese at Promontory is by John B. Silvis. Remarkably, it does seem to show a crew of nine or ten Chinese working with a white foreman on a track running in front of a CPRR freight house and Silvis’s train car. The image has the title “China section gang, Promontory” (above). The Chinese in the photo are weathered-looking, are holding iron tools, and wear leather boots and loose-fitting, patched clothing. One seems to be a youngster in his teens. These men fit the physical descriptions of Railroad Chinese, and the image provides remarkably clear views of faces—but the photo is not from the May 10 event. Silvis was not present then but took his image more than two years later at a location near Promontory.

  Silvis’s staged photograph responded to public curiosity about, and ignorance of, the Railroad Chinese. They were not invisible, but they were not well known either. As with Russell’s iconic image, they are present in some form, but understanding and appreciating the reality of those individuals who toiled, mile by mile, to get to Promontory continued to elude an American public whose interest soon waned.

  10

  Beyond Promontory

  The American eagle strides the heavens soaring

  With half of the globe clutched in his claw.

  Although the Chinese arrived later,

  Couldn’t you leave them a little sp
ace?

  —HUANG ZUNXIAN, CHINESE CONSUL GENERAL IN SAN FRANCISCO FROM 1882 TO 1885

  The completion of the Pacific Railway inspired a new way of thinking about the United States and its cartography. For decades before Promontory Summit, Americans largely thought of the nation in a North-South orientation. Its main characteristic was the division between slavery, centered in the South, and antislavery in the North, which shaped the country’s politics, culture, economics, social structure, values, demographics, and ambitions. The victory of the North over the slave South eroded this division and established the foundation of a unified nation-state, though the legacy of slavery endured. After the end of the Civil War, the creation of a single, uninterrupted rail line that ran east to west across the continent encouraged a new directional way of thinking about the nation. Americans could see themselves continentally, as a widespread nation of almost contiguous states, once Colorado joined the union in 1876 (Utah remained a territory until 1896), which politically connected the two great oceans of the globe, and beyond the waters, two great divisions of the world: Europe and Asia. For many, the Transcontinental Railroad appeared to realize the providential destiny of the country as a great continent-empire that made a global imagination possible. Travel between New York and San Francisco, either overland or by sea, took months, and could even take one’s life, before the completion of the Transcontinental. After May 10, 1869, one could make the trip in six days, at a fraction of the previous cost, comfortably and safely. California-grown strawberries could go east, as they did with Stanford for his banquet at Promontory, and visitors and settlers could venture out to the Far West. It also meant that Chinese could spread out from California, Oregon, and Nevada where they had concentrated and travel east, and they did. Chinese began to appear throughout the central regions of America, in Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, Arizona, Texas, and beyond to the East and South. They used the railroad they had helped build to find their way all around Gold Mountain.

  While national attention on the completed Pacific Railway focused principally on the commercial opportunities the rail line opened up for America in the Pacific and Asia, or on the national political significance of the iron lines that united the recently divided country, observers also took a keen interest in the demonstrated abilities of the Railroad Chinese who made the line possible. They, in fact, appeared to physically embody the interconnection between the Transcontinental’s national and global significance. The migrant Chinese were the human link with Asia, but they—and their labor—were also poised to help the country attain even greater glory and prosperity. These alien Railroad Chinese, it appeared to many, could be critical for the further development of the American nation.

  An article under the title “The Chinaman as a Railroad Builder,” an encomium to the Railroad Chinese, appeared soon after the Promontory event in at least twenty publications in every region across the country, including the South, the Northeast, the mid-Atlantic, the central states, and the Far West. The National Intelligencer, the main paper for the nation’s capital, and the New York–based Scientific American were among the most prominent periodicals that published it.

  The Chinese laborer “occupied a prominent position” in completing the Pacific Railway, according to the article, because without him, the Central Pacific might never have gotten out of California. It was not just the availability of Chinese labor and its low cost that had been critical; the singular abilities of the Chinese worker were many and admirable. His attitude was exemplary, he had discipline and endurance, and his “mechanical skill is remarkable.” The article was unrestrained even in comparing Railroad Chinese to whites. Chinese working for the CPRR “are more clever in aligning roads than many white men who have been educated to the business, and these Mongols will strike a truer line for a longer distance with the unassisted eye than most white men can with the aid of instruments. A good deal of nonsense had been talked about the Chinaman’s want of stamina, and his alleged inferiority to the white laborer in point of strength and capacity for work. The Central Pacific, however, has pretty thoroughly settled that point: “[after many tests] it was found that John Chinaman had burrowed further into the rock than his antagonist, and was, moreover, less fatigued.” Chinese had shown themselves to be “as fine railroad builders as can be found anywhere” and were now likely to move across the country to work on regional lines and other major construction projects. The article concluded with a salute to this talented workforce: “The Chinaman is a born railroad builder, and as such he is destined to be most useful to California, and, indeed, to the whole Pacific slope.”

  The Daily Alta California, the most prominent newspaper in the state, shared a similar opinion in its glowing report on the completion of the rail line. Reportedly, according to those who compared the work of the CPRR and UP, all declared that the Chinese “do a better, neater, and cleaner job, and do it faster and cheaper than the white laborers from the East.” The paper concluded that there was really no comparison between the two, as Chinese “work with more method, precision, order, and regularity, and seems to take pride in his handiwork.” The CPRR line was “infinitely superior in build and equipments.”

  After the completion of the Transcontinental there was an opening, a brief period of possibility and opportunity for Chinese in America that had not occurred before and would wither by the late 1870s. For several years, however, because of the positive national attention paid to the efforts of the Railroad Chinese, and coinciding with the national commitment to extend democracy to freed people through Reconstruction, a hopeful era for Chinese seemed to arise. Though violent Sinophobia continued to rage among white immigrant groups, many others in America expressed readiness to welcome huge numbers of Chinese into the country and even grant them the privilege of citizenship. Chinese in America actually experienced what might be called a “post-Promontory promise” in America.

  Legend has it that Railroad Chinese found themselves abandoned and discarded after the Promontory Summit event. They were allegedly set adrift in the deserts to find their way back to the Pacific coast. The belief, empathetic as it seeks to be, underestimates the standing the Railroad Chinese had achieved. They had become among the most experienced railroad builders in the country, and local and regional railroad builders valued what the Chinese could accomplish. The reputation of the Railroad Chinese preceded their actual presence around the country. Though many found themselves out of work or returned to China after Promontory, thousands of others located new work around the country. Ng Poon Chew, one of the early leaders among Chinese Americans, later observed that employment opportunities “were not wanting at all” after the completion of the Transcontinental. Even before the Promontory event, Railroad Chinese began to spread far beyond the Pacific Railway line.

  As early as 1868, hundreds of Chinese joined railroad construction crews in the Eugene, Salem, and Portland, Oregon areas. Newspaper articles identified them as “railroad hands,” indicating they were experienced, and favorably reported on their initial efforts. In the months after Promontory, even the UP hoped to recruit Railroad Chinese who had been employed on the CPRR to work on the improvement and maintenance of its line. Hundreds of Railroad Chinese became the main workforce on the line connecting Virginia City and Truckee. In June, five hundred Chinese described as “discharged hands from the Pacific Railroad” traveled by steamboat down the Mississippi to New Orleans, where they were expected to become agricultural workers. News reports in the summer and fall of 1869 tell of Chinese going to the Midwest for railroad work. Five hundred went to St. Joseph, Missouri; hundreds went to Paris, Texas; a thousand began work on the line built down California’s Central Valley. Soon Chinese workers could be found in New Mexico, Montana, Tennessee, Louisiana, Minnesota, Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey. Over the following years, they joined railroad construction projects in many other states throughout the country, where they proved most useful but also sometimes more expensive than first assumed. Some noted that
the CPRR had actually paid a “high price” for the labor of the Railroad Chinese.

  Leading political and business figures publicly explored the idea of recruiting hundreds of thousands of Chinese to fill the many labor needs all around the country. The New York Commercial Advertiser, for example, reported that employers in Charleston, South Carolina, were preparing to bring fifty thousand Chinese for work in the rice and cotton fields. A Memphis, Tennessee, newspaper announced that 100,000 Chinese would come to the Mississippi Valley in a few years. And mass movement apparently had already begun: Chinese were starting to travel to the South and some observers expected them to replace African Americans, now freed from slavery, as the region’s main labor force.

  The novel idea of providing Chinese labor to southern plantations had emerged soon after the end of the Civil War and the end of slavery, but a new burst of interest spread over the South in the spring and summer of 1869. A major commercial convention in New Orleans pointedly resolved to recruit Chinese who had worked on the CPRR to come build railroads in the South. At Memphis in July, five hundred delegates from California and many southern states explored the idea of bringing Chinese directly from China. The labor contractor Cornelius Koopmanschap, who had made a name for himself providing Chinese to the CPRR, attended and claimed that he could help supply Chinese to “meet all the demands of the South.” He was thinking on the order of tens of thousands. Another speaker, Tye Kim Orr, a resident of Chinese ancestry and schoolteacher who claimed to understand labor economics, boldly declared that China simply had “the best labor in the world” and the South should avail itself of it. Once large numbers of Chinese workers came to the southern coastal region, one newspaper predicted, it then could reemerge “as rich and productive as in the days of yore.”