Ghosts of Gold Mountain

by Gordon H. Chang

  Over the next several years, news reports appeared throughout the country that favorably depicted the Chinese as workers and even just as humans. Seeing Chinese in person for the first time, some Union Pacific workers reportedly exclaimed, “Why, hang it, they are just like men, after all” and did not have tails like cows. Detailed descriptions of work contracts and the labor habits of Chinese addressed the widespread curiosity about them. One article by a Euro-American contractor, for example, told of the costs involved, ways to manage contracted Chinese, the critical importance of an English-speaking “headman” or number one, as he was described, through whom orders were given, food rations, medical care and medicines, bedding, tools, and even vacation time. The writer made it clear that the Chinese required three days off for their New Year holiday.

  Individual Chinese also moved across the country. Former Railroad Chinese cooks started restaurants; doctors opened herbal stores; contractors became merchants and shopkeepers. Chinese workers joined at least sixty separate railroad projects across the country.

  One of the largest projects was the Central Pacific line, which stretched down the San Joaquin Valley toward Los Angeles. More than a thousand Chinese worked on it, including a treacherous stretch through the Tehachapi Mountains that required boring seventeen tunnels. A thousand Chinese attacked the San Fernando Tunnel to break into the Los Angeles basin. At almost seven thousand feet in length, it became the longest tunnel west of the Appalachians. Thousands then worked on the Southern Pacific rail line, which linked Los Angeles to Arizona and Texas. The largest employer of Railroad Chinese was the Northern Pacific Railroad, which constructed rail lines in Washington, Idaho, and Montana in the 1870s and 1880s. Six thousand, and perhaps more, worked on the NPRR. Historical recovery of their experiences on these lines has just begun.

  The Railroad Chinese, and their reputation, spread beyond the borders of the United States. For the next several decades, Chinese, including some who worked on the Transcontinental, helped build rail lines on every continent. They worked by the thousands in Hawaii, Cuba, Mexico, Peru, and even French colonial Africa. Even in far-off Britain, where the railroad construction boom began in the 1830s, the Pacific Railway and Railroad Chinese attracted close attention. Special correspondents produced reports for periodicals across the country considering the global implications of the Transcontinental and the contributions of the Chinese in completing it. One British newspaper called the Chinese migration to America a “revolution” and more historically important than the “intrigues and machinations of crowned heads or wily politicians.” Chinese who worked on railroads in the United States returned to China and played prominent roles in its early railroad history. One man in particular, Chen Yixi (Chin Gee Hee), who lived much of his life in the Seattle area, became legendary for his efforts to build railroads in his home area in the Siyi.

  In the 1880s, some ten to twelve thousand, many reportedly Railroad Chinese from the United States, labored to complete the challenging four-hundred-mile-long western portion of the Canadian trans-Pacific line through the Canadian Rocky Mountains. Work on the line was similar to that on the Pacific Railway, with extensive clearing of lands, grading for the track, laying ties and track, blasting rocks, and opening twenty-seven tunnels through granite mountains. Recruitment and management by labor contractors was similar to that on the CPRR. Workers came from the Siyi and formed teams like those in the United States. There was great loss of life and suffering. They sustained a high death rate, with estimated numbers ranging from six hundred to fifteen hundred, some 10 percent of the workforce, or one or two fatalities for each mile of track they laid. Further research might show that the Canadian experience, which is much better documented than the history of the CPRR, could serve as an analog to that of the United States in terms of work experience and fatalities.

  The CPRR’s recruitment of workers and the continuing demand for Chinese labor to meet American needs stimulated Chinese migration into the United States from 1869 to 1877. In those years, fifteen thousand Chinese entered the United States on average each year, with more than twenty thousand arriving in 1873. These are far lower than the grand numbers that were tossed around by the Big Four and post-Promontory entrepreneurs but appreciably greater than in previous years and indicate that Siyi people believed opportunities in America had not just continued to exist but expanded. The Chinese population in the United States increased by 50 percent in the decade from 1870 to 1880.

  In New York City alone, in 1879 Chinese had established three hundred laundries, fifty groceries, twenty tobacco stores, ten drugstores, and six restaurants and other establishments; there were another fifty Chinese laundries and six cigar stores in Brooklyn, which was not yet part of New York City. In Jersey City, three factories employed Chinese labor exclusively. All told, there were more than 2,500 Chinese men living in the area, and many had established unions with local white women, mainly “Spanish” (that is, probably Latin American) and Irish, with three hundred marriages having already occurred. With the anti-Chinese sentiment rising in the West, it was predicted that “considerable numbers” would soon settle in New York and other eastern cities.

  With the spread of Chinese across the country and their employment in construction projects, fields, and factories far distant from the West Coast, a palpable shift in attitudes toward accepting Chinese as people and not just as laborers began to appear. The Sacramento Daily Union noted this “awakening interest” in the “Chinese question” on the East Coast, and though some detractors continued to characterize them as slave-like, other observers adamantly argued that Chinese were industrious, self-reliant, and “remarkable for their intelligence and good general qualities.” In no way should they be considered servile coolies or slaves, their defenders argued. A New York newspaper declared that tarring this “most important labor movement of the age” with such labels was degrading; these people were not “coolies” but should be called by their “proper name”: “Chinese.” The years of toil put in by the Railroad Chinese—their dues, so to speak—undoubtedly helped prompt this unqualified declaration of regard for them.

  The Cincinnati Commercial, the city’s major newspaper, used an eye-catching headline that echoed this emerging respect for Chinese in the country. The lead article, covering its entire front page under the inspired headline “The American Chinamen,” observed that the Chinese were making a place for themselves in the country. The heartland newspaper openly welcomed them as excellent new additions to the national family and observed that the “Chinese labor question” was now the most important issue before all “intelligent laboring people everywhere in the United States.” The correspondent shared the results of his recent personal investigation of the Chinese population in California and offered high praise of them. The Chinese were a people of “industry, peaceableness, honesty, patience, conscientiousness, temperance, frugality and cleanliness,” he offered, and from his discussions with CPRR officials, he learned of their inestimable contribution to the recently completed railroad project. Chinese construction work, he concluded, was completed “with perfect order and a discipline never heretofore attained on any public work in the country.” They were far superior in industry, behavior, and ability than the Irish, the other immigrant group to which the Chinese were often compared. In fact, even in language acquisition, the writer claimed, the Chinese learned English faster than European foreigners. More Chinese than Irish could write their names in English, he declared. All in all, he was so thoroughly impressed with the Chinese, he insisted that their “manly straightforward being” would soon “win the confidence and support” of the people in the East. Indeed, the Chinese possessed all the “elements desirable in laborers and mechanics.”

  In August 1869, the well-regarded New York business periodical the Merchants’ Magazine and Commercial Review eagerly anticipated the arrival of the industrious Chinese on the East Coast and in the South, not only for their potential contributions to the workforce, but also beca
use they complemented the vast migration of immigrants from Europe. Millions had come to the United States from Europe, the newspaper observed, and now it was the turn of “millions” of Chinese to supplement the European immigrant population. As the provocative headline of the article announced, they were the “Coming Chinese,” and they should be welcomed. When they first arrived, the author noted, the Chinese suffered persecution and abuse, but they persevered and have now “asserted their right to labor.” Their great work on the Central Pacific Railroad had proved their worthiness. They were what an American should be: “frugal, industrious, teachable, patient and intelligent.” They were described as literate in their own language and “anxious to acquire our language” and send their children to public schools. Soon, the newspaper anticipated, they would migrate throughout the southern states and become “familiar faces in New England factory towns,” where, it was optimistically predicted, they would assimilate with the local populations and attain “homogeneity.” Some white observers even believed that Chinese would before long replace Native peoples and African Americans, who were allegedly decreasing in number, as the leading racial minority in the country. Was it not symbolically noteworthy that “the American, the European, and John Chinaman” were represented at the event at Promontory, one journalist observed, but not “the negro and the Indian,” asking, “Was not their absence significant?”

  The appearance of new gendered terminology for the Chinese in popular discourse also indicates that their toil qualified them, at least in the informed opinion of important observers, as positive, manly additions to the nation. Articles began to praise them as worthy, virile immigrants: they were called not just Chinamen, as they had been customarily designated, but simply “men.” In May 1870, the influential nationally circulated periodical Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper began an unprecedented series of major articles under the telling, and frequently heard, title “The Coming Man.” Famed Civil War correspondent and traveler to China Thomas W. Knox wrote the series, and illustrator Joseph Becker provided detailed visual impressions of many dimensions of Chinese in America, including their travel and arrival, interior locations in San Francisco’s Chinatown, including temples and theaters, scenes along the Pacific Railway and other work sites, and life in their private spaces. The depictions are respectful and detailed. Such comprehensive press attention to the Chinese in America had never been seen before. The series ran weekly for months, with each installment presenting a lengthy description of the life, personality, and ways of the Chinese. Knox predicted, they “will come to our western shores, not by dozens or hundreds, but by thousands and ultimately hundreds of thousands.” Moreover, they are a “recuperative race” and will “multiply rapidly,” he wrote, as “they are not effete,” echoing the new gendered image given them. By the close of the century, he asserted, their numbers would dominate the American West, and in time the whole “new world” would likely be “as Asiatic as it now is European.” For Knox, that future America full of Chinese was not frightening, and though it was not imminent, the development would be just a matter of time. The vision of Chinese as the “coming man” so captured American imaginations that other writers circulated both the phrase and the sense that America was on the verge of a veritable social transformation.

  Charles Crocker himself also employed gendered language to praise Chinese. He maintained that the CPRR had treated them “like men,” and they in turn treated the company “like men.” The Chinese, he publicly declared, “are men, good and true men.” Extending the hand of manly equality was Crocker’s way of expressing sincere respect for those who had made him very wealthy.

  But perhaps the most telling evidence of the possibility of change in the attitude of white Americans toward Chinese was the post-Promontory public discussion about extending to them the right to become naturalized citizens. The post–Civil War political climate in the country prompted debate about naturalization privileges and race and the Promontory event in 1869 had called attention to the growing presence and apparent importance of the alien Chinese in the country. So too did the successful conclusion of the Burlingame Treaty between China and the United States in 1868. Designed by Anson Burlingame, an American who had served as Lincoln’s minister to China and then became China’s minister to the United States, the agreement sought to establish a relationship of equality, mutual benefit, and reciprocity between the two countries. The treaty committed the parties to extending equal rights, protections, and privileges to the respective subjects of the two countries, including the ability to freely immigrate.

  Many in the United States took these domestic and international developments to mean that the existing prohibition against Chinese naturalization should be dropped. The exemplary record of the Railroad Chinese also convinced many that Chinese would make decent and desirable Americans, and they openly said so. After studying California’s Chinese, one writer from the Midwest confessed in September 1869, “I have been weaned of my prejudices against them,” and boldly declared, “I am thoroughly impressed that they would make good citizens.” A San Franciscan explicitly linked the issue to the centerpiece of national politics at the time, saying that extending citizenship to Chinese was consistent with, and required by, the objectives of Reconstruction. The Radical Republican principle that “all men are created equal” must be “impartially construed so as to take in the whole human race,” he claimed, and because the Radical Republicans considered Chinese “the equal of the Europeans,” the two races must “come here on terms of equality.” Chinese should have access to citizenship, and for Radical Republicans in Congress to grant anything less would make them “hypocritical dogs.” As early as August 1869, there were even reports about Chinese who had recently arrived in the Mississippi Delta voting in local elections in Louisiana.

  In 1870, Congress passed a new Naturalization Act that expressly protected black former slaves who had been born outside the United States by extending naturalization privileges beyond whites to persons of African ancestry. The act, however, stopped short of eliminating all racial requirements. Leading congressmen had argued for doing just that, but others, especially from the South and West, vehemently opposed doing so, as it would mean Chinese would be admitted to citizenship, which was unacceptable to them. Nevertheless, the issue did not go away. Efforts to remove racial categories and extend naturalization to Chinese persisted through the 1870s, though without success. Chinese continued to be denied naturalized citizenship until 1943.

  As Americans and Chinese wondered about improved prospects for a future in America, Chinese also looked back on their recent experiences to address that most important of life’s responsibilities for them: attending to the departed. Even before the concluding events at Promontory Summit, Chinese began planning on recovering the remains of the many Chinese who had died during the construction effort. In 1868, a year before Promontory, Chinese leaders in San Francisco dedicated $10,000 to meet the expenses for disinterring the bones of a reported “three hundred Chinese persons” who were buried along the route of the Pacific Railway for repatriation to China for final burial, as custom dictated. This now raises one of the most sensitive and controversial issues in Railroad Chinese history: How many Chinese died during the building of the rail line?

  Chinese who came to America risked death from accidents, disease, even murder. Death on board ship was a regular occurrence during the long voyage from China. The death or suffering of a “Chinaman” for most whites was not especially noteworthy. An example of this callousness is found in the travel journal of an American writer, Lucius Waterman. One day during his voyage across the Pacific, Waterman noted, a Chinese crewman “was attacked by a very peculiar disease, quite unknown among all civilized nations.” Waterman added that he might enter details in his journal at a future time “if I feel like it.” Either the same Chinese or another, Waterman also wrote, “put an end to his existence by jumping overboard after first attempting to kill himself.” He “was sufferin
g with a fever and was somewhat insane. No funeral honors in consequence. Passed the time as usual.” The loss of a Chinese life was barely an event worth noting.

  It is an understatement to say that California, and all of the American West, was a violent and dangerous place in the nineteenth century, but there was also no equal opportunity in suffering violence. Native peoples faced methodical, systematic murder. The remains of thousands of Chinese, many of whom died violently, were regularly returned back to their home villages from America over the years. Spiritual belief required that the bodies of the dead be repatriated so the deceased could be near their families for eternity. Shipping companies accrued a handsome profit from the practice. Famed New York jurist and future U.S. attorney general Edwards Pierrepont cynically noted in an 1868 address that American shipping companies were then engaged in a most advantageous exchange: they “take out dead Chinamen” to China and “bring back live ones,” he said. “Carcasses of defunct Chinamen” is how the Sacramento Daily Union crudely described the remains returned to their homes.

  The circumstances of daily life posed great risk for Chinese along the Transcontinental. Where they lived and worked, and even how they traveled, could kill them. Violent death could come suddenly, anonymously, and take many in a second. On the Sacramento River south of the starting point of the Central Pacific in October 1865, boilers of a steamer suddenly exploded and destroyed almost all of its forward decks and what was called the “Chinese saloon.” It was an undesirable place reserved for deck supplies and Chinese passengers, some of whom may have been on their way to work on the railroad. The blast killed fourteen whites and more than thirty Chinese “instantaneously” with hot steam, as was evident from the scalded skin on their recovered bodies. The Chinese were twenty-nine men and one “Chinawoman.” Men identified as “scoundrels” were later arrested, carrying packets and satchels of money and personal items taken from the bodies of the dead Chinese.