Ghosts of Gold Mountain
Page 26
Not all deaths were by accident. From the first arrival of Chinese migrants in the early 1850s, villains commonly selected them for robbery and vicious violence against their person, especially if they were carrying gold panned from California streams. If by luck they discovered a rich source of the precious metal, their good fortune could turn to misfortune and horrible slaughter at the hands of men who wanted the wealth for themselves. In 1856 the Shasta Republican estimated that “hundreds of Chinamen” had been “slaughtered in cold blood” over the previous five years by “desperadoes.” The newspaper angrily observed that although “the murder of Chinamen was of almost daily occurrence,” there had been only two or three convictions. Many in California opposed executing a white man for murdering a Chinese, according to the paper.
Killing Chinese could also be a planned, collective action. In Grass Valley in the spring of 1868, near the CPRR line, a gang identified as Ku Klux Klan members robbed and lynched four Chinese. But the worst mass killing of Chinese was yet to come in the 1870s and 1880s, when massacres of dozens of Chinese occurred throughout the West.
One tale, handed down from generation to generation by Chinese Americans whose ancestors lived through these times, tells of an unfortunate Chinese miner in Mariposa County, south of the CPRR line, who was thrown in jail after he accidentally wounded a white miner in an altercation. Imprisonment did not satisfy twenty white men loaded with whiskey. They wanted blood. They stormed the jail and managed to slip a rope through the bars and around the prisoner. The gang gleefully pulled and pulled, squeezing the man’s body against the bars until suddenly his agonized screams stopped. The rope flew out soaked with viscera. His body had been cut in two and his head battered to a pulp. The jail cell was a mass of gore. For years afterward, prisoners who inhabited the murder cell swore a Chinese ghost haunted the place. Try as they might, jailers could never completely cover over the bloodstains on the walls. They were still faintly visible more than seventy-five years later, the lingering presence of what became known as the Ghost of Hornitos.
There is little question that constructing the Central Pacific Railroad line claimed the greatest loss of life of Chinese in America. How many died is impossible to know, as the company kept no records of personnel killed on the job. Estimates from company officials many years later are in themselves unsettling in their vagueness. This has led to some preposterous legends, such as that the company murdered eight hundred unpaid Railroad Chinese by chaining them together and dumping them in the middle of Lake Tahoe to drown in the depths. The legend holds that their bodies remain preserved at the frigid bottom of the deep lake. There is no evidence for the horror story, but it has endured. Many Chinese workers certainly did die while constructing the CPRR; no fabrication is needed to establish that truth.
Louis M. Clement, one of the company’s chief engineers, recalled, for example, that “during the winter months there was constant danger from avalanches, and many laborers lost their lives.” James H. Strobridge, chief of construction, recalled “many instances” in the High Sierra in winter when “our camps were carried away by snowslides, and men were buried and many of them were not found until the snow melted the next summer.” Tunnel engineer John Gilliss wrote that in the ferocious winter of 1866–67, an avalanche at Tunnel No. 10 took the lives of “some fifteen or twenty Chinamen.” A. P. Partridge, a member of a bridge-building crew, also remembered the terrible winters, and he too said about the Chinese workers that “a good many were frozen to death” in 1867. The repeated use of the undefined term “many” by these veteran railroad builders is disturbing. How many is many? “Many” is far greater than “some,” “a score,” “dozens,” or even “a hundred,” all of which could have been offered as an estimate. But not one of the officials provided any numbers. They could not, perhaps would not, even venture a guess at the human toll.
No account of the experience of a Chinese worker during the construction of the Pacific Railroad line exists, but there is one from a worker on the Canadian trans-Pacific line, which was built in the 1880s, and his memoir emphasizes the horrors that he and his comrades suffered. Wong Hau-hon arrived in Canada in 1882 and joined hundreds of other Chinese working on the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) in the mountains of British Columbia. In 1926 when he was interviewed, Wong shuddered when he was asked to recall death on the line. He spoke of seeing corpses of many, many Chinese who had died from disease along the route. Sometimes their bodies “were stuffed into rock crevices or beneath the trees,” awaiting the arrival of coffins. Others were hurriedly buried in crude boxes or just in blankets or grass mats. “New graves dotted the landscape and the sight sent chills up and down my spine,” he said. Death from accidental explosions also claimed many of his friends. A huge boulder thrown up by a blast fell on one worker, Leung, and killed him. In another incident, a dynamite misfire in a cave took the lives of ten or twenty Chinese; their bodies, Wong recalled, “flew from the cave as if shot from a cannon. Blood and flesh were mixed in a horrible mess.” One of the CPR’s main white labor contractors stated that approximately six hundred Chinese were killed during construction of the line from accidents, poor food, and severe weather conditions. His number was likely an underestimation. Wong believed that three thousand Chinese had died, though his estimate was likely too high. The actual number, which will never be known, probably falls between these two extremes.
During the construction of the CPRR, local newspapers sometimes printed reports of accidents and deaths, but these were far from being comprehensive. Accounts from other sources such as individual memoirs tell of deaths that never found their way into the press. Partridge, the line supervisor, for example, recollected one of these deaths in his memoir. He recalled that one morning in the winter of 1867, when he and some friends were returning to Truckee by sleigh after a dance the night before at Donner Lake, they “saw something under a tree by the side of the road, its shape resembling the shape of a man. We stopped and found a frozen Chinaman.” They threw the body into the sleigh and took it to town, where they “laid him out by the side of a shed and covered him with a rice mat, the most appropriate thing for the laying out of a Celestial.” His chilling telling is unfeeling. He observed that “a good many” Chinese “were frozen to death” in the area but also gave no numbers.
Wong Geu, who was born in 1856 in China and arrived in America in 1878, provides another personal account. He settled in the Truckee area, where he worked as a track layer for the Southern Pacific. In the 1930s he told a researcher that he had once uncovered human bones at the snow sheds and tunnels near the summit. He concluded that they were the remains of Chinese railroad workers who had died from avalanches or tunneling accidents years before. He collected what he could find, arranged the bones, and reburied them in a solemn ceremony. He hoped the spirits of the departed workers had finally found some peace. This labor of honoring the dead was an obligation he felt duty bound to fulfill. After working for the railroad, he had gone on to work, of all things, as a comedian in San Francisco’s Chinatown for many years, but he never forgot his somber effort to care for the remains of the compatriots he never knew.
Nineteenth-century newspapers did publish articles about specific incidents that resulted in the deaths of Railroad Chinese. Even in their brevity, the reports often convey a dreadful sense of the constant danger they faced. The casual language informing readers of these tragic and gruesome deaths, and the omission of any name or other indication of identity, also suggests that for many other Californians, the death of Chinese was barely newsworthy. They were just “Chinamen.”
In April 1866, an accidental explosion at Colfax on the line took the lives of six or seven workers, three or five being “Chinamen,” all unnamed. The explosion was so powerful, the remains of some of the victims could not be found.
Just before Christmas in 1866, a terrible snowslide buried “a gang of Chinamen,” killing four or five of them. According to the Dutch Flat Enquirer, another “whole camp of Chi
namen was covered up during the night and parties were digging them out when our informant left.”
A snowslide killed at least nineteen Chinese, with many more feared lost, according to a March 1867 news report.
In May 1867, a Chinese worker excavating a line was killed when an embankment collapsed and buried him.
In mid-June 1867, a huge explosion in a tunnel a mile from Cisco killed one white worker and at least “five Chinamen” who were “blown up, all of whom were horribly mangled.” The news report described a horse and cart being blown a hundred feet in the air before they “came down in pieces.”
In December 1867, the New York Evening Post reported that twenty-two railroad workers on the Central Pacific died in an avalanche.
In January 1868, at Truckee, snow crushed a cabin where Chinese were living. Five died, and five others were “seriously injured.”
In February 1868, “two Chinamen” were killed on the line near Emigrant Gap. A locomotive pushing a snowplow caused a snowslide that threw them under the train, which ran over one of them and “instantly” killed him.
In 1868, two white railroad workers murdered two Chinese fellow workers in Toana, Nevada.
In the spring of 1868, the melting snows revealed corpses of Chinese workers still upright, their tools in their hands. Snow had buried them the previous winter.
A June 1868 item in the Daily Alta California reported that “a slide, in consequence of a blast, occurred near the summit tunnel, on the line of the Pacific Railroad, about noon day before yesterday, by which several Chinamen were killed.” Another report, perhaps on the same incident, stated that “thirty Chinamen who were engaged in excavating a snow tunnel, near the Summit, were caved on and covered up by the snow.”
In October 1868, a huge accidental explosion killed three Chinese and two white laborers who were working along the Humboldt River in Utah.
In December 1868, a locomotive smashed into a tree that Chinese were trying to remove from the tracks and “so killed one of the Chinamen.” The report, under the headline “Accident to a Freight Train,” focused on damage to the vehicle.
Death could also come at the hands of a fellow Railroad Chinese. In early May 1869, at least one Chinese killed another in fighting near Promontory.
The uncertainty about deaths of Railroad Chinese fuels the single most emotional historical controversy in their history. For many today, the meager information about their deaths and desultory historical attention to their loss dishonor their sacrifice. Efforts have been made over the years to calculate, or at least estimate, the numerical toll alone. Numbers at the low end of the range, based principally on newspaper reports, suggest that fewer than 150 died. The Central Pacific, in its own interests, it has been argued, had no reason to see large numbers of workers die; the expense of recruiting and retaining them was a strong incentive to try to keep them out of harm’s way, and thus the numbers must have been low. In response, others argue that the numbers were significantly higher, perhaps in the thousands, and cite ample evidence indicating that the leaders of the CPRR were desperate to lay as much track as fast as possible, as the very survival of the company depended on it, and they worried little about the working conditions of the Chinese. Their lives were expendable, financially as well as morally, and less important than making speedy progress. The almost complete absence of attention to worker fatalities in the correspondence among the CPRR’s top leaders is itself evidence of the low regard they gave to the dangers facing the workers. The vast majority of space in the letters is devoted to discussing how to solve pressing issues of construction and finance. As Lewis Clement responded when asked how many Chinese worked on the line, “I never counted.” And then, tellingly, he added, “I never took any particular interest in them, never cared about them so long as we got the work done.” E. B. Crocker made the company’s priorities clear in his own way in a private letter he sent to Collis Huntington in the harsh winter of 1867. Crocker informed Huntington that terrible accidents that took human lives were bound to happen during railroad construction, “in spite of all precautions,” but the company must be prepared for them so that such accidents “will not stop the tracklaying beyond.”
Relying solely on reportage provides an unreliable picture, as much evidence indicates that news of many Chinese deaths never made it into the newspapers at the time. In fact, a number of news items about deaths appear to have come from writers who happened to learn of the events simply by chance. No journalists were attached to the CPRR full-time. No article ever mentions that the company provided any information of its own on such incidents, and the CPRR never issued any public statement acknowledging the death of any railroad worker, Chinese or otherwise. Industrial relations then were a far cry from what they would become.
A compelling argument using evidence beyond newspaper accounts of accidents suggests that the death toll may well have climbed to over one thousand, though the case is far from conclusive. This estimate is based on reports about what appears to have been a mass repatriation of Chinese remains for shipment back to China for final burial after the Promontory event.
The story begins in mid-1869 with an article published by the Cincinnati Commercial that mentioned a sum of $10,000 that San Francisco Chinatown leaders had recently raised for the cost of retrieving and returning the remains of “300 Chinese persons” who were “buried on the line of the Central Pacific Railroad.” Several months later, in early January 1870, the Independent in Elko, Nevada, which is located on the CPRR line, reported that Chinese had been unearthing the remains of their countrymen who had died nearby. In that area of Nevada, almost all the Chinese had worked for the CPRR. Another paper reported that as many as six freight cars carrying the remains of Chinese were sitting on tracks between small towns in eastern Nevada. The causes of death are not given. Also in late January, in what may have been part of a coordinated effort, Chinese began disinterring the remains of “defunct brethren at the city cemetery” in Sacramento, “preparatory to shipping their bones to China.” In March 1870, a Nevada newspaper reported on further efforts to uncover and prepare Chinese remains around Winnemucca, 125 miles to the west of Elko. These dead were “a goodly number of Johns,” according to the news report, who had “delivered up the ghost along the line of the Central Pacific railroad” and were being prepared for repatriation. The remains were in containers “prepared and boxed in the most approved manner, and labeled with appropriate Chinese characters, given name, date of death, and company to which the deceased belonged.” Two train cars had transported the remains to San Francisco. These separate news reports appear to indicate that Chinese were engaged in a coordinated remains repatriation operation of major proportions, its size far exceeding anything similar before or after.
In late June 1870, the Sacramento Reporter, under the headline “Bones in Transit,” noted, “The accumulated bones of perhaps 1,200 Chinamen came in by the eastern train yesterday from along the line of the Central Pacific Railroad.” The remains weighed “about 20,000 pounds.” No detail was given on how the numbers were obtained. According to the newspaper, “nearly all of them are the remains of employees of the company who were engaged in building the road” and were on their way back for final burial in China. The Daily Alta California, the leading newspaper in the state, published out of San Francisco, reported the same information from Sacramento, including that the remains were of those “who died while in the construction of the Central Pacific Railroad and other service” and that they were “in transitu per railroad en route for China.” Along with the information from 1869, these articles, and the information from a third newspaper that reported on the remains of about 150 other Railroad Chinese who died along the line and were interred locally, make a case that possibly as many as 1,200, or more, Chinese died during the construction of the CPRR from a variety of causes, including natural causes, industrial accidents and disasters, and diseases such as smallpox, which was known to have afflicted railroad labor camps.
The news articles did not provide details on how the remains were stored. Were they in coffins, which held the full remains of the recently deceased; “bone boxes,” which held full or partial dry bone remains; or “spirit boxes” (zhaohun xiang), which held no physical remains? Spirit boxes were used when an individual was known to have died but the remains could not be recovered. The boxes were ritually consecrated near the death site to hold the spirit of the deceased in its own special container. These different sorts of vessels therefore varied considerably in weight and size, which means that the actual number of deaths could have been either lower or considerably higher than estimated in the news accounts.