Ghosts of Gold Mountain

by Gordon H. Chang

  Another way of looking at the deaths of Chinese who worked on the railroad is to consider the general death rate for Chinese in America. In late 1869, just six months after the events at Promontory, Chinese benevolent associations released their “census” of Chinese in America. Because the associations were intimately involved in welcoming arriving Chinese, collecting insurance monies and dues, monitoring debt, and guaranteeing the repatriation of remains, they kept detailed membership records, which probably give the most accurate tally of the population. Almost all Chinese in America belonged to one of the associations. According to their records. from the mid-1850s, when they were founded, to 1869, 7.5 percent of the Chinese who came to America died here, with the percentage varying considerably among the associations. For example, the Ningyung Benevolent Association, the largest, claimed 46,867 members over that period of time. Of these, 12,262 had returned to China, 27,118 remained in the United States, and 3,487 had died here. The second largest, the Yanghe Association, listed 28,207 members, of whom 21,820 were in the United States, 4,295 had returned to China, and 2,085 had died. The smallest association had a death rate of almost 20 percent. Various sources present figures that suggest that the risk of early death from disease, accident, or violence for Chinese in America, an almost all-young, all-male population, was high.

  Other reports gave an even higher rate. The Railroad Record, a periodical on railroad matters, published population figures for the Chinese in January 1870. The journal claimed that 138,000 Chinese had arrived in California, and of these, 37,322 had returned to China; 16,426 had died; 41,000 still lived in California, including 31,700 “active laborers,” 9,300 women and children, and the remainder old, ill, or in prison. The proportion of those who had died while in California was therefore 12 percent. Though the precise number of Railroad Chinese deaths will never be known, the toll was likely well into the hundreds, if not substantially higher.

  The glimmer of possibilities for work for Railroad Chinese which appeared post-Promontory eroded steadily and then violently in the later 1870s and the 1880s. The reputation they had earned as exemplary workers, and the successes they were establishing as laborers, storekeepers, artisans, and merchants in the towns along the railroad and the regions it opened up for them, were now being used against them. A terrible economic recession in the 1870s stimulated the rise of racist populism. Agitators claimed that white workers could not compete against the hardworking and frugal Chinese, who were, in what seemed to be a contradictory prejudice, perceived as racially and culturally inferior in many fundamental ways. Racists held that white workers could not compete against Chinese, but also that they should not have to. The railroad that Chinese had helped build produced a terrible unintended consequence.

  Just as Chinese used the railroad to spread across the country to places where they had never been before, white migrants from the East, many of them immigrants themselves, used the railroad to flood into the West, where they found Chinese already working and living. They saw Chinese as a threatening, undesirable race that deserved no place in a white man’s country. Organized forces throughout the United States conducted what can be called “the great purge” to rid the nation of Chinese. They used political, often violent action, tragically, with great success. The massive numbers of “the coming man” that were once predicted never materialized. Instead, a veritable war against Chinese in America reduced their numbers decisively.

  The opening shot of this war was fired in Los Angeles. In October 1871, a mob of five hundred attacked the Chinese quarter in Los Angles, then a small town. They ransacked and burned buildings occupied by Chinese and mutilated, shot, and lynched eighteen Chinese in the streets. Railroad Chinese who had traveled to southern California for railroad work there were likely among the victims. The massacre was the largest mass lynching in American history. Twenty-five rioters were indicted for murder, but none of them was ever convicted of the crime.

  In June 1876, a heinous killing of a Chinese man occurred in Truckee in what is called the “Trout Creek Outrage.” The mood of the town had turned viciously against Chinese, and hundreds of whites coordinated efforts to drive them out. Six or seven white men, members of a secret group called the Caucasian League, descended, fully armed, on two cabins inhabited by Chinese woodcutters along Trout Creek, not far from Truckee, at 1:00 a.m. on the eighteenth. They poured kerosene on the cabins and set them afire. As Chinese fled the burning buildings, the vigilantes shot them, killing one and wounding others, who fled into the woods. Though seven men were brought to trial, none were convicted of any crime and all were set free. A local newspaper called the shootings “one of the most cold-blooded and unprovoked murders ever recorded.” During the next decade, white residents of Truckee used planned violence, arson, and mass intimidation to drive Chinese, many them former Railroad Chinese, out of the town. The 1900 census shows just two Chinese still living in Truckee. The so-called “Truckee method” of ridding the town of Chinese through real and threatened violence and boycotts against employers of Chinese gained national attention. The Chinese had to go, nationwide.

  In October 1880, an armed mob of up to three thousand attacked the Denver Chinese community, which numbered a few hundred. The rioters, aiming to expel all Chinese from the city, burned residences, looted, and beat Chinese men and women, killing one. City officials rounded up more than two hundred Chinese and placed them in the county jail for their own “protection.”

  Formalizing these mob anti-Chinese sentiments, in 1882 Congress passed the first in a series of what are called the Chinese Exclusion Acts. Sinophobes agitated for this legislation to confirm the ineligibility of Chinese for citizenship and their exclusion from entering the United States. Opponents of these draconian measures cited the value of Chinese to America, including their work on building the nation’s infrastructure. President Chester Alan Arthur vetoed an early version of the legislation and referenced Railroad Chinese as a reason for his decision, declaring that the Chinese “were largely instrumental in constructing the railways which connect the Atlantic with the Pacific.” Congress overrode his veto and the objections of others, and in 1892 the restrictions were strengthened and continued under what was called the Geary Act, named for the sponsoring representative from California.

  These federally sanctioned anti-Chinese actions did not satisfy extremists, however. Local mobs took matters into their own hands and used extralegal measures to rid the country of Chinese. In these perilous years, Huie Kin recalled, he and other Chinese feared they would be shot in the back if they left their homes.

  In September 1885, an armed mob of 150 white workers attacked Chinese coal miners in Rock Springs, Wyoming, and killed at least twenty-eight. Chinese were, in the words of one article on the atrocity, “scalped, mutilated, branded, decapitated, dismembered, and hanged from gutter spouts.” One was sexually mutilated. They were among more than three hundred working for the Union Pacific Railroad. Those not killed were driven out of town.

  The worst incidence of violence against Chinese was the torture, mutilation, and murder of at least thirty-four Chinese miners in Hells Canyon, Oregon, in 1887. It is likely that some were former railroad workers. The “Evans Gang” ambushed the Chinese working along a remote section of the Snake River in eastern Oregon, and though the Chinese were armed and tried to defend themselves, the villains methodically picked them off and butchered their bodies. Some were scalped. The gang’s lust for gold alone did not explain their savagery: racial hatred also burned in their hearts. None of the gang was ever convicted of the crime.

  The number of expulsion efforts and killings of Chinese has been documented to be approximately 170 episodes, with seventy-five Chinese killed in just the years 1885–1887, the high point in anti-Chinese violence in the United States and its territories. Many Chinese fled the country, and by 1900, the Chinese population in the United States had dropped to 90,000 from its high point of 133,000 in 1882.

  At issue in the controversy over the d
eaths of Chinese who perished during and after the construction of the Pacific Railroad is the deep anguish and anger many felt about the suffering Chinese endured in nineteenth-century America, which has yet to be fully acknowledged. The grief continues long after the moments of tragedy. Numbers can suggest dimensions; the deeper question is the meaning of historical experience to the living. For many, especially Chinese Americans, the history of the Railroad Chinese requires contending with a painful, aggrieved, and unsettled past. Many today who sympathize with the Railroad Chinese say that low-end estimates of violent deaths of Chinese during and after the building of the railroads demean them and the blood contribution Chinese have made to America.

  Take, for example, a Railroad Chinese story provided by Sing Lum, born in Bakersfield in 1904. He became a moderately successful farmer, civic leader in local public education, and sprinter in senior track events. In 1984 the local school district honored him by naming a primary school after him. Late in life, Lum shared his memories with H. K. Wong, a San Francisco businessman and community historian. Lum recounted stories his grandfather and father had told him long ago, when he was a youngster, about the Chinese and the railroads. His grandfather, who may have worked in railroad construction, told him, “It was a hard, hard job to work on the railroad.” And treatment from “the boss man,” the “white man,” was bad. “If they didn’t like you, they’d just put a bullet through your head. Real tough times. Every day some killing going on,” Lum was told. Many Chinese were buried right along the Southern Pacific railroad track, especially around Delano, in Kern County, which the line reached in 1873. Lum recalled marking old graves. “Many Chinese got killed,” he said, “two or three hundred of them” during tunneling, and were buried in Caliente. In the 1920s their remains were sent back to China.

  After the railroad work was done, Lum was told, “the railroad people didn’t take the Chinese back to San Francisco. They let them walk back. See how cruel they were?” Then whites in Tulare County wouldn’t let Chinese cross through the county. “They killed quite a few of them.” Native Americans helped the stranded Chinese go west over the mountains to the coast and walk back north. They had nothing to eat. Many died. Lum then told Wong: “When we talk about how cruel these white people were to the Chinese, it just makes a fellow mad . . . [B]ack in the old days, the white man considered you as nothing, you’re not even a human being.”

  Another tragic incident highlights historical amnesia and Chinese death. In the rugged Santa Cruz Mountains, through which one travels to get from Silicon Valley to the shore, few today know that many Chinese died building a railroad through this coastal range. There are no markers. There is almost nothing in the history books. Nevertheless, just before midnight on November 18, 1879, more than thirty Chinese railroad workers died horribly in an explosion while they were tunneling for a line that connected San Jose to Santa Cruz. Veterans of the Central Pacific work were likely among them. They were among one thousand Chinese then working on the line owned by James G. Fair, the silver baron of the Comstock Lode and an aspiring railroad boss. Earlier in the spring of that year, a tunnel explosion had terribly burned more than a dozen Chinese workers. After surviving in agony for weeks, five died at the Chinese hospital in San Francisco. The rest of the Chinese returned to work reluctantly, fearful of the bad omen.

  The second calamity occurred 2,700 feet into the tunnel, when natural gas and seeping oil again exploded and took even more lives. Twenty-one Chinese and two whites were in the tunnel at the time. After twenty more Chinese, among them a man identified only as “Jim,” who had alerted the telegraph operator about the disaster, rushed into the tunnel to aid the victims, a second, even more violent explosion shook the mountain. The tunnel acted like a giant cannon bore and blasted out fire, rock, equipment, and humans. A third explosion occurred a few minutes later. The two white men were burned, but they survived. Newspaper reports listed twenty-four Chinese killed inside the tunnel; seventeen others who were removed were “all horribly burned,” with many dying in agonizing pain soon afterward. The “stench of burning flesh” belched from the portal. One horribly injured man identified as Ah Wo was found an hour later, dead in his cabin, with a silk scarf tied around his neck. His comrades said that that he had hanged himself, but evidence suggested that his friends had actually strangled him “to put him out of misery,” as the news article put it. The mangled body of Jim, who had rushed into the burning tunnel to help his compatriots, was later found inside the tunnel. His friend Cook, the white telegraph operator, sadly identified his remains. Jim and Ah Wo are the only Chinese identified by name. Later reports placed the number of Chinese buried at the site at thirty-two. Two years later, a huge mudslide buried another camp of Railroad Chinese. A dozen of their bodies were eventually recovered, but the full number of those killed was never determined. They are forgotten souls.

  Chinese took death rituals seriously, and the elaborate ceremonies at their funerals attracted a great deal of attention from white Americans. Chanting, wailing, burning symbolic items for use in the afterlife, and distribution of food often accompanied the occasion.

  Some Railroad Chinese waited many years for death to come so that their remains, and spirits, could return to the villages where they were born. Ah Jim was born in 1826 in China and arrived in the United States in 1859 at a relatively old thirty-three years of age. He worked on railroads and eventually settled in Marysville, California, which had a sizable Chinese population and where he aged through many decades. In 1941 he was reportedly 115 years old, blind, and a public charge. He said he was anticipating his death because then his remains could finally be sent home to be with his ancestors, and descendants, in China.

  It is not known whether Ah Jim’s final wish was ever granted. We do not know whether his spirit is an abandoned, hungry ghost still haunting here or a content spirit at home. Over time, his life, like the lives of so many other Railroad Chinese, was simply forgotten. As with those who actually died during the construction of the Transcontinental, thoughtless glorification of its completion over the years overshadowed its tremendous human cost and made Ah Jim, one of the forgotten workers, yet another victim of the railroad.

  Conclusion

  As the excitement of the meeting at Promontory Summit faded into the past and Chinese were pushed to the margins of American life, the place of Railroad Chinese in the story of the Transcontinental consequently became hazy, even obscured. Occasionally, however, someone would remember them and recall their contributions. At the fiftieth anniversary of the completion ceremony on May 10, 1919, organizers located three workers who were said to have formed part of the crew that laid the last rail. Old and worn, Ging Cui, Wong Fook, and Lee Shao were brought out of retirement from Susanville, a small town of retired railroad workers in western Nevada. Reportedly, they had worked on railroads for more than fifty years, “none taking a leave of absence” until just three years earlier, when they finally stopped working and received pensions. Brought out to stand in a celebratory parade, they were dressed in period work clothes to recall a history that the anniversary celebration romanticized. But in the few photographs from the day, the three appear tired—a news report said they were in their nineties—and they hardly seem pleased with being put on display (below). The news reporter described them as “shy”; being honored was “a bit strange to them.” “The strangers,” as the local newspaper called them, “will be placed upon a float” with tools and other material from the construction era. Because their names are given several different ways in the news articles, we cannot even be sure of their actual identities. After the event, they fall into historical oblivion. We know nothing about what became of them, not even where they are buried.

  Newspapers over the years occasionally mentioned other individual Railroad Chinese. In 1931, in brief articles, several California newspapers reported on the passing of Hung Wah. From the meager information contained in them, he apparently was the same Hung Wah of the railroad story, but
it is not certain. If indeed he was, he had outlived his old friend William McDaniel; E. B. Crocker died in 1875, Charles Crocker in 1888, Leland Stanford in 1893, and James Strobridge in 1921.

  The man identified as Hung Wah had died at 3:15 a.m. on April 14, 1931, at the age of ninety-six in the county hospital of Placerville, near Auburn, where he had been an “inmate” for twenty years. It seems he had become a ward of the county. He had been a well-known eccentric on the streets of the town, where he “hobbled about” collecting “scrap tin foil and other tit-bits of street refuse,” which he carried back to hoard in his room. An attendant had to clear out the refuse regularly when the patient was out.

  The articles described him as the “sole remaining pioneer Chinese of the gold rush days in California.” Mention is also made of his work in lumber and mining, but none about the railroad. Local residents had given him demeaning nicknames that drew on long-standing slurs against Chinese, including “Hung Wah Rock,” “Rock Canyon Charlie,” “Charlie Bang Bang,” and “King Tut.” The news articles and hospital records provide no names of any relatives or friends. He died of heart disease, after living in California for eighty-one years. According to the burial permit, he was “single,” and the names of his parents were “unknown.” No funeral or memorial service was held, and he was quickly buried the day after his death in the county hospital cemetery. Three years later the cemetery itself was closed and abandoned. Today the grave markers are all gone, and one cannot even locate where he is buried. Hung Wah’s was a pitiful end to a long and storied life. His lonely end, his life experiences largely later on forgotten, is emblematic of the void in the history of the Railroad Chinese.