Ghosts of Gold Mountain

by Gordon H. Chang

  The organization repeatedly: Otis Gibson, Chinese in America (Cincinnati: Hitchcock & Walden, 1877), 259, 333–45.

  Leung Cook, a proprietor: Leung Cook testimony, in Committee of the Senate of the State of California, Chinese Immigration: The Social, Moral, and Political Effect of Chinese Immigration (Sacramento: State Printing Office, 1876), 64–66. Also see the interview on the Six Companies with Long Dong, July 28, 1924, box 27, no. 171, Survey of Race Relations, Archives, Hoover Institution, Stanford.

  His photographs of Chinese: Carleton E. Watkins, “Chinese Women, San Francisco,” WA Photos 220, object 2001125, and “Chinese Actor, San Francisco,” WA Photos 220, object 2001124, Beinecke Library, Yale University. For a collection of Watkins’s work on Chinese, see http://www.carletonwatkins.org/search.php?keyword=chinese&v=list&c=25&so=1&tmrg=n&smode=OR&ex (accessed July 10, 2018).

  As early as the 1850s: Peter E. Palmquist, “In Splendid Detail: Photographs of Chinese Americans from the Daniel K. E. Ching Collection,” in Facing the Camera: Photographs from the Daniel K. E. Ching Collection (San Francisco: Chinese Historical Society of America, 2001), 8–17. In the 1860s, the prominent San Francisco portrait studio of Bradley & Rulofson employed Fong Noy, Fong Ah-Sin, and Ah Chew. Fong Noy was a chemist. Watkins employed a number of Chinese, including one named Ah Fue, to help produce stereographs in 1873. Gordon H. Chang, Mark Dean Johnson, and Paul J. Karlstrom, eds., Asian American Art: A History, 1850–1970 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 2–3, 469–70.

  Though his life: Compare Lai Yong’s work with that of well-known fellow San Francisco photographers Eadweard Muybridge and Bradley & Rulofson. See WA Photos 357, object 2015037, 2015087, and 2015085, all at Beinecke Library, Yale University.

  One striking image: WA Photos 357, object 2015070, 2015071, and 2015072, all at Beinecke Library, Yale University.

  Photography was not: Lai Yong, Yang Kay, A Yup, Lai Foon, and Chung Leong, The Chinese Question from a Chinese Standpoint, trans. Rev. O. Gibson (San Francisco: Cubery & Co., 1874), 1–3, reprinted in Gibson, Chinese in America, 285–92.

  So too does the dispatch: Evans, “From the Orient Direct.” Evans was originally from the Hudson River valley but moved to Texas for a short while, where he served briefly as the mayor of San Antonio, before moving to San Francisco. Clarence Alan McGrew, City of San Diego and San Diego County: The Birthplace of California (Chicago: American Historical Society, 1922), 106–7.

  Another keen observer: Daniel Cleveland, “The Chinese in California,” unpublished manuscript, Daniel Cleveland Manuscripts, 1868–1929, mssHM 72175–72177, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif.; Daniel Cleveland to Benson H. Lossing, May 27, 1868, Cleveland Letters to Lossing, BANC MSS C-B 858, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; and Cleveland to J. Ross Browne July 21, 1868, contained in Browne to Seward, July 24, 1868, “Diplomatic Correspondence,” in Papers Relating to Foreign Affairs Accompanying the Annual Message of the President to the 3d Sess., 40th Cong., pt. 1, (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1869), 530–44. The manuscript includes an entire chapter on the lives and work of Chinese railroad workers that will inform a later chapter in this book. The manuscript was completed sometime in early 1869, before the events at Promontory Summit.

  3. CENTRAL PACIFIC

  “The change of the route”: Asa Whitney, A Project for a Railroad to the Pacific (New York: George W. Wood, 1849), 40.

  Among those who: “Biographical Sketch,” in Memorial Addresses on the Life and Character of Leland Stanford, United States Senate, 53rd Cong., 2nd sess. (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1894), 11.

  Other continental expansionists: Gordon H. Chang, “China and the Pursuit of America’s Destiny: Nineteenth-Century Imaginings and Why Immigration Restriction Took So Long,” Journal of Asian American Studies 15, no. 2 (June 2012): 145–69.

  Similarly, William Speer: William Speer, The Oldest and the Newest Empire: China and the United States (Hartford, Conn.: S. S. Scranton and Co., 1870), 27–28; and for other views on the significance of Chinese in the West, see John David Borthwick, Three Years in California (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood, 1857); John Todd, The Sunset Land; or, The Great Pacific Slope (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1870); Mary Cone, Two Years in California (Chicago: C. Griggs, 1876); Walter M. Fisher, The Californians (London: Macmillan, 1876); and Isabelle Saxon, Five Years Within the Golden Gate (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1868), 38–46.

  In January 1855: Thomas Chinn, Him Mark Lai, and Philip Choy, A History of the Chinese in California: A Syllabus (San Francisco: Chinese Historical Society of America, 1969), 43.

  Later in 1855: “The City,” Sacramento Daily Union, November 8, 1855; and Speer, Oldest and the Newest Empire, 669.

  Not just in prediction: Lucy M. Cohen, “The Chinese of the Panama Railroad: Preliminary Notes on the Migrants of 1854 Who ‘Failed,’” Ethnohistory 18, no. 4 (Autumn 1971): 309−20; Lok C. D. Siu, Memories of a Future Home: Diasporic Citizenship of Chinese in Panama (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 38, 39; Railroad Record, May 26, 1859, 162; Minutes of the Meetings of the Board of Directors, July 1, 1853–June 28, 1854, Records of the Panama Canal Panama Railroad Company, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

  Chinese began to work: “News of the Morning,” Sacramento Daily Union, June 15, 1858; “The Chinese in California,” New York Tribune, May 1, 1869. Also see “China and the Indies—Our ‘Manifest Destiny’ in the East,” DeBow’s Review 15 (December 1853): 541–71; David Haward Bain, Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad (New York: Viking, 1999), 207.

  On April 16, 1868: R. David Arkush and Leo O. Lee, eds., Land Without Ghosts: Chinese Impressions of America from the Mid-Nineteenth Century to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 25–29.

  Political figures had at first: Mary Roberts Coolidge, Chinese Immigration (New York: Henry Holt, 1909), 21–23.

  many white employers continued: Franklin A. Buck, A Yankee Trader in the Gold Rush: The Letters of Franklin A. Buck (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1930), 128–33.

  A wildly popular Massachusetts: J. Hutchinson and D. D. Emmett, “Ho! For California!” in Songs of the American West, comp. and ed. Richard E. Lingenfelter, Richard A. Dwyer, and David Cohen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 14–15.

  Anti-Chinese music: Lyrics, “John Chinaman” (1855), and lyrics and score, “Get Out, Yellow-skins, Get Out!” in Lingenfelter, Dwyer, and Cohen, Songs of the American West, 299–309; and American Murder Ballads, comp. and ed. Olive Woolley Burt (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), 155–58.

  Elite political support: Judy Yung, Gordon H. Chang, and Him Mark Lai, eds., Chinese American Voices (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 9–12.

  One of the most eloquent: Norman Asing, “To His Excellency Governor Bigler,” Daily Alta California, May 5, 1852, reprinted in Yung, Chang, and Lai, Chinese American Voices, 9–12. In a curious twist, later in his career Bigler was appointed a federal commissioner to oversee the construction of the Pacific railroad.

  A decade later, Chinese: http://governors.library.ca.gov/addresses/08-Stanford.html (accessed August 18, 2018); and Gordon H. Chang, “The Chinese and the Stanfords: Nineteenth-Century America’s Fraught Relationship with the China Men,” in Chinese and the Iron Road: Building the Transcontinental and Other Railroads in North America, ed. Gordon H. Chang and Shelley Fisher Fishkin (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019). And see the excellent work by Julie Cain, “The Chinese and the Stanfords: Immigration Rhetoric in Nineteenth-Century California” (M.A. thesis, California State University, East Bay, June 2011).

  Jin Kee, for his part: Ibid.

  In business, too: Ibid.

  The sectional conflict over slavery: Bain, 57–148; and see Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: Norton, 2011).

  The almost 1,800 miles: “Magnitude,” Sacramento Daily Union, October 14, 1865.

  forging the roadbed: Edwin L. Sabin,
Building the Pacific Railway (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1919), 13.

  Stanford and the other leaders: Alfred E. Davis testimony, in Testimony Taken by the Pacific Railway Commission, vol. 6 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1887), 3620–26.

  Just a few hundred: Lewis M. Clement and Leland Stanford testimony, ibid., 6:3224–26; Crocker testimony, in Report of the Joint Special Committee to Investigate Chinese Immigration, U.S. Senate, 44th Cong., 2nd sess. (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1877), 666–69.

  In part because of: Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 62; Oscar Lewis, The Big Four: The Story of Huntington, Stanford, Hopkins, and Crocker, and of the Building of the Central Pacific (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1938), 69–70. A calendar showing when the CPRR reached different locations and their distance from Sacramento is in George Kraus, High Road to Promontory: Building the Central Pacific (Palo Alto: American West, 1969), 308–10.

  The CPRR’s labor predicament: “The Chinese in California,” Lippincott’s Magazine, July 1868, 36–41. Telegraph lines in California began to appear in the early 1850s, and Chinese came to use the technology with alacrity. See Albert Dressler, California Chinese Chatter (self-published, 1927).

  Chinese household servants: Calvin B. T. Lee, Chinatown, U.S.A. (New York: Doubleday, 1965), 17; Susie Lan Cassel, ed. The Chinese in America: A History from Gold Mountain to the New Millennium (Walnut Creek, Calif.: AltaMira, 2002), 314; author’s conversation with a member of the Crocker family, 2016.

  When Charles Crocker: Crocker testimony, in Testimony Taken by the Pacific Railway Commission, vol. 7 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1887), 3660; Bain, Empire Express, 208–9. Years later, Strobridge confessed that he had been very prejudiced against Chinese. “I did not believe we could make a success of it,” Strobridge said, admitting that he had been wrong and had very much changed his mind. Report of the Joint Special Committee to Investigate Chinese Immigration, 44th Cong., 2nd sess. (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1877), 723–28, 666–88.

  Strobridge knew the area: http://discussion.cprr.net/2009/07/name-of-wife-of-james-harvey-strobridge.html (accessed March 22, 2018); and Norman E. Tutorow, The Governor: The Life and Legacy of Leland Stanford: A California Colossus (Spokane: Arthur H. Clark Company, 2004), 244.

  According to a brief: “‘Rock Canyon Charlie’ Taken by Death at County Hospital,” Mountain Democrat, April 17, 1931; and “Pioneer Chinese of Gold Rush Days Dies in Placerville,” Los Angeles Times, April 15, 1931. Hung Wah’s age at time of death is given as ninety-six. One news article gave his age on arrival as five, but this is likely inaccurate. It is improbable that he was five years old when he entered the United States, as that would have been in 1840, years before gold was discovered in 1848. The first Chinese to live in San Francisco appear to have arrived in the spring of 1848. They were servants of an American businessman who brought them with him from China. Catherine Coffin Phillips, Portsmouth Plaza: The Cradle of San Francisco (San Francisco: John Henry Nash, 1932), 104.

  the 1860 census identifies: U.S. Census, Schedule 1, 19, Free Inhabitants in Township 105[?], in the County of Placer, State of California. I am much indebted to Bryanna M. Ryan, Curator of Archives, Placer County Archive & Research Center, for providing me with this and other information on Hung Wah. Email to author, September 14, 2017.

  In the 1850s: “Dutch Flat, California,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_Flat,_California (accessed August 18, 2018); and Phil Sexton to author, email, August 1, 2018.

  Chinese had arrived: Jeff Crawford, “The Golden Mountains: Chinese in Placer County, 1848–1880,” unpublished essay for Placer County Museums, “We Came for Gold” exhibition, April 15, 1998, 5; and Autobiography of Charles Peters: The Good Luck Era; The Placer Mining Days of the ’50s (Sacramento: LaGrave Co., n.d.), 143–45.

  Chinese also patronized: Crawford, “The Golden Mountain,” 5–7.

  The region also experienced: District Court, Nevada County, The People v. George W. Hall, September 22, 1853, photocopy in Hall, George, murder trial, Hagaman Chinese Collection, Searls Historical Library, Nevada City, Calif.

  Violence against Chinese soared: Daniel Cleveland to J. Ross Browne, July 21, 1868, contained in Browne to Seward, July 24, 1868, “Diplomatic Correspondence,” in Papers Relating to Foreign Affairs Accompanying the Annual Message of the President to the 3d Sess., 40th Cong., pt.1 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1869), 530–44.

  In this volatile environment: Placer County District Court, Case 1762, William Roush v. J. E. Terry, 1862, Placer County Archive & Research Center, Auburn, California. Teri Hessel provided a very helpful transcription of this difficult-to-read handwritten document.

  Chinese males married: Marriage Certificate of Ah Chee and Sun Low, November 16, 1862, Carson City, Nevada, Carson City Recorder’s Office, bk. 3, 296. Thanks to Judy Wickwire for providing this document.

  Hung Wah advertised: Placer Herald, August 29, 1863, and October 15, 1864.

  The January 1864 payroll: CPRR Payroll no. 26 for January 1864 and no. 34 for February 1864, Central Pacific Railroad Collection, MS 79, California State Railroad Museum Library, Sacramento. Other payroll records are from California, Railroad Employment Records, 1862–1950, Ancestry.com.

  These workers greatly: “City Intelligence,” Sacramento Union, May 1, 1865; and Crocker testimony, in Testimony Taken by the Pacific Railway Commission, 7:3659–60.

  4. FOOTHILLS

  Though a railroad conjures: Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980); Edgar B. Schieldrop, The Railway (London: Hutchinson, 1939).

  No account of the experience: Diary of Stephen Allen Curry, November 23, 1864, to June 16, 1865, Curry Family Collection, California Historical Society, San Francisco. Thanks to Roland Hsu for discovering this source.

  By mid-1865: Sue Fawn Chung, Chinese in the Woods: Logging and Lumbering in the American West (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 156.

  A photograph taken: The best-known photographs of nineteenth-century Chinese are those of Arnold Genthe, who took them in San Francisco at the turn of the century. See John Kuo Wei Tchen, Genthe’s Photographs of San Francisco’s Old Chinatown (New York: Dover Publications, 1984).

  Photographer Carlton Watkins: “Chinese-American Contribution to Transcontinental Railroad,” http://cprr.org/Museum/Chinese.html (accessed August 17, 2018).

  It was hardly: “City Intelligence,” Sacramento Daily Union, May 1, 1865.

  Massive excavations: “City Intelligence,” Sacramento Daily Union, September 4, 1865.

  Records we do have: CPRR Payroll no. 128, for April 1865, Central Pacific Railroad Collection, MS 79, California State Railroad Museum Library, Sacramento. Thanks go to Preston Carlson, Sabrina Jiang, Lily Anna Nilipour, Niuniu Teo, and James Thieu for their research.

  Below each: Ibid.

  Ah Fong’s Men

  1317.56

  Billy Yang’s Men

  1522.78

  Ah Gou’s Men

  1396.45

  Che Noa

  458.05

  Foo Sing

  121.44

  Hung Wah

  3875.48

  Sisson’s Time

  3335.41

  Wang Wan

  3278.34

  Ah Wy

  1756.10

  Ah Kung

  773.29

  Ah Coons

  3759.20

  Cum Sing

  2135.56

  Hung Wah

  221.20

  The Chinese contractor: CPRR Payroll Record, April and May 1865, Central Pacific Railroad Collection, MS 79, California State Railroad Museum Library, Sacramento.

  An early group photograph: Thanks go to Lim Lip Hong descendants for providing this photograph and the history of their great-grandfather.

  Hung Wah’s good fortune: CPRR Payroll Record, May 1865 and January–
July 1866, California State Railroad Museum, Sacramento.

  These Chinese workers: Catherine Coffin Phillips, Cornelius Cole, California Pioneer and United States Senator (San Francisco: J. H. Nash, 1929), 1929), 138.

  In a July 1865 report: Leland Stanford, “To the Stockholders of the Central Pacific Railroad Company, July 13, 1865,” Railroad Record, August 24, 1865, 323–24.

  In October 1865: Leland Stanford, Statement Made to the President of the United States, and Secretary of the Interior, on the Progress of the Work, October 10, 1865 (Sacramento: H. S. Crocker & Co., 1865), 990.

  Company leaders also: Leland Stanford, E. H. Miller Jr., and Samuel S. Montague, “To the Board of Directors of the Central Pacific Railroad Company,” January 5, 1867, reprinted in Testimony Taken by the Pacific Railway Commission, vol. 5 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1887), 3050, 3051; and Montague, annual report for 1865, cited in Erle Heath, “Trail to Rail,” Southern Pacific Bulletin, May 19, 1927, chap. 15, 12.

  Many railroad histories: Oscar Lewis, The Big Four: The Story of Huntington, Stanford, Hopkins, and Crocker, and of the Building of the Central Pacific (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1938), 75, photo caption facing page 80; and Maxine Hong Kingston, China Men (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980), 130–32. Other well-known works that present the baskets account include Jack Chen, The Chinese of America: From the Beginnings to the Present (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982), 69; Wesley S. Griswold, A Work of Giants: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962), 123; Alexander Saxton, “The Army of Canton in the High Sierra,” Pacific Historical Review 35 (1966): 141–52; John Hoyt Williams, A Great and Shining Road (New York: Times Books, 1988), 113–14; David Haward Bain, Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad (New York: Viking, 1999), 238–39; David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 67; and Stephen E. Ambrose, Nothing Like It in The World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863–1869 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 156–57. The most detailed account, including how the baskets were supposed to have been constructed and decorated, is in Corinne K. Hoexter, From Canton to California: The Epic of Chinese Immigration (New York: Four Winds Press, 1976), 74–76 and 79, but provides no sources. See the paintings by artists Jake Lee, ca. 1955, Chinese Historical Society collection, Chinese Historical Society, San Francisco; Tyrus Wong, illustration in William Harland Boyd, The Chinese of Kern County: 1857–1960 (Bakersfield, Calif.: Kern County Historical Society, 2002) 24; unknown artist, illustration in Helen Hinkley Jones, Rails from the West: A Biography of Theodore D. Judah (San Marino, Calif.: Golden West Books, ca. 1950), 14–15; and Mian Situ, “Powder Monkeys,” used on the dust jacket of this book.