Ghosts of Gold Mountain

by Gordon H. Chang

  But in America: Patrick Tinloy, “Nevada County’s Chinese, Part I,” Nevada County Historical Society Bulletin 25, no. 1 (January 1971): 1–7; George Anthony Peffer, “If They Don’t Bring Their Women Here”: Chinese Female Immigration Before Exclusion (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 91. Also see testimony in Committee of the Senate of California, Chinese Immigration, 60, 109; and in Report of the Joint Special Committee to Investigate Chinese Immigration, U.S. Senate, 44th Cong., 2nd sess. (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1877), 14, 142.

  Life for most of these women: Judy Yung, Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 26–31.

  In the 1870s: Magnaghi, “Virginia City’s Chinese Community”; Benson Tong, Unsubmissive Women: Chinese Prostitutes in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994), 94, 159–63; Yung, Unbound Feet, 41; Peffer, “If They Don’t Bring Their Women Here,” 124n13; and Marian S. Goldman, “Sexual Commerce on the Comstock Lode,” Nevada Historical Society Quarterly 21, no. 2 (Summer 1978): 99–129.

  Though many Chinese men: Six Companies, “A Memorial to the State of California to Bar Prostitutes” (1868), in Chinese American Voices: From the Gold Rush to the Present, ed. Judy Yung, Gordon H. Chang, and Him Mark Lai (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 23–24.

  This public and private outcry: Augustus Ward Loomis, “Chinese Women in California,” Overland Monthly, April 1, 1869, 344–51.

  A few years later: “Letter by a Chinese Girl” (1876), in Yung, Chang, and Lai, Chinese American Voices, 15–16. Also see Otis Gibson, The Chinese in America (Cincinnati: Hitchcock & Walden, 1877), 127–56, 200–222; Judy Yung, Unbound Voices: A Documentary History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 124–53; Yung, Unbound Feet, 35–36; Peggy Pascoe, Relations of Rescue: The Search for Female Moral Authority in the American West, 1874–1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 13–17, 153–65; and Ruthanne McCunn. Thousand Pieces of Gold (San Francisco: Designs, 1981).

  Some Chinese prostitutes: Elizabeth Sinn, Pacific Crossing: California Gold, Chinese Migration, and the Making of Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2013), 219–35; and Lucie Cheng Hirata, “Chinese Prostitutes in Nineteenth-Century America,” Signs 5, no. 1 (1979): 3–29.

  In the mid-nineteenth century: Yung, Unbound Feet, 33–34; Tong, Unsubmissive Women, 6–12; and Sinn, Pacific Crossing, 219–21.

  Outrage among whites: Testimony in Committee of the Senate of California, Chinese Immigration; U.S. Senate, Report of the Joint Special Committee to Investigate Chinese Immigration, 655; and Sinn, Pacific Crossing, 219–20. On white views of Chinese sexuality, see Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Berkley: University of California Press, 2001), 77–104.

  Occasionally, white observers: Watt Stewart, Chinese Bondage in Peru (Durham: Duke University Press, 1951), 230; and Testimony, Report of the Joint Special Committee to Investigate Chinese Immigration, 239.

  In 1870, as hundreds: “The Latest Chinese Importation: The Coming Man in Tennessee—His Experience on a Railroad,” New York Evening Post, July 18, 1870.

  Wives of farmers: Yung, Unbound Feet, 6–7.

  Families hoped the tie: Marlon Hom, Songs of Gold Mountain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987, 44n61. The author’s grandfather in America was married in this way. He faithfully financially supported his wife and adopted children in China throughout his entire life, though he never met them in person. In California he married a woman of Chinese ancestry born in America and had many children with her. They never went to China.

  How could you bear: Zhang and Hsu, “The View from Home,” 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).

  The quandary for unmarried: Franklin A. Buck, A Yankee Trader in the Gold Rush: The Letters of Franklin A. Buck (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1930), 128. Buck makes interesting observations about Chinese he encounters in gold country in the 1850s. He describes them as very capable traders and merchants and praises their education and English language abilities.

  In 1850, more than four thousand: Yung, Unbound Feet, 18, 24; Yung, Unbound Voices, 99; David Beesley, “From Chinese to Chinese American: Chinese Women and Families in a Sierra Nevada Town,” California History 67, no. 3 (September 1988): 168–79; and Augustus Ward Loomis, “Chinese Women in California,” Overland Monthly, April 1, 1869, 344–51.

  Chinese gangsters victimized: Appendix to the Opening Statement and Brief of B. S. Brooks on the Chinese Question (San Francisco: Women’s Co-operative Printing Union, 1877), 59–60.

  The methods used to send: Yuan Ding with Roland Hsu, “Overseas Remittances of Chinese Railroad Workers in North America,” and Liu Jin with Roland Hsu, “Chinese Railroad Workers’ Remittance Networks: Insights Based on Qiaoxiang Documents,” both in Chang and Fishkin, eds. Chinese and the Iron Road; Chen, Chinese San Francisco, 98–101.

  One popular art form: Bell Yung and Eleanor S. Yung, eds., Uncle Ng Comes to America: Chinese Narrative Songs of Immigration and Love (New York: MCCM Creations, 2014).

  Father, send money back: Zhang and Hsu, “The View from Home.”

  Don’t marry your daughter: Ibid.

  The lychee fruit: Tin-Yuke Char and C. H. Kwock, The Hakka Chinese—Their Origin and Folk Songs (Taipei: China Printing, 1969), 38.

  We’re guests stranded: Hom, Songs of Gold Mountain, 308–10, 257.

  If you want to see: Zhang and Hsu, “The View from Home.”

  At the lunar January lantern show: Ibid.

  9. THE GOLDEN SPIKE

  As the workforce surged forward: Strobridge to Stanford, July 23, 1887, in Testimony Taken by the Pacific Railway Commission, vol. 5 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1887), 2580–81; Wesley S. Griswold, A Work of Giants: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962), 256.

  In Utah there is: Mark Hopkins to Huntington, March 9, 1869, Huntington Letters; and Kenneth P. Cannon et al., The Archaeology of Chinese Railroad Workers in Utah: Results of Surveys in Box Elder and Emery Counties, Final Report to Utah Division of State History (Logan, Utah: USU Archaeological Services, 2016).

  Many workers lived out: Reno Crescent, July 14, 1868.

  The channel of the three-hundred: Edwin L. Sabin, Building the Pacific Railway (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1919), 184.

  As they advanced: “In Whirlwind Valley,” Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine, February 1869, 11; and Sue Fawn Chung, “Beyond Railroad Work: Chinese Contributions to the Development of Winnemucca and Elko, Nevada,” 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).

  A perceptive reporter: Alta California, November 9, 1868, quoted in George Kraus, “Chinese Laborers and the Construction of the Central Pacific,” Utah Historical Quarterly 37, no. 1 (Winter 1969): 41–57.

  The astonishing discipline: San Francisco Chronicle, September 10, 1868, quoted in Kraus, “Chinese Laborers,” 52.

  They were not pure machines: Quote from George Kraus, High Road to Promontory (Palo Alto: American West, 1969), 210.

  Photos taken by Alfred: Two authors put the number of residents at five hundred, though this seems high. Li Ju and Linda Ye, “A Photo Comparative Perspective of the Central Pacific Railroad,” unpublished essay, Chinese Railroad Workers Project Archives, Stanford.

  Numerous Chinese workers: In other photographs by Hart (“End of Track, Near Humboldt Lake,” “Second Crossing of Humboldt River. 430 Miles from Sacramento,” and “Advance of Civilization on the Humboldt Desert”), Chinese workers appear indistinctly in the distance. These images also show the ample detritus littering the ground in the work camps which archaeologists would study 150 years later
.

  In “End of Track: Chinese may be included in some images that contain crowds of people at a distance. Sometimes one can see only a mass of bodies, all with hats, some of which could have been those typically worn by Chinese as seen in other photos. See “The Last Rail. The Invocation, Fixing the Wire, May 10, 1869,” for example, taken by Hart at Promontory before the formal ceremony in May 1869. Indistinct groups of workers who may be Chinese also appear in the distance in images such as “Railroad Camp Near Victory. 10 1/4 Miles Laid in One Day” and “The First Greeting of the Iron Horse. Promontory Point, May 9th, 1869.”

  In the fall of 1868: San Francisco Chronicle, September 10, 1868; Kraus, “Chinese Laborers,” 51–52.

  Chinese and Native peoples: Benjamin Madley, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 224, 225, 226, 481–522.

  When the railroad entered: Kraus, “Chinese Laborers,” 51; Hsinya Huang, “Tracking Memory: Encounters Between Chinese Railroad Workers and Native Americans,” in Chang and Fishkin, Chinese and the Iron Road; Sue Fawn Chung, In Pursuit of Gold: Chinese American Miners and Merchants in the American West (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014), 140, 149, 164; and Griswold, Work of Giants, 244–45.

  In contrast, other pieces: Huang, “Tracking Memory”; and Sandra K. Lee and Douglas A. Lee, The Lee Family of New York Chinatown Since 1888: An Historical Exhibition, catalog (n.p., n.d.), 8.

  Stories of interactions: Daniel J. Meissner, “California Clash: Irish and Chinese Labor in San Francisco, 1850–1870,” in The Irish of the San Francisco Bay Area: Essays on Good Fortune, ed. Donald Jordan and Timothy J. O’Keefe (San Francisco: Irish Literary and Historical Society, 2005), 54–86; and Griswold, Work of Giants, 253.

  Incidences of serious violence: Griswold, Work of Giants, 110–12, 303.

  Fighting between the Union Pacific’s: Grenville M. Dodge, How We Built the Union Pacific Railway and Other Railway Papers and Addresses (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1910), 24, 68; Barry Patrick McCarron, “The Global Irish and Chinese: Migration, Exclusion, and Foreign Relations Among Empires, 1784–1904” (Ph.D. diss., Georgetown University, 2016), 116–17. Some historians take strong exception with Dodge and claim that little or no conflict existed between Chinese and Irish railroad workers. See http://cprr.org/Game/Interactive_Railroad_Project/Fiction_or_Fact.html (accessed July 2, 2018).

  In late May 1869: Harper’s Weekly, May 29, 1869.

  To push the work: Griswold, Work of Giants, 247–48, 306–7.

  Six-man teams then: John Hoyt Williams, A Great and Shining Road: The Epic Story of the Transcontinental Railroad (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 261–63; Sabin, Building the Pacific Railway, 200–202.

  A camp train pulled up: Williams, Great and Shining Road, 261–63.

  The ten-mile line was not just: Kraus, High Road, 252–53; “Ten Miles and 58 Feet of Track Laid Yesterday,” San Francisco Bulletin, April 29, 1869, 2; The Pacific Tourist: J. R. Bowman’s Illustrated Transcontinental Guide of Travel, from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, ed. Frederick E. Shearer (New York: J. R. Bowman, 1882–83), 14; and Erle Heath, “A Railroad Record That Defies Defeat,” Southern Pacific Bulletin 16, no. 5 (May 1928): 3–5. The descendants of a Railroad Chinese named Chin Lin Sou believe he was one of the supervisors over the army of Chinese workers. See, William Wei, Asians in Colorado: A History of Persecution and Perseverance in the Centennial State (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016), 76–77.

  After the end of work: As early as May 4, the CPRR sent hundreds of Railroad Chinese away from Promontory Summit for work elsewhere. A few days later they were “almost all gone” from the Promontory area. “From the Railroad Front” and “The Railway Front,” Daily Alta California, May 5 and 6, 1869; and Robert L. Spude and Todd Delyea, Promontory Summit, May 10, 1869, Cultural Resources Management, Intermountain Region, National Park Service, 2005, 14, 93.

  A few days after: This story draws from the report of the actual discovery as described in Christopher W. Merritt, “The Continental Backwaters of Chinese Railroad Worker History and Archaeology: Perspectives from Montana and Utah,” working paper presented to the Archaeology Network Workshop of the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project, October 2013, 5–6.

  The event began: “The Last Rail,” Daily Alta California, May 12, 1869; “John Chinaman at Lunch,” Chicago Tribune, May 13, 1869; “The Pacific Railroad: Interesting Account of Its Completion,” New Hampshire Sentinel, May 20, 1869; “A Significant Picture,” Galveston Tri-Weekly News, June 4, 1869; “From the Railroad Front—The Ceremonies,” Sacramento Daily Union, May 12, 1869; Spude and Delyea, Promontory Summit, 22–26; and David Haward Bain, Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad (New York: Penguin, 1999), 658–67.

  To emphasize: “The Pacific Railroad,” Sacramento Daily Union, May 11, 1869.

  After the brief event: “The Summit Deserted—A Scramble for Relics,” San Francisco Newsletter, May 15, 1869; “The Last Tie,” Overland and Out West Magazine, July 1869, 77–84.

  Strobridge held his own: “Pacific Railroad: Close of the Inauguration Ceremonies at Promontory Summit,” Chicago Tribune, May 12, 1869; “Honors to John Chinaman,” San Francisco Newsletter, May 15, 1869; “The Last Rail,” Daily Alta California, May 12, 1869; and “The Chinaman as a Railroad Builder,” Daily National Intelligencer, May 27, 1869. And see “A Compliment to the Chinese,” Sacramento Daily Union, May 3, 1869.

  At the lively public celebration: Sacramento Daily Union, May 8, 1869; “Arrival of Vice President Colfax and Party,” Sacramento Daily Union, August 13, 1869.

  As historically significant: “Completion of the Pacific Railroad,” San Francisco Bulletin, May 8, 1869.

  San Francisco and Sacramento: “The Pacific Railroad,” San Francisco Daily Times, May 10, 1869; “Railroad Celebrations East,” Daily Alta California, May 12, 1869.

  At Promontory Summit, however: Spude and Delyea, Promontory Summit, 20–21, 33–34, 49. See 1870 census of Promontory; Sue Fawn Chung to author, email, March 25, 2014.

  Several dramatic incidents: “Second Despatch,” Daily Alta California, May 8, 1869; Kraus, “Chinese Laborers,” 56–57; Williams, Great and Shining Road, 263–65.

  Stanford and his elite party: “Union Pacific Laborers Unpaid,” Sacramento Daily Union, May 11, 1869; J. N. Bowman, “Driving the Last Spike at Promontory 1869,” Utah Historical Quarterly 37, no. 1 (Winter 1969): 76–101; and Michael W. Johnson, “Rendezvous at Promontory: A New Look at the Golden Spike Ceremony,” Utah Historical Quarterly 72, no. 1 (Winter 2004): 47–68.

  Shortly before the Promontory: Daniel Cleveland, “The Chinese as Railroad Laborers,” a chapter in “The Chinese in California,” Daniel Cleveland Manuscripts, 1868–1929, MSS HM 72176, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif.

  “China is our neighbor now”: Rev. John Todd, The Sunset Land; or, The Great Pacific Slope (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1870), 291–92 and 234.

  In contrast to these expansive: “The Railroad Celebration in San Francisco,” Sacramento Daily Union, May 5, 1869; and “Completion of the Pacific Railroad,” San Francisco Bulletin, May 8, 1869.

  Colorful descriptions: Spude and Delyea, Promontory Summit, reproduces many of the images, most of them rarely seen, that were taken on May 10, 1869.

  The photographers captured: Denise Khor, “Railroad Frames: Landscapes and the Chinese Railroad Worker in Photography, 1865–1869,” in Chang and Fishkin, Chinese and the Iron Road.

  But is the scene: Andrew J. Russell, H69.4592030, Oakland Museum of California. See the online version with “magnifying glass.”

  Some interpret this omission: Sidney Dillon, “Historic Moments: Driving the Last Spike of the Union Pacific,” Scribner’s, September 1892, 253–59; J. N. Bowman, “Pacific Railroad: The Last Spike Driven,” Railroad Record, May 13, 1869, 147; Michael W. Johnson, “Rendezvous at Promontory: A New Look at the Golden Spike Ceremony,”
Utah Historical Quarterly 72, no. 1 (Winter 2004): 47–68; and Cleveland Ohio Leader, June 1893, Stanford Family Scrapbooks, vol. 4, p. 96, Special Collections, Green Library, Stanford University.

  Look even closer: Bradley W. Richards, The Savage View: Charles Savage, Pioneer Mormon Photographer (Nevada City, Calif.: Carl Mautz Publishing, 1995), 48; and “A Significant Picture,” Galveston Tri-Weekly News, June 4, 1869. Thank you to Victoria Sandin, who first alerted me to the ghostly figure.

  None of the images: Spude and Delyea, Promontory Summit, 155.

  10. BEYOND PROMONTORY

  An article under the title: Daily National Intelligencer, May 27, 1869; and Scientific American, July 31, 1869. The article appears to have come from San Francisco Daily Times, May 14, 1869.

  The Chinese laborer: “The Railway Front,” Daily Alta California, May 6, 1869.

  Legend has it that: Ng Poon Chew, “Chinese Immigration,” Chinese Students’ Monthly, March 10, 1914, 398; and see “How Our Chinamen Are Employed,” Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine, March 1869.

  As early as 1868: Oregon State Journal, July 25, October 17, and November 7, 1868; Morning Oregonian, August 16, 1869; and Railroad Record, November 12, 1868. Also see Thomas C. Durant to D. W. Strong, October 10, 1868, in Testimony Taken by the Pacific Railway Commission, vol. 5 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1887), 2968–70; Railroad Gazette, October 8 and July 30, 1870, and March 25, 1871.

  In the months after Promontory: Railroad Record, September 6 and 23, October 14, and December 12, 1869, and January 6, July 21, September 22, October 20, and November 24, 1870; Daily Alta California, May 8, August 7 and 8, 1869; Sacramento Daily Union April 30, 1870; Times-Picayune, July 14, 1870; Nottinghamshire Guardian, January 28, 1870; “Interesting to American Workmen,” Cincinnati Daily Inquirer, September 22, 1870; and Gilbert H. Kneiss, “The Virginia and Truckee Railway,” Railway and Locomotive Historical Society Bulletin, no. 45 (January 1938), Baker Library, Harvard Business School.