They were called “coolies,” a Hindu term meaning unskilled labor. The British picked it up and then passed it on to the Americans, who applied it to Chinese. The politicians cursed them, vied with one another about who hated the Chinese the most, declared them to be dregs, said they worried about the terrible habits the Chinese brought with them. One of the leaders in this ranting and raving was Governor Stanford. While campaigning, he had called the Chinese the “dregs of Asia” and “that degraded race.” In 1858, the California legislature banned any further importations. Still they came.
It got so bad that a young Californian appointed to collect the miner’s tax wrote in his diary, “Had a China fight. Knocked down some and drawed out our pistols on the rest…. Had a great time. Chinamen’s tails cut off. Down at the Little Yuba River shot a Chinaman. Had a hell of a time.” That same tax collector later was appointed by President Ulysses S. Grant to be ambassador to Japan.11
In the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, there are Chinese-English and English-Chinese phrase books from 1867. The English-speakers learned how to say in Chinese: “Can you get me a good boy? He wants $8.00 per month? He ought to be satisfied with $6.00. I think he is very stupid. Come at seven every morning. Go home at eight every night. Light the fire. Sweep the rooms. Wash the clothes. Wash the windows. Wash the floor. Sweep the stairs. Trim the lamps. I want to cut his wages.” Two phrases that never appear in the English-Chinese book are, “How are you?” and “Thank you.”
The Chinese could learn to say in English, to employers: “Yes, madam,” “You must not strike me,” and so forth. To authorities, “He does not intend to pay me my wages. He claimed my mine. He tries to extort money from me. He took it from me by violence. He assaulted me. The man struck the Chinese boy on the head. He came to his death by homicide. He was murdered by a thief. He was shot dead by his enemy. He was flogged publicly twice in the streets. He was frozen to death in the snow.”12
White men despised the Chinese even as they used them. They constantly compared the Chinese to another subordinate group, white women. The Chinese were small, with delicate hands and hairless faces and long, braided hair. One editor called them “half-made men,” which fit nicely with their two most common jobs, laundrymen and domestic servants. But the same editor referred to their “dreadful vitality.”13
After 1858, many Chinese had come to America in response to pamphlets put out by the several companies of Chinese merchants residing in San Francisco, advertising the high price of labor. The merchant companies took their pay from a percentage of a man’s earnings, plus a large bonus. They agreed to return a man to China free of charge; in the event of sickness he would be cared for; in case of death they would send the body home to be buried in the Celestial Empire. These contracts were faithfully fulfilled. Nonetheless, the ships rivaled the slave ships for gruesomeness.
In California the Chinese could find work as domestics: cooks, laundrymen, housekeepers, gardeners, errand boys, and so on. Like most previous immigrants, they sent back to China letters to their families, urging their wives, children, parents, brothers, and sisters to come. They landed in San Francisco, which had the largest number of Chinese and was known to them in their own language as “the big city—Tai Fau—first city.” Next came Sacramento, the “Yi Fau,” or the second city. Marysville was the third city.14
In 1868, Lippincott’s Magazine ran an article on “The Chinese in California.” “The purpose of every Chinaman in coming here is to amass such a sum—trifling in our eyes—in three or four years, as in China will give him support for life.” The Chinese “toiled without ceasing.” He never spent his money. No white man could ever surpass his industry. “He may have less muscle, but by his untiring persistence he accomplishes more work than the Caucasian.” There were no clumsy men among the Chinese, who “quickly got the ‘hang’ of whatever you set them at, and soon display a remarkable adroitness.” There was a “spirit of adventure” in them, which sent Chinese to Nevada, Idaho, and Montana for work. “Every Chinaman reads and writes, and in figures he is our superior.” To some extent they adopted the American costume—pants, boots, soft hats. But never coats. The pigtail “is sacred. Never can a Chinaman be persuaded that he can survive the loss of that emblem of dignity.” The article concluded with a plea for the federal government to do something to protect the Chinese—after all, it said, there was a Freedmen’s Bureau to protect the newly freed slave.15
AFTER a month’s labor, Strobridge admitted, albeit grudgingly, that the Chinese had performed superbly. They worked as teams, took almost no breaks, learned how to blast away rocks, stayed healthy and on the job. Engineer Montague praised them and declared in his 1865 report, “The experiment has proved eminently successful.”16
The CP began to hire them locally, offering $28 a month, then $30, then $31. Those were big wages even when the men had to pay for their own food. Crocker turned to a labor contractor in San Francisco, Koop-manschap, and had him look across the state for two thousand more “coolies,” and even to import them from China if necessary. Before the end of 1865, there were seven thousand Chinese at work on the line, with just under two thousand whites.17
Lee Chew was one of them. In 1903, he wrote an autobiographical sketch for Independent magazine. As a boy, he slept with the other boys in his village, thirty of them in one room. Girls had their own house, with a room that slept forty. Lee Chew worked on a ten-acre farm where his father grew potatoes, rice, beans, peas, yams, and fruits. He went to school to learn how “the great Emperors of China ruled with the wisdom of gods and gave to the whole world the light of high civilization and the culture of our literature, which is the admiration of all nations.”
In 1860 or thereabouts, the sixteen-year-old Lee Chew went to Hong Kong with five other boys and they got steerage passage on a steamer, where they almost starved. But in San Francisco they went to the Chinese quarter and he got a job with an American family as houseboy at $3 a week. Then he got a job with the railroad that lasted three years and he saved enough money to open his own laundry.
Many years later, when Theodore Roosevelt was president, Lee Chew gave it as his opinion that the Chinese in America “were persecuted not for their vices but for their virtues. No one would hire an Irishman, German, Englishman or Italian when he could get a Chinese, because our countrymen are so much more honest, industrious, steady, sober and painstaking.”18 A Chinaman who came back to Lee Chew’s village from the United States “took ground as large as four city blocks and made a paradise of it. He had gone away from our village as a poor boy. Now he returned with unlimited wealth, made in America.”
CHARLIE Crocker claimed it was impossible to tell Chinese apart (they were just like Indians, he said). Thus, fearing paying double wages, he devised a scheme of employing, working, and paying them wholesale.19
The CP organized the Chinese into gangs of twelve to twenty men, one of whom was an elected headman, another the cook. Crocker hired Sam Thayer, who spoke a number of Chinese dialects, to teach the men something of the English language. The headman collected all the wages, giving some to the cook to purchase provisions from the Chinese merchants. Other amounts went for clothing and opium. (The Chinese laborers used the drug on Sunday, their day off, to relax.) At the end of the month, each worker got his remaining $20 or more. Each gang had a white, usually Irish, boss, and the whites usually monopolized the skilled work, such as trestling, masonry, and actual rail-laying. The Chinese did the grading, made cuts and fills, blasted, felled trees, and, most arduous of all, drilled the holes and put in and lit the black powder while driving tunnels.
In May, Mark Hopkins wrote to Huntington, “We find a difficulty in getting laborers on the RR work. Prospecting generally takes off our men.” But sixteen hundred Chinese were then employed, and “without them it would be impossible to go on with the work.”20 Crocker’s brother E.B. wrote that spring to Representative Cornelius Cole, “I can assure you the Chinese are moving the
earth and rock rapidly. They prove nearly equal to white men in the amount of labor they perform, and are far more reliable. No danger of strikes among them … I tell you Cole we are in dead earnest about this R.R. and you take 6 or 8 men in real earnest, and if they have any brains and industry they will accomplish something.”21
IT had been Judah’s original plan to bridge the deeper ravines and gaps between Newcastle (below Auburn) and Illinoistown with timber structures, but with the Chinese there to fill and push the carts, wherever possible earthen embankments (“fills”) were used. In a five-mile stretch from Auburn to Newcastle, the only wooden structures were the Newcastle trestle (86 feet high and 528 feet long), a trestle near Auburn at 30 feet high and 416 feet long, and a few others.
But even the Chinese didn’t solve every problem. The embankments were often impractical. Soil covering the ridge was only a foot or so deep, so scraping up enough dirt to make heaps fifty to a hundred feet high and several hundred feet long was impossible. Therefore, the engineers decided, early in 1865, to build trestles. When the railroad was finished, earth could be hauled in by train and the trestles replaced by fills.
In historian Wesley Griswold’s phrase, the trestles stood like “transfixed centipedes, straddling the gaps in the ridge with their massive multiple pairs of legs from immense pines, planted at 16-foot intervals, their feet braced in masonry.”22 The trestles, whose support timbers were called “bents” by the engineers, came originally from hundreds of thousands of feet of lumber cut in coastal forests of the Northwest, brought to the site by schooner and flatcar.
But after Newcastle was reached, CP lumbermen started hacking away at huge trees closer at hand, giant red firs and others. The bridges that were built out of sturdy timber and laced together and steadied by rows of horizontal beams looked like many-legged structures. Their spindly appearance scared hell out of the passengers, who gazed down as much as a hundred feet (at Deep Gulch, for example). Still the bridges managed to stand the weight of a locomotive and cars. “The boom of the powder blast is continually heard,” the Auburn Stars and Stripes reported. “Frowning embankments rise as if by magic. High trestle bridges spring up in a week.”23
HUNTINGTON had meanwhile filed a work-route map with the secretary of the interior covering the entire area from the California-Nevada border to the Great Salt Lake. He simply ignored the clause in the Pacific Railroad Bill that limited the CP to 150 miles east of the border. With that map, Huntington got the race between the UP and the CP started.24
On June 10, the rails reached Clipper Gap, about halfway between Auburn and Illinoistown. Toward the end of that summer, the railhead became Illinoistown, fifty-four miles from Sacramento. The elevation was 2,242 feet. From there to the summit was about fifty miles. The grade climbed almost forty-eight hundred feet, to 7,042. The grade went up the dividing ridge between the North Fork of the American River, which lay to the south, and Bear River, which was to the north.
This was the toughest. The hardest. The most expensive. The fifty miles that would be the most time-consuming. It took a full year to reach Dutch Flat from Illinoistown, sixty-seven miles from Sacramento. After that the difficulties increased, including more blasting, cutting, and filling, another precipitous gorge to be bridged, massive pinewood stands to be cleared, numerous tight curves to be plotted.
The engineers contemplated drilling fifteen tunnels through the granite—five on the west slope, one at the summit, and nine on the east. The longest, at 1,659 feet or 553 yards (or 113 yards beyond a quarter-mile), twenty-six feet wide and twenty feet high, would bore through the summit itself (No. 6). More than five hundred kegs of black powder would be consumed each day. Hundreds of gullies and ravines had to be filled, and at least eight long trestles built, with spans from thirty-eight to sixty feet high and from 350 to 500 feet long. Huntington had thirty vessels at sea simultaneously, bringing supplies and locomotives to California.
The task facing the CP was not only improbable, it was unique in engineering annals. The grading alone would exceed $100,000 per mile. Tens of thousands of tons of granite would have to be chipped and blasted from the mountains. Smaller chunks of it could be used for ballast on the track; big pieces could be sold to construction firms in California.
Strobridge divided his work crews into five parts. The largest, some five thousand men and six hundred teams of horses, were sent ahead of Illinoistown to work on Cape Horn. Another thousand men were detailed to clearing the right-of-way. Smaller teams of three to four hundred men each were put to work boring entrances for the first three tunnels.
One of the most feared stretches ran three miles along the precipitous gorge of the North Fork of the American River, nicknamed “Cape Horn.” The slope was at an angle of seventy-five degrees, and the river was twelve hundred to twenty-two hundred feet below the line of the railroad. There were no trails, not even a goat path. The grade would not be bored through a tunnel but, rather, built on the side of the mountain, which required blasting and rock cuts on the sheer cliffs. The mountain needed to be sculpted, because the roadbed would be curved around the mountain. The curves that hugged the monolith were either up grade or, sometimes, down. Men had to be lowered in a bos’n’s chair from above to place the black powder, fix and light the fuses, and yell to a man above to haul them up. With regard to Cape Horn and the tunnels, Van Nostrand’s Engineering Magazine said in 1870, “Good engineers considered the undertaking preposterous.”25
One day in the summer of 1865, a Chinese foreman went to Strobridge, nodded, and waited for permission to speak. When it was granted, he said that men of China were skilled at work like this. Their ancestors had built fortresses in the Yangtze gorges. Would he permit Chinese crews to work on Cape Horn? If so, could reeds be sent up from San Francisco to weave into baskets?
Strobridge would try anything. The reeds came on. At night the Chinese wove baskets similar to the ones their ancestors had used. The baskets were round, waist-high, four eyelets at the top, painted with symbols. Ropes ran from the eyelets to a central cable. The Chinese went to work—they needed little or no instruction in handling black powder, which was a Chinese invention—with a hauling crew at the precipice top.
Hundreds of barrels of black powder were ignited daily to form a ledge on which a roadbed could be laid. Some of the men were lost in accidents, but we don’t know how many: the CP did not keep a record of Chinese casualties.26
The Chinese workingmen, hanging in their baskets, had to bore the holes with their small hand-drills, then tamp in the explosives, set and light the fuse, and holler to be pulled out of the way. They used a huge amount of powder that was shipped to them from Sacramento. Crocker had a “spark-proof” car built to transport it, with iron sides, a door lined with India rubber, and a tin roof which could not catch fire from sparks and could be blown off in the event of an explosion. The CP made it in the railroad’s workshops at E and Sixth Streets in Sacramento. This car alone was allowed to haul explosives to the work sites, and it never had an accident.27
The Chinese made the roadbed and laid the track around Cape Horn. Though this took until the spring of 1866, it was not as time-consuming or difficult as had been feared. Still, it remains one of the best known of all the labors on the Central Pacific, mainly because, unlike the work in the tunnel, it makes for a spectacular diorama. As well it should. Hanging from those baskets, drilling holes in the cliff, placing the fuses, and getting hauled up was a spectacular piece of work. The white laborers couldn’t do it. The Chinese could, if not as a matter of course, then quickly and—at least they made it look this way—easily. Young Lewis Clement did the surveying and then took charge of overseeing the railroad engineering at Cape Horn.
What Clement planned and the Chinese made became one of the grandest sights to be seen along the entire Central Pacific line. Trains would halt there so tourists could get out of their cars to gasp and gape at the gorge and the grade.28
DANGEROUS as the Cape Horn work was, clearing th
e roadbed was worse. The Chinese who did it had the task of making an avenue a hundred feet wide on either side of the roadbed, mainly to provide room for the graders and to prevent tall trees from crashing down on the track. At least twenty-five feet on each side of the grade had to be cleared and leveled. Not only trees and stumps, but rocks, other obstructions, and vegetation of all types had to be removed. Past Illinoistown, the growth included some of the world’s largest trees, hundreds of feet high.
One three-hundred-man gang spent a full ten workdays clearing a single mile of right-of-way. The trees were shipped to sawmills to be fashioned into ties and trestling. Then the stumps had to be blasted from the soil. Ten barrels of black powder were needed to free each one. In any one week, the crews used as much explosives as did Generals Lee and McClellan at Antietam. Every time the powder charge was exploded, chunks of rock and tree flew through the air. They were like missiles fired by nature at the army invading it.29 (In World War II, the GIs in their foxholes got wounded more often by splinters flying through the air during a German barrage than by the shrapnel itself.) When a congressional investigator expressed incredulity at the amount of black powder used for any one stump, Clement told him, “These are not Yankee forests, but forests with trees four, six, and eight feet in diameter.” They were often 150 feet tall.30
THE first two groups, other than CP workers, to get a glimpse of what was being accomplished were George Gray and his assistants, and Schuyler Colfax accompanied by three journalists and some others.
Nothing Like It in the World The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869 Page 18
