In early 1865 the Central Pacific Railroad had work for 4,000 men. Charles Crocker, the contractor running construction, could barely keep 800 on the job at one time. Most were Irish immigrants, the work was brutal, and the camps were badly run. Men quit faster than they could be replaced.
That shortage pushed Crocker toward a decision that shaped the western half of the first transcontinental railroad.
A railroad with no plan to hire Chinese workers
According to Stanford University’s Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project, the company began with no intention of employing Chinese labor at all. Its president, Leland Stanford, had been elected governor of California on a platform against Chinese immigration and had called the Chinese “the dregs” of Asia. In January 1865 the construction supervisor, James Strobridge, advertised in the Sacramento Union and handed out bills across the state asking for 5000 laborers. Only a few hundred came. Strobridge himself called the white workers “unsteady men and unreliable.”
PBS’s American Experience account says Crocker suggested a rethink, and ran straight into Strobridge’s prejudice. The foreman gave way after a group of Irish laborers agitated over wages. Crocker told him to bring in Chinese workers instead, and the Irishmen dropped their dispute at once. Strobridge reluctantly hired 50 Chinese men as wagon-fillers. Their work impressed him, so he hired more, and for harder jobs.
Numbers climb fast
Labor recruiters began combing California, and Crocker paid companies to advertise the work in China. Chinese crews arrived by the shipload. By July 1865 the Chinese workforce was nearly 4,000, according to the Stanford project. During 1866, approximately 8,000 Chinese worked on tunnels and 3000 on grading and other tasks, about ninety percent of the workforce. PBS puts the high at 12,000 in 1868, at least 80% of the Central Pacific’s workers. One scholar cited by the Stanford researchers estimates the total over the whole job could have reached 20,000.
Most came from the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong province, a region the Stanford project describes as hit by extreme poverty, ethnic conflict and civil unrest.
Crocker later said he had no complaints. “Wherever we put them, we found them good,” he recalled, “and they worked themselves into our favor to such an extent that if we found we were in a hurry for a job of work, it was better to put Chinese on at once.”
Pay, food and a famous retort
The Chinese teams worked in groups of 20 under one white foreman. They were paid $27 a month at first, then $30, with food and board deducted. Irish workers got $35 a month with board provided.
Their habits set them apart, PBS notes. Cooks bought dried food from the Chinese districts of Sacramento and San Francisco, and the crews ate vegetables and seafood. They drank tea rather than water, which PBS says helped them avoid the dysentery that struck white crews.
As work crews neared the summit, Strobridge still doubted the Chinese could handle some jobs. When Irish masons struck for higher pay, Crocker proposed Chinese stonelayers. The foreman objected. Crocker’s answer became famous: “Did they not build the Chinese Wall, the biggest piece of masonry in the world?” Chinese crews were soon laying stone.
The ten-mile day
By the end of the line Crocker was confident enough in his Irish and Chinese crews to try for a record. On April 28, 1868, they laid 10 miles of track in a single day. An observing army officer told Crocker he had never seen such organization, that “it was like an army marching over the ground and leaving a track built behind them.”
The Stanford project says Chinese workers numbered 10,000 to 15,000 at high points of the work and carved 15 tunnels through solid Sierra granite. It also notes a gap in the record: no letter, diary or memoir by the Chinese workers themselves survives, so historians rely on managers’ reports, engineers’ memoirs and journalists’ accounts.
Sources
- Workers of the Central and Union Pacific Railroad | American Experience | Official Site | PBS
- Geography of Chinese Workers Building the Transcontinental Railroad
