Professor Wecker
HUM 357O.O - Immigrant Literature
They built the Great Wall of China, didn’t they?
When people hear about the Great Wall, they will typically think about the Great Wall of China. However, what we will talk about here is not the Great Wall of China, initially built more than two thousand years ago. Rather we will talk about the critical role Chinese immigrant laborers played here in the United States one hundred and fifty years ago, in building the first transcontinental railroad. The linking of the Atlantic east coast with the Pacific west coast by this Great Iron Trail fundamentally transformed the United States, and propelled into the greatest power in human history.
When Leland Stanford and Thomas C. Durant, on May 10, 1869 (Williams 264), drove down that ceremonial last spike, a spike made of California gold, on the transcontinental railroad at the Promontory Summit, Utah, the history of the United States, and with it the history of this world, was forever changed. Among the engraving on 3 sides of the spike was the invocation “… May God continue the unity of our country as this railroad unites the two great oceans of the world…” (Williams 266).
Before that very moment, eight Chinese men, making the final preparation for the last spike of that historical railroad, had laid the final pair of rails. In the midst of fifteen hundred spectators of “every color, creed and nationality” (Williams 264), they appeared to be but a small and insignificant group. However this belies the role some 12,000 Chinese laborers (Calloway 144) had played in the preceding five years, from 1864 to 1869 that made this monumental iron and steel highway possible.
From the continuous execution toward the Manifest Destiny, the California Gold Rush and opening of the West stimulated increased interest in building a transcontinental railroad. To this end, the Central Pacific Railroad Company (CPRR) was established and construction of the route East from Sacramento, California began in 1863 (Borneman 41). At the same time, the Union Pacific Railroad Company (UPRR) started the route west from Omaha, Nebraska.
During the construction of the long and meandering 690 miles (Williams 267) from Sacramento, California, through the high Sierra Mountains, to Promontory Summit, Utah, where the route east eventually met the route west, Chinese laborers had at times consisted over 90% of the work force. (CPRR) While sustaining tremendous losses and facing overt and blatant racial discrimination during the construction of the transcontinental railroad, by their sheer perseverance, unsurpassed industriousness and continuous ingenuity, these Chinese immigrants made the transformation of the United States possible, and forever shaped the course of the world’s history.
The soaring Sierra Mountains, through which the route east was required to cut, blast and tunnel its way through, presented an unprecedented challenge to any railroad builders. To make matters worse, the project was suffering persistent financial problems and severe labor shortages. Of the planned 5,000 needed laborers, only 600, merely 12% of the anticipated amount, were on the payroll by 1864. Only 50 miles of tracks were built in the first two years, despite being on relatively flat land. (CPRR)
The severe labor shortage was caused in part by market forces – available labors were simply gravitating towards the readily available gold mining operations. It was also in large part due to virulent and prevalent racial prejudice, in that only white people were considered as being capable laborers for railroad building, as in many other contemporary aspects. One of the original plans to relieve the labor shortage by using prison labor with five thousand prisoners of war from the Confederate Army failed to materialize due to the timely end of the Civil War. (Chang 55)
Faced with an undersized but restive white workforce and lack of alternative white labor pools, the CPRR began to adapt to market reality by recruiting Chinese laborers, who were readily available in California, having been attracted by earlier gold rush dreams but were being squeezed out of gold mining opportunities by unfairly imposed taxes and fees.
To overcome strong objections from the construction superintendent James Strobridge that he did not want any Chinese employees in building the railroad (Galloway 83), his CPRR boss Charles Crocker, by reportedly retorting: “They built the Great Wall of China, didn’t they?” (Ambrose 150) reasoned with him that a race that had invented gun powder and built the Great Wall of China might also be capable of building a railroad (Williams 96). As history unfolds from that moment on, they were also to build the Great Iron Trail of the United States (Howard 173).
After the first day of tryouts, with grudgingly suspended objection from the construction superintendent and dismissive taunting by the far more muscular white crew, the seemingly effortless efficiency and superior quality demonstrated by the first group of 50 Chinese recruits quickly quashed lingering doubts in the CPRR management and shattered the barrier for the participation of Chinese laborers in the railroad construction. Because of their rapidly growing participation, the labor shortage was quickly solved for the CPRR. And with that, the transcontinental railroad project overcame one of its existential challenges. (Williams 97)
Soon, labor recruiters were scouring California, and Crocker hired companies to advertise the work in China. The number of Chinese workers on CPRR payrolls began increasing by the shipload. Several thousand Chinese men had signed on by the end of 1865; the number rose to a high of 12,000 in 1868, comprising at least 80% of the Central Pacific workforce. According to Crocker, "Wherever we put them, we found them good, 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" (Bain 221).
The Chinese laborers were organized into teams of about a dozen or so, with each team assigned its own cook and headman, who communicated with the Central Pacific foremen (Chang 57). Workers lived in canvas camps alongside the grade. In the mountains, wooden bunkhouses protected them from the drifting snow, although these were often compromised by the elements. Each gang had a cook who purchased dried food from the Chinese districts of Sacramento and San Francisco to prepare on site. They bathed themselves, washed their clothes, and stayed away from whiskey. Instead of water they drank lukewarm tea, boiled in the mornings and dispensed to them throughout the day. In such a manner, the Chinese laborer workforce managed to avoid the dysentery that ravaged white crews.
In tunnel construction through the Sierras, Chinese laborers were willing to use the newly available alternative to black powder, Nitroglycerin, more powerful but also lethally less predictable to handle, to blast the hardest granites (Chang 59). When the worksites were covered under several feet of snow, they continued work by creating an underground network of tunnels, sleeping quarters and chimneys (Chang 60).
As they rapidly closed in on the rendezvous point at Promontory Summit, Crocker was so convinced of the skill of his workers that he decided to try for a record by laying 10 miles of track in one day. That day:
One by one, platform cars dumped their iron, two miles of material in each trainload, and teams of Irishmen fairly ran the five-hundred-pound rails and hardware forward; straighteners led the Chinese gangs shoving the rails in place and keeping them to gauge while spikers walked down the ties, each man driving one particular spike and not stopping for another, moving on to the next rail; levelers and fillers followed, raising ties where needed, shoveling dirt beneath, tamping, and moving on... it was just like an army marching over the ground and leaving a track built behind them (Bain 639).
According to the famous author Mark Twain, “the Chinese – ‘a lazy one does not exist,’… crimped, tamped, and blasted under infernal conditions” (Williams 161). The laborers carried out their work with astounding precision. A tunnel several thousand feet long chiseled and blasted with four faces - two from each side of the mountain, and two from the center through a shaft down from the mountain top – was within two inches when the two halves met– saving months of expected remedial work. It was found to be of “first quality throughout” by the US Government inspectors.
Not only did the Chinese do most the blasting, but some of the actual construction as well. White artisans were in short supply. Due to the massive widening of the Emigrant gap ledge and construction of an increasing number of vast retaining walls, culverts, drains and bridge supports, several hundred Chinese were selected and trained as masons. Those selected received higher wages and performed as well as they had in other lines of work. The Railroad Record, as early as 1866, recognized that without tapping the Chinese labor market in California the work could never have been this advanced (Williams 162-163).
More than two thousand years ago, the construction of the Great Wall of China shifted the strategic balance between the more developed but largely agricultural Chinese inland and the less developed but more mobile and aggressive surrounding nomadic tribes. On top of the tall, massive and continuously solid masonry wall, a relatively small army of infantrymen could stop a far larger, mobile and better trained nomadic cavalry force. Its completion allowed ancient China to develop into one of the most prosperous places before Renaissance and Industry Revolution. A massive Chinese labor force had built it. Like the role their ancestors played in that huge construction project that changed the course of Chinese history, a large Chinese labor force was instrumental in the construction of the transcontinental railroad - the Great Iron Trail – that fundamentally changed the course of history of the United States and that of the world.
The completion of the first transcontinental railroad transformed relationship between the old and established east with the new and “wild” west, helping the formation of single national identity of the United States. It allowed rapid settlement of the western frontier by waves upon waves of European immigrants, forever transforming the ethnographic composition west of the Mississippi River. Among many others, one of the long lasting consequences of access to these vast new lands through the transcontinental railroads was the re-alignment of the cultural, agricultural, industrial, demographic, and military landscape.
One day after the last spike, the first transcontinental freight train rumbled out of California on its way to the east coast. It carried in its hold an emissary of the Asian markets: a shipment of Japanese teas. On May 15, though the road required hundreds of thousands of dollars in patchwork along its length, regular passenger service opened for business. (Williams 268) Travelers could make the trip between San Francisco and New York in a week. No longer did passengers or cargo have to take the treacherous 3-month route across the ocean and Panama that had killed railroad advocate Theodore Judah. The coasts were connected -- and the world as Americans knew it had grown smaller.
This was especially helpful for the industrial north at the time. While the nation was still divided due to the Civil War, the transcontinental railroad helped unify the nation, eventually making it a super power. Commerce increased between the states allowing over 50 million dollars’ worth of cargo to be shipped every year from 1869-1879. Goods from Asia and raw materials from the West were shipped to the East faster than ever. The West began to catch up with the Eastern way of life as many more people could now move west. The railroad brought products of eastern industry to the growing populace beyond the Mississippi. It ensured a production boom, as industry mined the vast resources of the middle and western continent for use in production.
After the railroad was completed, people had better access to mineral resources. More pay ores (gold, silver, platinum, etc.) were discovered as a result, and ores that had been developed minimally were developed more fully. Mining towns sprang up in a few areas, and most of them built spur railroad lines up to the main transcontinental railroad line to transport the valuable ores that came out of the mines and mills of those camps.
The building of the railroad linked the east and west coasts together, connecting the country in a way it had never been connected before. It formed America's first technology corridor. The railroad made it easy to ship produce, textiles, and other goods from one end of the country to the other. It also led to the settlement of the vast Western and Midwestern plains. Hundreds of frontier towns sprang up, anchored by train junctions and depots, and “as the line wound through the Sierras, resort hotels and spas blossomed in the crisp mountain air, especially among the crystal clear lakes” (Williams 243).
The Transcontinental Railroad created a nationwide transportation network that united the Nation. This network replaced the wagon trains of previous decades. It allowed for the transportation of larger quantities of goods over longer distances. It caused the transportation cost to be reduced to 52.5 cents per ton per mile for military freight compared to wagon tariff of $1.97, saving Washington millions of dollars each year. (Williams 234) The railroad also aided the United States military. Before the railroad was built, the West was, in several ways, isolated from the East, and so there was a great potential of a rebellion, or something else that would require military action, occurring and the military wouldn't have been able to reach the place where the event was taking place in time to stop it. With the completion of the railroad, transporting soldiers to problem areas became much easier, and there was less of a threat that way.
The first true “through” train of excursionists and emigrants rumbled through the arid slopes of Promontory Point, heading west, while from the other direction came a California freight carrying the first consignments of Japanese teas to the cities of the East Coast. As railroad financier George Francis Train stated, "The great Pacific Railway is commenced... Immigration will soon pour into these valleys. Then millions of immigrants will settle in this golden land in twenty years... This is the grandest enterprise under God!” (Williams 268) Americans moved west for free land, and the railroads carried cattle east to feed the millions in the cities. Buffalo hunters worked for railroad companies, changing the lives and cultures of Native Americans forever. Settlement developed along the railroad, leading to the population and organization of western territories and their eventual statehood. The development of the transcontinental railroad shaped the American West.
Not everyone would benefit from that transformation, however. The transcontinental railroad was not the beginning of the white settlers' battles with Native Americans. Nor was it the final nail in the coffin. But it was an irrevocable marker of encroaching white society, that unstoppable force which would be forcing Indians onto reservations within decades. New treaties scattered the Indians to reservations and opened the last great Native American holding to the settlers so steadily branching outward from the iron road. And the buffalo herds upon which Indians depended had been nearly depleted. They were easy prey to sport-hunters brought to the plains by the carload. More disastrously, the railroad introduced the herds to American industrial production, for which they became one more resource to be mined en masse. Millions of buffalo fell to indiscriminate slaughter, their hides shipped back along the rails to the markets of the East. The building of the transcontinental railroad contributed to the final destruction of the Plains Indians' way of life.
Homesteaders were able to move easily to the Great Plains to take up lands offered under the Homestead Act of 1862, accelerating America's fulfillment of its belief in its manifest destiny to populate the land of North America. It allowed the cattle ranching and farming industries to develop in the West, fueling the rapidly growing United States economy.
As the railroad encouraged the growth of American business, so too did it promote evolution of the nation's public discourse and intellectual life. Americans were able to travel across the length of the continent in a matter of days, and they could gaze upon their country in its entirety from the windows of their train cars. Conversations that would begin in the east would end in the west. Books written in San Francisco found homes on New York shelves just one week after their publication. The rails carried more than goods; they provided a conduit for ideas, a pathway for discourse. With the completion of its great railroad, America gave birth to a transcontinental culture. And the route further engendered another profound change in the American mind. Here was manifest destiny wrought in iron; here were two coasts united; here was an interior open to settlement. Distances shrank, but identification to land and fellow American grew in inverse proportion.
Just a few days before the last spike of the first transcontinental railroad was driven down, Charles Crocker, who five years ago had made that famous retort, recognized the role that the Chinese immigrant labor force had played. During a celebratory evening banquet, Crocker gave a speech which stated:
In the midst of our rejoicing, … I wish to call to mind that the early completion of this railroad we have built has been in a great measure due to that poor, destitute class of laborers called the Chinese – to the fidelity and industry they have shown – and the great amount of laborers of this land that have been employed upon the work (Howard 336-337).
By the time the United States entered World War, it had already surpassed Great Britain as the greatest industrial and economical power and well on its way to becoming the greatest military power, less than fifty years after the completion of the first transcontinental railroad. The manifest destiny had become the manifest reality.
If one looks deep and wide enough, history is full of events with striking similarities and profound differences, across time and vast distances. More than two thousand years ago, the building of the Great Wall thousands of miles long allowed a largely agricultural China to be free from recurring nomad incursions and develop in relative isolation. A hundred and fifty years ago, a large Chinese workforce played an essential and befitting role in building the first transcontinental road, the Great Iron Trail that allowed so many fundamental transformations of the United States.

Works Cited
Bain, David Haward. Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad. New York: Penguin Books, 1999. Print.
Borneman, Walter R. Rival Rails: The Race to Build America's Greatest Transcontinental Railroad. New York: Random House, 2010. Print.
Chang, Iris. The Chinese in America: A Narrative History. New York: Penguin Books, 2003. Print.
"CHINESE-AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION TO TRANSCONTINENTAL RAILROAD." CHINESE-AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION TO TRANSCONTINENTAL RAILROAD. N.p., n.d. Web. 05 Dec. 2012. <http://cprr.org/Museum/Chinese.html>.
Galloway, John Debo. The First Transcontinental Railroad: central Pacific Union Pacific. New York: Arno Press, A New York Times Company, 1981. Print.
Howard, Robert West. The Great Iron Trail: The Story of the First Transcontinental Railroad. New York: Putnam, 1962. Print.
Ambrose, Stephen. Nothing Like It in the World, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000, Print.
Thomas, William G. The Iron Way: Railroads, the Civil War, and the Making of Modern America. New Haven: Yale UP, 2011. Print.
Williams, John Hoyt. A Great & Shining Road: The Epic Story of the Transcontinental Railroad. New York: Times, 1988. Print.