Hart Photographs, 1862-1869 / Department of Special Collections, Stanford University LibrariesĪt the time, it was a region enmeshed in political and social turmoil, but residents there often had contact with foreigners and were less fearful of taking long ocean voyages, making them good recruits, according to Fishkin. A camp of Chinese workers near Brown's Station of the Central Pacific Railroad. So the company arranged with labor contractors to bring workers directly from China, mostly from Guangdong province in the south. The success of the experiment led the Central Pacific to hire additional Chinese workers, but the Chinese labor pool in California soon ran out. They hailed from Sacramento, San Francisco and the gold-mining towns of the Sierra Nevada. They were among the 50,000 to 60,000 Chinese living in California who arrived in the early 1850s to work in mining and other sectors of the American West, according to the project. Strobridge also worried that the whites wouldn’t labor alongside the Chinese, who he thought lacked the brainpower to perform the work as well.Įventually, he yielded and in 1865 the Central Pacific tested out 50 Chinese laborers. “He didn’t think they were strong enough,” Obenzinger told NBC News in a 2017 interview. Among those initially against it was the Central Pacific construction supervisor, James H. Eventually, they headed to the Nevada silver mines for better wages and the prospect of striking it rich, Hilton Obenzinger, the project’s associate director, said.īut the plan hit opposition amid anti-Chinese sentiment that stemmed from the California Gold Rush. Many whites who took the jobs did so for only a time, reluctant to shoulder the demanding and hazardous work expected of them. Chang and Shelley Fisher Fishkin, co-directors of the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project at Stanford University. To grow its workforce, the Central Pacific took out an advertisement in January 1865 seeking 5,000 railroad laborers, but only a few hundred whites responded, according to “The Chinese and the Iron Road: Building the Transcontinental Railroad,” a book scheduled for release in April and edited by Gordon H. Stanford also served as president of the Central Pacific and later established the university that bears his name. It also generated tremendous wealth for railroad tycoons such as Leland Stanford, a former California governor who ran under an anti-Chinese immigrant platform. ![]() Produce and natural resources were among the things that could now be moved more quickly and cheaply from coast to coast. The first transcontinental railroad became a boon to the economy of a nation recovering from a civil war, shaving significant travel time across the continent from several months to about a week. Acts of Congress provided both companies with land grants and financing. The Union Pacific Railroad pushed west from Council Bluffs, Iowa (bordering Omaha), where their rails joined existing eastern lines. The Central Pacific broke ground on the first transcontinental railroad Jan. ![]() Stanford Historical Photograph Collection / Stanford University Libraries AN EXPERIMENT YIELDS SUCCESS Previous scholars and historians believed that there were no Chinese workers in this photo, but Stanford researchers identified two of them in the crowd. Leaders of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific Railroad lines meet and shake hands in this iconic photograph taken by Andrew J. “It is the best opportunity I will have in my lifetime to have this story shared, to have it understood and appreciated by people outside our community,” said Michael Kwan, the association’s president, whose great-great grandfather worked for the Central Pacific. Among the events planned around the sesquicentennial is the 2019 Golden Spike Conference, organized by the Chinese Railroad Workers Descendants Association, which will feature workshops, lectures, tours and a musical by Jason Ma entitled “Gold Mountain.” This May, for the 150th anniversary, descendants of the Chinese railroad laborers and other advocates have been working hard to ensure history does not repeat itself. ![]() I was beside myself,” Choy, who passed away in 2017, recalled during a 2013 interview. naturalized citizens under federal law.īut the ceremony featured nothing more than a “ passing mention of the Chinese.” The five minutes promised to the society never happened. Volpe’s remarks referenced some of the backbreaking and deadly work done on the Central Pacific by a labor force that was almost 90 percent Chinese, many of them migrants from China, ineligible to become U.S. “Who else but Americans could chisel through miles of solid granite? Who else but Americans could have laid 10 miles of track in 12 hours?”
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