The Iron Road, Chinese Labor and the Transcontinental Railroad

When the Central Pacific Railroad broke ground in Sacramento in January of eighteen sixty-three, its supervisors assumed they would build eastward through the Sierra Nevada using Irish and white American laborers. Within two years they were running short of workers. Charles Crocker, one of the Central Pacific's four founders, suggested trying Chinese workers, and construction boss James Strobridge hired fifty men for a trial.

They proved so reliable and efficient that within two years the workforce was overwhelmingly Chinese, about twelve thousand men, roughly eighty percent of the Central Pacific's labor force. They were mostly from Guangdong Province in southern China, many already experienced in California from the mining years. They set up their own camps, cooked their own food, and drank boiled tea rather than the river water that sickened their colleagues.

They received less pay than white workers for the same labor. When they struck in the summer of eighteen sixty-seven demanding equal wages and shorter hours in the tunnels, Crocker cut off their food supply until they returned to work. The work they did was genuinely extraordinary.

Through the Sierra Nevada, they drilled and blasted through granite that a superintendent later said was the hardest rock he had ever encountered. In the brutal winter of eighteen sixty-six and sixty-seven, they dug tunnels through forty-foot snowdrifts to reach the rockface. Some were buried alive in avalanches.

The exact death toll was never recorded. When the Golden Spike was driven at Promontory Summit, Utah, on May tenth, eighteen sixty-nine, completing the transcontinental line, the Chinese workers who had built most of it were not invited to the ceremony. The railroad compressed California's growth by decades.

Settlers who would have spent six months crossing the continent now arrived in six days.