The Summit Tunnel's Unnamed Workers

Somewhere inside this mountain, in the winter of eighteen sixty-six, a man who will never appear in any official record drilled a hole in granite with a hand steel and a hammer. He drilled it by candlelight. When the hole was deep enough, his partner packed in black powder. Then they ran.

The Central Pacific Railroad needed to cross the Sierra Nevada. The engineering problem was not the grade. It was one particular formation of granite near Donner Summit, a mass so hard that black powder barely scratched it. At the peak of construction, somewhere between ten thousand and fifteen thousand Chinese laborers were doing this work, roughly eighty to ninety percent of the entire construction force. They were paid twenty-six dollars a month. White workers doing the same labor received thirty-five.

The tunnel they were drilling through in the winter of eighteen sixty-six is called Tunnel Six. It is one thousand six hundred fifty-nine feet long. Engineers planned to drill from both ends simultaneously to cut the time in half. It still took fifteen months. That winter the Sierra Nevada received so much snow that the workers could not reach the rock face at all. So they dug tunnels through the snow itself, sometimes forty feet deep, to get down to where the mountain was. They lived and worked in the snow tunnels for weeks at a time. Light came from candles. Air came from shafts punched to the surface.

The Central Pacific kept meticulous payroll records. They kept no casualty records for their Chinese workers. When a blasting charge went off early, or a snow tunnel collapsed, or a man fell from a cliff face where workers were lowered in wicker baskets to set charges on sheer rock, the company did not write down his name. When the railroad hired archaeologists decades later and found bones along the right-of-way, remains were gathered and returned to China. Most of the dead were never identified.

In June of eighteen sixty-seven, an estimated three to five thousand of these workers stopped working. They set down their tools and presented a list of demands: equal pay with white workers, a ten-hour workday above ground and eight hours underground, and the legal right not to be struck by foremen. The Central Pacific's response was to cut off their food supply. After one week, the men returned to work on the original terms. Not one demand was met. The event is considered the first large-scale organized labor action in Sierra Nevada history.

Interstate Eighty crosses their work today. The tunnel is still there, still active, still carrying freight across the mountain they drilled through by hand. There is no monument to them at the summit.