The Town That Expelled Its Builders

The railroad that made Truckee a town was built almost entirely by Chinese laborers. The tunnels, the grades, the roadbed over the Sierra, the snowsheds that kept the tracks passable through winter, the infrastructure of the whole crossing, was built on Chinese hands. When the construction work moved on, many of those workers stayed. They operated laundries and restaurants and truck farms that supplied the mining camps. They had built the town's economic foundation.

In eighteen seventy-six, white residents of Truckee organized themselves into the Caucasian League and launched what the historical record describes as a coordinated campaign to remove the Chinese community entirely. It combined an economic boycott of any business that employed or served Chinese workers with arson attacks on Chinese-owned structures. The campaign was explicit about its goal. It largely achieved it over the next two years, through arson attacks including the eighteen seventy-six Trout Creek Outrage and a final burning of the Chinese quarter in eighteen seventy-eight. Truckee's Chinese residents, who had built much of what the town depended on, were gone.

The newspaper editor and lawyer who backed this campaign was a man named Charles McGlashan, who owned the Truckee Republican and served as defense attorney for men accused in the anti Chinese arson attacks. McGlashan used the Truckee expulsion as a template. Historical accounts in the California History Journal and at the Bancroft Library document that advocates used the Truckee events as evidence in the political campaign that resulted in the Chinese Exclusion Act of eighteen eighty-two. The specific mechanism, whether McGlashan himself testified or corresponded with congressional sponsors, has not been fully established in archival documents available to researchers, but the Truckee expulsion's role as a model event in the national anti-Chinese campaign is documented in multiple sources.

What happened here in eighteen seventy-three is not on any historical marker in downtown Truckee. The railroad is celebrated. The Donner Party is interpreted. The people who built the railroad and were then expelled from the town they built are largely absent from the civic story.

What you see here now is the edited version.