Truckee: Timber, Railroad, and the Shadow of the Chinese Workers
Near Tahoe City, California
Truckee exists because of two things that no longer define it: the transcontinental railroad and the timber industry that fed it. In the eighteen sixties, as the Central Pacific pushed east toward Donner Summit, Truckee became the primary staging point, the place where workers, equipment, and supplies were organized before the brutal climb into the Sierra Nevada. The tracks reached Truckee on April third, eighteen sixty-eight, and the town's future as a railroad hub was secured.
What followed was one of the great industrial operations of the nineteenth century American West. The Central Pacific required millions of board feet of timber, for railroad ties, trestle bridges, snowsheds that covered miles of track in the high Sierra, and fuel for the locomotives themselves. The forests around Truckee, thick with sugar pine and ponderosa, supplied most of it. Sawmills multiplied along every accessible drainage. At the peak of the logging era, the largest mill operation was north of Truckee at Hobart Mills, where the Sierra Nevada Wood and Lumber Company ran a full industrial community.
The labor that built the railroad through these mountains was overwhelmingly Chinese. By the mid eighteen seventies, roughly a quarter of Truckee's population was of Chinese descent, and the town had one of the largest Chinatowns in California. The Chinese workers had built the tunnels, blasted the cuts, and laid the track that made Truckee possible. Then, beginning in the eighteen seventies, white residents organized boycotts and violence aimed at forcing them out. In September eighteen seventy-six, men set fire to cabins housing Chinese woodcutters near Trout Creek, shooting those who fled and killing one. No one was convicted. By eighteen eighty-six the so-called Truckee Method, a systematic economic and social squeeze, had driven most of the Chinese community out of town.
Truckee today is a mountain resort community, known for snow sports and Lake Tahoe proximity. The railroad still runs through the center of downtown, whistling past the Victorian storefronts, carrying freight over the same summit the Chinese workers conquered one hundred fifty-seven years ago.
