The Long Rail and the Short Promise, Central Pacific Across the Basin

The men who built the railroad across Nevada were, for the most part, invisible to the reporters who covered it. Journalists described the engineering. They calculated the miles of track per day, sometimes three, sometimes six on a good flat stretch of the Humboldt Valley.

What the papers rarely described was who was doing the work. Between ten thousand and twenty thousand Chinese laborers had blasted and cut the Central Pacific's route through the Sierra Nevada, working in brutal conditions, though the precise death toll on the Sierra leg has never been reliably established. By the time they reached Nevada in eighteen sixty-eight, they were the most experienced railroad construction force in the country.

They moved east across the Great Basin at a pace that stunned observers. The route followed the Humboldt River, the same river that wagon trains had tracked westward since the eighteen forties. The Humboldt was a slow, bitter, alkali-laced stream that offered the only continuous water source across three hundred miles of high desert.

Emigrants called it the Humbug River for the way it dried to nothing at its sink, leaving travelers stranded. The railroad followed its valley because there was no other practical choice. Chinese workers earned thirty dollars a month, paid for their own food, and received no housing.

White workers earned thirty-five dollars and had room and board provided. That differential, embedded in Central Pacific payroll records, describes the economic logic of the project with a clarity no editorial can match. In eighteen sixty-seven, Chinese workers staged a week-long strike along the Nevada-California border demanding equal wages.

The company cut off their food supply. The strike ended. The workers went back to the track.

The golden spike was driven at Promontory Summit, Utah, in May of eighteen sixty-nine, completing the first transcontinental railroad. The ceremony photographs show eleven men with their hands on two locomotives. Not one of them is Chinese.