The Golden Spike's Missing Workers

On May tenth, eighteen sixty-nine, the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads met at Promontory Summit, Utah, and a photographer named Andrew J. Russell set up his camera. The image he made that day, two locomotives facing each other across a gap in the rails, men in suits raising bottles, dignitaries posing on the cowcatchers, became the definitive photograph of a defining American moment.

Look at the photograph. Count the Chinese workers.

Between ten thousand and fifteen thousand Chinese men, the majority Cantonese migrants recruited by the Central Pacific, had done the most technically demanding work of the western construction: drilling through the Sierra Nevada, blasting the thousand-foot descent into the Nevada desert, laying track across the basin toward Promontory. They had worked in conditions that killed some of them in numbers the company did not make public. The specific death toll of Chinese workers on the Central Pacific is not established in the public record.

When the ceremony happened, the Chinese workers were not in the photograph and not, by most accounts, significantly present at the celebration. The commemorative record was built around the locomotives, the golden spike, and the men in suits.

The National Historic Site at Promontory Summit re-enacts the driving of the spike and maintains interpretive exhibits on the Chinese labor force. The exhibits have expanded in recent decades to address the gap between what the ceremony commemorated and who made it possible. The locomotives Jupiter and No. One Hundred Nineteen, the originals long since gone, are represented by full-scale replicas built in the nineteen seventies. They face each other on the original alignment, exactly where Russell's photograph was made.