A Chinaman's Chance

“I timed the movement twice and found the speed as follows: The first time 240 feet of rail was laid in one minute and twenty seconds; the second time 240 feet was laid in one minute and fifteen seconds.” 

—San Francisco news reporter for the Daily Alta California 

Sunlight creeps over the mountains of Utah and spills across the ground. A train huffs along a track. The orange-red dawn fingers the ink-black metal of the engine and catches the steam and smoke rising from it. 

The engine wheezes to a halt not far from the end of the line. 

Feet encased in thick leather work boots stir up puffs of dust. Black braids of hair swing under wide-brimmed hats, the style of which was brought from another country. The wearers of the hats are also from another country: China. 

This is the Central Pacific Railroad’s great force of track layers. Some of these men have been laboring on the iron road for as long as six years. 

The line started in California in 1863. Today is Wednesday, April 28, 1869. Trains can now run from San Francisco up into the Sierra Nevada mountains, through Donner Pass and down into the Nevada and Utah deserts. 

The Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads have been building towards each other since they began, and are now nearing the chosen junction in Ogden. Recently, the Union Pacific laid six miles of track in one day. Their bosses sent a message to Charles Crocker, the Central Pacific’s construction supervisor, inviting him and his “Chinese pets” to beat that. The Central Pacific workers did so, laying seven miles in a day. The Union Pacific then hammered out seven and a half miles in one day by working from 3:00AM until nearly midnight. 

Crocker then claimed that the Central Pacific workers were capable of putting down ten miles of track in one day. 

The Union Pacific workers declared this idea ridiculous, and the UPRR’s vice-president Thomas Durant bet Charles Crocker $10,000 that ten miles of track in one day was impossible to fulfill, saying further that his money was covered. 

In response, Charles Crocker and James Strorbridge, his one-eyed construction superintendent, spent several days arranging for trains loaded with track supplies to be brought to the rail head. To win the bet, five trains, each with sixteen flatcars full of supplies, are standing ready. Every set of sixteen cars holds enough materials for two miles of track. 

Workers have already laid down wooden ties on graded ground for ten miles. It was planned that Tuesday, April 27, would be the great day, but a train running off the tracks caused the event to be postponed to the 28th. 

Now the day has come. Over 4,000 men are assembled and ready to begin. All but a small fraction of this number are Chinese. These men range in age from their late teens to their forties, and all are fit and strong. The weather and terrain in the United States are like nothing they ever saw at home. Yet touches of home are found in all their camps. Ceramic bowls, toothbrushes made of bamboo and boar bristles, food, and opium are all shipped to Gold Mountain from China. So many Chinese live in the United States that it has produced a new and thriving market in the buying and selling of Chinese goods.

Most of these Chinese men hail from southern China’s Pearl River delta, called the Siyi, consisting of four counties south-west of Hong Kong. To them, the United States was the Flowery Flag Nation and Gold Mountain. It’s a place where laborers are wanted, and the Chinese are willing to supply that labor. The Chinese are the most numerous of the CPRR’s workers, and the company knows it. These men have climbed the mountains and tunneled through them. For years now, both railroad employers and the employed have been aware that the iron road can’t go forward without Chinese workers. 

When pay is handed out on Fridays, white workers, mainly Irish, tend to disappear, and sometimes don’t come back after the weekend, too drunk to work. Chinese workers insist on being paid in gold dollars rather than paper, and save their money. They send much of their earnings home, first exchanging gold for silver, which is more valuable in their homeland. The silver goes back across the sea to their home villages. With the money go many letters to families. Some of those letters are to wives and children they have never met, supported by what is sent back from Gold Mountain. Some of those wives in China die virgin widows, legally married to men they have never been with, after raising children they adopted and provided for with money from an unseen husband. The wealth from Gold Mountain also funds the building of village watch towers, erected so as to provide warnings against attacks. Many of these towers stand into the twenty-first century. 

These men have been tried and have not been found wanting. They know their business. They know this will be a race against time. They’ve beaten the Union Pacific once, and they’re ready to do it again. The bosses are ready to have them prove to the other side that they are just as capable of great things.

One-eyed Strorbridge is mounted on a horse, ready to travel up and down the line to perform his role of superintendent. The Chinese have been heard referring to him as “One-eyed bossy man.” He holds his watch in his hand, waiting for the hour. 

The delicate second hand makes the final round of the dial. 

The engine’s whistle screams long and loud, piercing the morning quiet, and a plume of white steam shoots into the air. It’s 7:00AM. 

Every worker surges forward, climbing onto the flatcars and unloading the iron rails, fishplates, and kegs full of bolts and spikes. In eight minutes, the first sixteen flatcars are bare.

Smaller flatcars are set on the tracks by hand and loaded with the supplies. A horse with a rider is positioned on either side of the car, and a single long rope links the horses and is secured to the vehicle. Six men pile onto each flatcar and hand out materials as they are needed. 

Eight Irishmen, working in teams of four, use heavy iron tongs to grip the 560 pound rails and move them off the flatcar and onto the ties. After they are set down, the rails are meticulously straightened; a crooked section could derail a train. Straightening finished, spikes are hammered by hand with mallets through the solid iron rails and into the wooden ties.

Then the fishplates—which hold one length of rail to another—are bolted on. Four hundred Chinese men armed with shovels and tamping bars lift the edges of the ties and fill in more ballast, setting the track firmly in place. 

The track moves forward at a pace to match a leisurely stroll. An hour goes by, and a mile has been laid down. Two hours pass, and the supplies from the first sixteen-car train are used up. 

The small horse-drawn cars are now moving at speed, whizzing forward and back on the track. Empty cars are lifted off to allow full ones to pass, then set back in place to complete the return journey and be reloaded. 

As the watch hands tick towards noon and heat grows, the work keeps on at a steady pace. When the CPRR hands break for lunch at 1:30PM, they have been at it hammer and tongs for six and a half hours, and more than six miles of track are on the ground. The bosses declare that this location will be known as “Victory."

After lunch, the going gets tougher. The morning’s prepared grading covered terrain that was relatively flat. The road now winds right and left up a slope. The straight iron rails need to be bent accordingly, and this slows the march of the railroad army. The ends of the rails are placed on wooden blocks and they are beaten in the center with hammers until the necessary curvature is reached. Nevertheless, when the railroad hands call it quits at 7:00PM, ten miles and fifty-six feet of track have been built. 

The four Irish iron workers receive four days’ worth of pay. There are no records telling whether the Chinese workers received anything more than their usual wages for a day. No bookkeeping is done on the wages due to “John Chinaman.” One-eyed Strorbridge does not know the names of his multitude of Chinese workers. He hands pay over to Chinese headmen, who then deal out the proper amounts to every man in their work gangs. But this Strorbridge does know, and will testify to in Congressional hearings concerning Chinese immigration: the company had less difficulty with Chinese workers than with whites, even when their pay was delayed. The Chinese are a hard-working people who all the bosses say are less troublesome than Irish hands. 

Boarding boss Jim Campbell mounts a locomotive and has the engineers run it back to the morning’s camp at 40 miles an hour to prove the track is well-laid and safe. 

As the sun sets, 1,200 men ride the flatcars they emptied back to Victory Camp. The rest walk the ten miles back. Night creeps over the earth, and stars wink in the heavens. Candles and fires glow in and around the tents, lighting up the canvas city. The strains of a song drift in the air swirling with opium smoke: Marry your daughter to a Gold Mountain guest, They would come back home with glory and wealth. 

Tomorrow is another day of work. 

Author’s note: The song lyrics are quoted from the book “Ghosts of Gold Mountain” by Gordon H. Chang. I also used that book for much of my research.

I also used the following article for research:

http://cprr.org/Museum/Southern_Pacific_Bulletin/Ten_Mile_Day.html

“A Chinaman’s chance” is a term that developed in California in the late 1800s. It’s similar to “when pigs fly” and “a snowball’s chance in Hell". Chinese in the U.S. were often viewed and treated with hostility.