The CPRR first tried to use Irish immigrant and other white workers, but the labor supply was scarce. Leland Stanford, president of the railroad, had been elected governor on a program opposing Chinese immigration, calling the Chinese “the dregs” of Asia and declaring to the state legislature a year earlier, “The presence of numbers of that degraded and distinct people would exercise a deleterious effect upon the superior race.” 1 The Central Pacific Railroad (CPRR) would extend east from Sacramento across the Sierras and Nevada to meet the Union Pacific Railroad (UPRR) that stretched west through the plains from Council Bluffs, Iowa, and Omaha, Nebraska.Īt the start of construction the Central Pacific Railroad had no plans to hire Chinese workers. Ground was broken in Sacramento at Front and K Street on Januto begin construction of the Central Pacific Railroad, the western link of the first transcontinental railroad. This is an introduction, a way to begin to convey a bit of what the Chinese workers encountered and what they achieved. Hart, the official photographer for the CPRR, and others, to convey how the Sierra Nevada summit or the Nevada desert looked – and felt. We also include a few of the photographs taken by Alfred A. In this visualization, we briefly recount the story of the Chinese workers in the context of engrossing topographic contour maps. We can now comprehend in new ways the immense engineering challenges and extreme geologic and meteorological conditions the Chinese workers faced. Today we can also draw upon artifacts of material culture uncovered by archaeologists, oral histories of descendants of the workers, and the ability of digital resources to bring together all the texts and other evidence for insights. Historians have only been able to fashion what we know about the Chinese workers through the eyes of others, such as reports and letters to company and government officials by managers and engineers and their memoirs, along with accounts by journalists and travel writers. But there is no extant letter, diary, or memoir by the Chinese workers themselves. This was the largest engineering project of the time, crucial for developing the American West and connecting the United States across the continent. The terrain was a bit easier once they reached the high desert of Nevada and Utah, but there they had to contend with extreme heat, long supply lines, and the breakneck speed of construction. The eastern section of the line, built by the Union Pacific Railroad Company, required tracks laid across vast flat expanses of mid-western prairie, but the western portion of the line required tunneling through the imposing Sierra Nevada mountains – blasting and digging cuts through deep rock, carving out 15 tunnels through solid granite in high altitudes, dumping large quantities of dirt and rubble to create fills, constructing trestles across deep canyons, building retaining walls. The Chinese numbered 10,000 to 15,000 during high points of construction of the CPRR and they perhaps amounted up to 20,000 in total between 18, composing as much as 90 percent of the workforce for much of the construction. Chinese workers were an essential part of building the Central Pacific Railroad (CPRR), the western section of the first transcontinental railroad across the United States.
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