The Chinese and the Development of the West

One of the most significant events in the history of the American West was the discovery of gold in the state of California in 1848. In the ensuing excitement people came to California, delirious with gold fever, not only from the East Coast of the United States but from all parts of the world.

Gold Rush

A New York newspaper reported from Monterey, California, on 29 August 1849, People were running around the area picking up pieces of gold from the ground as if a thousand pigs let loose in a forest were hunting for peanuts.” Rumors spread of the person who made 5,356 dollars in 64 days simply by sorting out gold from the sand in a stream with a pan, and of the reporter who made 100 dollars in one day when he came to cover the story. In the East Coast at that time, these were considered enormous sums of money.

People influenced by such rumors moved west one after another. Some sailed south, around the tip of South America. Some went by ship as far as Panama and crossed the isthmus by canoe or on foot. Still others went by land, battling Indians and harsh weather along the way. Some 25,000 people traveled west by sea and some 80,000 by land. As many as 250 ships sailed from the East Coast for California during the winter of 1849 and the spring of 1850. Advertisements for passage to California were posted not only in the East Coast of the United States but in Europe and Australia and in the major ports of China.

By the end of May 1848, three-fourths of the male population of San Francisco had gone out to hunt for gold. Because there were no shopkeepers, businessmen, reporters, or teachers, stores and businesses closed their doors, newspapers suspended publication, and even schools were forced to close. Shipping came to a standstill as sailors jumped ship to join in the excitement. Guards at San Jose Prison abandoned their posts and set out with their prisoners to hunt for gold.

The Gold Rush in California was followed by similar discoveries in Colorado, Nevada, Idaho, Montana, Arizona, New Mexico, North Dakota, and South Dakota, but California’s Gold Rush exerted the greatest influence on American society. The migration of people seeking new land rapidly increased the population of the West. The western territories became isolated states; ultimately they merged into a great nation stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

Construction of the Transcontinental Railroad

As the West developed, it became important to build a railroad that would link the East and the West politically and economically. As early as the 1830s merchants engaged in trade with China had advocated such a project in order to further trade with the Orient; at the same time railroads were beginning to replace water transportation as an economical means of shipping goods. The birth of the state of California in 1850 especially accelerated the construction movement. As the result of a study conducted by the War Department, the federal government concluded that three such railroads were possible, in the North, in the South, and across the center of the United States. In 1862 Congress approved the construction of a transcontinental railroad that would cross the center of the country.

In 1862 the Union Pacific Railroad was established and began to construct a railroad line heading west toward California from Omaha, Nebraska. Meanwhile in California the Central Pacific Railroad, which had been established a year earlier, began to construct a line heading east from Sacramento. The federal government granted these companies all the land they needed for construction and an additional 20 square miles of public land for each mile of railroad track. It also loaned them 16,000 dollars for each mile of flat land, 32,000 dollars for each mile of hilly land, and 48,000 dollars for each mile of mountainous terrain on which they laid their tracks. This was obviously a major national undertaking.

The Civil War temporarily interrupted the construction work, but work resumed as soon as the war ended in 1865. The Union Pacific employed mainly Irish laborers who had come to the United States as refugees from famines. The Central Pacific employed mainly Chinese laborers. A total of approximately 20,000 workers advanced the construction at an average rate of two miles a day (the record was 10 miles a day). Finally the two lines became parallel and were joined in Promontory, Utah. On 10 May 1869 the representative of the Central Pacific, Leland Stanford, hammered a gold spike into a railroad tie, and the transcontinental railroad was completed.

The Chinese and Railroad Construction

The majority of laborers engaged in constructing the transcontinental railroad from California toward the interior were Chinese. They lived in small tents beside the railroad tracks. Using picks and shovels, one-horse carts and wheelbarrows, they engaged in extremely heavy labor from sunrise to sunset. The labor contractors never took harsh weather or geographical conditions into consideration. During the difficult construction in the Sierra Nevadas in the winters of 1866 and 1867, for example, many Chinese lost their lives because they were forced to work and live literally under the snow. They were also made to perform other dangerous tasks. Workers were often suspended in baskets from the edge of cliffs in order to plant charges of dynamite; they were pulled back up quickly, just before the dynamite exploded. Treated like slaves, Chinese laborers shed much sweat and blood, leaving, as the saying went, “Chinese bones under every railroad lie.”

A historic photograph has recorded the ceremony marking the conclusion of the railroad. Its inscription explains that “Chinese laborers working for the Central Pacific Railroad laid the last rail and hammered in the final spike to complete the transcontinental railroad. This was the section of track into which the golden spike was hammered.”

In 1885 a young Japanese named Muto Sanji toured the United States, investigating labor conditions in an effort to encourage Japanese emigration. In “On American Immigration”, which he published two years later, he described the role of Chinese railroad workers:

Even Caucasians acknowledge that Chinese immigrants made no small contribution to the development of the state of California and that it could never have attained its present position without their assistance… Workers were vital to the construction of the greatly needed railroads, but it was extremely difficult to obtain them at the time. If workers were available, they were unlikely to take notice of railroad work in their search for profitable occupations. The capitalists were in a quandary. Then, showing no shame in their desire for quick success, they found valuable laborers among the Chinese and completed the work in the shortest time possible. In fact, it is because of these Chinese that goods shipped from California can arrive at markets 1,000 miles to the east in only a week.

The Entrance of Chinese Workers

The usefulness of Chinese labor had been discovered in the 1840s, when employers began to look for an inexpensive replacement for recently abolished slave labor. At first, Chinese laborers went out from Amoy or Hong Kong to British Guyana, the Malay Peninsula, Hawaii, Cuba, and Peru; eventually their route included California and extended from the continent of South America all the way to Australia. These workers left home illegally, since during the Qing Dynasty ordinary people were forbidden by law to go abroad. Because of political confusion, warfare, and a series of floods and droughts, the number of people who defied the prohibition on travel and went abroad as contract laborers gradually increased.

This Chinese “Coolie Trade” was not different in recruitment methods and in conditions of importation from the black slave system that it was supposed to replace. Many of the workers were either captured by force or lured aboard ships and then abducted. On the immigrant ships, which took from 75 to 100 days to sail from Amoy to California, sanitary conditions were very bad, with large numbers of people crammed into small quarters. As many as one-fifth of the passengers died before they reached their destination.

During the 27 years between 1847 and 1874, approximately 500,000 coolies were “imported” into the United States. In 1850, for example, 44 immigrant ships set sail from Hong Kong for San Francisco, each loaded with 300 to 700 immigrants. According to Elmer C. Sandmeyer, who has investigated the question of Chinese labor in the United States, 20,026 Chinese arrived at the San Francisco Customs House in 1852, 4,270 in 1853, and 16,084 in 1854. Most of the Chinese who came to the West Coast were employed by the mines and the railroads: there were 30,000 Chinese working in mines in 1862; the number of Chinese engaged in building the transcontinental railroad reached more than 13,000 at its highest point.

The Chinese population of the West increased year by year. According to the national census, Chinese in California, for example, numbered 34,933 in 1860 and 49,277 in 1870, although, as Sandmeyer points out, these figures are probably lower than the actual numbers. By 1870 Chinese made up approximately 10 percent of the total population of California.

The Chinese Exclusion Movement

Even as early as the Gold Rush, fights began to break out between whites and Chinese. These arose from the antagonism of white workers who saw themselves in competition with cheap Chinese labor and from racial prejudice in the face of different manners and customs. According to a list of atrocities toward Chinese Americans compiled by Pat Sumi for use in an Asian Studies course at the University of California, Davis, in 1971, acts of violence occurred in 1849 against 60 Chinese in a California mining camp. From 1852 to 1853 approximately 1,000 Chinese miners were expelled from the Marysville region of California. In the 1850s the California legislature established a special tax on foreign miners, with Chinese workers as its main target. Since tax collectors could keep part of the revenues for their own income, they used merciless collection methods. During the same period many incidents occurred in which Chinese were attacked and assaulted.

As Muto Sanji saw it, the various unfortunate encounters of the Chinese miners are an obvious fact of California history. These incidents took place because the state government was not yet fully established and the of government were insufficient to secure justice. …As far as we are able to determine, the total number of Chinese murdered by whites was approximately eighty-eight. Among them eleven were killed by tax collectors; two were executed by the courts; the rest were all massacred by roving bands. Not one of the miscreants was punished. Although in fact the number of massacred Chinese probably did not stop at the figure given above, that figure is the same as those entered in the registers of the companies formed by the Chinese (these companies were emigrant companies or philanthropic societies established for the of mutual aid). At any rate, the acts of the white men against the Chinese were the acts of barbarians, which would bring shame to civilized people. (Italian in original) As discrimination against Chinese spread to other states, various laws were enacted with the Chinese as their object, such as head taxes, laundry regulations, queue regulations, housing capacity regulations, and prohibitions on testimony. In the Panic of 1873, tensions again grew fierce between white workers and the poorly paid Chinese. Finally in 1880 a “Treaty to Control Chinese Immigration” was signed by the United States and China. In 1882 Congress passed the first of a series of laws based on this treaty, which prohibited the entry of Chinese laborers for 10 years. In 1902 it voted to ban virtually all Chinese immigration indefinitely.

The Chinese Massacre at Rock Springs

The massacre that broke out in Rock Springs, Wyoming, in 1885 is typical in size and anti-Chinese feeling of incidents in which Chinese were expelled or murdered. According to materials found in the University of Wyoming’s The Chinese Massacre at Rock-Springs, Wyoming Territory, published in 1886, the following picture emerges.

This incident took place on 2 September 1885, when Wyoming was still a territory. Rioters killed 28 Chinese miners and wounded 15. In addition, they drove several hundred people out of town and destroyed an estimated 148,000 dollars’ worth of houses and goods by arson and looting. Nevertheless, not one of the culprits was punished.

Until 1875 only whites had worked for the Union Pacific Coal Company in Rock Springs. When a labor dispute grew into a strike in that year, the company brought in Chinese workers as strike breakers, fired the strikers, and reopened the mines with 150 Chinese and 50 white miners. Later, the number of Chinese increased to 331. The whites had disliked the Chinese from the beginning. They began to look with hatred upon these strike breakers, who were willing to work for low wages. Ultimately, they attacked and set fire to Chinatown, creating a situation that the governor of Wyoming Territory settled by requesting federal troops to preserve order.

Contemporary public opinion and newspapers did in fact call this incident a “massacre,” but because of their sympathy for the white workers, they placed the blame on the coal company and the Chinese workers. The Rock Springs Independent clamored repeatedly, “The Chinese Must Go” — this was a slogan used at the time by people favoring the expulsion of the Chinese criticized the company’s employment policies. The Omaha Bee carried an article entitled “The Union Pacific’s Plan to Evade Responsibility,” which argued that the incident had occurred because the company systematically oppressed white workers and treated them like slaves. After the incident, 16 people were arrested as suspects. Public opinion opposed their punishment, and the jury at the trial in Green River, Wyoming, acquitted them all on the grounds that “there was not one item which could prove who the offenders were on that day.”

On 15 April 1931 the Wyoming Press of Evanston, Wyoming, carried the testimony of a woman whose father had witnessed the incident when he was a boss in the Rock Springs mines. The gist of his story was this:

One week before the riot Mr. C.P. Wassung and I had occasion to visit Laramie, on lodge business. We met an acquaintance, who had no business connections in Rock Springs at the time, but who remarked that he would visit our town in a few days, and that there would be something doing. The “something doing” part of the conversation made an indelible impression on our minds, when this same man became one of the leaders of the riot on September 5th.

This testimony suggests that the disturbance was not accidental; it was planned and prepared well in advance. After the incident, the movement among white workers to expel Chinese workers grew even stronger. Many Chinese emigrated to California or returned to their homeland until, by 1900, they had almost completely vanished from Western railroads and mines. Japanese laborers began to appear in large numbers, low-wage earners who would make up for the loss of labor by equally low-paid Chinese. In 1961, when I was a student at the University of Wyoming, I attended a course on the history of the state of Wyoming. The professor in charge of the course lectured quite matter-of-factly about the massacre at Rock Springs, nor could I see any particular reaction among the American students who were listening to him. But then I also remember that they expressed no particular consciousness of me as the sole Asian in the class. I, who had already become interested in this aspect of the development of the West, learned with inexpressible irritation that they understood the incident as merely one more event in the turbulent period when Wyoming was a territory.