Sue Lee
speaker
63 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Sue Lee’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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So the estimate is that 15,000 to 20,000 Chinese worked on the transcontinental railroad, primarily on the Central Pacific side. The Chinese who initially worked on the railroad, let's say in the beginning, 1864, they were already here. They may have come for the gold rush. Initially, the Central Pacific didn't want Chinese workers at all.
At the time that the Central Pacific began its construction, they had great difficulty hiring white workers. White workers would work through one payroll or two payrolls and then to head literally for the hills for more lucrative mining work or other work. And the leaders of the Central Pacific were very leery of hiring Chinese workers in the area.
It was out of desperation that the Central Pacific in 1864 hired a small group of Chinese workers to do what they deemed was the light work, which was filling carts with rubble and things like that. But once the Central Pacific was convinced that the Chinese could handle the work, they
They began hiring as many Chinese as they could in the area in California and eventually hired contractors to go to China to hire workers. The majority of those Chinese came from a really small area of China outside of the city of Guangdong. They came because their kinsmen came. And it was easier to recruit groups of Chinese from a particular village.
That area has a history of sending their men overseas to send money back to support families. And so the recruiters would bring Chinese here. They'd come by ship. They end up going by ship to Sacramento, and then they'd be put onto rail cars to wherever the end of construction was to begin work on the railroad. And again, they were hired in gangs of 30. There was kinship. There was teamwork.
Those workers stayed together. They weren't indentured. They had contracts, so they might work a month, two months, a season, a year, and leave for other work.
So here you are in a tropical area of southern China where it's hot and humid, no snow. And you come all the way across the Pacific, end up at Donner Lake, right? You've got cold, cold, snowy winters and hot, hot summers. So you end up carving tunnels through the Sierra Nevada and you live next to the summit tunnel.
What we know about these gangs of Chinese working together was that they lived together, they ate together, they worked together. The gangs worked 24-7. Each gang had their own Chinese cook, so they ate a Chinese diet. And there are stories about how perhaps Chinese cooks would plant the seeds of Chinese vegetables along the line and would then have a source for vegetables in their diet.
The railroad company used vendors. It was Sison and Wallace and another fellow named Koopmanshop who provided all the provisions. Dried shrimp, dried seafood, dried vegetables from China. So the Chinese had their own diet. You'd be cared for sometimes by a herbal doctor.
So either one of the men may have been trained as an herb doctor before coming and then became a laborer, or you'd have these itinerant herb doctors that would travel from gang to gang. In your off hours, you would play Chinese games, smoke a little opium, try to keep warm in the winter. try to keep cool in the summer, but you'd be working six days a week from dawn to dusk.
They ended up doing the heavy lifting, if you will, on the Central Pacific. They had to carve through the granite of the Sierra Nevada. They had hand tools. They had black powder. And then later on, closer to the end of the construction of the summit tunnel, they had nitroglycerin, which was extremely, extremely dangerous.
During the winter, there'd be avalanches where entire camps would just disappear. And then the bodies wouldn't be recovered till the next spring because there was so much snow and ice up there. Just horrendous, horrendous stories. It's thought that the Chinese who came here, who worked on the railroad, were illiterate and uneducated. But in fact, they came from all kinds of professions.
They understood teamwork. And so they were very effective in those gangs of 30 men working on the railroad. And can you imagine drilling holes and filling the holes with black powder and then running for your life before the explosions? They made the equivalent of a dollar a day, but they would have to pay for room and board.
The white workers would be making $35 a month and board would be covered. But it said that even having to pay their own board, Chinese workers were able to save $20 a month. Summit Camp is the camp where the Chinese worked for over two years. Summit Tunnel is the largest of the 15 tunnels that were carved out of the Sierra Nevada. And it took over the course of two winters to complete.
A couple of thousand Chinese camped next to the location of the tunnel. And so that area has been very important in excavating and finding the remnants of the way Chinese lived as they worked.
What triggered the strike, we believe, is that there was a huge accident, an explosion. And the Chinese workers knew that the white workers were making more money and were working fewer hours per day. So on a Monday in June 1867, they stopped work along this 30-mile stretch at the same time. So they were extremely organized. They had good communication between the work camps.
So they laid down their tools and didn't go to work, which scared the hell out of the Central Pacific Railroad leaders and said, wait a minute, we can't do this. We can't afford for the Chinese to stop work. And so within a week, the Central Pacific stopped the supplies to these work camps. So they basically starved them out. So the strike ended.
But the Central Pacific quietly did raise the wages of the Chinese workers and did cut the work hours by one hour over a couple of months after the strike.
Well, the China Wall, which is near the Summit Tunnel, it's between, I think, Tunnel 7 and 8, there's nothing between the rocks. There's no mortar. It looks like a jigsaw puzzle where they just use rocks to build this 75-foot wall. And, you know, before they took the tracks out, there was a track on it. It's 150 years old. It's amazing.
The summit tunnel itself, to make the impact on you emotionally, I think it's kind of crazy, but you should go in the winter when there's still ice in the tunnel. It's a huge, huge tunnel. It's dark as hell. And in the winter, there's ice in there. It's freezing. And then you think, how in the world did these Chinese build it?
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