Labor, Railroads, and the Building of the West

Chapter Opening

Chapter 1 traced the migration of Chinese laborers to California during the Gold Rush era and the earliest settlements they established in mining camps and port cities. This chapter follows those laborers as their work expanded far beyond the diggings of the Sierra Nevada foothills — into the construction crews of the Central Pacific Railroad, the fields and canneries of California agriculture, the laundries and kitchens of its growing cities, and the factories of its emerging manufacturing economy. It is, in one sense, a chapter about economic history: about the specific industries in which Chinese labor became indispensable to the development of the American West. But it is also, and just as importantly, a chapter about the political consequences of that indispensability — about how Chinese workers' very success in meeting the West's labor needs generated the organized, racialized opposition that would culminate, within a few decades, in the most comprehensive exclusion regime in American immigration history.

The pattern that Chapter 1 identified in the mining camps of the early 1850s — economic welcome giving way, as competition intensified, to racialized hostility — recurs and intensifies throughout the history this chapter traces. Chinese labor was, at every turn, sought after by the employers who needed it and resented by the white workers who competed with it or feared they might. Central Pacific Railroad executives actively recruited Chinese laborers because they performed difficult, dangerous work reliably and at a cost the company found advantageous; farm owners, cannery operators, and manufacturers made similar calculations across the 1860s and 1870s. At the same time, white laborers and the labor organizations that represented them increasingly framed Chinese workers not as fellow wage earners but as a racial threat to the white working class's economic future — a framing that would provide much of the popular energy behind the anti-Chinese movement examined in Chapter 3 and the federal exclusion law examined in Chapter 5.

This chapter asks students to hold in view both the scale of Chinese workers' contribution to the physical and economic construction of the American West and the specific mechanisms — wage competition narratives, labor union organizing, the "coolie labor" stereotype, and eventually formal political mobilization — through which that contribution was reinterpreted as a danger to be contained. Understanding Chinese labor in this period requires attention to concrete working conditions: the wages Chinese laborers earned, the tasks they performed, the risks they assumed, and the strategies of cooperation and endurance that allowed them to survive brutally demanding work. It also requires attention to the political discourse that grew up around that labor — a discourse that had only a loose relationship to the actual conditions of Chinese employment, but that proved extraordinarily effective at mobilizing white working-class support for exclusionary politics.

The railroad is this chapter's central case study, and for good reason. The Central Pacific Railroad's Chinese workforce undertook some of the most dangerous construction work in American history, blasting tunnels through Sierra Nevada granite and laying track across the high desert of Nevada and Utah under conditions that killed an unknown but substantial number of workers. Their labor was essential to the completion of the first transcontinental railroad, an infrastructure project that transformed the American economy and bound the Pacific coast to the rest of the nation. Yet Chinese railroad workers received systematically lower wages than white workers performing comparable labor, were excluded from the ceremonial recognition that attended the railroad's completion, and would, within little more than a decade of finishing this work, find themselves the targets of a federal law barring further immigration of Chinese laborers altogether.

This chapter also broadens the story beyond the railroad to examine the full range of industries in which Chinese labor became significant during the 1850s through the 1870s — agriculture, canning, domestic service, laundry work, and small manufacturing — and to trace how the same economic logic that shaped Chinese employment in mining and railroad construction operated across this broader occupational landscape. Understanding this breadth is essential to understanding why anti-Chinese politics, examined in the following chapter, became a statewide and eventually national political movement rather than a localized dispute confined to a single industry or region.

Learning Objectives

Guiding Historical Questions

Historical Context

The labor history this chapter traces unfolds against the backdrop of one of the most rapid economic transformations in American history. California's admission to the Union in September 1850 was followed, over the ensuing two decades, by an extraordinary expansion and diversification of the state's economy, from a Gold Rush society organized almost entirely around mineral extraction to a diversified regional economy encompassing large-scale agriculture, industrial manufacturing, and, after 1869, direct rail connection to the national market. Chinese labor was present, and in many sectors indispensable, at every stage of this transformation.

As Chapter 1 explained, Chinese miners entered the California gold fields in substantial numbers beginning in 1849 and 1850, working claims through cooperative, labor-intensive methods well suited to placer mining. Over the course of the 1850s, however, mining opportunities available to Chinese workers narrowed considerably. The most productive and accessible claims had generally been depleted or claimed by earlier arrivals, and organized efforts by white miners — reinforced by discriminatory taxation, most significantly the Foreign Miners' License Tax — increasingly restricted Chinese access to remaining opportunities. By the early 1860s, growing numbers of Chinese workers who had begun their California careers in mining were seeking employment in other sectors of the state's rapidly diversifying economy.

The most consequential of these new opportunities arrived with the chartering of the Central Pacific Railroad in 1861 and the subsequent decision, following the outbreak of the Civil War and the passage of the Pacific Railway Act of 1862, to construct a transcontinental line connecting California to the existing rail network of the eastern United States. The Central Pacific, responsible for building eastward from Sacramento across the Sierra Nevada and the Great Basin, faced a chronic and worsening shortage of laborers willing to perform the grueling, dangerous work of grading roadbed, blasting tunnels, and laying track through some of the most difficult terrain the American railroad industry had yet encountered. Company leadership, after initial skepticism about whether Chinese laborers — widely stereotyped by contemporary Americans as physically unsuited to heavy labor — could perform this work, began recruiting Chinese crews in substantial numbers beginning in 1865, first from the existing California Chinese population and increasingly, as demand outstripped local supply, through direct recruitment in China itself.

The results of this recruitment transformed the Central Pacific's labor force. By 1867 and 1868, Chinese workers constituted the overwhelming majority — by most estimates, roughly ninety percent — of the Central Pacific's construction crews, numbering at peak construction periods somewhere between ten and fifteen thousand men. These crews performed the most demanding and dangerous portions of the entire transcontinental project, including the series of tunnels blasted through solid granite at the Sierra Nevada summit, work that proceeded through brutal winter conditions at high altitude and that killed an unknown but almost certainly substantial number of workers through accidents, avalanches, and exposure. The precise number of Chinese worker deaths during the railroad's construction remains a subject of historical investigation and debate, in significant part because the Central Pacific kept incomplete records of Chinese worker casualties relative to the records it maintained for white employees — itself a telling indication of the differential value the company's own record-keeping practices assigned to Chinese and white lives.

Beyond the railroad, Chinese labor became increasingly significant across a widening range of California industries during the 1860s and 1870s. Agricultural employers, particularly in the expanding wheat, fruit, and vegetable operations of California's Central Valley, relied heavily on Chinese field labor, and Chinese workers played a central role in the reclamation and drainage of agricultural land in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, work that transformed vast areas of wetland into some of the state's most productive farmland. The canning industry that developed alongside California's expanding fruit and vegetable agriculture employed large numbers of Chinese workers, as did domestic service, laundry operations — an industry in which Chinese-run businesses came to hold a distinctive and, in the public imagination, closely associated position — and a range of small-scale manufacturing enterprises, including cigar-making, boot and shoe production, and woolen textile manufacturing.

This economic breadth mattered enormously for the political history that followed. Because Chinese labor was present across so many sectors of the California economy, opposition to Chinese labor was never confined to a single industry or a single group of aggrieved workers. Miners, railroad laborers displaced or undercut by Chinese crews, agricultural workers, and, especially, urban craft workers in trades such as cigar-making, boot and shoe manufacturing, and laundry work where Chinese competition was most directly and immediately felt, all developed grievances — some grounded in genuine economic competition, others amplified well beyond their economic substance by racial ideology — that would converge, over the course of the 1860s and 1870s, into an increasingly organized, increasingly political anti-Chinese labor movement. That movement's early development, traced at the end of this chapter, sets the stage directly for Chapter 3's fuller examination of anti-Chinese politics and violence.

Chronology Preview

Major People, Groups, and Places

Core Vocabulary Preview

The following key terms appear throughout this chapter. Students should understand each term before proceeding to the main sections.

Chinese Labor in the Gold Rush Economy

Mining Labor

As Chapter 1 described, Chinese miners entered the California gold fields in growing numbers from 1849 onward, organizing themselves into cooperative work groups that pooled labor, capital, and equipment to work claims systematically, including claims that earlier arrivals had abandoned as insufficiently profitable for individual prospectors. This pattern of disciplined, group-based labor allowed Chinese miners to extract meaningful returns from marginal claims throughout the 1850s, even as the most productive and accessible deposits were claimed and depleted by earlier arrivals.

By the early 1860s, however, the mining economy that had drawn the first generation of Chinese migrants to California had changed considerably. Placer mining, the relatively low-capital, labor-intensive technique best suited to the cooperative work groups Chinese miners typically organized, had given way in many districts to hydraulic and hard-rock mining methods requiring substantially greater capital investment — methods generally controlled by larger, capital-intensive operations from which Chinese labor was frequently excluded, whether through direct discrimination or through the practical barriers of raising the capital such operations required. Chinese miners who remained in the mining economy through this period increasingly worked claims and districts that had already been passed over by this shift toward large-scale operations, continuing the pattern, established in the 1850s, of Chinese labor entering an economic niche after the most lucrative opportunities had already been captured by others.

Camp Life

Mining camp life for Chinese workers in this period continued to combine demanding physical labor with the maintenance of communal and cultural practices adapted to frontier conditions, much as Chapter 1 described for the 1850s. Camps organized around kinship and shared county of origin persisted, as did the connections to merchant firms in San Francisco and Sacramento that supplied goods, transmitted remittances and correspondence, and provided a link to the broader migration and mutual aid networks examined throughout this textbook. As mining opportunities narrowed, however, camp populations increasingly included men who had already begun supplementing or replacing mining income with other forms of labor, including seasonal agricultural work and, from the mid-1860s onward, railroad construction — a transitional pattern that reflects the broader occupational diversification this chapter traces.

Racial Taxes and Restrictions

The discriminatory taxation that Chapter 1 identified as an early formalization of anti-Chinese policy in the mining economy continued and, in some districts, intensified through the 1860s. Beyond the Foreign Miners' License Tax itself, Chinese miners faced a range of informal and formal restrictions on which claims and districts they could work, restrictions enforced through local mining district rules, through organized harassment by white miners' associations, and, with increasing frequency, through violence — a pattern examined in greater detail in Chapter 3's discussion of anti-Chinese violence in mining camps and cities. These restrictions, compounding the capital barriers created by the shift toward hydraulic and hard-rock mining, steadily narrowed the range of mining opportunities available to Chinese workers across the decade, accelerating the movement of Chinese labor into the railroad, agricultural, and manufacturing sectors this chapter goes on to examine.

Economic Competition

The economic competition between Chinese and white miners that intensified over the course of the 1850s and into the 1860s established a pattern of grievance and political mobilization that would recur, in different forms, across every industry this chapter examines. White miners who framed Chinese labor as an unfair competitive threat — whether because Chinese miners' willingness to work marginal claims at modest returns was perceived as depressing wages and opportunities generally, or because of more directly racial hostility toward Chinese presence in the mining districts — developed political and organizational tools, including exclusionary mining codes and discriminatory taxation, that would be adapted and expanded as Chinese labor moved into new sectors of the California economy. Understanding this mining-camp origin of anti-Chinese labor politics is essential to understanding why the railroad, agricultural, and craft-union conflicts examined later in this chapter followed such a familiar and well-rehearsed pattern.

The Transcontinental Railroad

Central Pacific Recruitment

The Pacific Railway Act of 1862 authorized construction of a transcontinental railroad connecting California to the existing rail network of the eastern United States, with the Central Pacific Railroad responsible for building eastward from Sacramento across the Sierra Nevada and the Great Basin to a meeting point with the Union Pacific, which was building westward from Iowa. From the outset, the Central Pacific faced a severe labor shortage. California's relatively small and highly mobile population, drawn disproportionately toward the ongoing lure of mining opportunity, provided an unreliable and insufficient workforce for the grueling, dangerous, and comparatively low-paid work of railroad grading and construction.

Company leadership, including construction superintendent Charles Crocker, initially expressed considerable skepticism about whether Chinese laborers, widely stereotyped by contemporary Americans as physically frail and unsuited to heavy manual labor, could perform the demanding work the railroad required. This skepticism was overcome through a combination of labor necessity and direct experience: an initial, small-scale trial of Chinese work crews in early 1865 demonstrated that Chinese laborers performed the required grading and construction work capably and reliably, and the company moved rapidly toward large-scale recruitment. By 1867, Chinese workers constituted roughly ninety percent of the Central Pacific's construction workforce, numbering at peak periods somewhere between ten and fifteen thousand men — a workforce drawn initially from the existing Chinese population of California and increasingly, as demand outstripped local supply, through direct recruitment efforts in Guangdong itself, operating through the same emigration broker and credit-ticket networks that Chapter 1 examined.

Work Crews and Labor Discipline

Chinese railroad crews were typically organized under a system of subcontracting in which a Chinese labor contractor, often himself a member of the merchant or association leadership examined in greater detail in Part III of this textbook, assumed responsibility for recruiting, organizing, and, in significant part, supervising a crew of workers on behalf of the railroad company. This arrangement gave Chinese work crews a substantial degree of internal organization and self-management, with work assignments, camp provisioning, and daily discipline managed substantially through Chinese contractors and crew leaders rather than through direct company supervision of individual workers — an arrangement that provided Chinese laborers considerably more collective bargaining leverage, and more capacity for coordinated action such as the 1867 wage strike discussed later in this section, than the popular image of an undifferentiated, passively obedient Chinese labor force would suggest.

Mountain Labor and Explosives

The most dangerous and technically demanding portion of the Central Pacific's construction project was the series of tunnels required to carry the line through the granite summit of the Sierra Nevada. Chinese work crews performed the overwhelming majority of this tunnel construction, employing black powder and, as the project progressed, the newly developed and considerably more volatile explosive nitroglycerin to blast through solid rock, often working simultaneously from both ends of a planned tunnel and, in the case of the summit tunnel, from a vertical shaft sunk to allow blasting to proceed from the tunnel's middle as well as its ends. This work proceeded through brutal Sierra Nevada winters, with crews laboring in tunnels dug beneath snowpack that in some years exceeded thirty feet, housed in camps that were themselves periodically struck by avalanches. The precise number of Chinese worker deaths during this phase of construction remains a subject of ongoing historical investigation, complicated by the Central Pacific's incomplete record-keeping regarding Chinese casualties relative to the more thorough records the company maintained for white employees.

Wages, Strikes, and Dangerous Work

Chinese railroad workers were paid systematically lower wages than white workers performing comparable labor, and were typically required to provide and pay for their own food and lodging out of their wages, an expense the company generally covered for white workers. In June 1867, several thousand Chinese workers on the Central Pacific line organized a strike, demanding wage increases, a reduction in the workday from twelve to ten hours, and an end to the practice of company foremen physically beating workers to enforce labor discipline. The strike, involving an estimated three thousand or more workers and sustained for approximately a week before economic pressure — the company's suspension of food supplies to strikers' camps — forced its end, demonstrated a degree of coordinated labor organization among Chinese workers that directly contradicted contemporary stereotypes of Chinese labor as inherently passive or incapable of collective action. The strike produced only modest concessions from the company, but it stands as significant evidence, examined further in this chapter's primary source materials, of Chinese railroad workers' agency and capacity for organized resistance to exploitative conditions.

Completion and Its Aftermath

The Central Pacific and Union Pacific lines met at Promontory Summit, Utah Territory, on May 10, 1869, completing the first transcontinental railroad and marking a transformative moment in American economic history, binding California and the broader Pacific coast to the national rail network and dramatically reducing the time and cost of transcontinental travel and commerce. The ceremony held to mark the occasion, including the driving of a ceremonial golden spike, produced photographs and accounts that became iconic images in American popular memory — images from which Chinese workers, despite having performed the overwhelming majority of the Central Pacific's construction labor, were conspicuously absent. Following the railroad's completion, the large Chinese workforce that had built it dispersed into other sectors of the western economy, including the agricultural, manufacturing, and railroad-maintenance and expansion work examined in the following section, carrying with them skills, savings, and organizational experience that would shape Chinese labor history in the American West for decades to come.

Agriculture, Manufacturing, and Service Work

Farm Labor

As California's agricultural economy expanded rapidly during the 1860s and 1870s, driven by the growth of large-scale wheat cultivation and, increasingly, the fruit and vegetable production that would come to define the state's agricultural reputation, Chinese labor became an increasingly significant component of the state's farm workforce. Chinese workers performed the labor-intensive tasks of planting, cultivating, and harvesting that this expanding agricultural economy required, often organized, as in mining and railroad work, into cooperative labor groups managed through Chinese labor contractors. Chinese laborers also played a central and often underrecognized role in the reclamation of agricultural land in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, constructing the extensive system of levees that drained wetland areas and transformed them into some of the state's most productive farmland — physically demanding and dangerous work performed under conditions that, as in railroad construction, received limited contemporary documentation relative to its scale and significance.

Canneries

The growth of California's fruit and vegetable canning industry during the 1870s and 1880s, itself substantially dependent on the agricultural expansion Chinese field labor helped make possible, created significant additional employment for Chinese workers, who performed much of the labor-intensive processing work canning required. Cannery labor, like agricultural and railroad work, was frequently organized through Chinese labor contractors who supplied and managed crews on behalf of cannery operators, extending the contracting system this chapter has examined across multiple sectors of the California economy.

Domestic Service

Chinese workers, particularly in the gender-imbalanced bachelor society that Chapter 4 examines in greater detail, found significant employment in domestic service throughout California's growing cities, working as cooks, house servants, and general domestic laborers in the households of the state's expanding middle and upper classes. This employment, while frequently low-paid and precarious, provided an important occupational alternative for Chinese workers as mining and, eventually, railroad opportunities contracted, and it placed Chinese workers in direct, sustained daily contact with white American households in a manner that shaped broader public perceptions of Chinese labor and character.

Laundries

The laundry trade became, over the course of the 1860s and 1870s, one of the most distinctive and, in the public imagination, most closely associated occupations of Chinese America. Chinese-run laundries required relatively modest startup capital, relied on skills that were readily transferable and did not depend on English fluency or extensive local social connections, and occupied an economic niche — commercial laundry service — that faced relatively limited competition from other California industries during this period. By the 1870s, Chinese-operated laundries were a common feature of California's urban commercial landscape, and the laundry trade would remain a significant occupation for Chinese Americans for decades, eventually becoming subject to a distinctive body of discriminatory municipal regulation that the U.S. Supreme Court would address in the 1886 case Yick Wo v. Hopkins, a landmark equal protection decision falling outside this chapter's period but significant to the broader legal history this textbook traces.

Restaurants

Chinese restaurants, serving both a Chinese immigrant clientele and, increasingly over time, a broader American public, developed alongside the other service industries this section examines, providing both a source of employment for Chinese workers and an early and durable point of cultural contact between Chinese and non-Chinese Californians. Restaurant work, like laundry operation, offered an occupational path that did not depend on the capital-intensive investment required in manufacturing or the physical risks of mining and railroad labor, and it would remain, alongside laundry work, one of the most persistent and visible occupational niches of Chinese America across the following century.

Chinese Labor and White Working-Class Politics

Wage Competition Narratives

As Chinese labor became increasingly visible across the mining, railroad, agricultural, and manufacturing sectors of the California economy during the 1860s and 1870s, a political narrative developed among white workers and their organizations holding that Chinese labor systematically depressed wages and displaced white workers from employment opportunities they would otherwise have held. This wage competition narrative drew, in specific trades where direct competition for the same jobs genuinely existed — cigar-making, boot and shoe manufacturing, and certain forms of agricultural and railroad labor prominent among them — on real economic grievances. At the same time, the narrative was substantially amplified beyond its specific economic basis into a generalized claim that Chinese labor as such, across the entire California economy, threatened the livelihood and living standards of white workers, a claim that found receptive audiences even among workers with little direct occupational competition with Chinese labor.

Labor Unions and Racial Exclusion

Craft unions in trades where Chinese competition was most directly felt became early and vocal centers of organized opposition to Chinese labor during the 1870s. Cigar makers' unions, boot and shoe workers' organizations, and similar craft-based labor organizations increasingly incorporated explicit anti-Chinese positions into their organizing platforms, campaigning for boycotts of Chinese-made goods, for legislative restriction of Chinese labor, and, eventually, for the federal exclusion of Chinese immigration altogether. These unions' opposition combined genuine economic grievance with an increasingly explicit racial ideology holding that Chinese workers were fundamentally incompatible with an American labor movement organized around free white labor — an ideology that would find its fullest political expression in the anti-Chinese movement examined in Chapter 3 and the exclusionary legislation examined in Part II of this textbook.

Political Mobilization Against Chinese Workers

By the mid-1870s, opposition to Chinese labor had moved decisively beyond individual trade unions into broader, more organized political mobilization, laying the groundwork for the explicitly anti-Chinese political parties and campaigns that Chapter 3 examines in detail. Labor organizations increasingly coordinated across trades, built alliances with broader nativist and racial-exclusionist political currents, and began directing sustained pressure toward state and federal legislators for restriction of Chinese immigration and labor. This political mobilization, emerging directly out of the specific labor conditions and grievances this chapter has traced across mining, railroad, agricultural, and manufacturing work, represents the crucial hinge between the labor history of this chapter and the political and legal history of exclusion that occupies the remainder of Part I and all of Part II of this textbook.

The "Coolie Labor" Stereotype

The "coolie labor" stereotype introduced earlier in this chapter played a central role in this political mobilization, providing white labor organizations with a framework for opposing Chinese labor that presented itself as a defense of free labor principles rather than simple racial exclusion. By characterizing Chinese workers as inherently unfree — bound, in this telling, to exploitative labor contractors and emigration firms in a manner scarcely distinguishable from indentured servitude — labor organizations and their political allies could frame opposition to Chinese immigration as consistent with, rather than contrary to, broader American ideals of free labor and fair competition. As this chapter has demonstrated, this framing bore only a loose relationship to the actual contractual structure of Chinese labor migration, the organizational autonomy of Chinese work crews under the labor contracting system, and the documented instances of organized Chinese labor action such as the 1867 railroad strike. Its political effectiveness, however, depended little on its factual accuracy, and it would remain a central rhetorical tool of anti-Chinese politics through the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and beyond.

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