Ghosts of Gold Mountain by Gordon H. Chang

Author:Gordon H. Chang
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HMH Books

8

Truckee

The western states of America are sparsely populated for such a large land area . . . Through opening mines, exploiting wastelands, and constructing railways, cities have been gradually formed, of which the city of San Francisco is especially prosperous. All the former work was dependent on recruiting Chinese laborers and by this opportunity Chinese people could earn their living.

—MEMOIR OF ZHANG YUNHUAN, 1886

The summit tunnel finally opened to passengers on June 18, 1868. Its completion meant that a train could run all the way from Sacramento to Reno, Nevada, a distance of 154 miles, on “the grandest engineering feat ever attempted by man,” as the Alta California announced.

The newspaper’s special correspondent, one of the first passengers to cross the Sierra Nevada by rail, hopped aboard the inaugural passenger train in Sacramento to make the historic journey. His eyewitness account provides a vivid sense of the extreme physical conditions the construction workers faced. Full of excitement and awe, his travelogue is also replete with references to the Chinese laborers and inspires wonder at their experiences in building the line through the Sierra.

The writer describes the changing scenery as the steam-driven train leaves the bucolic Central Valley and passes through the towns of Newcastle, Auburn, and then Clipper Gap. Three hours after leaving Sacramento, the train passes through Colfax and navigates around the infamous Cape Horn. The roadbed is carved into the slope of the mountain, and the train needs to snake along a perilous ledge. “Nervous passengers begin to look around anxiously,” the correspondent writes, “peering with evident trepidation down into the depths below,” where a branch of the American River flows 1,200 feet beneath them.

At Secret Town, the train reaches 2,985 feet, and peaks appear ahead that are covered with snow. Though it is mid-June, passengers soon see snow covering the ground next to the track and feel the cold air coming down from the mountains. They are thrown back in their seats by the steep climb.

At sixty-seven miles from Sacramento, the train reaches Dutch Flat, and at Shady Run Station, the train reaches the first tunnel, seventy-five miles from Sacramento. It is five hundred feet in length and 4,500 feet above sea level. Plenty of snow still covers the ground next to the track, and soon the train passes through towering drifts, the way cleared by men working with shovels. “Chinamen are swarming all along the road,” the writer records, and “they have nearly finished their work in this vicinity and are packing up their traps preparatory to passing on over the summit” into Nevada. At more than one hundred miles from Sacramento, the train enters Summit Valley, at 6,800 feet elevation, and then it reaches Summit Tunnel, 1,659 feet in length. Great banks of snow, ice, and rock still cap the summit at more than 7,000 feet.

At Summit Tunnel, the train must stop. Cars that have jumped the track and other obstacles on the track ahead require the writer and other passengers to disembark and walk carefully through the frigid “Great Bore.

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