A Primary Source Investigation of the Transcontinental Railroad by Xina M. Uhl

Author:Xina M. Uhl
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc

The Central Pacific Railroad had one problem in particular. The young adventurers who had signed up to work in Sacramento left when the railroad made it to eastern California, where they hoped to strike it rich. No local population from which to hire lived in the isolated hills and canyons of the Sierra Nevada. In spring 1865, the Big Four needed five thousand men. They had only eight hundred. Charles Crocker suggested that they hire fifty local Chinese laborers.

THE CHINESE

Stephen Ambrose reports in Nothing Like It in the World that when Crocker suggested hiring Chinese workers, James Harvey Strobridge, the Central Pacific's superintendent of construction, replied, "I will not boss Chinese!" The Chinese were considered weak and unmanly. Strobridge eventually relented but gave the Chinese the relatively simple task of filling horse-drawn carts with rubble. The Chinese were so hardworking in this and every subsequent task they were given that the Central Pacific came to depend on them for their most dangerous and labor-intensive jobs, while the skilled work of masonry, carpentry, and laying rail was reserved for white laborers.

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