By the railroad. Today were going to have two perspectives, one on the Chinese Railroad workers and another on native americans. Please hold your audience questions. Were going to have our two speakers on this topic give their presentations, and then were going to sit down and have a little chat in front of you here on the chairs. Then we will have opportunity for the audience to raise questions. So to start out our program, were going to talk about the Chinese Railroad workers, and our presenter is hilton obenzinger. He has been a lecturer at Stanford University in american studies and english and associate director for honors and advanced writing. He received his doctorate from the modern thought in Literature Program at stanford. Hes a critic, a poet, a novelist, a historian, and the recipient of the american book award. Hilton is the author of american palestinian, melville twain and the holy land mania, cannibal elliott and the lost histories of San Francisco, new york on fire. His recent auto biographical novel, busy dying, and other books as well as many articles in scholarly journals. He is the associate director of the Chinese Railroad workers of north american project here at Stanford University. He is assisting in the development of the projects website, content, and digital visualizations along with writing about the Chinese Railroad workers themselves. He is one of the editors of the soontobereleased and theres information on the front table about this but in the next few weeks, theyll be releasing from this project a book called the chinese and the iron road. So please would you welcome hilton obenzinger. [ applause ] hello. Are electronics set . Okay. Thank you very much. Im glad to be here, and thank you to the organizers of this, and thank you for getting up so early in the morning. So i welcome you on behalf of the Chinese Railroad workers of north america project, which is a transpacific project of scholars, and i welcome you on behalf of the gordon chang and Shelly Fisher fishkin, the codirectors. This is a very busy time for us with our books coming out, but also, you know, the commemorations, theres a lot of interest in the railroad. Gordon is in new york speaking at a major chineseamerican conference. Shelly is at another conference, so were traveling everywhere to try and speak about this. Oh, wrong one. There we go. So this is one of the pictures thats iconic of this time. East meets west, alfred russell. And as you can see, there are no chinese. Now, well talk about that in a bit. But chinese, you can see some here, and this is at bloomer cut, which is a cut is exactly what you see there. Instead of going over, they just cut through. And we believe some chinese started to work on this late in 1864 and 1865. This is the kind of work they did here, carting. This is bloomer cut again, then and today by li ju, a major exhibition. This is, you know, track work in nevada, working in the snow. This was supposed to be a snowplow clearing the tracks. It didnt work. Shovels worked and eventually sheds over, you know, areas where the snow would fall. Now, there are some chinese if you can see in this picture, laying the last tracks. Notice how theyre dressed, in kind of very shabby clothes or loosefitting. Three of them laying the last track. So now were back to this picture. We believe studying this, there may be two or three chinese in this picture. If you notice, the man with the back turned to you, wearing shabby clothes of a worker, that may be a chinese worker. And then the man holding his hat in front of someones face. You had to hold a pose for a long time, and so we think it could be that there was a chinese man there by the clothing, and he didnt want his face in the picture. Now, am i going the right way . Okay. Now, there were no chinese or very few chinese in that photo. The fact is there were very few chinese at that ceremony, and most of the people, if you look at that photo again, are wearing, you know, fairly welltodo clothes for the time and hats and shoes. In fact, there are very few workers there at all. Irish workers working on the Union Pacific or working with chinese on the Central Pacific, none of those workers were there. Now, the irish workers on the Union Pacific, they werent paid, and they actually the ceremony was supposed to be may 8th, and durant from the Union Pacific was stopped by a barricade on the tracks, and they held him hostage until they got their money, and they did get their money. It was for good reason that they were afraid they wouldnt get paid. Now, many of the workers were released, but many of the chinese went back to rebuilding the shoddy, you know, construction. But when they began, they needed workers, and there was a shortage, a scarcity in california. So they put out this flier in january 1865 for 5,000 workers. And crocker, i think, testified that there were no more than 800 that ever showed up. They simply did not want to work. Its difficult work, and the pay was very low. They could get jobs in the mines, other places, and get better pay and a better life. So those white workers, mainly irish, were not interested. Then they said, well, lets hire chinese, okay . Crocker got the idea and said, well, they built a great wall, didnt they . They could do this. Strowbridge did not, you know, think that the strowbridge was the construction manager did not think that they were strong enough. And here is stanford reporting to the congress in 1865. So, you know, strobridge says, i will not boss chinese. I will not be responsible for the work done on the road. From what ive seen of them, theyre not fit laborers anyway. I dont think they could build a railroad. So they did an experiment and worked them, loading up carts. Then they hired 50 more when that seemed satisfactory. Then another 50, and that seemed to work well. So the bulk of the labor force became chinese. The First Chinese from, you know, the area, auburn, San Francisco, et cetera. This is the kind of initial work. Another cut. So they went to chinatown in San Francisco, sacramento, and by march, they sent out Labor Contractors to guangdong. So by july 1865, the workforce, chinese was 4,000. By 1867, approximately 8,000 chinese were working in constructing the tunnels, and another 3,000 were laying track. Now, they all came from one area in guangdong, four counties at that time. Now its five. They split one in half. And they were familiar with california, gold mountain, the gold rush, and why from there and not beijing, for example . Well, access to hong kong and macau, and they got the news. So this is the way it looks today. One of the more prosperous areas of china today. And they came from these villages. We visited the villages, some of our colleagues in china had been doing research in the villages. Some of them are still called railroad villages. Our archaeology project led by barbara voss has been digging in villages, finding important artifacts linking them to the railroad and what life was like at that time. They would arrange with the contractor to take the ship, and soon it would be the Pacific Mail Steamship Company that the big four owned parts of. Then they would arrive in San Francisco. This is a great painting by jake leoned by the Chinese Historical Society of america. And they would be taken through the six companies, which is what we kind of call a grouping of kinship and regional benevolence societies and businesses. There they would arrange to be shipped to the end of the line, and they would pay a small amount for medical insurance. There would be a chinese acupuncturist, herbal doctor available. And then they also paid for their bones to be shipped back to china if they died. Now, this is at the golden spike visitors center. I dont know if its still there, but a couple years ago. This painting trying to imagine the white workers, mainly irish, and the chinese happily working together. I guess you can tell, you know, the white worker. You cant tell that hes irish particularly. But ive never seen any of the pictures of Chinese Workers with an open vest with their chest exposed, posing a little bit more like bruce lee. Okay. So the records, as you heard, are diminished. Many of them destroyed. There are a few payroll records left, incomplete, inexact, and its very hard to find out who and how many. Most of the names, if you can see it were like ah wong, ah being like mr. Ister, but diminutive. Theyre also like nicknames, not their full chinese name. Then in some places, you would get John Chinaman one, John Chinaman two, John Chinaman three as they named who they were. And then they would pay the Labor Contractor or the subcontractor, and he would divvy up the money through the foreman. Now, they became absolutely essential. As much as 80 to 90 of the workforce. The greater portion of the laborers employed are chinese. Without them, it would be impossible to complete the western portion of this Great National enterprise within the time required by the acts of congress. Now, as Richard White pointed out, this may not have been a big moneymaking deal initially as a railroad. As a scheme, maybe. But it was highly political. They debated where the route would be before the civil war, and there was a debate between, you know, the north and the south. The Southern Pacific Railroad would have been the easiest with that route. That meant allowing the south to expand slavery. So they went with this middle route, and very, very difficult terrain. So they needed these workers. Now, the white workers left. The way to look at this is that they could have had a lot of white workers, a lot of irish workers if they had decided to pay them well. They wanted to pay chinese less. So its important to keep that in mind. Wait a minute. Okay. Here we go. This is the route around cape horn, named after the southern part of south america that they had to go around in a big loop. Theres kind of a picture of it. This is on digital visualization on our website. This is one of the first major engineering feats they had to go through. Now, theres been a lot of debate, especially amongst, you know, historian buffs and railroad buffs that this one article says they were suspended by ropes from above because there was a, you know, sharp they wanted to cut in to make the roadbed. So this became some notion that they were hanging in baskets, and this is, again, jake lee kind of making a characterization of the whole building. The railroad by the chinese in baskets. Theres no direct evidence that they actually were in baskets at cape horn, but we believe after a lot of research that they actually did hang in baskets but further to the east. The cape horn area is not enough of a slant to allow for baskets. So we have an opinion about that working with scholars. They also built tunnels, 15 tunnels through the sierra, and this is kind of a graphic showing some of them and the summit tunnel. In particular, number six was the most difficult, that they dug out. No power tools. All by hand, mallet and, you know, banging to get a little spot through granite, putting in explosive and then getting out as fast as you could. As you can imagine, there were a lot of accidents, and when they did the summit tunnel, they used nitroglycerine, newly invented. And after a huge explosion blew up a block in San Francisco, they banned shipping nitroglycerine. So what they did is get a chemist who drank a little and mixed it onsite to make nitroglycerine and, you know, so very dangerous. Now, they stopped using it, and some people think, well, it was too dangerous, but, no, they realized they were going to have to pay patent fees for using nitroglycerine, and they were too cheap for that. Now, one of the things they did that was a little different is they built a vertical shaft to go down the middle and be able to work on four sides, in going out and out going in to meet. And they hauled locomotive engine to the top, and they used that to raise buckets, to, you know, clear the rubble. That was the only machine of that sort that they used. So this is going through donner pass. You can see these tunnels today. They still exist. They moved the route. And so they did this amazing job. Now, part of the thing is when they were first hired, they were paid 26 a day, some people doing skilled work a little bit more, and they had to pay their own meals. They had to arrange their own food, and they also had cooks. So it was a very interesting arrangement that they had. Eventually the pay went up, but it was never the same as the white workers or the irish, who initially were paid 35, and that went up. And the company paid for their food. Now, chinese food became another source of income for the big four, and they would attach a railcar as it moved up the railroad, selling chinese food. In the any case, they were able to get a wide variety of dried foods from china, grown in california, a very big Distribution Network developed. They also drank tea, and when they drank water, it was boiled water. This prevented it wasnt necessarily intended this way. You know, intestinal diseases whereas the white workers thought this was rather crazy and drank cool water coming down the mountains, and they had more problems with, you know, intestinal diseases. Well, at a certain point, the inequality between the white workers and the Chinese Workers became unbearable. There was a big explosion in one of the mines in june 1867, and this triggered a strike by the Chinese Railroad workers. It was a very across a very long area from the tunnels to grading, et cetera. All the work that was being done. There must have been a lot of organizing done initially, and theres a report that a flier went around, and they chose the date. And gordon believes they chose the date for propitious reasons of chinese beliefs of earth and heavens. And they launched it in june 1867. They said, now, one of the demands in one of the newspapers, the right of the working man, overseers of the company to either whip them or restrain them from leaving the road when they desire to seek other employment, they protested the right to do it because labor was so scarce. They had already had their wages raised to 35 an hour, and they wanted parity. Now, this is only one report in one newspaper, and as you heard, there are a lot of antirailroad people. So were not sure that this was actually a demand, but they were reported to be very bullying people on the line. Strobridge would walk around with an ax handle. Crocker would ride on a horse, and they would, you know, whip people, beat people, you know, hurry up, work. So this may have been a demand. It doesnt seem unthinkable. And as they noticed, they said, it will be impossible to do this while we have a strike. If we get over this without yielding, it will be all right hereafter. And as e. B. Crocker, charles crockers brother said, theyre getting smart. Theyre realizing that theres a labor scarcity. They could leave and work in the mines in nevada, not too far away. So the strike lasted a week. In their panic, they suggested, lets go to the Freedmens Bureau and get some freed slaves and have them come in. Get 10,000 of them. At one point, they said, look, we need thousands more chinese, japanese, mexican, anyone that we can get. That way the cost of labor would go even lower. So the strike was over in eight days. They starved them out, cut off food supplies, and then crocker said, well, if you want to quit and go back to sacramento, you cant ride on the train. And they basically gave in. Now, they also asserted that Chinese Labor was not slavery. It was free labor, just as free labor as yours and mine. Now, the big four were republicans, abolitionists, prolincoln, and to say that they were using slave labor would be very difficult for them. They said, no, theyre paid. Theyre free. Theyre not indentured. They are not cooleys meaning indentured and forced to work, but there was lots of argument about that. So this ended up being the route that they were going. You can see the whole extent of it from sacramento here in this illustration. One of the other things that they accomplished is, you know, building ten miles in one day, and this is standing there in the black suit is james strobridge. If you go to hayward, you can see his ranch, and theres a street called strobridge. And next to him is h. H. Minkler, who was his main foreman. As they went ahead in a militarytype fashion there was a military person there who was very impressed how they brought things, unloaded them, and there were eight irish track layers and thousands of Chinese Laborers. The eight track layers got their names listed and were paraded in celebration in sacramento. The Chinese Workers didnt get their names listed. Now, i always imagine the ten miles was a straight line, but as you can see, it kind of curves around, and they had to bend the rails to make the curves while trying to do this fe feat. And the memory of it is still alive. Now, some people say this is the most anyone has ever built a railroad in one day. I dont know. But at that time it certainly was, and at that time the strike was the Largest Labor action in the country 3,000 workers at least went out on strike. So these are kind of amazing things. At the end, in the golden spike, strobridge saluted the workers and presented them as the chosen representatives of the race which have greatly helped to build the road, a tribute they well deserve, which evidently gave them much pleasure as the newspaper reported. So that was the extent. Now, the chinese went on to work. They worked here, as you can see on the bottom, the canadian pacific, point alones village in montere