America’s first major immigration crackdown and the making and breaking of the West

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 is widely considered to be the first major immigration clampdown in American history. It’s a riveting tale that parallels today and may provide insights into the economic consequences of immigration restrictions and mass deportations. This is Part 1 of that story, which explains how Chinese immigrants became a crucial workforce in the American West and why, despite their sacrifices and contributions creating the transcontinental railroad, the railroad’s completion may have actually contributed to a populist backlash that sealed their fates.

Donner Memorial State Park in Truckee, California, is a place where natural beauty clashes with historic horror like maybe nowhere else on Earth. The park has a stunning alpine lake and inspiring views of the craggy, granite peaks of the Sierra Nevada. It’s an awesome place to swim, boat, windsurf, hike, snowshoe, ski, picnic — you name it. It also just so happens to be the gruesome site where, in the winter of 1846-47, a snowbound Donner Party resorted to the most infamous incident of cannibalism in American history.

The first time my wife and I visited Donner Memorial State Park together, we expected that the reminders of cannibalism would be the most disturbing part of an otherwise pleasant stroll around Donner Lake. We were wrong.

Walking about halfway around the lake, we reached a beach area called China Cove. We peered across emerald waters for a beautiful view of granite-crowned Donner Peak. China Cove seemed like an odd name for this area. But then, on our walk out, my wife spotted a placard pointing to why.

In the mountains just above the lake, there’s a series of now-abandoned tunnels that, for well over a century, enabled the transcontinental railroad to cross the imposing Sierra Nevada. It was by far one of the most — if not the most — difficult stretches of the railroad to build. The mountains here are steep and made of solid granite. And, after Americans began to dream of a railroad that could link the Atlantic with the Pacific, surveyors determined that the train tracks would have to go literally right through them.

The Pacific Railway Act, which was signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln in 1862, funded the creation of the transcontinental railroad. The federal government awarded contracts to two railroad companies. One, Union Pacific Railroad, would build from the east and the other, Central Pacific Railroad, would build from the west. Each company was paid in federal subsidies and land grants based on the miles of track they laid. This incentivized building track as quickly as possible because, as the companies built toward each other, one company’s loss of a mile was the other’s gain. The race was on.

The Central Pacific Railroad had a much harder job. It had to build a railroad through the Sierra Nevada, with its sheer cliffs, hard granite, and monster snowstorms. And the company had to recruit workers on the still relatively unpopulated West Coast.

Central Pacific Railroad first tried to recruit white workers to do the job. But many Americans were fighting in the Civil War and those Westerners who weren’t fighting apparently believed they had better economic options, including trying to strike it rich in Nevada’s booming silver mines. The work of building a railroad was brutal and turnover was high. The company found itself in a frantic search for a large and cheap labor force to help do the work in record time.

Meanwhile, a small population of people had begun to arrive in the American West from the Far East, specifically the war-torn Guangdong province in Southern China. These thousands of Chinese immigrants were first attracted to Northern California for the same reasons that many white Americans and Europeans were: the lore of riches in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada after the discovery of gold in 1848 sent shockwaves around the world.

Pariah Immigrants

Almost as soon as the Chinese came to America, they were targeted with discrimination, hostility, and violence. First, it was at the local and state levels. Beginning as early as 1849, California mining counties began passing laws that sought to restrict the rights of the Chinese to mine. In 1850 and 1852, the California State Legislature passed laws taxing foreign miners (any foreigner who was considered a “free white person” was exempt). These were only some of the first shots in a barrage of discriminatory laws and community actions that would make life harder for Chinese immigrants.

So, in the 1860s, Charlie Crocker, one of the executives and founders of Central Pacific Railroad, caused some controversy when he floated the idea of hiring Chinese workers to help build the railroad. Despite being recent migrants themselves — California had only recently become part of the United States after a war with Mexico — many white workers were unhappy seeing other foreigners getting jobs and seizing opportunities. Racist notions about Chinese people infected American perceptions of their value as community members and human beings. They also infected business executives’ views of their capabilities as workers.

At one point, for example, a railroad executive questioned whether the Chinese had the strength and skills to do masonry. Crocker reportedly replied, “Did they not build the Chinese Wall, the biggest piece of masonry in the world?” (Today, up near Donner Summit above the lake, there’s a 150-foot tall retaining wall still standing that Chinese workers built for the transcontinental railroad. Locals have named it “the China Wall.”)

Central Pacific Railroad ended up deciding to hire Chinese workers, and the company turned to a Chinese labor contractor named Hung Wah to help with recruitment. Wah was based in Auburn, California, a mining town that sits in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, along the planned railroad route. In 1863, Wah advertised in an Auburn newspaper that he could “furnish any number of Chinese laborers to work on Rail Roads, Wagon Roads, or Mining Claims” and could do so “at the lowest cash rates.” This ad apparently caught the attention of railroad executives.

Between 1865 and 1869, the Central Pacific Railroad would employ about 20,000 Chinese immigrants in total — as much as 90% of their workforce at the peak of construction — to build the western section of the transcontinental railroad. Although these workers would prove themselves to be incredibly talented, brave, and productive, the company didn’t treat them well. It paid them less than their white counterparts. It forced them to sleep in tents while white workers got to sleep in warmer box cars. And it enlisted them to do the most dangerous jobs.

The Summit Tunnel

The section of the railroad that towers above Donner Lake, through Donner Pass, was especially difficult and perilous to build. One tunnel in particular, the Summit Tunnel, required workers to dig by hand, using primitive tools and explosives, through nearly 1,700 feet of solid granite.

Roland Hsu is the former research director of Stanford University’s Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project, which tapped dozens of scholars from multiple disciplines to analyze and document the contributions of Chinese immigrants to the creation of the transcontinental railroad.

Hsu says that, when constructing the tunnels, four Chinese workers would ram a long iron bar into the granite. Another would hit the bar with a sledgehammer. Next they would twist and hammer the bar again, arduously boring a hole into the rock. Once the hole was deep enough, they would pack it with explosives, light them, and run for their lives. “That would break a layer of granite, and then they’d come back and — by hand — carry out all the debris.”

Inch by inch, it would take workers over two painstaking years to bore Summit Tunnel through Donner Peak — and Central Pacific Railroad, racing to complete the project, insisted they work around the clock and through the winters. These would be some of the snowiest winters on record.

It was hard work. And, while the poor treatment they experienced might have led other workers to quit, the Chinese immigrants had fewer options than other workers. That said, they still refused to be mere cogs in their railroad company’s machine. In June 1867, in what proved to be the biggest organized labor strike in the nation, Chinese workers stopped working on the railroad in a fight for better pay, reduced hours (from 11 to 10 hours a day), and better working conditions.

Fearing that if he gave them an inch they’d take a mile, Crocker declared he would not meet their demands. And, after about a week of labor strife, Crocker turned to intimidation efforts, including cutting off the supply of food and other provisions to the camps of Chinese workers. The company ultimately coerced the laborers to return to work. Despite the mostly unsuccessful strike, historians note that the company did end up increasing their pay in coming months.

Countless Chinese workers died constructing Summit and other tunnels in the mountains above Donner Lake. They died in explosions. They died falling. They died freezing to death in the elements at altitude during brutal snowstorms and subzero cold spells. They died in avalanches of rock and snow.

“And one thing we do know is that those who died in the avalanches, their bodies were left at the base towards what’s now Donner Lake until the spring,” Hsu says. “Because the company was not gonna go in and try to dig them out or even see if they were worth rescuing.”

We lack solid estimates for the exact number of Chinese laborers who died building the transcontinental railroad, but, Hsu says, evidence suggests it was as high as 1,200. For perspective, 42 people died in the Donner Party, which now has a lake, a mountain, a pass, a state park, and more named in their memory.

The Irony And Tragedy Of Completing The Transcontinental Railroad

The transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869. It was a marvel of modern engineering and technological innovation, slashing the time it took to cross the United States from many months to a mere week. It literally united the nation. Not only did the railroad reduce the time and cost of making the journey, it also helped ensure that there would be no more tragedies like the Donner Party.

There’s no doubt that the railroad would ultimately be a gigantic engine that powered economic growth in the West. But, as with many other new technological waves in history, excitement about locomotives was accompanied by a speculative mania. And, when the spell was broken and the economy came crashing down, life would get much worse for Chinese immigrants.

Railroad investors believed that the sky was the limit with the transcontinental and other railroads. They took on massive amounts of debt, buying railroad bonds and gobbling up real estate they believed would increase in value near train stops. This debt proved to be a ticking time bomb.

What followed was a financial crisis known as “The Panic of 1873,” which led to what some historians call “the first Great Depression,” or “the Long Depression.” Nationally, the unemployment rate skyrocketed to 14 percent. The economy remained bad for many years.

Nancy Qian, an economist at the Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management, says this harsh recession was worse in the West — and one reason, ironically, was the transcontinental railroad.

“One of the ironies of integrating the East and West of the United States with the transcontinental railroad is that the West had to now compete with the East,” Qian says. “The East was more developed than the West. This made it very difficult for manufacturing and agriculture in the West.”

Like so many other times in history, economic turmoil led to scapegoating, populist foment, and racial violence. With many white people now looking for gainful employment, Qian says that Western voters and populist politicians began to blame Chinese immigrants for taking jobs. They began to gravitate to the idea that, “If we kick out the Chinese, then the rest of us will have more jobs, more opportunities.”

Ground zero for this movement to kick the Chinese out of America would be none other than the home to what is now Donner Memorial State Park: Truckee, California. Many of the Chinese immigrants who built the railroad moved there after its completion. In fact, they helped make Truckee’s “Chinatown” one of the largest in the nation. But soon that would dramatically change.

Next week in the Planet Money newsletter: the movement to exclude and expel Chinese immigrants from the United States, and a new study that shows how Chinese exclusion affected the American economy. Subscribe here.