The Archeology of the Chinese Workers Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad

Golden Spike National Historical Park, in the dry country between the Sierra Nevada and the Rocky Mountains, celebrates the completion of the first transcontinental railroad, which joined the East and West coasts of a rapidly industrializing United States. It could not have been built without Chinese immigrant workers.

Yet their own voices are almost entirely missing. No letters, diaries or other writings by Chinese workers on the first transcontinental railroad have been found. The few eyewitness accounts and images come from European and European American observers, often colored by the anti-Chinese sentiment of the time. What survives is what they left in the ground — and the stories passed down by their descendants.

Building the Central Pacific

Congress funded Army surveys of five possible routes between 1853 and 1855, and the Railway Act of 1862 authorized the Central Pacific Railroad (CPRR) to build the western part of the chosen line and the Union Pacific the eastern part.

Early progress was slow, hampered by labor shortages, strikes and an unwillingness to raise wages. Urged by his friend Charles Crocker, Superintendent J.H. Strobridge reluctantly hired 50 Chinese men, then 50 more — until some 11,000 Chinese workers were employed on the Pacific Railroad by 1868.

Crews faced freezing and scorching temperatures, blizzards and avalanches, bad water and blasting accidents. An unknown number died — probably hundreds, perhaps thousands.

Averaging nearly three miles of track a day, Chinese-led CPRR crews entered Utah Territory in March 1869. On April 28, 1869, in just 12 hours, Chinese crews and a smaller group of non-Chinese workers laid 10 miles and 56 feet of track — a record never surpassed. Before noon on May 10, eight Chinese men moved the final rail into place before guests drove the ceremonial golden and silver spikes. Yet no Chinese faces appear in the photographs of the celebration.

Reading the camps

Archeologists face a paradox: artifacts stay where they fell, but the people who left them moved across thousands of miles. About 31 worker campsites and supply camps have been found on the slopes of Promontory Summit, and hundreds more across the West — the only evidence of the frantic final months of construction.

Left, sod-covered worker shelters at a railroad camp; right, the archeological remains of a shelter. From Homstad, Caywood and Nelson, Cultural Landscape Report: Golden Spike National Historic Site (National Park Service, 2000).

Excavated Chinese dwellings range from tents to dugouts — shelters dug into the ground, surviving today as shallow depressions — to formal houses, reflecting both construction and the much longer period of maintaining the line.

• Terrace, the Salt Lake Division's maintenance and repair headquarters, yielded Chinese coins from Szechuan and Yunnan provinces and the remains of shanties and dugouts. The 1880 census counted 54 Chinese residents there — railroad employees, but also grocers, laundry owners and tailors — and a March 8, 1902, newspaper article on "Terrace's Chinatown" described a store, a place of worship and children in school.
• At West Lake and East Lake, the census ignored Chinese residents, but fieldwork found substantial Chinese communities in the 1870s and 1880s.

Renewed archeological work ahead of the Golden Spike's 150th anniversary turned up thousands of 1800s artifacts. Even the most remote camps had strikingly uniform supplies and household goods. Imported Chinese porcelain bowls from camps before 1870 bear "double happiness" and "bamboo" designs; later ones, "wintergreen" and "four seasons." Metal suspender clasps and shell shirt buttons show workers adopting Western clothing.

Artifacts from Ten-Mile (Seco) Station, including a Chinese rice bowl. From Raymond and Fike, Rails East to Promontory: The Utah Stations (Bureau of Land Management, 1994).

After the golden spike

Despite unequal treatment, many Chinese workers stayed with the railroads. Later transcontinental, branch and regional lines depended on the expertise of CPRR veterans, and railroad work gave steady employment when Chinese immigrants were shut out of most industries. Few grew rich, but their savings built communities such as Terrace, West Lake and East Lake. After the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, railroad jobs gradually went to other immigrant groups, and by 1910 most Chinese workers had been replaced.

Because the railroad didn't record their names, individual contributions are hard to trace. The Southern Pacific Bulletin names a few — Ah Hop, Toy Gee and Charlie Dan — some of whom gave nearly 50 years to the railroad. For others, like Lee Wong Sang, who passed through CPRR camps in California, Nevada and Utah between 1866 and 1869, the railroad was a short chapter in a longer life.

NPS employees, members of the Hibernian Society of Utah and members of the Chinese Railroad Workers Descendants Association remember the railroad's workers. Credit: National Park Service.

Every Chinese railroad worker risked his life for the hope of a better future; for many it never came, and for many more their fate is unknown. Archeology replaces the old label of "Silent Spikes" with recognition of what they achieved — lifting up their communities and linking a country.

Sources

Based on "The Archeology of Chinese Laborers Who Connected the Country," Golden Spike National Historical Park, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The article draws on the park's Cultural Landscape Report (2000), Raymond and Fike's Rails East to Promontory (1994), and research by Merritt and others, Voss and others (2018) and Nakayama.