The American Future (37 page)

There's a photograph of the colonel, in front of a tent, standing next to Wong Sic Chien, the Chinese consul from New York, and their colleagues in the Investigation Commission, taken in Rock Springs, Wyoming: a redbrick coal town on the upmost reaches of the Colorado. It's still a Union Pacific freight yard, linked to its bigger neighbor Green River. With gas at four bucks a gallon, business is looking up, and the chains of freight wagons, many of them with Japanese markings, roll through the yards for a good fifteen, twenty minutes a time. Looking down on Rock Springs from surrounding hills are the usual strip malls, Rite Aid, Starbucks, KFC; tree-lined streets with their natty two-car suburban driveways. From this eminence modern Rock Springs surveys the relics of a lost industrial Wyoming: the Beaux Arts or Flemish-gabled banks half boarded up; more churches than a decayed coke town rightly needs, and between them Asiatic manicure parlors and funky tattoo stores; a gesture of gentrification here and there: the craft-ale bar, scrubbed pine and stainless steel brewing vats. No Chinese restaurants, not that I saw: a bad memory that won't quite go away; twenty-eight Chinese massacred in a hate riot in 1885. The crime for which they paid with their lives had been to decline to join a strike organized by Welsh and Swedish miners with whom they shared the pit and the town. No love lost. When it came to it,
the Welsh colliers set Chinatown on fire, shot up anyone trying to leave; 400 were driven into the hills, where more died of exposure attempting to get to Green River.

That was the sort of thing that got old Fred stirred up. He reckoned someone had to be, and he was, after all, Chinese consul for San Francisco; though he didn't much look the part with his white whiskers, old-fashioned high-collar coat, and plug hat. In his time, Fred Bee had been many things, the sort of things you would expect from a Placer County man: soldier, founder-investor in the Pony Express, the Sausalito Land and Ferry Company north of San Francisco, and, in 1858, the Placerville-St. Joseph (Overland) Telegraph Company, the parent of Western Union from which he had made a nice little pile. But Fred Bee wasn't made for a quiet, pipe-sucking kind of life, and since he was an attorney, he spent most of his time going to the law for the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association. He figured it was a matter of upholding the dignity of the country; the integrity of its justice. The Burlingame Treaty of 1868, which had confirmed the right of the Chinese to “expatriate” themselves to the United States (there being an awful lot of railroad track to lay at that particular time), had reciprocally allowed Yankees to go and trade whatever they liked—tobacco or souls—in Ch'ing China. The treaty had also guaranteed that these migrations would be voluntary. Chinese migrants would be free to come and go within the United States as peaceably as they wished. Though Americans in China insisted on their own extraterritorial jurisdiction, not being keen on imperial law, the Chinese migrants were to enjoy the full protection of the law afforded to citizens, even though they had been permanently disqualified from naturalization.

If America was now a continental nation, courtesy of the meeting of the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific in May 1869, it was the Chinese who had made it so; not just the railroad graders and exploders and masons, but the multitudes of men who made a rough life bearable: the launderers and the dry-goods merchants and woodcutters and sometimes camp girls too. And instead of thanks, what they had got, Fred Bee noticed, was the smell of their Chinatowns burning to the ground, lynch mobs, and summary orders to leave town sharpish. So they went at gunpoint, the mobs wagging lengths of rope at them in Rock Springs, women laughing and clapping as the Chinese miners
shuffled into the darkness pushing their sad, overloaded handcarts. This had happened in Rocklin and the rest of the Sacramento Valley, in Eureka and Truckee and Tacoma, Seattle and San Jose and countless other places up and down the West Coast; and governor after governor had turned a blind eye, knowing mayors and police chiefs were in cahoots. The least that decent America could do for these innocents, Colonel Bee thought, was to make reparation for their losses and their suffering. It had been Rocklin in 1877 that had first got him aggravated. But the story had begun long before that.

 

It had begun with the Great Greaser Extermination Meeting, as the California gold miners called it. Their problem then had not been with the Chinese but with the Latinos who were sitting right on the American Eldorado and had the cheek to imagine they might get a share of it. It hadn't been one of the Mexicans or Chileans or Californios who had made the first strike, after all. It had been James Marshall working down by the tail race of the sawmill he was building for Mr. John Sutter on an icy morning in January 1848. But the “greasers” had got their hands on gold around Sonora. It's true they had actually built the town in the first place, naming it after their homeland in northwest Mexico, meaning to search for the gold deposits they knew were there. It's true that they had been mining for generations before California had seen hide or hair of the Anglos. “Placer” mining, the sifting of gold specks and nuggets from the pack of debris and dirt that had been eroded away from rock veins, was an old Mexican technique.
Placera
was Spanish for alluvial deposit.

For the Americans who rushed to the southern Sierra Nevada in 1848 and 1849, the prior presence of so many Chileans, Argentinians, and, more inconveniently, Californios whom the new-minted Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo had now decreed to be Americans, was an irritation. But they could be dislodged without too much trouble by tried-and-true methods of threats, assaults on the camps, the occasional lynching and race riot. Hence the Great Greaser Extermination Meeting summoned to coordinate all these efforts. But when the Chileans had the gall to organize and arm themselves in defense, institutional means could do the trick. A tax was imposed on “Foreign Miners” of three dollars a month. Although Californios and Mexicans were now part of the postwar United States, merely speaking Spanish
was often enough to be obliged to pay the punitive duty. It worked. At the end of 1849 there were 15,000 Hispanic miners working the placers around Sonora and elsewhere in the southern Sierra. A year later just 5,000 remained. It would not be their gold rush.

In 1852, the Foreign Miners Tax was reissued with a specific proviso exempting anyone who might in due course become a naturalized citizen. This meant the duty was aimed at those who, it had been decided, could never achieve citizenship; who had been declared constitutionally unassimilable. This meant the Chinese. There were only a few thousand of them in California at this time, but already the defensive locals were beginning to dread the hordes to come. Unless of course they were the ones making money from their trans-shipment, like the labor-broker Cornelius Koopmanschap of San Francisco and Canton. He and shippers like him who knew south China well had struck up a profitable relationship with their counterparts in the Pearl River Delta, the deepest reservoir of Chinese emigrants to the United States. Their province of Guangdong was the one most deeply penetrated by Western guns and money. British victory in the Opium War had opened Hong Kong and Canton, and the endless cycle of misery, famine, epidemic, and civil war had created a well of desperation on which the labor merchants could draw for recruits. The men who went to the Gold Mountain, as the United States was now known, would send the money they earned back to their homes and villages, followed in due course by their triumphant selves. And though the anti-Chinese campaign always called them “coolies,” they were not going as oriental slaves. But the terms on which they emigrated, agreeing to pay back the merchants who put up their transport and medical costs (with a healthy markup) from future earnings, meant they were not exactly free either. The emigrants were indentured laborers, subjected to the debt sovereignty of the merchants and, once they got to California, the Chinese Six Companies society that officially managed the interests of the community.

But still, it would be Gold Mountain. “They want the Chinaman to come and will make him welcome” promised the flyers in China. “There will be big pay, large houses and food and clothing of the finest description…It is a nice country without mandarins and soldiers. All alike; big man no larger than little man.”

According to the Six Companies, by 1855 there were more than
40,000 Chinese immigrants in California. Apart from the teenage girls who were often abducted into prostitution or sold by their families, they were all male; and not all of them came to work as miners. From the beginning there was an astute realization among the Chinese communities that the bachelor world of the miners would require a host of goods and services that women normally provided, other than sex: laundry, groceries, cooking, hostelries, firewood, fresh produce, fish. Those were all menial jobs that had mostly been beneath male dignity in south China but would provide a steady living if the gold, literally, did not pan out.

They came in shiploads, packed so tightly into holds they might as well have been slaves, and subjected to the ferocious discipline of the merchant shippers. When they got to the Sierra, abuse and intimidation immediately followed. In 1852 a gang of 60 white miners attacked 200 defenseless Chinese men at their camp on the American River in Tuolumne County and then went on to take the assault to another 400 downstream. Repeatedly thereafter they were threatened at gunor knifepoint. But many still persisted, following the hope of fortune. Though a California law had prohibited the Chinese from legally filing claims, some took over mines abandoned by whites and, because they came from water country at home, understood the flumes well enough to do better. Others went farther afield, to Nevada, Oregon, and Washington, and up the Rockies to Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana. By 1870, a quarter of all miners in the West were Chinese, and paranoid hatred stalked them wherever they went.

But the business opportunities for the merchants who were supplying Chinese labor were just beginning to open up. In 1862 Congress, at Lincoln's behest, passed the funding for a transcontinental railroad, and work began in 1863. The timing was not accidental, coming as it did in the middle of the war. If the politics of slavery were tearing the Union apart, the railroads would make an end run around the strife and knit the country together again. The westward line of the Union Pacific was dominated by Irish labor, using picks and mules, and living in some of the rowdiest work camps in America. Their opposite number on the Central Pacific, moving east from Sacramento, faced the most daunting challenge with a steep rise of 7,000 feet in just a hundred or so miles, from the Sacramento Valley to the summit of the Sierra Nevada.

The Central Pacific was made possible by a consortium of four major investors: Collis P. Huntingdon, Mark Hopkins, Leland Stanford, and Charles Crocker. As governor of California in the year of the Railroad Act, Stanford had spoken out against Asia “with her numberless millions” sending “to our shores the dregs of her population.” There could be no question, Stanford said, sounding a note that would become academic orthodoxy among many social scientists in academia thirty years later, “that the settlement among us of a degraded and dishonest people must exercise a deleterious influence upon the superior race.”

But among the Central Pacific partners Stanford wasn't the one with the urgent job of finding adequate labor to build the line. Casualties were already high, wildcat walkouts common. Crocker needed a long-term labor force of at least 5,000 if the job was to be completed on time, and as of winter 1865 he had just 800, mostly Irish. It was his older brother Edwin Bryant Crocker, the company attorney, who suggested the possibility of employing Chinese workers who had been used for construction on the admittedly much easier California Central Railroad. They could be dependably delivered by the Six Companies, worked well in teams, and were said to be “docile and industrious.” The superintendent of works, James Strobridge, hated the idea of being “boss of the Chinese,” believing they were altogether too fragile for such work, buying into the received wisdom that because Asians had less body hair they were somehow more effeminate than European men. But Strobridge had little choice. He was down to a mere 300 workers, most of whom, when a section of track was finished, would disappear on a drunken spree with few returning. A trial gang of fifty Chinese were recruited from the towns around the mountains and used by the skeptical Strobridge to load dump carts with rock debris and then drive them. Satisfied with their labor, he then gave some of them picks to work on easier excavation. With every job escalating in difficulty, the Chinese exceeded his expectations.

By the autumn of 1866 3,000 had been hired, and Stanford, who not long before had been so insulting about the damage done to California by Asian imports, now took every opportunity to sing the praises of “his” Chinese. By 1867, they were 75 percent of the Central Pacific workforce; at its peak between 10,000 and 12,000 men. They were a tunneling army of working prodigies, comparable to those
that built the Great Wall, an analogy much invoked by the proud managers of the line.

There were so many ways to die for the Central Pacific. Blasters hanging in perilous baskets at the rock face would swing back to the explosion after drilling the stone and lighting the fuse. Sometimes the nitroglycerine they used was so volatile and violent that the explosion stoned them with flying boulders. Many were taken by avalanches. Five were killed near the Donner Summit on Christmas Day in 1866. The company had offered its workers canvas tenting, and the Irish and the Cornish ex–tin miners used them. But with good reason the Chinese thought the tents more likely to be buried beneath the forty-feet drifts that accumulated when the mountain wind got up, and preferred a molelike subterranean existence, excavating long tunnels, both for work and shelter, some wide enough to take a two-mule sled. But inevitably sometimes an avalanche blocked the entrances to the warrens, or the chimneys and the workers were buried alive inside, their bodies irrecoverable until the spring thaw.