Q: After the race-motivated “Chinese must Go” campaigns of the 1870s and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, records from many Chinese immigrants in the United States were often lost. 1862-1869, courtesy Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries) Chinese railroad workers look down at the forks of the American River, three miles above Alta, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. The conversation has been edited for clarity and length. This news organization sat down with Chang to talk about the book. Chang, Ghosts of Gold Mountain, takes one of the most comprehensive looks to date at Chinese railroad workers’ lives during that time, pulling from extensive public and private archives, oral histories, and other sources. Now, in preparation for the 150th anniversary of the completion of the historic railroad, a new book by Stanford professor Gordon H. But, despite their significant contributions to this early American dream, their stories were often overlooked by journalists at the time and by historians for decades after the railroad was built. Many of those workers gave their lives in their perilous jobs. Some 10,000 to 15,000 Chinese workers toiled along the line between 1863 and the railroad’s completion on May 10, 1869, comprising 90 percent of the workforce along the Central Pacific Railroad’s line, which ran through California, Nevada and Utah. (Photo by Andrew Russell/Courtesy Yale University Libraries) Conspicuously absent is any representation from the Chinese laborers who comprised 90 percent of the Central Pacific Railroad’s workforce. Dodge, Union Pacific Railroad (center right) at the ceremony commemorating the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad in Promontory Summit, Utah on May 10, 1869. Montague, Central Pacific Railroad, shakes hands with Grenville M. Stretching 1,912 miles from Omaha, Nebraska, where it linked to a network of railroads on the East Coast, to its terminus in the burgeoning city of Oakland, the railroad was more than a boon for businessmen and entrepreneurial spirits seeking fortunes it united a country still reeling from the Civil War, symbolized the taming of the rugged West and became a physical representation of Manifest Destiny. They chiseled and blasted their way through solid rock, filled riverbeds and graded the foundation for what would become the most significant infrastructure project in United States’ history at the time: the completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad. STANFORD - Using only picks and shovels, wheelbarrows, carts and horses, thousands of Chinese laborers cleared the dense brush and conifer thickets of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
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