MeMoMu_THOT_054 NOBODY WROTE DOWN THEIR NAMES
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22. märts kell 17:49
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Twenty thousand Chinese laborers drilled through the Sierra Nevada mountains by hand, survived winters at Donner Summit, and were lowered down cliff faces in wicker baskets to set explosive charges into solid granite. They were paid thirty percent less than the Irish workers on the other end of the line and were not invited to the ceremony when the railroad was finished.
In the spring of 1865 a superintendent named Charles Crocker was running out of workers. The Central Pacific Railroad needed to lay track across the Sierra Nevada mountains and the Irish laborers he had been relying on were striking for higher wages, shorter hours, and better food. Crocker's solution was to hire fifty Chinese men from the surrounding California community on a trial basis. His partner James Strobridge objected loudly. Crocker's response was: well, they built the Great Wall, didn't they? The fifty men went to work and Strobridge never objected again.
By 1868 somewhere between ten and twenty thousand Chinese laborers were building the western half of the first Transcontinental Railroad through terrain that engineers had privately considered impossible. They drilled tunnels by hand through nearly 1,700 feet of solid granite at Donner Summit, the same mountain pass where the Donner Party had been stranded two decades earlier and resorted to cannibalism to survive. They worked in temperatures that dropped to minus forty in the winter and rose to over 120 degrees in the Nevada desert in the summer. They were paid roughly 30 percent less than their Irish counterparts on the eastern section. The Central Pacific provided the Irish workers with free meals and housing. The Chinese workers were required to supply their own food entirely.
This turned out to be one of the most consequential differences between the two workforces and it had nothing to do with economics. The Chinese workers organized themselves into teams of twelve to twenty men, each with a designated cook who prepared food on keyhole-shaped wok stoves set up at each camp. A supply train arrived weekly carrying dried oysters, abalone, dried bamboo, seaweed, mushrooms, dried fruits, vermicelli, salted cabbage, Chinese bacon, peanut oil, and rice shipped directly from China. Fresh vegetables and meat were procured locally from Chinese farmers who had stayed in California after the Gold Rush. The food was prepared according to principles of traditional Chinese medicine, with every ingredient understood in terms of its effect on the body, what heated it and what cooled it, what replenished energy and what restored balance after a long day of labor. The cook was not just a cook. He was the health officer of his team.
And then there were the tea boys. Young workers assigned specifically to wander through the construction sites all day carrying small kegs of boiled tea on their shoulders, pouring cups for anyone who needed one. The Irish workers on the eastern section drank water from whatever source was available, ditches, wells, rivers, and streams running alongside the worksites. The University of New Mexico anthropologist Stan Rhine, whose research on the Chinese railroad workers has been cited repeatedly in the historical record, put it directly: at the time of construction there was not the kind of awareness of health that there is today and people would drink water out of ditches with no testing. The Chinese workers drank boiled tea. The boiling killed what the drinking killed the Irish. The health difference between the two workforces became documented enough that railroad management noticed and commented on it. The Chinese crews had lower rates of dysentery and waterborne illness than any other group on the line and the tea is the reason.
On May 10 1869 the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific met at Promontory Summit in Utah and the golden spike was driven into the final tie. Eight Irish workers who had set a single day track-laying record were brought to Sacramento to be cheered in a parade, their wagon filled with flowers thrown by women and children. Their names were recorded by the railroad and preserved in the historical record. None of the Chinese workers' names were recorded at the ceremony. The men who had drilled through the Sierra Nevada by hand, who had survived the winter at Donner Summit, who had been lowered down cliff faces in wicker baskets to set explosive charges into solid rock, were not invited to most of the festivities marking the completion of the railroad they had built. Three years later the United States government passed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the first and only law in American history to bar a specific nationality from immigrating to the country, and most of the Chinese railroad workers were pushed out of their jobs by 1910. The railroad that their labor had made possible was used to enforce the isolation the law had created.
The tea boys kept walking through the worksites until the last spike went in. Nobody wrote down their names either.
- Donnie Kuva vähem
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