Ties That Bind - Bay Area Council Economic Institute

14
Ties That Bind
mining experience in China and Southeast Asia, and brought with them special skills in excavating
and extracting ore. They were known for extracting significant gold deposits from mines and
claims abandoned by earlier prospectors.
In later years Chinese laborers made up most of the workforce laying track for the San Jose Railroad,
the California Central Railroad from Sacramento to Marysville, and the transcontinental
California Pacific Railroad from Sacramento to Promontory Point, Utah. For $28 a month, they
took on dangerous jobs such as planting nitroglycerine in cliffs while suspended in baskets on
ropes. Several hundred lost their lives through accidents or working through harsh winters. Chinese
also played a major role at this time constructing levees in the Sacramento River Delta area,
a massive reclamation effort that subsequently enabled the large scale development of agriculture
in the Sacramento Valley.
Crossing the Sierra
“Throughout its history, American California has always imported
its labor when necessary. The construction of the Central Pacific
offered the first case in point. It was one thing to build a rail
line from Sacramento across the valley floor, even to nudge it
into the foothills; but when it came to crossing the Sierra Nevada,
construction chief Charles Crocker knew that he had a
problem. There were not enough men in California willing to do
this sort of backbreaking work at the price Crocker was willing
to pay.
Surveying the labor pool of California, Crocker could see that
there were thousands of Chinese in the state, most of whom
had, for reasons of racial exclusion, been marginalized out of
Chinese immigrants traveling to
California in the steerage
accommodations of Pacific
Mail’s steamer “SS Alaska”
in 1876.
(From the collection of Steve and
Jeremy Potash, Oakland, CA)