Promontory Summit, Utah Territory. May 10th, 1869. There is a photograph. You have probably seen it. Two locomotives nose to nose, a crowd of men in hats standing on the tracks raising bottles celebrating the moment the transcontinental railroad was completed. Every man in that photograph is white. The 12,000 Chinese laborers who built the most dangerous section of the railroad, the 690 miles of mountain, desert, and granite from Sacramento to Promontory were asked to step aside before the photograph was taken.
12,000 men. Not one face in the picture. Not one name in the speech. Not one mention in the ceremony. This is their story. And it begins not at the summit, but in the granite. The Central Pacific Railroad had a problem. It was 1865 and the company needed to build a railroad through the Sierra Nevada, the most formidable mountain range in North America.
The route required tunnels [music] blasted through solid granite, bridges spanning gorges that dropped a thousand feet, and roadbeds carved into cliffsides so [music] steep that men had to be lowered in baskets to place the dynamite charges. White laborers would not do the work. They tried. They quit. The conditions were too dangerous, the pay too low, the mountains too high.
By the end of 1864, the Central Pacific had fewer than 600 workers and was falling catastrophically behind schedule. Charles Crocker, the construction superintendent, made a suggestion that the other railroad executives [music] considered absurd. Hire Chinese workers. The objections were immediate.
Chinese men were too small, too weak. They could not handle the cold, the altitude, the dynamite. [music] They were, in the language of the era, not built for this kind of work. Crocker responded with a sentence that would prove prophetic. “They built the Great Wall, didn’t they?” The first Chinese workers were hired in February, 1865.
50 men. They were given the [music] worst jobs, the ones no one else would do. And they did them so well that Crocker immediately hired more. By the end of 1865, [music] there were 3,000 Chinese laborers on the line. By 1867, there were 12,000. They were 80% [music] of the Central Pacific’s total workforce. They came from Guangdong [music] province, mostly.
They were young, 20s and 30s. They left families [music] behind and crossed the Pacific because California promised wages that were 10 times what they could earn at home. What California did not promise was that the work would try to kill [music] them every single day. The railroad kept records of everything: miles of track laid, tons of granite blasted, [music] pounds of black powder used.
It kept records of payroll and supplies and schedules. It did not keep records of names. The Chinese workers were listed [music] in the books as numbers or as Chinese labor, more simply as coolies, [music] 12,000 men. And the railroad could not be bothered to write down who they were. The Sierra Nevada tested them in ways that no human labor force had ever been tested.
At Cape Horn, a sheer granite cliff face above the American River, the roadbed had to be carved into the rock at an elevation of 1,400 ft. There was no ledge. There was no foothold. Chinese workers volunteered to be lowered over the cliff in woven reed baskets, drilling holes into the granite, packing them with black powder, lighting the fuse, and then, if the men above hold fast enough, being pulled to safety before the explosion.
Not all of them were hold fast enough. The railroad did not record how many men died at Cape Horn. It did not record how many men died anywhere on the line. Modern historians estimate that between 1,000 and 1,200 Chinese workers were killed during construction from explosions, rockfalls, avalanches, heatstroke, and frostbite.
Some estimates go higher. The truth is that nobody counted because nobody was required to count. At the Summit Tunnel, >> [music] >> Tunnel 6, the Chinese crews faced 1,659 ft of solid granite at an elevation of 7,000 ft. They worked from both [music] ends and from a central shaft, chipping through rock so hard that they advanced only 8 in per day.
They worked in shifts around the clock in tunnels lit by [music] candles and filled with dust so thick that men coughed blood. The winter of 1866 to ’67 brought 44 ft of snow to the summit. The Chinese workers lived in tunnels [music] beneath the snowpack connected by passageways they carved through the ice. They could not see the sky for weeks at a time.
Avalanches buried entire camps. In the spring, when the snow melted, the bodies of men who had been swept away were found still holding their tools. They were paid $31 a month, $10 less than white workers doing easier work at lower altitudes. They bought their own food. They provided their own tents.
They received no medical care. In June 1867, 3,000 Chinese workers went on strike. They demanded equal pay, shorter hours in the tunnels, [music] and an end to the practice of whipping workers who were deemed too slow. The railroad cut off their food supply. After 8 days without rations at 7,000 ft, the workers returned. The strike was broken. Nothing changed.
They went back into the tunnels. They went back [music] to the baskets on the cliffs. They went back to the dynamite and the granite and the snow. Because the alternative was to go home with nothing. And they had come too far and buried too many of their own to leave empty-handed. And when the last spike was driven [music] at Promontory Summit, they were told to step aside so that the photograph could show only the people who mattered.
The people with names. Look at the photograph again. The one at Promontory Summit. The two locomotives, the champagne, the handshakes. Now look at what is not in the photograph. 12,000 men who blasted through 690 mi of granite, desert, [music] and mountain. Who worked in baskets over 1,000 ft drops. Who lived under snow for months.
Who struck for their dignity and were starved back to work. Who watched their friends die in explosions and avalanches and were told to keep working because the schedule was the schedule. The last rail was laid by Chinese crews. The last spike, the famous golden spike, was driven by railroad executives who had never lifted a hammer in their lives.
Governor Leland Stanford swung at the golden spike and missed. The telegraph operator sent the signal anyway. The nation celebrated. The Chinese workers were not invited to the ceremony. They watched from a distance. Some of them had been on the line for 4 years. Some had buried brothers in the granite. After the ceremony, they were given their final wages, in some cases less than what they were owed, and released.
No pension, no land grant, no thank you. They walked off the site carrying their tools and their dead [music] men’s names in their memory, and America forgot them before the champagne went flat. Within 13 years, the United [music] States would pass the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the first law in American history to ban immigration based on race.
The men who built the [music] railroad were now legally forbidden from becoming citizens of the country they had connected. We do not have 12,000 names. That is the cruelest part of this [music] story. The railroad did not record them, and the men themselves, [music] many of whom could not write English, left few records.
But we have some. Fragments, traces. Enough to know they were real. We know about Hung Wah, a labor contractor who organized crews [music] and negotiated with the railroad on behalf of workers who could not speak English. He kept his own records in Chinese. Some of them survived. We know about the unnamed man.
Historians call him Ah Goong, which is simply the Cantonese word for grandfather, whose story was reconstructed by the writer Maxine Hong Kingston from family memories. He worked on the [music] Summit Tunnel. He survived the winter of 1866 to ’67. He sent money home every month. We know about the workers who carved their names in Chinese characters into the granite walls of the tunnels they dug.
If you visit the abandoned tunnels of the old Central Pacific route in the Sierra Nevada, you can still find these carvings. Names, dates, and in at least one case, a poem about missing home. 12,000 men, and the few names we have we found not in the railroad’s archives, [music] but in family letters, in carved stone, and in the memory of grandchildren who were told, “Your grandfather built [music] the railroad and they never thanked him.
” In 2014, the US Department of Labor inducted the Chinese railroad workers into the Labor Hall of Honor. It took 145 years. The citation [music] reads, in part, “Their labor helped transform the economic and physical landscape of the nation.” It does not [music] list their names because America still does not know them.
12,000 men drove the spikes. History remembered zero of their names. But the granite [music] remembers. The tunnels they carved still stand. The roadbed they blasted still holds. The railroad they built still runs. And somewhere in Guangdong province, in family homes and village shrines, there are photographs of young men who went to California and never came back.
Or who came back old and broken and proud of something that the country they built refused to acknowledge. If you ever drive through the Sierra Nevada on Interstate 80, you are driving on a road that follows the grade the Chinese workers carved with their hands. If you stop at Donner Summit and walk to the old railroad tunnels, you can touch the chisel marks.
You can find the names. They are still there. Waiting to be read. If this story stayed with you, tell me, what does it mean when a country forgets the people who built it? And if you want another story about the people the record left out, it’s right here.
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
