Stanford Gives Voice To Chinese Railroad Workers

PALO ALTO, CA -- Marking its 150th anniversary, the First Transcontinental Railroad of the United States constructed between 1863 and 1869 was arguably one of the most ambitious American engineering enterprises at the time and the source of much of the wealth used to create Stanford University. Reducing the time it took to cross the continent from months to days, the railroad helped pave the way for Western migration.

The groundwork was laid in great detail by the Stanford News Service.

Fifteen to 20,000 Chinese migrants laid the tracks of the western half of the railroad. Those workers pounded on solid rock from sunrise to sunset, hung off steep mountain cliffs in woven reed baskets and withstood the harshest winters on record in the Sierra Nevada, the news service added. They were paid less than white workers, and hundreds lost their lives as a result of the dangerous work, said Gordon Chang, professor of American history at Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences.

While scholars have long recognized that Chinese migrants were crucial to the railroad’s construction, the details of those workers’ lives remained largely unknown until a team of Stanford scholars created the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project in 2012 to recover their history.

“Without the Chinese migrants, the Transcontinental Railroad would not have been possible,” said Chang, who is the Olive H. Palmer Professor in the Humanities. “If it weren’t for their work, Leland Stanford could have been at best a footnote in history, and Stanford University may not even exist.”

The project is co-directed by Chang and English Professor Shelley Fisher Fishkin, who is the Joseph S. Atha Professor in Humanities and director of the American Studies Program.
Over the past seven years, the project’s researchers undertook the most exhaustive search ever conducted for materials related to the Chinese railroad workers. The team’s findings are being published in two forthcoming books: The Chinese and the Iron Road: Building the Transcontinental Railroad, which Fishkin and Chang edited, and Chang’s Ghosts of Gold Mountain: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad.

More information can be found here.