AH TOY
Major Player in the Sex Trade
http://students.seattleu.edu/riccir/toy/toy3.htm


Just like other noteworthy prostitutes of the West such as Sarah
Bowman or Dona "La Tules" Gertrudis Barcelo, Ah Toy succeeded by
adapting to the changing conditions of her environment. Benson Tong
and other historians hypothesize that she was the first Chinese
prostitute in America. She arrived in San Francisco in late 1848.

Successful Entrepreneur
Unlike most Chinese prostitutes, she independently operated
establishments of "commercial vice" and resisted attempts by the
male-dominated society (i.e. tongs) to control her business or
extort "protection money from her." Ah Toy began her business from a
humble residence in a small shanty on an alley off Clay Street (near
Kearny). As her business grew she was increasingly sensationalized
in newspapers and was described as "strangely alluring" by foreign
visitors to San Francisco.

In 1850 Ah Toy expanded her business employing two recently arrived
prostitutes. Within two or three years, she was doing sufficiently
well to move into bigger quarters. In 1852, she was listed as being
the proprietor of two "boardinghouses." That year, she was also
blamed for the immigration of several hundred Chinese prostitutes.
Despite the increasing involvement of tongs in the industry, Ah Toy
maintained control of her business operations for at least two more
years. Benson Tong notes that she even "procured prostitutes for
other Chinese brothels."

Increasing Tong Control
However, around 1854, Tongs began importing women for prostitution,
marking the beginning of the end of the period of "laissez-faire"
practices, and the increasing rarity of prostitutes operating as
autonomous entrepreneurs. While competition and tong control
eventually brought about Ah Toy's downfall and removal from the
spotlight in San Francisco prostitution, her story indicates that
the dynamics and foundations of the industry are much more
complicated than is commonly assumed.


=================


Madam Ah Toy 1850
http://ftp.wi.net/~census/lesson38.html


Tall and with an ivory complexion, Ah Toy in her youth was so
beautiful that when news of her arrival reached the goldfields in
that land bereft of women, miners put away their picks and shovels
and traveled a hundred miles to San Francisco just to look at her.
She had arrived in the city alone with her amah and established her
salon in a courtyard on Clay Street between Dupont (now Grant) and
Kearny.

She gave no favors to anyone but charged an ounce of gold dust (at
$18 an ounce) just for the privilege of looking at her face. Men
lined up in an queue that stretched for a block or more. At the
height of her fame in the early 1850s, when the boat from Sacramento
touched shore men would leap from the gunwhales and race to her
courtyard in hopes of catching a glimpse of her. She was as famous
in her day as Lola Montez the dancer was in hers.

Legend has embellished the hard facts contained in the city's police
and court records. She once had two miners arrested for trying to
pass off brass filings as gold. Her appearance in court before
police judge George Baker in this case was a sensation. She pointed
out a number of others among the spectators as having committed a
like deception on her. Their confusion was obvious. Yet,
notwithstanding a basin full of brass filings that she fetched in
for the judge to see, she lost the case.

In a remarkable show of spirit, she soon appeared in court again,
this time as an unlicensed advocate, to defend a woman friend
accused of beating a gentleman named Jonathan Nissum. Ah Toy
eloquently pleaded that the beating had been provoked because Nissum
had neglected to pay a certain debt. However, she lost this case
too, and the defendant had to pay a fine of $20.

When she appeared again in San Francisco, it was as the first madam
of its emerging Chinatown and owner of a flourishing brothel at her
Clay Street address. Several nice shanties in the courtyard had been
occupied by gentlemen who had been forced to move on account of the
goings-on there. But when Madam Ah Toy was served with a complaint
for keeping a house of ill fame, she showed that she had learned the
law and the case was dismissed by Judge R. H. Waller of the
recorder's court.

Madam Ah Toy, several times married, lived to a venerable age.
Unlike tens of thousands [of women] in her line of work, she is now
enshrined in the hall of famous memories of this remarkable city,
which admires enterprise, courage, and the sort of character that
could cope with the hazards of survival in the Wild West. It is a
commentary on the times that the business she engaged in was one of
the very few that in those days could give her an independent
living.

We have long stereotyped 19th Century Chinese immigrant women as
prostitutes, and as with all stereotypes, the characterization
contains some truth. In the first pathbreaking article on Chinese
immigrant women, Lucie Cheng estimated that the proportion of
prostitutes among the Chinese female population in San Francisco was
85 percent in 1860 and 71 percent in 1870. These lurid numbers
fueled anti-Chinese agitation in California, resulting in enactment
of the Pace Act of 1875 and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which
excluded most women by portraying them all as prostitutes.

Though the faces of Chinese pioneer women have been even less
visible than those of most women in the American West, they are
essential to any accurate picture—not in the passive, simplistic
stereotypes of prostitutes and imported wives that texts have
customarily shown, but in the details of their individual vitality.

The independent woman who "makes out," as It were, has only recently
begun to emerge; she belies traditional stereotypes and forces us to
look at Chinese immigrant women, Chinese American culture, and
western history from a new angle. It is not the hardships and
horrors that Chinese pioneer women have had to endure, then, that
tell the final tale, nor how many numbers women totaled in relation
to men. It is rather the deeds that individual women performed and
the courageous independence with which they responded to
circumstances. It is the fight they waged for the survival of
themselves, their families, and valued cultural traditions.

Chinese tradition may have dictated that no "decent" woman could
travel, yet Judy Yung clearly shows Chinese women immigrating to the
Western Frontier as early as Chinese men. The first recorded of
these women, Marie Seise, stepped off a ship named The Eagle in San
Francisco in 1848 as the servant of a family of traders, the
Gillespies of New York. Lest her journey sound trivial, it is worth
emphasizing the route Marie traversed before meeting the Gillespies:
She ran away from her parents in China to avoid being sold, worked
as a servant in Macao, married a Portuguese sailor, and moved as a
servant with another family to the Sandwich Islands after the sailor
deserted her. Marie Seise was obviously determined, at whatever
expense, to chart her own course.

Nor was Seise alone. Another "China Mary"—a generic name, Young
explains, ascribed to many Chinese immigrant women by their new
frontier neighbors—ran away from her home in China when she was
nine, had made her way to Canada at age 13, outlived two husbands,
and then moved to Sitka, Alaska, where she survived as a
fisherwoman, hunter and prospector, restaurant keeper, nurse,
laundress, and official matron of the Sitka jail.

Yet another, Yuen, similarly outlived three husbands and was said to
have been "the toast of her countrymen" in the Wyoming mining and
railroad camps where she cooked during Pony Express days. Another
notable woman was Mary Tape, who sailed from Shanghai with
missionaries at age 11, then married and lived in California. Mary
Tape worked as an interpreter and contractor of labor, taught
herself photography and telegraphy, and, when they tried to bar her
daughter from public schools, won a case against the San Francisco
Board of Education in court.

Chinese Slaves and Prostitutes in the West
In the first years of the goldrush many immigrant Chinese women were
brought to North America to serve as slaves and prostitutes for men
of every racial descent, on a western frontier where few women of
any race existed and were sexual pressure was increased on Chinese
male immigrants by miscegenation laws that forbade them to marry or
mix sexually with non-oriental women.

Dorothy Gray, author of Women of the West, however, is quick to
point out that it was scarcely fair to term them "women." Many of
the slaves hidden in Chinatowns's teeming alleys and crannies were
girls as young as ten or 12. In some cases slavers actually owned
girl babies whom they would raise to a more profitable maturity as
household slaves or prostitutes. Gray writes:

The girl slave's life was cruel to the extreme. Of course they got
neither the payment for their sale or debauching, nor any of the
income from their prostitution. They went out a few times a month
under heavy guard to "take the air." The rules were like those of a
medieval prelate's prison. Beatings were common, and burning with a
hot iron was done, but since that would mark the merchandise it was
only for extreme cases.

Failure to please a customer of any kind and in any condition
brought starvation, flogging... Some people who have studied the
condition have stated that a crib girl lasted from six to eight
years at her degrading task. The frugal owner, when a girl became
diseased, broken-minded, senile before her time, often made
her "escape" to the Salvation Army, thus avoiding the problem of
disposing of a worn-out item. If the owners of slave girls had to
end the career of a crib inmate themselves, they provided what was
called "hospitals."

A newspaper reporter found conditions grim:

When any of the unfortunate harlots is no longer useful and a
Chinese physician passes his opinion that her disease is incurable,
she is notified that she must die... Led by night to this hole of
a "hospital," she is forced within the door and made to lie down
upon the shelf. A cup of water, another of boiled rice, and a little
metal oil lamp are placed by her side... Those who have immediate
charge of the establishment know how long the oil should last, and
when the limit is reached they return to the "hospital" unbar the
door and enter ...Generally the woman is dead, either by starvation
or from her own hand.

An white madam wrote of the Chinese slave trade in her memoirs:

When I got to San Francisco in 1898, I had as a laundry woman an old
Harridan named Lai Chow, who was once a slave girl, brought in for
the "sports" in Little China (Chinatown). She told me she came in
with 12-year-old girls, two dozen of them in padded crates billed
as "dishware."

An even more extreme case of the baby girl brought to the US by
a "grandmother" who had purchased the baby for $10 in China and
planned to raise her as an "investment" in future merchandise—for
merchandise, in actuality, is what the enslaved female became during
the course of her journey.

A method that superficially sounds more legitimate was
the "contract," similar to indentured servitude except that the
women whose lives were quite literally being laid on the line could
neither read nor write. They "signed" not with a name but with a
thumbprint affixed to the bottom of the document after the deal had
been settled. Simple purchase was frequent. Hirata tells of an old
woman slave in California who had been resold four times, the first
at age seven when her way of fighting against banishment from home
and family was to cry and hide under the bed. If all else failed,
there was kidnapping, as in the case of the woman who was invited by
a man to tour a streamer anchored at the dock in Shanghai, then
found herself sailing across the Pacific in the bottom of the coal
bucket he had pushed her into.

Female Slavery: A Chinese-American Cooperative Venture
The usual attitude in the US was to fault the Chinese exclusively
for this trade in female slavery. But one would have to seek far to
find a more mutually cooperative Chinese-American venture in the
19th Century than the enslavement of these Chinese women.

Historian Dorothy Gray describes the dual responsibility:

The system had its roots in the culture of the homeland China where
prostitution and slavery were open practices. But in America the
slave system of prostitution contravened the most essential aspect
of law and was possible only through the continued connivance of
American officials who amassed fortunes in graft.

This point again illustrates how the immigrating woman was often
caught between the repressive aspects of her traditional culture and
the unbridled exploitation of the new capitalism.

The enslaved immigrant woman's immediate destination was customarily
San Francisco, where she was held in a kind of underground warehouse
termed a "barracoon." There—unless a purchase had been made in
advance—she was put up for bid. Her purchaser might be a Chinatown
merchant seeking a slave wife. It might be the owner of a local
brothel. It might be, in the case of Lalu Nathoy, who became Polly
Bemis, a saloonkeeper from an Idaho mining camp, a transaction
causing her journey to swerve from urban to rural.

Lalu Nathoy was a slave girl, brought to Grangeville, Idaho from
China when she was 19, and won by Charles Bemis, who aced out her
Chinese master in a poker game. Bemis protected "Polly" from the
burly miners in the dance hall where she worked, and, when he was
shot in the eye after a poker quarrel, Polly nursed him back to
health. After they were married, Polly lived on a ranch near the
Salmon River where she grew plums, pears, grapes, and cherries and
raised chickens and cows. "She was gentle and kind to all and had
many friends," we learned from Sister M. Alfreda Eisensohn, who has
collected many of Polly's memorabilia at the convent at Cottonwood.
Polly, who died in 1933 when she was 80 years old, is buried here. A
tiny pagoda is carved on her tombstone.

Although Lalu led a long life, Yung notes that "prostitutes could
meet with no worse fate than to be banished to the mining camps,
where they led lives as harsh as they were short."

Emancipation Proclamation Ex-Cludes Chinese Females

Altogether, evidence indicates that the enslavement of Chinese
immigrant women was the most widely known secret in the American
West in the mid-19th Century. In the same era that Lincoln was
signing the Emancipation Proclamation to freed black slaves in the
Confederacy, Gray estimates that several thousand Chinese females a
year were being smuggled through San Francisco's immigrant station
to be sold into slavery. Public knowledge of the slave trade was
such that, in 1869, the San Francisco Chronicle could report the
arrival of a ship from China in this manner:

The particular fine portions of the cargo, the fresh and pretty
females who came from the interior, are used to fill special orders
from wealthy merchants and prosperous tradesmen. A very considerable
portion are sent into the interior... in answer to demands from well-
to-do miners and successful vegetable producers.

The slave trade continued in full force in San Francisco's Chinatown
right up until the 1920s:

It seems impossible that people made little or no protest against
the vice and horror of the slave girls of Chinatown, so near the
good cuisine at Marchands and the Poodle Dog. The early "scorchers"
rushed by on the first cycles in Golden Gate Park, the Gibson girls
went boating on the ferryboat El Capitan singing "Bill Bailey, Won't
You Please Come Home." And the town remained docile, passive, and
yet somehow uneasy over the inhumanity of actual slavery in a major
American city.

Protestant Mission Houses and the Anti-Slavery Reform Movement in
the West

Protestant mission houses, opening on the edges of Chinatown during
the Progressive Era, offered an option for women to escape
prostitution. Launching what was as close to an antislavery reform
movement as the West would experience, the christian missions had a
historical connection with China. Missionaries coming from China
frequently brought converts back, and those in American Chinatowns,
as noted by Yung, "proved to be a vital link" in joining homebound
immigrant wives to a world outside this small flats.

Margaret Culbertson, director of the Presbyterian Chinese Mission
later to achieve fame as San Francisco's Cameron House, issued a
challenge in regard to prostituted immigrant women: "Cannot anyone
suggest a plan to remedy this evil?" Writers of purple prose were
fond of scenes in which runaway women slaves fell at the feet of
pallid policemen, begging for help.

The lawmen, if they did not hand the women back to
the "highbinders," usually passed them along to the Presbyterian
mission. This was especially true after the arrival of Donaldina
Cameron, who set about to free enslaved Chinatown women with a
fervor causing Dorothy Gray to term her "the most active and daring
freedom fighter in the history of the West."

More than 3,000 young and innocent Chinese women who were being sold
into prostitution and slavery were rescued during 40 years of
tireless work by Donaldina Cameron, "Lo Mo"—Little Mother—to those
grateful children. As manager of the Chinese Presbyterian Mission
Home from 1895 on, Cameron would assist the police in their raids on
brothels and go to court to prevent the vile traders from reclaiming
the women they dishonestly called "their wives." Cameron cared for
the women who had no homes, always respecting their culture and
educating them in its traditions. Many give credit to Cameron's bold
and timely efforts for the passage of the Red Light Abatement Act of
1914 which helped eradicate large-scale prostitution in Chinatown.

The Chinese Exclusion Act 1882

In 1882 the US government enacted the Chinese Exclusion Act, which
stopped all Chinese women, except the wives (or wives-to-be) of
Chinese American merchants, from being admitted as legal immigrants.
The value of the wife of a merchant thus stood very high, as a
measure that parallels in some ways, yet differs profoundly from,
the value of women prostitutes during the earlier years. Merchants'
wives were brought to North America from China to begin raising
families, implicitly making possible the establishment of permanent
communities in the new world—a threat to the European-based cultures
of Canada and the US that later exclusionary legislation in both
countries would attempt to eliminate.

Chinese in Oregon

• 1851: Sung Sung was the first person of Chinese ancestry to settle
in Oregon.
• 1867: The first Chinese Temple or "Jesse House" was built in
Oregon and dedicated to Kuan-yin, a revered Buddhist saint.
• 1890: The Chinese Consolidate Benevolent Association was
established in Oregon. It reorganized in 1910 and incorporated in
1911.
• 1915: Portland Chapter of Chinese American Citizens Alliance
Formed. The organization of the native Sons of the Golden State in
San Francisco in 1895 marked the start of a new period in the
history of the Chinese community in America. It was organized by
the increasing number of native-born Chinese Americans determined to
secure and defend their civil rights as American citizens, Chinese
with votes. By 1915, under their new name of Chinese American
Citizens Alliance, they had additional chapters in Chicago, Detroit,
Pittsburgh, Boston, Houston, San Antonio, Albuquerque, Los Angeles,
Fresno, San Diego, Salinas, Oakland, and Portland, Oregon. Their
newspaper, the Chinese Times, founded in 1921, had the largest
circulation of any Chinese language newspaper in the country. Their
1913 success in blocking the proposal by state senator Camminetti to
disenfranchise Chinese Americans brought them prestige, but the
elitist character of the organization, Republican-oriented and
primarily of and for businessmen and professionals, led to its
gradual decline and ability to gain a wider constituency.

Xenophobia and the Experience of Chinese Women in the West

In the words of Benson Tong about prostituted Chinese women,
the "not only survived subjugation but also, in many cases, summoned
the strength to change their fate." Moreover, the dynamics of
Chinese pioneer women's participation in the American westering
experience shifts the shape of the whole. It cannot be claimed that
Chinese immigrant women did not suffer oppression or that they were
always able to overcome it. It is obvious, first, that they came up
against as many difficulties as did other pioneer women, and,
second, that these difficulties were multiplied because they were of
Chinese descent in a racist society during an era of extreme
Xenophobia. Nevertheless, the above examples clearly demonstrate the
courage and independence of Chinese pioneer women and the vital
roles they played in the creation of an emerging Chinese American
culture.

Changing Patterns of Chinatowns in the Pacific Northwest

From the 1850s till today, Chinatowns have displayed a changing
pattern not only in their nature but in geographical location.

Chinese communities spread to the northwestern states of Washington
and Oregon at an early date as the lumber industry, mining, and
salmon canneries developed there in the early and mid-1850s. In the
1860s and 1870s, they moved to Idaho and Montana to work in the
mining industries. All the smaller Chinatowns disappeared during the
exclusion period. Only the larger ones in Portland and Seattle have
survived. In the lumber areas, Chinese were mainly cooks and
storekeepers.

The number of Chinese miners were not large. In 1870, there were
7,740 in the four states, with 234 on the Columbia River. A young
Chinese named Chin Chun Hook arrived in Seattle in 1860 and in 1868
opened a general good store by the waterfront. This was the
beginning of Seattle's Chinatown, which grew in numbers when coal
mining and the railway came to the area. They worked in the Yesler
Saw Mill and followed their usual occupations as laundrymen,
domestics, restaurant and hotel keepers, and cigar makers. As in
California, when the economy faltered in 1873 and 1875, the Chinese
became the scapegoats and were driven out of most northwestern
towns. In Seattle, of the 350 forced out of their homes, 196 were
shipped to San Francisco on the Queen of the Pacific on February 7,
1886. A week later, 110 were shipped out on the George W. Elder.
Federal troops stopped the riot there.

But the growing Northwest needed labor and the Chinese had their
defenders. Chinatown managed to hold on. Chinese worked on the
Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition in 1909 and the Lake Washington Ship
Canal in 1910-1915. Seattle Chinatown had a single Overseas Chinese
Benevolent Association uniting people of all districts and family
names. The community grew back to over 7,500 in the 1970s and more
modern types of social organizations were formed.

Chapter 26: Railroad West

Without the "Chinaman's" knowledge and respect for explosive
powders, ability to work on the side of near vertical cliffs at
dizzying heights and survive hardships which white men could not
endure the Central Pacific would never have been completed when it
was but much later. --R. W. Howard, The Great Iron Trail

The Chinese filled swamps, cut into mountains, dug tunnels, built
bridges. As one historian notes, "The work was so obviously needed
and all groups and areas vied with each other to build a railroad in
their area, so that they would have welcomed the devil himself had
he built a road. The lack of white laborers was too evident to cause
even the most ardent anti-Chinese to resent their employment on such
work." --Robert E. Wynne, Reaction to the Chinese in the Pacific
Northwest and British Columbia

The expansion of the railroad system in the US was astonishingly
swift. England had pioneered the building of railways and for a time
was the acknowledged leader in the field, but from the moment
sighted saw railways as the obvious solution for transport across
the vast spaces of the American continent. By 1850, 9,000 miles of
rails had been laid in the eastern states and up to the Mississippi.
The California goldrush and the opening of the American West made
talk about a transcontinental line more urgent. As too often
happens, war spurred the realization of this project.

The West was on. California was a rich and influential state, but a
wide unsettled belt of desert, plain, and mountains separated it and
Oregon from the rest of the states. As the economic separation of
North and South showed, this situation was fraught with danger. It
could lead to a political rift. In 1860, it was cheaper and quicker
to reach San Francisco from Canton in China—a six-day voyage by sea—
than from the Missouri River, six months away by wagon. The urgent
need was to link California firmly with the industrialized eastern
states and their 30,000 miles of railways.

A railway would cut the journey by a week. The threat of Civil War
loomed larger between North and South over the slavery issue.
Abraham Lincoln's Republican administration saw a northern
transcontinental railway as a means to outflank the south by drawing
the western states closer to the North. In 1862, Congress voted
funds to build the 2,500-mile-long railway. It required enormous
resourcefulness and determination to get this giant project off the
drawing boards. Not much imagination was required to see its
necessity, but the actual building presented daunting difficulties.
It was calculated that its cost would mount to $100 million, double
the federal budget of 1861.

It was Theodore Judah, described by his contemporaries as "Pacific
Railroad Crazy," who began to give substance to the dream. An
eastern engineer who had come west to build the short Sacramento
Valley Railroad, he undertook a preliminary survey and reported that
he had found a feasible route crossing the Sierra by way of Dutch
Flat. But the mainly small investors who supported his efforts could
not carry through the whole immense undertaking. With rumors of
Civil War between North and South, San Francisco capitalists, mostly
Southerners, boycotted the scheme as a northern plot, and pressed
for a southern route.

The Big Four: Stanford, Huntington, Hopkins and Crocker 1849

Then the Big Four, Sacrament merchants, took up the challenge:
Leland Stanford (1824-1893) as president, Collis P. Huntington as
vice-president, Mark Hopkins as treasurer, and Charles Crocker, in
charge of construction, formed the Central Pacific Railway Company.
Judah was elbowed out.

The Big Four came as gold seekers in 1849 or soon after but found
that there was more money to be made in storekeeping than in
scabbling in the rocks in mountains. As Republicans, they held the
state for the Union against the secessionists. Leland Stanford, the
first president of the Central Pacific, was also the first
Republican governor of California.

The beginnings were not auspicious. The Union Pacific was building
from Omaha in the East over the Plains to the Rockies, but supplies
had to come in by water or wagon because the railways had not yet
reached Omaha. The Civil War now raged and manpower, materials and
funds were hard to get. The Indians were still contesting invasion
of their lands. By 1864, however, with the Civil War ending, these
problems were solved.

Union Pacific Hires Indian Women to Build Line 1864

The UP hired Civil War veterans, Irish immigrants fleeing famine and
even Indian women, and the line began to move westward.

In his paper, "Toledo, Oregon 1866-1900," Oregon historian Robert
Johnston wrote:

...the Indians provided free labor for the very important task of
building roads, as long as they were fed—and they would refuse to
work if not fed.

The Central Pacific, building eastward from Sacramento, had broken
ground on January 8, 1863, but in 1864, beset with money and labor
problems, It had built only 31 miles of track. It had an even more
intractable manpower problem than the UP. California was sparsely
populated, and the gold mines, homesteading, and other lucrative
employments offered stiff competition for labor. Brought to the
railhead, three out of every five men quit immediately and took off
for the better prospects of the new Nevada silver strikes. Even
Charles Crocker, boss of construction and raging like a mad bull in
the railway camps. Could not control them.

In the winter of 1864, the company had only 600 men working on the
line when it had advertised for 5,000. Up to then, only non-oriental
labor had been recruited and California laborers were still
motivated by the goldrush syndrome. They wanted quick wealth, not
hard, regimented railway work. After two years only 50 miles of
track had been laid.

James Strobridge, superintendent of construction, testified to the
1876 Joint Congressional Committee on Chinese immigration:

[These] were unsteady men, unreliable. Some would not go to work at
all ...Some would stay until pay day, get a little money, get drunk
and clear out.

Something drastic had to be done.

In 1858, 50 Chinese had helped to build the California Central
Railroad from Sacramento to Marysville. In 1860, Chinese were
working on the San Jose Railway and giving a good account of
themselves, so it is surprising that there was so much hesitation
about employing them on the Central Pacific's western end of the
first transcontinental railway. Faced with a growing crisis of no
work done and mounting costs, Crocker suggested hiring Chinese.
Strobridge strongly objected:

I will not boss Chinese. I don't think they could build a railroad.

Leland Stanford was also reluctant. He had advocated exclusion of
the Chinese from California and was embarrassed to reverse himself.
Crocker, Huntington, Hopkins, and Stanford, the "Big Four" of the
Central Pacific, were all merchants in hardware, dried goods, and
groceries in the little town of Sacramento. Originally, they knew
nothing about railroad building. Wasted time was wasted money. The
CP's need for labor was critical. The men they already had were
threatening to strike. Finally 50 Chinese were hired for a trial.

Union Pacific Hires Chinese to Build Transcontinental Railroad 1865

In February 1865, they marched up in self-formed gangs of 12 to 20
men with their own supplies and cooks for each mess. They ate a meal
of rice and dried cuddlefish, washed and slept, and early next
morning were ready for work filling dump carts. Their discipline and
grading—preparing the ground for track laying—delighted Strobridge.
Soon 50 more were hired, and finally some 15,000 had been put on the
payroll. Crocker was enthusiastic:

They prove nearly equal to white men in the amount of labor they
perform, and are much more reliable. No danger of strikes among
them. We are training them to all kinds of labor: blasting, driving
horses, handling rock as well as pick and shovel.

Countering Strobridge's argument that the Chinese were "not masons,"
Crocker pointed out that the race that built the Great Wall could
certainly build a railroad culvert. Up on the Donner Pass today the
fine stonework embankments built by Chinese are serving well after
100 years.

Charles Nordhoff, an acute observer, reports Strobridge telling
him, "[The Chinese] learn all parts of the work easily." Nordhoff
says he saw them

...employed on every kind of work... They do not drink, fight or
strike; they do gamble, if it is not prevented, and it is always
said of them that they are very cleanly in their habits. It is the
custom, among them, after they have had their suppers every evening,
to bathe with the help of small tubs. I doubt if the white laborers
do as much.

As well he might. Well-run boardinghouses in California in those
days proudly advertised that they provided guests with a weekly
bath.

Their wages at the start were $28 a month (26 working days), and
they furnished all their own food, cooking utensils, and tents. The
headman of each gang, or sometimes an American employed as clerk by
them received all the wages and handed them out to the members of
the work gang according to what had been earned. "Complete and
wonderfully effective because tireless and unremitting in their
industry," they worked from sun-up to sun-down.

All observers remarked on the frugality of the Chinese. This was not
surprising in view of the fact that, with a strong sense of filial
duty, they came to America in order to save money and return as soon
as possible to their homes and families in China. So their dwellings
were of the simplest, and they usually dressed poorly. In Land of
Gold, Hinton Rowan Helper finds their mere appearance and habit of
dress is "uncouth" and offensive.

[John Chinaman's feet enclosed in rude wooden shoes, his legs bare,
his breeches loosely flapping against his knees, his skirtless, long-
sleeved, big-bodied pea-jacket, hanging in large folds around his
waist, his broad-brimmed chapeau rocking carelessly on his head, and
his cue [sic] suspended and gently sweeping around his back! I can
compare him to nothing so appropriately as a tadpole walking upon
stilts.!

However, they ate well:

...rice and vermicelli (noodles) garnished with meats and
vegetables, fish, dried oysters, cuttlefish, bacon and pork, and
chicken on holidays, abalone meat, five kinds of dried vegetables,
bamboo shoots, seaweed, salted cabbage, and mushroom, four kinds of
dried fruit, and peanut oil and tea.

This diet shows a considerable degree of sophistication and balance
compared to the beef, beans, potatoes, bread, and butter of white
laborers.

Stereotypically, the Chinese are identified with eating dogs and
cats, animals that are domesticated but not raised for food. The
consumption of dogs and cats is the most common image of Chinese
foodways; typical of these images are these stanzas from Luke
Schoolcraft's "Heathen Chinee."

Lady she am vellie good, plenty chow chow
She live way up top side house,
Take a little pussy cat and a little bow wow
Boil em in a pot of stew with a little mouse
Hi! hi! hi!

Some say pig meat make good chow chow
Too much largie, no muchie small
Up sky, down sky, down come chow chow
Down come a pussy cat, bow wow and all
Hi! hi! hi!

The Chinese are also identified as eating mice and rats, animals
considered filthy and disease-carrying and therefore dangerous and
polluting. In the last stanza of Billy Rice's "Chinese Ball," the
visitor recounts an imagined Chinese supper.

For supper we had red-eyed cats
And boot-legs stuffed with fleas.
We had fish boiled in castor oil,
Fried clams and elephant knees,
We had sauerkraut and pickled meuse,
And oysters on the half-shell.
We had Japanese tea in the key of G,
Which made us feel quite well.

Other supplies were purchased from the shop maintained by a Chinese
merchant contractor in one of the railway cars that followed them as
they carried the railway line forward. Here they could buy

pipes, tobacco, bowls, chopsticks, lamps, Chinese-style shoes of
cotton with soft cotton soles, and ready-made clothing imported from
China.

On Sundays, they rested, did their washing, and gambled. They were
prone to argue noisily, but did not become besotted with whiskey and
make themselves unfit for work on Monday. Their sobriety was much
appreciated by their employers.
According to Violet Updike (1893-1980), who grew up in Oysterville,
Chinese laborers were a tight knit group:

We had Chinese laborers who came in here and worked on the
railroad. They were always ignored. Nobody made an issue of their
being here. They worked in our salmon canneries in Waldport and
Oysterville. But they lived off to themselves. They were here during
the pack season and then they were gone.

"Crocker's Pets"

Curtis, the engineer in charge, described them as "the best
roadbuilders in the world." The once skeptical Strobridge, a smart,
pushing Irishman, also now pronounced them "the best in the world."
Leland Stanford described them in a report on October 10, 1865, to
Andrew Jackson:

As a class, they are quiet, peaceable, patient, industrious, and
economical. More prudent and economical [than white laborers] they
are contented with less wages. We find them organized for mutual aid
and assistance. Without them, it would be impossible to complete the
western portion of this great national enterprise within the time
required by the act of Congress.

Crocker testified before the congressional committee that "if we
found that we were in a hurry for a job of work, it was better to
put on Chinese at once." All these men had originally resisted the
employment of Chinese on the railway.

Four-fifths of the grading labor from Sacramento to Ogden was done
by Chinese. In a couple of years more, of 13,400 workers on the
payroll, 12,000 were Chinese. They were nicknamed "Crocker's Pets."

Stanford Wills Permanent Employment for Chinese

The Chinese crews won their reputation the hard way. They
outperformed Cornish men brought in at extra wages to cut rock.
Crocker testified:

The would cut more rock in a week than the Cornish miners, and it
was hard work, bone labor. [They] were skilled in using the hammer
and drill, and they proved themselves equal to the very best Cornish
miners in that work. They were very trusty, they were intelligent,
and they lived up to their contracts.

Stanford held the Chinese workers in such high esteem that he
provided in his will for the permanent employment of a large number
on his estates. In the 1930s, some of their descendants were still
living and working lands now owned by Stanford University.

The Chinese saved the day for Crocker and his colleagues. The terms
of agreement with the government were that the railway companies
would be paid from $16,000 to $48,000 for each mile of track laid.
But there were only so many miles between the two terminal points of
the projected line. The Union Pacific Company, working with 10,000
mainly Irish immigrants and Civil War veterans, had the advantage of
building the line through Nebraska over the plains and made steady
progress.

The Central Pacific, after the first easy 23 miles between Newcastle
and Colfax, had to conquer the granite mountains and gorges of the
Sierra Nevada and Rockies before it could emerge onto the Nevada-
Utah plains and make real speed and money. The line had to raise
7,000 feet in 100 miles over daunting terrain. Crocker and the
Chinese proved up to the challenge.

Between Heaven and Earth

After reaching Cisco, there was no easy going. The line had to be
literally carved out of the Sierra granite, through tunnels and on
rock ledges cut on the sides of precipices.

Using techniques from China, they attacked one of the most difficult
parts of the work: carrying the line over Cape Horn, with its sheer
granite buttresses and steep shale embankments, 2,000 feet above the
American River canyon. There was no foothold on its flanks. The
indomitable Chinese, using age-old ways, were lowered from above in
rope-held baskets, and there, suspended between earth and sky, they
began to chip away with hammer and crowbar to form the narrow ledge
that was later laboriously deepened to a shelf wide enough for the
railway roadbed, 1,400 feet above the river.

Behind the advancing crews of Chinese builders came the money and
supplies to keep the work going. This was an awesome exercise in
logistics. The Big Four, unscrupulous, dishonest, and ruthless on a
grand scale, were the geniuses of this effort. The marvel of
engineering skill being created by Strobridge and his Chinese and
Irish workers up in the Sierra was fed by a stream of iron rails,
spikes, tools, blasting powder, locomotives, cars, and machinery.
These materials arrived after an expensive and hazardous eight-
month, 15,000-mile voyage from East Coast ports around Cape Horn to
San Francisco, thence by river boat to Sacramento, and so to the
railhead by road.

The weather, as well as the terrain, was harsh. The winter of 1865-
1866 was one of the severest on record. Snow fell early, and storm
after storm blanketed the Sierra Nevada. The ground froze solid.
Sixty-foot drifts of snow had to be shoveled away before the graders
could even reach the roadbed. Nearly half the work force of 9,000
men were set to clearing snow.

In these conditions, construction crews tackled the most formidable
obstacle in their path: building the ten Summit Tunnels on the 20-
mile stretch between Cisco, 92 miles from Sacramento and Lake Ridge
just west of Cold Stream Valley on the eastern slope of the summit.
Work went on at all the tunnels simultaneously. Three shifts of
eight hours each worked day and night.

Chinese Railroad Workers Killed by Avalanches

The builders lived an eerie existence. In The Big Four, Oscar Lewis
writes,

Tunnels were dug beneath 45-foot drifts and for months, 3000 workmen
lived curious mole-like lives, passing from work to living quarters
in dim passages far beneath the snow's surface... There was constant
danger, for as snows accumulated on the upper ridges, avalanches
grew frequent, their approach heralded only by a brief thunderous
roar. A second later, a work crew, a bunkhouse, an entire camp would
go hurtling at a dizzy speed down miles of frozen canyon. Not until
months later were the bodies recovered; sometimes groups were found
with shovels or picks still clutched in their frozen hands.

On Christmas day, 1866, the papers reported that "a gang of
Chinamen employed by the railroad were covered up by a snow slide
and four or five [note the imprecision] died before they could be
exhumed." A whole camp of Chinese railway workers was enveloped
during one night and had to be rescued by shovelers the next day.

No one has recorded the names of those who gave their lives in this
stupendous undertaking. It is known that the bones of 1,200 men were
shipped back to China to be buried in the land of their forefathers,
but that was by no means the total score. The engineer John Gills
recalled that "at Tunnel No. 10, some 15 to 20 Chinese [again, note
the imprecision] were killed by a slide that winter." The year
before, in the winter of 1864-1865, two wagon road repairers had
been buried and killed by a slide at the same location.

A. P. Partridge, who worked on the line, describes how 3,000 Chinese
builders were driven out of the mountains by the early snows.

Most ...came to Truckee and filled up all the old buildings and
sheds. And old barn collapsed and killed four Chinese. A good many
were frozen to death.

One is astonished at the fortitude, discipline and dedication of the
Chinese railroad workers.

Many years later, looking at the Union Pacific section of the line,
an old railway man remarked, "There's an Irishman buried under every
tie of that road." Brawling, drink, cholera, and malaria took a
heavy toll. The construction crew towns on the Union Pacific part of
the track, with their saloons, gambling dens, and bordellos, were
nicknamed "hells on wheels."

Jack Casement, in charge of construction there, had been a general
in the Civil War and prided himself on the discipline of his
fighting forces. His work crews worked with military precision, but
off the job they let themselves go. One day, after gambling in the
streets on payday (instigated by professional gamblers) had gotten
too much out of hand, a visitor, finding the street suddenly very
quiet, asked him where the gamblers had gone. Casement pointed to a
nearby cemetery and replied, "They all died with their boots on." It
was still the Wild West.

It is characteristic that only one single case of violent brawling
was reported among the Chinese from the time they started work until
they completed the job.

The Central Pacific's Chinese became expert at all kinds of work:
grading, drilling, masonry, and demolition. Using black powder, they
could average 1.18 feet daily through granite so hard that an
incautiously placed charge could blow out backward. The Summit
Tunnel work force was entirely composed of Chinese, with mainly
Irish foremen. Thirty to 40 worked on each face, with 12 to 15 on
the heading and the rest on the bottom removing material.

The Donner tunnels, totaling 1,695 feet, had to be bored through
solid rock, and 9,000 Chinese worked on them. To speed the work, a
new and untried explosive, nitroglycerin, was used. The tunnels were
completed November 1867, after 13 months. But winter began before
the way could be opened and the tracks laid.

That winter was worse than the preceding one, but to save time it
was necessary to send crews ahead to continue building the line even
while the tunnels were being cut. Therefore, 3,000 men were sent
with 400 carts and horses to Palisade Canyon, 300 miles in advance
of the railhead. "Hay, grain and all supplies for men and horses had
to be hauled by teams over the deserts for that great distance,"
writes Strobridge. "Water for men and animals was hauled at times 40
miles."

Trees were felled and the logs laid side by side to form
a "corduroy" roadway. On log sleds greased with lard, hundreds of
Chinese manhandled three locomotives and 40 wagons over the
mountains. Strobridge later testified that it "cost nearly three
times what it would have cost to have done it in the summertime when
it should have been done." But we shortened the time seven years
from what Congress expected when the act was passed.

Between 10,000 and 11,000 men were kept working on the line from
1866 to 1869. The Sisson and Wallace Company (in which Crocker's
brother was a leading member) and the Dutch merchant Cornelius
Koopmanschap of San Francisco procured these men for the line.
Through the summer of 1866, Crocker's Pets—6,000 strong—swarmed over
the upper canyons of the Sierra, methodically slicing cuttings and
pouring rock and debris to make landfills and strengthen the
foundations of trestle bridges. Unlike the caucasian laborers, who
drank boiled stream water, the Chinese slaked their thirst with weak
tea and boiled water kept in old whiskey kegs filled by their mess
cooks.

According to Morris Smith, a member of the Lincoln County Historical
Society:

On the railroad side of Chitwood there was a bridge crew that
replaced rotten piling and braces or what have you. They had a flat
car that hauled timbers and tools to the work site. There were also
two big passenger cars painted red. Inside there were bunks for the
men to sleep in. And, of course, there was a cook car.

The crew had a Chinese cook. At noontime, he loaded the men's lunch
up on one of those three-wheel speeders and took it to them, and
when the lunch hour was over he went back. Now, generally if you
appreciate a Chinese cook's food he's very generous. He knew kids
liked pastries, so he made more cakes and pies and donuts than the
men could ever eat. He always managed to get back to the schoolhouse
gate ten or 15 minutes before 1pm and before the lunch bell rang and
we had to go in. When we'd see him coming the gate would fly open
and there'd be 20 or 25 kids eagerly waiting there. We'd flock
around him, and it didn't take long for the pastries to disappear.

Historian Robert Johnston refers to another Chinese cook in Lincoln
County:

The only incident of conflict in the city's economy reported by the
Leader drew the comment, "Toledo rarely ever has labor troubles, but
it was the scene of a strike last Friday." Apparently the Chinese
cook at the Blake House refused to cook, "or even wash dishes" and
was promptly fired.

They kept themselves clean and healthy by daily sponge baths in tubs
of hot water prepared by their cooks, and the work went steadily
forward.

Crocker has been described as a "hulking, relentless driver of men."
But his Chinese crews responded to his leadership and drive and were
caught up in the spirit of the epic work on which They were engaged.
They cheered and waved their cartwheel hats as the first through
train swept down the eastern slopes of the Sierra to the meeting of
the lines.

They worked with devotion and self-sacrifice to lay that 20-odd
miles of track for the Central Pacific Company in 1866 over the most
difficult terrain. The cost of those miles was enormous—$280,000 a
mile—but it brought the builders in sight of the easier terrain
beyond the Sierra and the Rockies. Here costs of construction by
veteran crews were only half the estimated amount of federal pay.
By summer, 1868, an army of 14,000 railway builders was passing
over the mountains into the great interior plain. Nine-tenths of
that work force was Chinese. More than a quarter of all Chinese in
the country were building the railway.

Snakes Big Enough to Swallow a Man 1868

When every available Chinese in California had been recruited for
the work, the Central Pacific arranged with Chinese labor
contractors in San Francisco to get men direct from China and send
them up to the railhead. It was evidently some of these newcomers
who fell for the Paiute Indian's tall tales of snakes in the
desert "big enough to swallow a man easily." Thereupon "four or five
hundred Chinese took their belongings and struck out to return
directly to Sacramento," reports the Alta California.

"Crocker and Company had spent quite a little money to secure them
and they sent men on horseback after them. Most of them came back
again kind of quieted down, and after nothing happened and they
never saw any of the snakes, they forgot about them." At least one
Chinese quit the job for a similar reason. His daughter, married to
a professor of Chinese art, told me that her father had worked on
the railway but quit because "He was scared of the bears." He later
went into domestic service.

By September 1868, the track was completed for 307 miles from
Sacramento, and the crews were laying rails across the plain east of
the Sierra. Parallel with the track layers when the telegraph
installers, stringing their wires on the poles and keeping the
planners back at headquarters precisely appraised of where the end
of the track was.

The Great Railway Competition

On the Plains, the Chinese worked in tandem with all the Indians
Crocker could entice to work on the iron rails. They began to hear
of the exploits of the Union Pacific's "Irish terriers" building
from the east. One day, the Irish laid six miles of track. The
Chinese topped this with seven. "No Chinaman is going to beat us,"
growled the Irish, and the next day, they laid seven and a half
miles of track. They swore that they would outperform the
competition no matter what it did.

Crocker taunted the Union Pacific that his men could lay ten miles
of track a day. Durant, president of the rival line, laid a $10,000
wager that it could not be done. Crocker took no chances. He waited
until the day before the last 16 miles of track had been laid and
brought up all needed supplies for instant use. Then he unleased his
crews.

On April 28, 1869, while the Union Pacific checkers and newspaper
reporters looked on, a combined gang of Chinese and eight picked
Irish rail handlers laid ten miles and 1,800 feet more of track in
12 hours. This record was never unsurpassed until the advent of
mechanized track laying. Each Irishman that day walked a total
distance often miles, and their combined muscle handled 60 tons of
rail.

Two Ends Meet in the Middle at Promontory 1869

So keep was the competition that when the two lines approached each
other, instead of changing direction to link up, their builders
careened on and on for 100 miles, building lines that would never
meet. Finally, the government prescribed that the linkage should be
Promontory, Utah.

Competition was keen, but there seems to be no truth in the story
that the Chinese and Irish in this phase of work were trying to blow
each other up with explosives. It is a fact, however, that when the
two lines were very near each other, the Union Pacific blasters did
not give the Central Pacific men timely warning when setting off a
charge, and several Chinese were hurt. Then a Central Pacific charge
went off unannounced and several Irishmen found themselves buried in
dirt. This forced the foremen to take up the matter and an amicable
settlement was arranged. There was no further trouble.

On May 10, 1869, the two lines were officially joined at Promontory,
north of Ogden in Utah. A great crowd gathered. A band played. An
Irish crew and a Chinese crew were chosen to lay the last two rails
side by side. The last tie was made of polished California laurel
with a silver plate in its center proclaiming it

The last tie laid on the completion of
the Pacific Railroad, May 10, 1869.

But when the time came it was nowhere to be found. As consternation
mounted, four Chinese approached with it on their shoulders and the
laid it beneath the rails. A photographer stepped up and someone
shouted to him "Shoot!" The Chinese only knew one meaning for that
word. They fled. But order was restored and the famous ceremony
began; Stanford drove a golden spike into the last tie with a silver
hammer. The news flashed by telegraph to a waiting nation. But no
Chinese appears in that famous picture of the toast celebrating the
joining of the rails.

Crocker was one of the few who paid tribute to the Chinese that day:

I wish to call to your minds that the early completion of this
railroad we have built has been in large measure due to that poor,
despised class of laborers called the Chinese, to the fidelity and
industry they have shown.

No one even mentioned the name of Judah.

The building of the first transcontinental railway stands as a
monument to the Union of Yankee and Chinese-Irish drive and know-
how. This was a formidable combination; they all complemented each
other. Together they did in seven years what was expected to take at
least 14.

In his book on the building of the railway, John Galloway, the noted
transportation engineer, described this as "without doubt the
greatest engineering feat of the 19th Century," and that has never
been disputed. David C. Colton, then vice-president of the Southern
Pacific, was similarly generous in his praise of the Chinese
contribution. He was asked, while giving evidence before the 1876
congressional committee, "I do not think it could have been
constructed so quickly, and with anything like the same amount of
certainty as to what we were going to accomplish in the same length
of time."

And, in answer to the question, "Do you think the Chinese have been
a benefit to the state?" West Evens, a railway contractor,
testified,

I do not see how we could do the work we have done, here, without
them; at least I have done work that would not have been done if it
had not been for the Chinamen, work that could not have been done
without them.

It was heroic work. The Sierra and Rocky mountains, over sagebrush
desert and plain. The Union Pacific built only 689 miles, over much
easier terrain. It had 500 miles in which to carry its part of the
line to a height of 5,000 feet, with another 50 more miles in which
to reach the high passes of the Black Hills. With newly recruited
crews, the Central Pacific had to gain an altitude of 7,000 feet
from the plain in just over 100 miles and make a climb of 2,000 feet
in just 20 miles.

All this monumental work was done before the age of mechanization.
It was pick and shovel, hammer and crowbar work, with baskets of
earth carried slung from the shoulder poles and put on one-horse
carts.

For their heroic work, the Chinese workmen began with a wage of $26
a month, providing their own food and shelter. This was gradually
raised to $30 to $35 a month. Caucasians were paid the same amount
of money, but their food and shelter were provided. Because it cost
75 cents to a dollar a day to feed a white unskilled worker, each
Chinese save the Central Pacific, at a minimum, two-thirds the price
of a non-oriental laborer (1865 rates). Chinese worked as masons,
dynamiters, and blacksmiths and at other skilled jobs that saved
about $5 million by hiring Chinese work.

Did this really "deprive white workers of jobs" as anti-Chinese
agitators claimed. Certainly not. In the first place, experience had
proved that non-oriental workers simply did not want the jobs the
Chinese took on the railroad. In fact, the Chinese created jobs for
non-oriental workers as straw bosses, foremen, railhandlers,
teamsters, and supervisors.

The wages paid to the Chinese were, in fact, comparable to those
paid unskilled or semiskilled labor in the East (where labor was
relatively plentiful), and the Chinese were at first satisfied.
Charles Nordhoff estimated that the frugal Chinese could save about
$13 a month out of those wages. The Alta California estimated their
savings at $20 a month and later, perhaps, as wages increased, they
could lay aside even more. With a bit of luck, a year and a half or
two years of work would enable them to return to China with $400 to
buy a bit of land and be well-to-do farmers.

Two Thousand Tunnelers Strike for Higher Wages 1867

But the Chinese began to learn the American way of life. On one
occasion in June 1867, 2,000 tunnelers went on strike, asking for
$40 a month an eight-hour day in the tunnels, and an end to beating
by foremen. "Eight hours a day good for white man, all same good for
Chinese,'' said their spokesman in the pigeon English common in the
construction camps. But solidarity with the other workers was
lacking, and after a week the strike was called off when the Chinese
heard that Crocker was recruiting strikebreakers from the eastern
states.

When the task was done, most of the Chinese railwaymen were paid
off. Some returned to China with their hard-earned savings, and the
epic story of building the Iron Horse's pathway across the continent
must have regaled many a family gathering there. Some returned with
souvenirs of the great work, chips of one of the last ties, which
had been dug up and split up among them. Some settled in the little
towns that had grown up along the line of the railway. Others took
the railway to seek adventure further east and south. Most made
their way back to California and took what jobs they could find in
that state's growing industries, trades, and other occupations.

Many used their traditional and newly acquired skills on the other
transcontinental lines and railways that were being swiftly built in
the West and Midwest. This was the start of the disapproval of the
Chinese immigrants in America.

The Union and Central Pacific tycoons had done well out of the
building of the line. Congressional investigation committees later
calculated that, of $73 million poured into the Union Pacific
coffers, no more than $50 million could be justified as true costs.
The Big Four and their associates in the Central Pacific had done
even better. They had made at least $63 million and owned most of
the CP stock worth around $100 million and 9 million acres of land
grants to boot.

Building Other Lines

The expansion of the railroads was even faster in the following
decade. In 1850, the US had 9,000 miles of track. In 1860, it had
30,000. In 1890, it had over 70,000 miles. Three years later, it had
five transcontinental lines.

The first continental railway was soon followed by four more links:
(1) the Southern Pacific-Texas and Pacific, completed in 1883 from
San Francisco to Texas by way of Yuma, Tucson, and El Paso; (2) the
Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe, completed in 1885 from Kansas City to
Los Angeles via Santa Fe and Albuquerque; (3) the Northern Pacific
completed in 1883 from Duluth, Minnesota to Portland, Oregon, and
the Great Northern (1893). The skill of the Chinese as railroad
builders was much sought after, and Chinese worked on all the lines.

Some 15,000 worked on the Northern Pacific, laying tracks in
Washington, Idaho, and Montana; 250 on the Houston and Texas line;
600 on the Alabama and Chattanooga line; 70 on the New Orleans line.
Nearly 500 Chinese were recruited for the Union Pacific even after
the lines were joined. Many worked in the Wyoming coal mines and
during the summer months doubled as track laborers. They carried the
Southern Pacific line over the burning Mojave Desert.

In 1881, Chinese laborers, many of whom had seen previous service on
the Oregon & California Railroad, were hired by the Oregon Pacific
Railroad Company to do the heavy work of grading, boring through the
tunnels, and laying the track over the Coast Range. They helped link
San Francisco with Portland in 1887. At Summit, 500 Chinese
laborers, working for minimal wage and under harsh conditions,
constructed the Corvallis & Eastern Railway. They also worked on the
line north from Sacramento along the Shasta route to Portland, which
was reached in 1887.

However, after 30 years of exploitation on the railroads, Oregon's
romance with Chinese labor turned to livid racial hatred:

Chinese immigration in Oregon began in 1850. In that year, the
scarcity of common labor, caused by the rush of able-bodied whites
to the California goldfields, became so acute that Asians
were "imported." The influx increased with the years, and the
construction of the railroads, beginning in 1862, brought the
Chinese pouring into the state.

At first everybody was satisfied. The Chinese were patient workers,
willing to toil long hours for small wages. But a reversal of
feeling came with the completion of the first overland railroad in
1869. With swarms of Coolie laborers released to compete with white
laborers for jobs that were none too many, they were soon regarded
as a "menace" by non-oriental workers in general all along the
Pacific Coast. In Oregon, displaced Chinese workers flocked to
Portland, Oregon City, and other large towns.

For many years after 1870, anti-Chinese demonstrations were
frequent. In Portland, white agitators met in open lots and
harangued against the Orientals, while conservative newspapers
defended them. Torch-light processions marched through the streets,
carrying anti-Chinese banners. A committee of 15 was chosen to
notify the hated foreigners to "git up an' git." Masked whites
terrorized the Chinese by dynamiting their homes. Chinese lives were
sacrificed on the alters of white imperialism and hatred, and
nothing was done about it. The militia was finally called out to
cope with the terrorism, but did no permanent good. It was only
through passing the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 that violent race
prejudice was finally appeased and the anti-Chinese feeling died
down.

Speaking eloquently in favor of Chinese immigrants, Oswald Garrison
Villard (1872-1949), the son of social reformer Helen Frances
Garrison and railroad financier, Henry Villard, said,

I want to remind you of the things that Chinese labor did in opening
up the Western portion of this country... [They] stormed the forest
fastnesses, endured cold and heat and the risk of death at hands of
hostile Indians to aid in the opening up of our northwestern empire.
I have a dispatch from the chief engineer of the Northwestern
Pacific telling how Chinese laborers went out into eight feet of
snow with the temperature far below zero to carry on the work when
no American dared face the conditions.

And these men were from China's sun-drenched south, where it never
snows.

In certain circles, there has been a conspiracy of silence about the
Chinese railroadmen and what they did. When US secretary of
transportation John Volpe spoke at the "Golden Spike" centenary, not
a single Chinese American was invited, and he made no mention in his
speech of the Chinese railroad builders.

Railroad Transforms Oregon 1868

Since settlement, no single event did more to transform Oregon than
did the railroads. The first, promoted by Ben Holladay (1819-1887)
in 1868, was to link Portland to San Francisco. By 1782 it had
reached Roseburg and thus, by that date, was the valley served. With
the arrival in 1883 of that first transcontinental train in Portland
and the completion of Holladay's line to San Francisco in 1887,
Portland was, as the president of the Portland Board of Trade put
it, "incorporated with the rest of the world." In the next years
local lines were constructed to the coast, in the interior and all
though the valley. By the turn of the century Oregon, excepting the
southeast corner, was fully integrated by its rails.

A number of consequences followed. Now agriculture was no longer
limited to areas served by water routes. In the interior the
railroads affected the transition from a cattle-raising economy to
one of wheat and wool. The coast at Astoria, Newport and Coos Bay
was relieved to some degree of its isolation. New towns developed at
important junctions, and more than one county seat was moved to be
closer to the locomotives' toot. Portland, where all rails met,
became more than ever the economic center of the state. Finally, the
railroads facilitated immigration into Oregon from all regions of
the country.

There was, however, one consequence of the railroads not foreseen
or, at any rate, not desired—the high freight rates. For farmers
these could be prohibitive. Efforts to have them lowered were
initially defeated due to the alliance between the railroads and
government. In the last decades of the century, government in Oregon
was largely in the hands of the colorful but conservative wing of
the Republican party. The color came from such figures as John
Mitchell. When US Senator Mitchell, for example, died in office in
1905, he had been convicted of both bigamy and bribery. It was in
response to such escapades, but in particular to the freight rates,
then the first, but unsuccessful, protests were mounted by the new
Oregon Grange in the 1870s.


========================================================

http://www.loyno.edu/history/journal/Holman.htm
Ah Toy, the famed `first' Chinese prostitute in San Francisco,
exhibited none of the qualities of a Victorian woman. Described as
having a slender body and laughing eyes, she was not pious, nor
pure, nor submissive. While she was successful because she did not
adhere to the classic qualities of Chinese women, she was still
impressed with qualities of the myth. "White men would line up and
pay an ounce of gold just to look at Ah Toy."

Ah Toy, "was quite selective in her associations, was liberally
patronized by white men, and made a great deal of money."59 In 1857,
Ah Toy packed her bags and returned to China, fitting the
mythological end of a return to morality. In fact, she returned to
America later and died in poverty; but this did not receive
publicity: according to the world (and agreeing with the myth), she
got out.

Cities would advertise their famed prostitutes, ballooning tales
about them – reemphasizing the glamour of the profession. In 1896,
Phoenix had quite a reputation. A merchant, S. I. Robert, living in
a small town outside Phoenix said, "Phoenix had a population of
about 900 people. Their chief industry was gambling, liquor and wild
women resorts. It was a hell of a town, a Mecca for all the
underworld of the Southwest."

Nowhere was the frontier and all its wildness more represented than
in California in 1849 – 1852. The frenzy of the gold strike inspired
a migration West of a magnitude never before experienced by America.
This migration inspired tales and legends that flowed East. The
eastern culture, eager for news of the West, was puzzled at these
tales of wonton sin and often took them at face value.

In addition, there had never been a time in history nor a place
where prostitutes had been so idolized as in California. "[G]old
dust was plentier than pleasure, pleasure more enticing than virtue.
Fortune was the horse, youth in the saddle, dissipitation the track,
and desire the spur. Let none wonder that the time was the best ever
made."

While California did not invent prostitution, the gold-rush
experience, with its racially mixed population, surplus of young
males and rambunctious economy, foreshadowed the elevated status
that prostitutes would hold on all other miner frontiers that
followed.

The gold rush population was almost entirely young men, who had a
very difficult time finding female companionship, whatever their
intentions. In 1949, there were men for every one woman in
California. Men had few choices: compete for the very few
respectable women available, look homeward, or turn to the loving –
and expensive – arms of a prostitute.

The miners came in forty-nine
The whores in fifty-one
And when they got together
They made a native son.

California had the unique quality of urban vitality but with the
addition of rural isolation. For prostitutes, this meant an
increased market for their supply and appeal of life without
condemnation. Entrepreneurship was almost a mania in San Francisco
during the Gold Rush, even for some women. Women that refused to
bow to immorality had few options of self-started success, but for
women willing to buy into the risk – and the mentality of the time –
there were the profits of prostitution or brothel and saloon
management.

To sit with you near the bar or a card table, a girl charges one
once [of gold, about $16] an evening… and if you wanted anything
more from these nymphs, you had to pay fifteen to twenty ounces
[$240 - $320].

In the first few years of the gold rush, prostitutes no longer had
to live in a degraded position in society. Instead, society admired
prostitutes as the women they were, not how they made their
money.70 "There was no country in the world no represented in San
Francisco by at least one prostitute." When three hundred French
prostitutes sailed into San Francisco, one miner said, "Gads, what
rich cargo. They will be worth their weight in gold… the imports of
California are richer than the exports."

It is too much to expect from weak male human nature in California,
that a man ever so correctly inclined, would prefer the lean arm of
a bonneted, ugly, board shaped specimen of a descendent of the
puritans, to a rosy-checked, full formed, sprightly and elegant
Spaniard or Frenchwoman.

Prostitutes formed a part of the first wave of gold seekers in 1949.
While many of the men that came to mines were inexperienced and knew
nothing of gold mining, the majority of the first prostitutes to
come to California were professionals who know the trade from top to
bottom. Professional prostitutes took advantage of the high numbers
of lustful lonely men and the lax morals, and achieved from these
the financial rewards and elevated status.

These were professionals and they knew their trade: what men wanted
and needed to hear was their business. As a result, while these may
have not been the most beautiful women, in their customer's eyes
they were goddesses.

Prostitution was one of the few venues for women to satisfy the gold
bug that bit the country in the mid-1800s; only these women used
their bodies instead of a pick and shovel. The materialistic drive
of society in the West did not just affect men – women also wanted
new clothes, a house and a good life. The `get rich quick' mentality
of the miners in the west was only available to women through very
narrow venues: laundry, cooking, marriage, or prostitution. In 1887,
a survey of 300 prostitutes found that they made $5 to $7 a night,
compared to the $1.50 to $3 a week for domestic services, or the $75
a say for a washerwoman, making "the wages of sin… fairly
attractive."

In 1966, a seamstress could possibly make $3 a day, working 12 to 15
hours, if she found the work.

The phrase `prostitute with a heart of gold' originates in San
Francisco, and was documented during a series of events that started
with Bella Cora, a famed prostitute, attending a play with her
husband Charles Cora. The couple sat behind US Marshall Richardson
and his wife, who objected to sitting so close to the sinful couple.
First she demanded to the couple that they leave, and when they
would not, appealed to the manager of the theater. The manager
refused to involve himself, and Mr. and Mrs. Richardson left. Two
days later, the men met at a saloon, and got in a fight that ended
in Cora shooting and killing the Marshall.

Bella immediately hired the best lawyers and then tried to bribe the
jury. When this was discovered, her lawyers used the
phrase `prostitute with a heart of gold' to justify Bella's
dedication to her friend and lover. Soon the background was
forgotten, and the East coast adopted the phrase to give prostitutes
womanly values.

A different stereotype that mythologized in connection with
California was that of the Chinese prostitute. In the myth she is
exotic, beautiful, submissive, a slave to her evil master, kidnapped
from China, and has a man to marry her, civilize her, and bring her
back to moral purity. Chinese prostitutes were the "archetype of
female bondage and degradation."

Known as baak hakk chai, or a hundred men's wife, and loungei, a
woman always holding her legs up, the numbers and tales of Chinese
prostitutes in San Francisco were largely over exaggerated.
White Americans knew little about Chinese prostitutes daily lives.
Living shrouded in a cloak of mystery, myths abounded, such as the
vaginal opening of the Chinese ran `east-west' instead of `north-
south' like white women.

Because whites did not understand Chinese kinship rules, when a man
and woman living together were not directly related, the woman was
labeled as a prostitute, which flooded the census statistics.83
There were several reasons for the importation of Chinese women to
be prostitutes, including customs, United States laws, financial
reasons, and the nature of the destination. Tradition bound many
Chinese men to leave their families in the homeland, rather than
plant their seeds in the `white devils' country.

Chinese customs dictates that a woman serve her in-laws and if
necessary, act as her husband's substitute in the event of a death
to perform the mandatory burial and mourning rights.84 As a result,
many Chinese men spent years of their lives – sometimes their whole
lives – without female companionship.

This population missed women, and had no choice but to frequent
prostitutes for sexual fulfillment. 85 "The demand for Chinese
prostitutes by both Chinese and white men intersected with an
available supply of young women sold into servitude by impoverished
families in China."86 Also, Chinese women had a common goal of many
prostitutes: they sought the "land that flowed with gold, where
[one] could make big money, and return to China a rich woman."

The American stereotype of the typical Chinese women fit well into
the Victorian concept of the female: passive and submissive. At the
same time, the myth of the enslaved Chinese prostitute fit well with
the progressive attitude of prostitution exploiting women.

"By the beginning of the twentieth century, the isolation and self-
contained lifestyle that had once existed in many area of the
American West had disappeared."

The West was pierced with technology and industry. With these
changes came civilized families who built farms, villages, towns and
cities – all with churches. The members of these churches all had
puritan prejudices and orthodoxy clinging like cobwebs in the backs
of their mind. The days of wonton sinful enjoyment were over.