But you aren't allowed to copy it and call it your own. This is my paper. No touchy.
In 1848, gold was found at Sutter's Mill in California, sparking the beginning of the Gold Rush in 1849. People flooded into California, eager to make quick, easy money. Among the many whites who came for the gold, Chinese immigrants began to arrive. Back in China, rumors of “The Golden Mountain,” a land where gold shone everywhere, had begun to spread. At that time, China had just recently lost the Opium War with the British. China was forced to sign a treaty that required them to pay for destroyed opium and open up five ports to British ships and traders. Other countries eventually were able to get China to agree to similar contracts. The peasants of South China rebelled in the early 1850's after suffering from floods and famines. The rebellion became a civil war and by the end, more than twenty million Chinese were dead. After all these devastating events, many Chinese began to consider going to another country. The prospect of being able to make money quickly made the Chinese eager to go to California. Most planned to return to China after making enough money to pay off their debt from the voyage, and for their families back in China. When they arrived, they found life much more difficult than expected. Not able to understand English, they looked to the Americans for some form of assistance, but instead, they found themselves attacked by whites, both verbally and physically. They found themselves prohibited from working on certain jobs. And if that wasn't enough, the government passed laws that were specifically targeted at them. In general, the Chinese were mistreated by whites, who took advantage of the immigrants in a strange new land.
In most cases, the Chinese were not allowed to work on mines that the white men were working on. It wasn't until after the white men were done mining that they could use them. The white men became frustrated easily and didn't scour the mines as well as the Chinese, and sometimes the Chinese would end up with more gold than the white men. They were later accused of stealing gold because whites would become angry at their success. Many Chinese immigrants became cooks, waiters, houseboys, laundrymen and vegetable peddlers. In this time with so much gold, most whites didn't want to take such jobs. What ever job the white men didn't want, the Chinese would take. The most common example of this was laundrymen. Washing laundry was a job traditionally for women in the United States. In California, however, there were few or no women in most cities. The land was dominated by men. White men didn't feel that doing a woman's job was right, but the Chinese jumped at the chance. Unfortunately for them, whites tried to take advantage of them anyways. Some would go into laundromats and “claim parcels that did not belong to them, saying they had lost their tickets, and would fight if they did not get what they asked for.” (Wu, Tung 13, 15) Another Chinese owned laundromat suffered from an attack from whites, when they forced their way into the shop, taking the newly cleaned laundry and trampling it underfoot.
In San Francisco, there were groups of whites who would “follow the Chinaman...howling and screaming to frighten him... catch hold of his cue, and pull him from the wagon...throw brickbats and missiles at him.” (Griswold 119) In the mines, there once was a fight between a white miner and two Chinese. Other whites ran to the scene with picks. It ended with four Chinese terribly wounded, one fatally wounded, and several white men cut and bruised. The whites poured out of the mine, who then called for reinforcements and went to Chinatown to rid the town of the Chinese.
At least thirty Chinese were killed, a figure that seems an understatement, given the hundreds who escaped into the hills without food, water, or adequate clothing. Some estimates of the deaths run as high as fifty, but there is no way of knowing...newspapers reported that precisely three white men had perished and twenty or thirty Chinese. (Bain 200-201)
Even when the Chinese immigrants had taken jobs that no one else would take, the white men would claim that they were taking the jobs of whites and women. They were “accused of working for slave wages and undermining the white man's standard of living.” (Sung 22) They were blamed for monopolizing land, running corporations, and bringing about the Depression. Eventually, they came to be wrongly viewed as an economic threat. Whites would attack the Chinese in many ways, from their arrival in California to their departure back to China, or worse, death. Some were shot, others were hanged. Some were stoned, beaten or massacred. California legislation made them pay a $3 monthly tax on foreign miners that was only collected from the Chinese. Every way they turned, there was no help from the wrath of the white man.
Later on, a large project began that would span across the country; the first transcontinental railroad. On July 1, 1862, Lincoln signed a bill that gave the Central Pacific company the right to build east from Sacramento. This also allowed a second company, the Union Pacific, to build westward from the Missouri.
As the railroad construction began, it became apparent that there weren't enough workers. Advertisements were sent out, but not enough workers showed up. Finally, it was suggested to James Harvey Strobridge, the labor boss, that they test out Chinese workers. He felt that the Chinese were not strong enough, too slender and weak to be able to do anything. He said, “not fit laborers...don't think they could build a railroad...trying to feed them the weird things they liked to eat would alone be a plaguey nuisance.” (Griswold 110) Finally, he agreed to taking on fifty of them. Doubtful of any success, he watched and waited for them to tire and fall onto the very track they were building. Instead of falling to the ground, the Chinese workers did the opposite of what he expected. They built more track than any other group before had. Strobridge admitted, though reluctantly, that the Chinese were good workers and hired another group of fifty. More and more Chinese were added until almost the whole Central Pacific work force was made of Chinese workers.
In spite of the fact that Strobridge felt they were good workers, they were still given less money than white workers, not to mention the fact that they weren't provided with food and board. Whites received more pay, food, board and shorter work hours. When the Chinese tried going on a strike for a pay raise and shorter hours, their food supply was cut off and eventually they had no choice but to return to work without receiving their rather reasonable demands. Had another group of workers gone on a strike, they probably would have been able to succeed in their attempt.
As the work moved into the Rocky Mountains, the Chinese were given the most dangerous and difficult jobs, with still no raise in pay. They were the ones to place gunpowder into the walls of mountains to blast paths into the rock. They were forced to work when no other white man would even considering going outside. When the mountain sides grew too steep, they were “lowered...from the top of the cliff in wicker baskets to chip out holes for the initial charges of powder.” (Griswold 123) In one place, the rock was so hard that the gunpowder was simply blown back, as if fired from a canon. Then, nitroglycerin, a new type of explosive, was introduced. It was more effective, but was incredibly dangerous. The labor bosses decided that they would use the Chinese to test this new explosive. Not only were they desperate to blast through the mountain, but they didn't care about the lives of the Chinese. Their reasoning was if they died, they could always get more Chinese to take their place. This flammable liquid exploded quickly, and if the men didn't get away fast enough, they would disappear in a flash of fiery light. Also, it sometimes wouldn't explode or it would only partially explode, and the first man to hit the leftover pool explosive with a pick would be incinerated, along with the men around him. It wasn't until Strobridge had an eye taken out from a bit of stray rock from an explosion that they stopped using nitroglycerin.
On top of all the blasting the Chinese did, they also had to dig through snowdrifts in the winter. There were constant avalanches, and sometimes they would be forced to live like moles in a hole under the snow for weeks at a time. These holes would be hot and have little air, and the men would suffocate or die from the extreme heat. The Chinese also had to rid the path of large trees and boulders from the ground to built the railroad. There were “forests with trees four, six, and eight feet in diameter...often 100 to 150 feet tall.” (Griswold 145) They were so big that it often required up to ten barrels of powder.
After many months of work, the laborers were finally cleared the mountains and into the deserts of the midwest. Now they would suffer from the burning heat of the sun instead of the chilling cold of the snow. Building in the desert was dangerous for there was little water, little food, little shade and little shelter. Native American also made attacks on the workers from time to time. The white men joked that it was so bad that “even the jackrabbits carried canteens and haversacks.” (Meltzer 20)
When the Central Pacific met the Union Pacific, things began to heat up. The Irish immigrants regarded the Chinese with distaste and talked openly about banding together and driving all the Chinese off the job. One Irishman said, “But if it wasn't for them damned nagurs [blacks and Chinese], we could get $50 and not do half the work.” (Griswold 111) Not only that, some Irish workers decided to terrorize the Chinese and would blow up gunpowder without warning while the Chinese workers were on top of the explosion site.
At the end of the construction, the Chinese were not allowed into the famous picture of the two trains from each location facing each other. They were not mentioned in the celebratory speech in the end. In fact, they were forbidden from using the very railroad they had built, and had to walk the whole way back home. No records of the men were kept, but it is almost certain that hundreds, if not thousands died in the railroad construction.
After the construction, whites more or less had no purpose for the Chinese immigrants. They had fulfilled their “purpose” by constructing the railroad. If the attacks on them had been bad before, they were even worse after the railroad was finished. Little by little, legislation appeared, preventing the Chinese from doing what little they could do before. They couldn't become citizens because they were neither white nor black. Immigration from China was stopped because of the Naturalization Act of 1870 and was the first bar on free immigration. Also, the Chinese were the first culture to be prohibited to freely migrate. They could not serve as witnesses in the California Supreme Court because their word would not be accepted in court. There were segregated schools to separate whites and Chinese. The government of San Fransisco even “prohibited people who carried loads on poles from using the side walks” (Wu, Tung 39) just because Chinese peddlers carried baskets of food using poles. Special taxes were paid almost entirely by the Chinese for any reason they could think of. They couldn't farm because they weren't allowed to own land. They couldn't get jobs because they were not permitted to join the labor unions. A bitter song called John Chinaman about the Chinese immigrants appeared as well. The song goes as follows:
I imagined that the truth
You'd speak under oath
But I find you'll lie and steal too-
Yes, John, you're up to both
Oh, John, I've been deceived in you
And in all your thieving clan
For our gold is all you're after John
To get it as you can
(Wu, Tung 31)
Throughout the years, Chinese immigrants were looked down upon and scorned by whites. Attacked and prohibited from certain jobs, there was hardly any means of survival in this unfamiliar land. When they did get jobs, they were still attacked and often given the most dangerous and difficult tasks. Legislation was created against them and their lives became steadily harder. They had no way to retaliate against this unfairness, and tolerated it silently and patiently. It would take many years before whites would finally accept the Chinese as American citizens.
