Chinese and Irish Workers on the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863–1869

The famous Andrew J. Russell photograph taken at Promontory Summit, Utah, on May 10, 1869 — the so-called “Champagne Photo” of the joining of the rails — shows perhaps a hundred white men gathered around the joined Central Pacific and Union Pacific locomotives. It does not show any of the roughly 15,000 Chinese laborers who had built the Central Pacific’s track from Sacramento east through the Sierra Nevada, and it does not show the Irish-American and African-American workers who built most of the Union Pacific’s track west from Omaha. The men who actually laid the rails were not invited to the ceremony at which the rails were joined.

The Transcontinental Railroad — formally completed by the joining of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific lines that day — was the largest American engineering achievement of the nineteenth century. It was built, primarily, by people most contemporary American newspapers did not consider citizens, working for less than white workers were paid, in conditions that killed more than a thousand of them. This is who actually built it.

The Labor Crisis of 1864

The Central Pacific Railroad began construction in Sacramento in January 1863. By 1864 its construction superintendent, Charles Crocker, had a problem: the company could not retain white American workers. The labor market in California was dominated by mining; men who came to work for the railroad either deserted for the goldfields after their first paycheck or demanded wages the railroad could not pay. By early 1865, with only 50 miles of track laid in two years of construction, Crocker and his foreman James Harvey Strobridge were running out of options.

In February 1865, over Strobridge’s strong objections, Crocker hired a test crew of 50 Chinese workers. The contemporary American stereotype was that Chinese men were too small and too physically slight to perform heavy construction. Within a month the experiment was extended. By late 1865 the Central Pacific was actively recruiting in southern China — primarily in the Sze Yup (Siyi) district of Guangdong Province — through Chinese-American labor contractors using the “credit ticket” system, in which a recruit’s transpacific passage was advanced and then deducted from his wages. By 1867 the Central Pacific employed roughly 12,000 Chinese workers; by the line’s completion in 1869, around 15,000 had served.

The Sierra Nevada

The Central Pacific’s challenge was the wall. The Sierra Nevada mountains rise from the California Central Valley in roughly 100 miles to a 7,000-foot crest over Donner Pass. The Central Pacific had to drive a railway through them. Between 1865 and 1869, Chinese crews — working with hand drills, sledgehammers, picks, shovels, and black powder (and, from 1867, the more dangerous and unpredictable nitroglycerin) — dug fifteen tunnels through Sierra granite. The longest, Summit Tunnel (Tunnel No. 6) at Donner Pass, was 1,659 feet long and took fifteen months to dig, working from both ends simultaneously and from a vertical shaft in the middle, in 24-hour shifts year-round.

At Cape Horn, an exposed cliff above the American River in Placer County, Chinese workers were lowered in wicker baskets down sheer rock faces in 1865–66 to drill blasting holes for the railbed cut. The story is widely repeated in popular histories; Stanford University’s Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project, which has compiled the most rigorous modern documentation of the workforce, has confirmed the technique through period photographs and contemporary press accounts.

The winter of 1866–67 in the Sierras buried the line under more than 40 feet of snow. Chinese crews dug tunnels through the snowpack to keep working, ate, slept, and stored powder in those tunnels for weeks at a time. Avalanches killed an unknown number — bodies sometimes not recovered until the following spring’s thaw. The Central Pacific did not keep systematic records of Chinese deaths. The 1870 estimate by a San Francisco newspaper, citing the recovery of bones for return to China at the line’s completion, put the figure at around 1,200; Stanford’s modern researchers, including historians Gordon H. Chang and Shelley Fisher Fishkin, suggest the true figure may be higher.

The Strike of June 1867

On Monday, June 24, 1867, approximately 3,000 Chinese workers high in the Sierras quietly walked off the job. Their demands, presented in writing to Strobridge: wages equal to those paid to white workers ($45 per month), a ten-hour workday rather than the prevailing twelve, the right to leave the company without forfeiting wages, and an end to the use of physical force by white overseers. They posted no pickets and made no threats; they simply stopped working and remained in their camps.

The strike lasted eight days. Crocker cut off the workers’ food supply — provisioning of Chinese camps was handled by Chinese-American contractors paid by the Central Pacific, but the contractors themselves were dependent on the railroad’s stores — and after a week the strikers, isolated and hungry, returned to work. The Central Pacific had refused full parity, but the Chinese monthly wage rose from $26 to between $30 and $35. The boarding provision was not changed; Chinese crews continued to feed themselves at their own cost.

The strike was the largest organised labor action by Asian workers in nineteenth-century America. The Central Pacific suppressed coverage of it. It was rediscovered by historians only in the late twentieth century, largely through Chinese-language press accounts.

The Union Pacific from the East

The Union Pacific’s workforce, building west from Omaha across the Great Plains, was differently composed. Many were Irish immigrants — some recently arrived during and after the Great Famine of the 1840s, others second-generation. A large proportion were Civil War veterans of both the Union and the Confederate armies. African American workers, many recently freed, served in significant numbers; in 1867 and 1868, Mormon labor contractors based in Utah supplied crews for the line’s approach through Utah Territory.

Union Pacific work was different from Central Pacific work in that it was carried out across flat or moderately rolling country, but it was not safer. Buffalo herds disrupted operations; harsh winters and summer thunderstorms killed workers regularly; Native American resistance — the railway crossed the lands of the Pawnee, Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho without their consent or any compensation — produced a series of attacks on construction crews in 1867 and 1868. The Plum Creek attack on August 6, 1867, in Nebraska, derailed a UP train and killed seven workers, of whom one (the Briton William Thompson) survived being scalped and later recovered his own scalp from a doctor’s office.

UP wages averaged $2 to $3 per day for unskilled labor and rather more for skilled tradesmen — broadly competitive with Central Pacific white wages but lower than the line was nominally offering, because UP construction superintendent Thomas Durant ran an extensive set of side businesses, including the Crédit Mobilier construction company, which siphoned tens of millions of dollars in federal subsidies into the pockets of UP directors and Congressmen. The Crédit Mobilier scandal, broken by the New York Sun in September 1872, was the largest American political corruption case of the nineteenth century.

The Ten-Mile Day and Promontory Summit

The race between the two lines became, by 1868, a public spectacle. On April 28, 1869, near present-day Promontory, Utah, a Central Pacific crew of eight rail-handlers (Michael Shay, Patrick Joyce, Michael Kennedy, Thomas Daley, George Wyatt, Edward Killeen, Michael Sullivan, and Fred McNamara — all Irish-American), backed by 4,000 Chinese support workers carrying rails, ties, spikes, and water, laid 10 miles and 56 feet of track in a single day. The record was set on a $10,000 bet between Charles Crocker and Thomas Durant. The mark has never been broken by hand.

Twelve days later, on May 10, 1869, four ceremonial spikes — two gold, one silver, one a combined gold-silver-iron alloy — were tapped into a pre-drilled tie at Promontory Summit. A telegraph wire attached to the final spike sent the single word “DONE” to operators across the country. Russell’s photograph followed. The Central Pacific’s Chinese workforce, who had laid the final stretches of track, had already moved camp east; what Chinese workers were present at the ceremony were not invited into the photograph.

What Most Accounts Get Wrong

Three corrections worth making. The first is the claim that Chinese workers were chosen because they were “cheaper than white workers.” They were paid less than white workers, but the documentary record — including Charles Crocker’s own 1876 testimony to a US Senate committee — makes clear that the Central Pacific hired Chinese workers because they could not get white workers to do the job at any wage. The cost differential was an outcome of racially separate labor markets, not a strategic choice.

The second is the implication that immigrant railroad labor was passive. The June 1867 strike, the daily resistance documented in surviving Chinese-language sources at the Stanford project, and the wage gains it secured all show otherwise. So does the formation of Chinese benevolent associations and burial societies that, decades later, retrieved the bones of thousands of dead workers from the Sierra and the deserts and shipped them home to Guangdong for proper interment — a coordinated, multi-decade collective effort by communities that the popular narrative tends to depict only as victims.

The third is the framing of the railroad as a national success story. The line transformed the US economy. It also broke the treaty rights of the Plains nations whose land it crossed, accelerated the destruction of the buffalo on which those nations depended, made possible the white settlement of the West that the federal government had not been able to coerce through forty years of military operations, and — within a single generation — produced the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first law in US history to bar immigration on the basis of race or nationality. The same Congress that voted to build the railroad voted to exclude the people who built it.

Why It Still Matters

The Golden Spike National Historical Park at Promontory Summit, Utah, has since 2015 included formal recognition of the Chinese workforce in its interpretive program. In 2014 the US Department of Labor inducted Chinese railroad workers into its Hall of Honor. Stanford University’s Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project, led by Gordon H. Chang and Shelley Fisher Fishkin, has assembled the most comprehensive surviving record of the workforce, and Chang’s 2019 book Ghosts of Gold Mountain: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad is the standard modern account.

The historical correction is real and recent. The railroad was finished in 1869; the formal national acknowledgement of who finished it has been a project of the past twenty years.

For more on the immigrant labor history of the United States, see our piece on Japanese American incarceration in World War II.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many Chinese workers built the Transcontinental Railroad?

Approximately 15,000 Chinese workers were employed by the Central Pacific Railroad between 1865 and 1869, forming roughly 80–90 percent of the line’s workforce at peak construction. Most were recruited from Guangdong Province in southern China through the credit-ticket system, in which their transpacific passage was advanced and then deducted from their wages.

Who built the Union Pacific?

The Union Pacific’s workforce, building west from Omaha, Nebraska, peaked at around 10,000 and was drawn largely from Irish immigrants, Civil War veterans of both Union and Confederate armies, formerly enslaved African Americans, and Mormon contract crews based in Utah Territory. Construction was overseen by Thomas Durant, whose Crédit Mobilier construction company later produced the largest political corruption scandal of the nineteenth century.

How much were Chinese workers paid?

Chinese workers were initially paid $26 per month and required to pay for their own food. White Central Pacific workers were paid $35 a month plus board. After an eight-day strike by approximately 3,000 Chinese workers in the Sierra Nevada in June 1867, Chinese wages were raised to $30–35 per month, but the boarding inequality was not addressed.

How many Chinese workers died building the railroad?

The Central Pacific kept no systematic records of Chinese fatalities. A widely cited 1870 newspaper estimate, drawn from the volume of bones returned to Guangdong for burial after the line’s completion, put the figure at around 1,200. Modern researchers at Stanford’s Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project consider this a likely floor and suggest the true number may exceed 1,500.

What was the “ten-mile day”?

On April 28, 1869, near present-day Promontory, Utah, a Central Pacific crew of eight Irish-American rail-handlers backed by approximately 4,000 Chinese support workers laid 10 miles and 56 feet of track in a single day, on a $10,000 bet between Charles Crocker and Thomas Durant. The record has never been broken by hand-laid track.

Why are Chinese workers absent from the famous Promontory photograph?

Andrew Russell’s “Champagne Photo” of the joining of the rails at Promontory Summit on May 10, 1869, shows the Central Pacific and Union Pacific executives and their assembled white workers. Chinese workers, who had laid the final stretches of Central Pacific track in the preceding days, were not invited into the frame. Their omission was deliberate and consistent with the broader cultural erasure that produced the Chinese Exclusion Act thirteen years later.

Sources

1. Stanford University — Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project
2. National Park Service — Golden Spike National Historical Park
3. US Department of Labor — Chinese Railroad Workers Hall of Honor (2014)
4. Gordon H. Chang, Ghosts of Gold Mountain: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019)
5. Gordon H. Chang and Shelley Fisher Fishkin (eds.), The Chinese and the Iron Road: Building the Transcontinental Railroad (Stanford University Press, 2019)
6. Stephen E. Ambrose, Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863–1869 (Simon & Schuster, 2000)
7. David Haward Bain, Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad (Viking, 1999)
8. Maury Klein, Union Pacific: The Birth of a Railroad, 1862–1893 (University of Minnesota Press, 2006)