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In June 1867, two thousand Chinese Transcontinental Railroad workers participated in a general strike (a collective action) for a week along the Sierra Nevada range, demanding better working conditions. [1] By 1867, the Central Pacific Railroad workforce was composed of 80-90% Chinese laborers and the rest were European-Americans. [2]
For most Chinese immigrants of the 1850s, San Francisco was only a transit station on the way to the gold fields in the Sierra Nevada. According to estimates, there were in the late 1850s 15,000 Chinese mine workers in the "Gold Mountains" or "Mountains of Gold" (Cantonese: Gam Saan, 金山). Because anarchic conditions prevailed in the gold ...
Chinese immigrants were particularly instrumental in building railroads in the American West, and as Chinese laborers grew successful in the United States, a number of them became entrepreneurs in their own right. As the numbers of Chinese laborers increased, so did the strength of anti-Chinese attitude among other workers in the US economy.
After slavery was abolished in the United States, Chinese laborers were imported to the South as cheap labor to replace freed Blacks on the plantations.Many of the early Chinese laborers came from sugar plantations in Cuba and after the transcontinental railroad was completed, California also contributed to the labor supply.
Chinese workers made up 90% of the West Coast railroad workforce, but their contributions are often “rendered invisible,” former state Sen. Richard Pan said.
But as Wong notes, the railroad is an ambivalent symbol for Chinese Americans, since it represents both the American dream of mobility, luxury and power but also the historical difficulties of the Chinese workers, who often had no choice but to take railroad jobs and who were never allowed the sort of mobility the railroad offered to Anglos.
The Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 suspended Chinese immigration for ten years, but not before thousands of immigrants came to the American West. Most Chinese immigrants to Wyoming Territory took jobs with the railroad at first, but many ended up employed in coal mines owned by the Union Pacific Railroad .
Chinese immigrants first started as domestic servants and service workers (cooks, laundry men). Chinese immigrants nearly doubled the number of white miners in eastern Washington . Nearly 17,000 Chinese also helped build the Northern Pacific Railroad transcontinental line in Washington State.