Stanford Researches Builders of US Transcontinental Railroad: the Chinese

Dr. Fishkin discusses research

Last month, the director of the American Studies Program at Stanford, Dr. Shelley Fisher Fishkin, spoke at the U.S.-China People’s Friendship Association to explain some special research: the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project.

Dr. Fishkin said that when she joined the University in 2003, she had heard that Chinese labor was the key to the fortune with which Leland Stanford founded Stanford University, and assumed she would find something in the library—a letter from one of the workers or a something.

There was nothing. 

She asked her colleague in the history department, Dr. Gordon H. Chang, where she might find something. He said, “Nowhere.”

Not a single letter or journal entry or remittance slip from the people who had done the most for the railroad…for the university, for the states, for the country.

Just as unbelievable—and heartbreaking-- was a collective national amnesia that the Chinese had even participated. During the 100^th anniversary of the completion of the railroad in 1969, a celebration was held during which the role of the Chinese was attributed to non-Chinese.
“Who else but Americans can drill ten tunnels in mountains 30 feet deep in snow?” asked the orator officiating the ceremony, Secretary of Transportation John Volpe. “Who else but Americans could chisel through miles of solid granite? Who else but Americans could have laid ten miles of track in twelve hours?”

But, the people who performed all those engineering marvels hadn’t been Americans.

They had been Chinese.

(To Be Continued. Next: When West Was Far from East.)