A photograph of a three white miners to the left of the sluice box and four Chinese miners to the right of the sluice box.
Module 2: Chinese Immigration and Labor from the Gold Rush to the Golden Spike, 1849–1869
Is it possible to be both Chinese and American?
This module is about the experiences of early Chinese immigrants in the United States, focusing on their role in two pivotal events: the California Gold Rush and the construction of the country’s first transcontinental railroad. In both cases, their labor was central and valuable, but Chinese immigrants faced racial discrimination and marginalization.
In early 1848, James Marshall was building a sawmill in Coloma, California when he spotted gold along the American River. He showed it to his boss, John Sutter, in Sacramento, who tried to keep the discovery a secret, but word traveled quickly. By fall, reports and samples of the gold were submitted to Washington, DC. At the end of the year, President James K. Polk revealed the finding in his annual address to Congress, and thousands of Americans made plans to seek their fortunes in California. These gold-seeking miners became known as “forty-niners.”
The California Gold Rush (1848–1855) is commonly viewed as the origin story of the state and an important chapter in American westward expansion. The image of a forty-niner is often a rugged, bearded white American man wearing denim and carrying a pickaxe. Yet this image obscures the diverse origins of gold seekers, which also included Indigenous peoples, African Americans, Latin Americans, and Chinese immigrants.
Image 09.02.01 — White and Chinese miners at a sluice box in Auburn Ravine, California, 1852. By 1860, Chinese immigrants made up twenty percent of the mining population in California.
What were some factors that led early Chinese immigrants to come to California and the American West?
How did early Chinese immigrants build California and the American West?
What kinds of discrimination did early Chinese laborers face?
Push-Pull Factors
Immigration and migration occur through “push-pull factors,” or circumstances that push people out of their home countries, and circumstances that pull them into a new country. This can be a useful way of understanding immigration, especially during specific moments in history.
The California Gold Rush and the possibility of wealth were major “pull” factors for Chinese migrants. Similar to other gold seekers, they wanted to strike it rich in the United States. Among the hundred thousand people who went to California in the first year of the Gold Rush, only 325 came from China, but their numbers later increased. By 1852, the San Francisco customs house counted more than twenty thousand arrivals from China. By 1860, Chinese people were 10 percent of the total population of California and 20 percent of the mining population.
Various factors “pushed” these immigrants to leave China. In southern China, people experienced overpopulation, famines, floods, and other natural disasters. Many blamed the ruling Qing dynasty for these hardships and in 1851, a local group called the Taipings seized control of most of southeastern China. The Taiping Rebellion lasted thirteen years, and cost millions of lives. Moreover, tension between two ethnic groups, the Cantonese and Hakka, grew into a war starting in 1856. This political and environmental instability motivated some to leave.
Push-pull factors can help us understand some reasons for immigration, but the decision to leave one’s own country is a complex matter with many groups, histories, events, and politics involved. Chinese migration is not only a result of people being lured by wealth and pushed out by poverty.
Additionally, contact with Europeans and Americans provided opportunities for many Chinese people to travel. Farmers in Guangdong Province of South China often supplemented their income by traveling to the closest major city, Guangzhou, for work in the off-season. Guangzhou was closely connected to overseas trade routes. Chinese men living and working there would establish connections with Europeans and Americans, who offered opportunities to travel internationally for work. People from Guangdong were likely among the first Chinese people to learn about the discovery of gold in California, bringing the news from traders and travellers back to their hometowns. In China, an image of California as “Gold Mountain,” or “Gum Saan” in Cantonese, soon emerged.
Image 09.02.02 — A sketch depicting Chinese emigration to America on board the steamship Alaska, bound for San Francisco, California, 1876.
Chinese Laborers in the California Gold Rush
Chinese immigrants worked in California’s gold mines and service industries that catered to miners. Mining was painstaking work, sifting gold flakes from gravel using picks, pans, and shovels. Chinese laborers often sought gold in depleted, abandoned places that white miners would not work. Teamwork made this toil more tolerable, with Chinese groups forming cooperative arrangements to ease the labor demands and equipment costs. Some Chinese people also worked for wages under mining companies.
Image 09.02.03 — Sketch of Chinese miners during the California Gold Rush, Tuolumne County, Southern Mines, California, 1858.
Because mining communities discouraged women and families, Chinese men took on domestic chores such as cooking, cleaning, sewing, and mending. Although they were not accustomed to domestic labor in China, they picked up these skills in California to earn wages. White miners looked down on the Chinese men’s willingness to do this labor, which American society associated with women. They concluded that Chinese men were weak and not “masculine.”
Chinese laborers toiled alongside people of many races, nationalities, and religions during the Gold Rush. In some places, they found ways to cooperate and work together, but also encountered racism and conflict. For example, white American miners often discriminated against and attacked Indigenous and Chinese people. In 1848, the United States had just conquered much of the Southwest as a result of the Mexican-American War and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. With this newly acquired land, white miners felt entitled to California’s resources. Indigenous people and Chinese people became the prime targets for discrimination and violence in California’s mining districts. White miners drove them out by force, sometimes setting fire to their tents.
Image 09.02.04 — An 1869 political cartoon in Harper’s Weekly by Thomas Nash, titled “Pacific Chivalry,” illustrates anti-Chinese sentiment among white miners in California.
In addition to individual acts of racism and violence, restrictive local and state laws made discrimination legal. Hundreds of California mining districts adopted mining codes, barring Chinese, Mexican, and other immigrant miners from staking claims. In 1852, California passed a Foreign Miners Tax, which required a monthly payment of three dollars from any miner who was not a US citizen. At the time, only “free white persons” could become naturalized citizens, so the tax especially targeted Chinese immigrants.
From Mines to Railroads
As the Gold Rush era ended, some Chinese migrants left California, while others were hired to work on the Transcontinental Railroad. By 1860, about half who had rushed to California for gold returned to China. Many who stayed found industrial work. During and after the Civil War, the country began large-scale industrialization, especially in the West. Railroads were central to these developments, and building them created new opportunities for Chinese workers. The Union Pacific Railroad and Central Pacific Railroad companies were tasked with each building a railway—one eastward from Nebraska, and one westward from California, connecting at a midpoint in Utah to form the first transcontinental railroad.
While the Union Pacific Railroad had a robust post-Civil War labor market to construct this transportation system, California’s Central Pacific Railroad had a harder time finding workers. California’s population had grown but was still only 380,000 people in 1860. The company preferred white workers, but only a few hundred white men applied.
Charles Crocker, one of the company’s executives, had a Chinese servant named Ah Ling, who may have first suggested employing Chinese workers. The Irish-born field construction supervisor, James Strobridge, was reluctant at first. But Strobridge seemed to change his mind after he met a Chinese labor contractor, Hung Wah, in a town near the Sierra Nevada mountains. Chinese names appeared in the Central Pacific’s payroll records starting in January 1864. Hung Wah received 675 dollars in expenses for approximately twenty-five Chinese workers.
Most Chinese laborers that were hired during the beginning of the railroad’s construction had probably been in California since the Gold Rush in the 1850s. The Central Pacific Railroad needed additional labor. They soon recruited workers directly from China. By July 1865, the Chinese workforce numbered nearly four thousand. By 1867, the Central Pacific Railroad had twelve thousand Chinese workers.
Building railroads in the nineteenth century required skills in metalwork, carpentry, explosives, timber clearing, and water control. This was intense manual labor; forging the roadbed, tunneling, and laying the tracks were done without modern tools like power drills, motor vehicles, and diesel lifts. Furthermore, the geography and environment of the railroad route made the work even more challenging.
The route began at sea level in Sacramento and greatly increased in elevation as it crossed the Sierra Nevada mountains, rising more than 7,000 feet within 100 miles at Donner Summit. Chinese workers forged the railroad in the Sierra Nevada, digging multiple tunnels through rock, granite, and conifer forests. The longest one was the Summit Tunnel, which was almost a third of a mile—about five football fields in length—sixteen feet wide, nineteen feet high, and 124 feet below surface level at its deepest.
It took more than two years of constant, grueling, and often deadly work to excavate and lay railroad tracks. This included working through terrible winters, blizzards, and avalanches. Most Chinese workers had been accustomed to a semitropical coastal climate in southern China, not snow or cold weather.
The Central Pacific did not keep records of how many workers died on the job, so the number of Chinese workers who lost their lives in the construction of the railroad can only be estimated. Some historians estimate that 50–150 Chinese workers died in landslides, explosions, falls, and other accidents. Other historians and sources—including a chilling news article from 1870 about the transportation of 20,000 pounds of remains to workers’ hometowns in China for burial—estimate that over a thousand died.
Image 09.02.05a — The Central Pacific Railroad (CPRR) relied heavily on Chinese immigrant labor to build the western portion of the Transcontinental Railroad. The CPRR employed twelve thousand Chinese workers by 1867.
Image 09.02.05b — It took more than two years of constant, grueling, and often deadly work to excavate and lay tracks. This photo was taken approximately eighty miles from Sacramento, California, c. 1866–1869.
Image 09.02.05c — Winter construction of the Transcontinental Railroad in the Sierra Nevada mountains, c. 1867–1868. Avalanches and other accidents were some of the threats to workers enduring deadly blizzards and long winters.
Image 09.02.05d — Chinese railroad workers on the Humboldt Plains. The railroad connected the Union Pacific railroad at Promontory Point, Utah, creating the first transcontinental railroad. Contributions of Chinese laborers were often obscured or omitted, leading to historians referring to them as “Silent Spikes.”
Image 09.02.05e — When the Central Pacific and Union Pacific rails were officially joined at Promontory Point, Utah, photographer Andrew J. Russell commemorated the moment in this famous photo. Chinese workers were excluded from the photo despite their contribution to this feat.
By 1869, the Central Pacific Railroad reached across the Nevada and Utah deserts. On May 10, 1869, the rails of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific officially joined together at Promontory Point, Utah, with a ceremonial presentation of a final spike made of gold. Prominent railroad company officials gathered around the presidents of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific. The “Golden Spike” celebrated this momentous feat of industrial development and a photographer commemorated the moment in a famous photograph. Chinese workers were excluded from the photograph despite their contribution to this engineering feat and to the United States’ rise as a global industrial power.
Chinese laborers were crucial to the development of the American West. They mined gold, provided services to local communities, and built the transcontinental railroad, which boosted the economy of newly acquired land in the US. Yet the Chinese population faced mob violence, unfair taxes and discriminatory policies, low wages, and dangerous and deadly working conditions.
Glossary terms in this module
Central Pacific Railroad Where it’s used
The first railroad to connect California to the rest of the US. Thousands of Chinese laborers were employed at very low wages and subjected to harsh working conditions to construct the most dangerous parts of the railroad.
domestic labor Where it’s used
Work commonly associated with the household, such as cooking, cleaning, and sewing. In the US, domestic labor has historically been associated with women. Because Chinese men were willing to take up this work to make a living, they were seen as less masculine than white men.
industrialization Where it’s used
The process in which a country moves from primarily producing agriculture to manufacturing goods such as steel.
