Countless Chinese railroad workers in the mid 1800s died building the Transcontinental Railroad. They blasted the Sierra Mountain to pave the way for the railroad, often times not getting out fast enough to escape the impact of the blast.
Despite that, their story is often an afterthought. Their contributions relegated to a sentence or two in American history books and pushed into the background of celebrations commemorating the opening of the railway connecting East & West.
Scholars at Stanford University are trying to rectify that, reports the Los Angeles Times. They’ve launched the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project and are collecting stories of these 12,000 Chinese migrants to be part of U.S. history.
“This university wouldn’t exist without these workers. Leland Stanford was rich, but he became fabulously rich because of the railroad,” said Hilton Obenzinger, associate director of the project. “He could create a university because of the Chinese workers who built the railroad.”
A conference was held earlier this month to shed light on the subject. Descendants of 50 railroad workers came to share oral histories.
“Up to now, we kind of have this image of nameless, faceless men with big straw hats,” said Barre Fong, who is working on a documentary for the project. “We got some pretty interesting details about who they were, who they left behind and why they left China, and the legacy they left behind in the United States.”
The hope is to correct an omission in our history books. in 1969, Historian Connie Young Yu attended the 100th anniversary celebration of the opening of the railroad and hear then Transportation secretary John Volpe omit any reference to the Chinese workers.
“He had no clue of the history,” she said.
You can read the thoughts of many descendants of Chinese railroad workers in the Los Angeles Times.
RE: stories of Chinese Railroad workers needed: To be grammatically accurate and correct, it should read, “This university wouldn’t exist without these workers. Leland Stanford was rich, but he became fabulously rich because of the railroad, LELAND STANFORD could create a university because HE EXPLOITED Chinese workers who built the railroad.”