The Railroad, part 9

Getting the tracks laid up and over the towering Sierras was going to take an army, one equipped with fearlessness and sheer mussel. To raise this army Charles Crocker advertised throughout California, offering permanent employment for as many as 5000 men. Seldom was he able to sign on more than 800 men at a time and then every payday he seemed to loose at least 100 of them. The lure of the Nevada gold fields was more enticing than the backbreaking labor of laying a railroad track across the mountains.

In 1865 Crocker thought he had the solution to his labor problem. A decade earlier Chinese had come to California to rework the tailings of the gold mines the forty-niners had left. Crocker knew just how hardworking these men, called Celestials by their white counterparts in the goldfields, could work. According to Crocker the Chinese were industrious, clean, and they weren't the hell-raisers that the Irish and other workers were. All of these facts Crocker pointed out to his chief of staff, James Harvey Strobridge.

Strobridge, whose gangling stature exceeded six-foot, was a slave driver "fortified with a spectacular fund of profanity." He had lost an eye during a black-powder blast and now wore a black patch over the empty socket. After Crocker convinced him to hire the Chinese, which at first he didn't want to do, these workers, in their Pidgin English, referred to Strobridge fearfully as "One Eye Bossy Man."

Like many persons of the fairer skin, Strobridge possessed a full measure of contempt for Celestials--those strange little men who wore "dishpan straw hats, pigtails and floppy blue pajamas." Strobridge believed that the Chinese, unlike his brawny Irish workers, were to frail for such strenuous work as constructing a railroad, much less over mountains. Further adding to his argument against hiring Chinese, Strobridge wanted to know just how he was expected to feed them, considering the "outlandish fodder they ate?" Cuttlefish, bamboo shoots, mushrooms, rice, even seaweed were their usual daily diet. Then the worst possible thing happened.

A crew of Irishmen threatened to go on strike, leaving Strobridge desperate for workers. Crocker got his way when Strobridge finally, though reluctantly, agreed to take on 50 Chinese, but only as an experiment.

Strobridge's experiment not only worked in that he soon came to realize what steady workers the Chinese were, but also in that the striking Irish hurried back to their jobs. In fact, the Chinese pleased Strobridge so much that he soon signed on an additional 50 workers, then more and more. He was so pleased that finally he was dismayed when he discovered that Crocker had all but emptied the Chinatowns of Sacramento and San Francisco of able-bodied Chinese men.

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