This post is in honor of the little guys. Not the Big Four of the CPRR, not the investors of the UPRR, not the Congressmen and dignitaries who supported the whole Transcontinental Railroad project. Just the crewmen who connected an entire nation, coast to coast.
I want to begin this photo essay, however, with an acknowledgement. The native tribes of America were deeply impacted by the coming of the railroad. Their way of life was forever altered. No summary of the TCRR would be complete without them, and I want to honor that first.
Tens of thousands of people worked on the Transcontinental Railroad. The Central Pacific line alone employed over 10,000 people at a time, and that doesn’t account for the high turnover in personnel.
Labor during the Civil War was in short supply, in the West as well as in the East. The Union Pacific solved that by hiring Irish immigrants. After the war, they also hired army veterans. The Central Pacific, having direct sea access to China by way of San Francisco, hired Chinese laborers.
Much has been said about the discrimination Chinese labor faced among the white population, but the railroad viewed them as hard-working employees. Charles Crocker, testifying before Congress in 1877, said, “We have treated them like men, and they have treated us like men, and they are men, good and true men.” (The entire report will reveal attitudes by the Congressmen that were not as favorable, by the way. The U.S. has come a long way in 100-plus years.)
When the last rail was laid and the Golden Spike ceremony was over, Central Pacific Construction Boss James Strobridge hosted a dinner party in his rail car. He invited a Chinese labor crew as his personal guests to the party, and they were greeted with cheers for a job well done.
The crews on the railroad did extremely dangerous work. Many died in the process. And we in modern America still owe them a debt of gratitude for the feat of engineering and endurance they pulled off.
All of those crewmen needed a place to live in the wilderness. Much has been made of the “Hell on Wheels” towns that sprang up around the end of the tracks. Those were more interested in parting the men from their wages than they were in taking care of their needs. Their needs were provided by the rail companies, in the form of tent cities and dormitory cars. The Union Pacific dorms described in The Journal of Sean Sullivan (William Durbin, 1999) had two levels of sleeping quarters in each car.
Note: The historic photos by Alfred A. Hart were stereographic prints. They have been cropped to highlight the content for modern audiences.
Featured image credit: Crewman riding atop train on Cement Ridge, circa 1865-69, by Alfred A. Hart, Library of Congress. Cropped and colorized by The Novel Historian, 2019.
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You can get a tourist’s-eye-view of the TCRR in the middle chapters of my novel, Transcontinental Runaway, available on Amazon Kindle.
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