The Strike That Built the Mountain: Chinese Railroad Workers, June 1867

In the spring of 1867, the hardest construction job on the continent was the Central Pacific's push through the Sierra Nevada. Chinese workers had been at it for two years, drilling and blasting through granite at elevation, killed by avalanche, by premature explosion, by falling rock. By June, wages for Chinese workers sat at $35 a month.

Out of that $35, they paid for their own food, lodging, and tools. White workers on the same railroad earned roughly $35 a month with board and lodging provided by the company. The nominal gap was five dollars. The real gap was considerably wider.

On June 24 or 25, 1867 (sources differ by one day), roughly 3,000 Chinese workers on a 30-mile stretch between Cisco and Truckee stopped working. Workers organized a disciplined, nonviolent action. They stayed in their camps. No property was damaged. No supervisor was touched.

The demands

The workers had three specific demands. They wanted $40 a month in wages, bringing their nominal pay level with the white workers' base rate. They wanted a 10-hour workday in open air, reduced from 11. And they wanted an eight-hour shift in the tunnels, where black powder smoke and heat made conditions more dangerous than the open grade. They also demanded an end to corporal punishment: overseers held the authority to whip workers or physically prevent them from leaving to seek employment elsewhere.

The demands were moderate. They did not ask for pay parity including board. They asked for the hours and the wages their counterparts received for less dangerous work.

Crocker cuts the food

Charles Crocker, the Central Pacific's construction superintendent, had one decisive advantage. The camps where the Chinese workers lived were accessible only by the company's own railroad. There were no roads through the Sierra Nevada at that elevation. The workers could not reach Sacramento markets on their own. Crocker cut off food and supply deliveries.

Within about a week, malnutrition forced the workers to return. Crocker also threatened to forfeit the entire month of June wages for workers who did not come back. No formal concessions were announced. The Central Pacific did not negotiate.

Crocker recalled it later: "If there had been that number of white laborers... it would have been impossible to control them. But this strike of the Chinese was just like Sunday all along the work. These men stayed in their camps. That is, they would come out and walk around, but not a word was said. No violence was perpetrated along the whole line." He meant it as praise for his own management. It reads as a description of workers conducting a disciplined labor action against a man with a monopoly on their food.

What followed

No leaders were ever identified by the company. No written records from the workers' side of the strike survived. In the months that followed, Central Pacific quietly raised wages for experienced workers above the $35 floor. Some historians conclude that management partially met certain hours demands without announcement, to avoid acknowledging a concession.

The workers did not get wage parity. They continued building the railroad. It was completed in May 1869.

This strike was the largest labor action in California to that point and one of the largest 19th-century labor actions in the country. The Knights of Labor formed two years later; the AFL, 19 years after that. Labor histories that begin with those organizations erase what happened in the Sierra Nevada in the summer of 1867: 3,000 workers who organized across a 30-mile mountain front, held their position for a week against a food blockade, and forced a company that controlled the only way in or out to take them seriously enough to be afraid.

Sources

• PBS American Experience, "The Chinese Workers' Strike" (transcript and primary sources)
• Gordon H. Chang, Ghosts of Gold Mountain: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019)
• Stanford University, Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project
• Wikipedia, "1867 Chinese Labor Strike" (citing Chang; use as pointer to primary sources)
• Asian American Education Project, Chinese Labor Strike of 1867 lesson plan