How much did the Chinese get paid to build the Transcontinental Railroad?
Initially, Chinese employees received wages of $27 and then $30 a month, minus the cost of food and board. In contrast, Irishmen were paid $35 per month, with board provided. Workers lived in canvas camps alongside the grade.
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The Central Pacific's Chinese immigrant workers received just $26-$35 a month for a 12-hour day, 6-day work week and had to provide their own food and tents.
The construction of the Transcontinental Railroad was an engineering feat of human endurance, with the western leg built largely by thousands of immigrant Chinese laborers. The building of the Transcontinental Railroad relied on the labor of thousands of migrant workers, including Chinese, Irish, and Mormons workers.
“Not only were they paid less than their white counterparts,” Chang says. “They also had to pay for their food, supplies and medicine, all of which the railroad company provided to white workers.” What little money the Chinese workers saved, they sent back to their families.
The railroad workers were paid, on average, a dollar a day. They lived in twenty railroad cars, including dormitories and an arsenal car containing a thousand loaded rifles. They worked hard and were usually able to lay from one to three miles of track per day depending upon the available materials.
On the western portion, about 90% of the backbreaking work was done by Chinese migrants. About 10,000 to 15,000 Chinese workers came to the United States to build the Central Pacific Railroad. Chinese workers found some economic opportunity but also experienced hostility, racism, violence, and legal exclusion.
They were paid less than other workers and expected to purchase their own food. However, this disadvantage turned out to carry some advantages for the Chinese workers. Records indicate they ate a diet rich in vegetables, seafood, rice, and tea.
He told President Andrew Johnson that the Chinese were indispensable to building the railroad: They were “quiet, peaceable, patient, industrious and economical.” In a stockholder report, Stanford described construction as a “herculean task” and said it had been accomplished thanks to the Chinese, who made up 90% of the ...
While much of the original transcontinental railroad tracks are still in use, the complete, intact line fell out of operation in 1904, when a shorter route bypassed Promontory Summit.
After completing the first transcontinental railroad in 1869, Chinese laborers fanned out across the United States to work on at least 71 other rail lines, according to Fishkin.
They would next find work on the railroads in the West, especially Texas. More than 1,200 Chinese laborers helped build the Southern Pacific Railroad from Los Angeles to El Paso, completed in May 1881. When the job was done, about 300 Chinese decided to stay in El Paso.
In 1870 it took approximately seven days and cost as little as $65 for a ticket on the transcontinental line from New York to San Francisco; $136 for first class in a Pullman sleeping car; $110 for second class; and $65 for a space on a third- or “emigrant”-class bench.
The rail line, also called the Great Transcontinental Railroad and later the Overland Route, was predominantly built by the Central Pacific Railroad Company of California (CPRR) and Union Pacific (with some contribution by the Western Pacific Railroad Company) over public lands provided by extensive US land grants.