What were the majority of the workers for the Union Pacific railroad?

More Chinese immigrants began arriving in California, and two years later, about 90 percent of the workers were Chinese. Chinese laborers at work on construction for the railroad built across the Sierra Nevada Mountains, circa 1870s. “Hong Kong and China were as close in travel time as the eastern U.S.,” Chang says.



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Chinese workers made up most of the workforce between roughly 700 miles of train tracks between Sacramento, California, and Promontory, Utah. During the 19th century, more than 2.5 million Chinese citizens left their country and were hired in 1864 after a labor shortage threatened the railroad's completion.

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While Chinese workers dominated the railroad workforce in the West, most eastern and southern railroad companies relied on Black Americans to do the back-breaking construction work.

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While Chinese workers dominated the railroad workforce in the West, most eastern and southern railroad companies relied on Black Americans to do the back-breaking construction work.

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Cornelius Vanderbilt gained control of most of the railroad industry. He offered rebates to customers and refused service for people traveling on competing railroad lines. He lowered the rates on his railroad in order to gain more business.

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The construction of the UP was led by Thomas C. Durant, vice president and general manager of Union Pacific, president of the Credit Mobilier, and a self-serving financial strategist.

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Gandy dancer is a slang term used for early railroad workers in the United States, more formally referred to as section hands, who laid and maintained railroad tracks in the years before the work was done by machines.

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Altogether, the Central Pacific Railroad hired an estimated 12,000 Chinese workers, some as young as 12. The Chinese workers, at that time the largest industrial workforce in American history, made up 90 percent of the Central Pacific's total labor force.

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Central Pacific Railroad, American railroad company founded in 1861 by a group of California merchants known later as the “Big Four” (Collis P. Huntington, Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins, and Charles Crocker); they are best remembered for having built part of the first American transcontinental rail line.

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Many workers contributed to the construction of railroads. On the East Coast, Native Americans, recently freed black people, and white laborers worked on the railroads. On the West Coast, many of the railroad workers were Chinese immigrants. New Jersey issued the first railroad charter in 1815.

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The challenge was on, “man against machine.” John Henry was known as the strongest, the fastest, and the most powerful man working on the railroad.

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Whitney suggested the use of Irish and German immigrant labor, which was in great abundance at the time. Wages were to be paid in land, thus ensuring that there would be settlers along the route to supply produce to and become patrons of the completed line.

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