Who were the laborers of the Central Pacific Railroad?

Less than two years later, almost 90 percent of the Central Pacific workforce was Chinese; the rest were of European-American descent, mostly Irish. At its highest point, between 10,000 and 15,000 Chinese were working on the Central Pacific, with perhaps as many as 20,000 in total over time.



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Chinese railroad workers, who at one point made up 90% of the Central Pacific line's workers, were joined by the Union Pacific line's Irish immigrants and Civil War veterans in the east. Mormons, African Americans, and some Native American tribes, specifically the Pawnee, helped to build the railroad as well.

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Leland Stanford, president of Central Pacific, former California governor and founder of Stanford University, told Congress in 1865, that the majority of the railroad labor force were Chinese.

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Volpe's remarks referenced some of the backbreaking and deadly work done on the Central Pacific by a labor force that was almost 90 percent Chinese, many of them migrants from China, ineligible to become U.S. naturalized citizens under federal law.

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The construction crew grew to include 12,000 Chinese laborers by 1868, when they breached Donner summit and constituted eighty percent of the entire work force. The Golden spike, connecting the western railroad to the Union Pacific Railroad at Promontory, Utah, was hammered on May 10, 1869.

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Workers would often quit whenever a lucrative strike was reported, leaving the arduous manual labor of railroad construction for a fleeting chance at riches in the gold fields. CPRR managers like Charles Crocker started to consider alternative labor sources in 1864. Bank & Cut at Sailor's Spur by A.

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Rail yard engineers, dinkey operators, and hostlers. Railroad brake, signal, and switch operators and locomotive firers. Railroad conductors and yardmasters.

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The Transcontinental Railroad was built mostly with immigrant labor. The Union Pacific Railroad hired Irish immigrants and Civil War veterans, including African American freemen. The Central Pacific Railroad hired Chinese and Irish immigrants.

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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 ...

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North America's four major rail networks — Norfolk Southern, CSX, Union Pacific and Canadian National — all own lines that were built and operated with slave labor.

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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.

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Railroad workers put in long hours; a 1907 law restricted train crews to 16 hours work out of every 24. Well into the twentieth century, work was unsteady and unsafe. One railroad worker in every 357 nationally died on the job in 1889.

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Beginning in 1863, the Union Pacific, employing more than 8,000 Irish, German, and Italian immigrants, built west from Omaha, Nebraska; the Central Pacific, whose workforce included over 10,000 Chinese laborers, built eastward from Sacramento, California.

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Leland Stanford, president of Central Pacific, former California governor and founder of Stanford University, told Congress in 1865, that the majority of the railroad labor force were Chinese.

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Most of them were Chinese workers who were paid less for their labor than their European counterparts. Chinese migrants worked in the Sierra foothills for the Central Pacific Railroad. For years, railroad workers were largely overlooked in memorial events marking the railroad's completion.

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