Archetypal Railroad Essay

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THE CHINESE AND THE TRANSCONTINENTAL RAILROAD My name is Chin Lin Sou. I was born in China in 1837. I came to California as a young man because I had heard you could make enough money in a few years to live very comfortable in my country for the rest of your life. When I got to California I found that the Chinese men were despised by most white men. They compared us to women because we were small and had long braided hair. The only jobs we were allowed to have were laundrymen and domestic servants. I heard about a job with a company called Central Pacific. This company was in charge of building a railroad that would start in Sacramento, California and end in Omaha, Nebraska. I later learned that another company called Union…show more content…
When we met in the middle of the mountain we were only two inches apart. This was a great triumph of engineering. It had been done without electric powered carts to haul out the broken granite, no steam-driven drills, or steam engines with power scoop shovels. It had been done with black powder and muscle power. Well over 95% of this work was done by the Chinese workers. For this back-breaking, dangerous work, we were paid from $28.00 to $35.00 a month. We had to pay for our food out of our wages. We were furnished with food we liked. Oysters, cuttlefish, oriental fruits, bamboo sprouts, seaweed, and mushrooms. These came dried from a Chinese store in San Francisco. The white men drank from the streams and lakes and often had dysentery. We only drank tea, and since the water was boiled for this, we seldom got sick. We slept in tents, six or eight to a tent. Governor Leland Stanford or California broke ground in 1863 to begin construction by the Central Pacific Railroad. Six years later laborers of the Central Pacific from the west and the Union Pacific Railroad from the east met at Promontory Summit, Utah. It was here on May 10, 1869 that Governor Stanford drove the Last Spike, (a golden one) that joined the rails of the Transcontinental Railroad. Travel from coast to coast was reduced from six months or more to just one
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