The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881-1885 (36 page)

Six months after Onderdonk began his contract the hospital at Yale had to be enlarged to take care of the accident victims. Mrs. Onderdonk, capable and unpretentious, acted as superintendent. Most of the injured arrived in bad shape because of the difficulty of conveying them back to Yale over the impossible terrain. Deaths occurred almost weekly, as a study of the
Inland Sentinel
reveals:

May 18, 1881
– Flying rock from a blast in a cut sprays eight men, killing one.

June 2, 1881
– The white boss of a Chinese work gang ignores a warning that all the charges have not yet gone off, walks forward, and is killed instantly when a blast hurls a rock straight into his face.

June 9, 1881
– Two workmen die when rock is dislodged from the ceiling of a tunnel in which they are working.

“Our attention has been called to the neglected condition of the cemetery here, of late,” the
Sentinel
wrote that June. “The fact that it is rapidly filled up with victims and strangers from the railway works … should not cause less interest than has heretofore been displayed upon ‘the city of the dead.’ ” The same issue reported “many unnecessary sacrifices of life along the railway construction line.” That day a local man, the proprietor of the Romano House, had a narrow escape when a dynamite blast showered his carriage with pieces of rock.

By August the paper was becoming alarmed at the accident rate: “Life is held too cheap, generally, in this country, and it will evidently require severe punishment to teach parties that they cannot trifle with other people’s lives even if they are careless of their own existence.” Exactly one week after those words were written, two more men working in Number Seven Tunnel were killed by falling boulders.

2
“The beardless children of China”

When Andrew Onderdonk arrived in British Columbia there were perhaps thirty-five thousand white citizens in the province. Since he would need at least ten thousand able-bodied men to build his part of the railway – and actually many more, because of the turnover – it was clear that he would have to look elsewhere for much of his labour force. From the very outset there was a kind of terror that he would solve the problem by importing and employing Chinese.

The
British Colonist
, which since the days of its eccentric founder Amor de Cosmos had stoutly opposed all Oriental immigration, showed this feeling early in January, 1880, after the Seattle
Post
had warned the British Columbians that they might as well “resign themselves to all the evils of Chinese competition for but little short of a miracle will prevent the San Francisco contractors from employing Chinamen on their work.” The
Colonist
voiced the fear that Onderdonk would exclude “white free labor … and by the employment of Chinese slave labour conspire to send beyond the seas the eight or ten millions of Canadian money required to be spent on the work of construction.” However, the paper reassured its readers, “we have reason to know that in assenting to the transfer of the contract the Can. Govt. asked for the employment of the surplus
white
labour of the Province and of Canada.”

The difficulty was that there was very little surplus white labour because of the railroad boom in the western United States and in Canada. Onderdonk, when he arrived in Victoria in April, 1880, was met by a deputation from the Anti-Chinese Association. He was not evasive in his reply to their demand for assurances that he would not employ Orientals, but he was careful to avoid committing himself. It was his intention, he informed the delegation, to give white labour the preference in all cases. When the white labour of the province was exhausted he would, if necessity compelled him, fall back on the French Canadians of eastern Canada. Should that not be sufficient, he would with reluctance engage Indians and Chinese.

The first Chinese had come to British Columbia from California in 1858, attracted by the gold of the Fraser and Cariboo. Anti-Chinese feeling had been rising steadily since the early 1860’s and had reached a peak in 1878 when the Legislature passed a resolution banning their employment in the public works of the province. At that time there were some three thousand Chinese in British Columbia, all of them prepared to work
for lower wages than any white labourer; that was the chief cause of the discontent. The
British Colonist
, which wanted Chinese immigration restricted, exclaimed in 1878 that “the Chinese ulcer is eating into the prosperity of the country and sooner or later must be cut out.” That same year the provincial government imposed a head-tax of ten dollars on all Chinese, an act that met with the most stubborn resistance. Stores in Victoria’s Chinatown closed their doors; Chinese merchants refused to sell goods to whites; laundrymen abandoned their daily operations; vegetable peddlers ceased to call; cooks, housemaids, and houseboys deserted their posts in restaurants and private homes. The impasse was resolved after a fortnight or so when the British Columbia Supreme Court ruled that the tax was unconstitutional; but the bitterness remained. There was no politician in the province who could have been elected had he advocated, even in the most tentative terms, the continued admittance of any Chinese to Canada. Indeed, it was considered to be political suicide to take any stand but one that was anti-Chinese.

The feeling elsewhere in Canada, though less intense, was generally against the Chinese. The Trades and Labour Council of Toronto wanted them banned outright from Canada. Almost all newspapers were editorially opposed to Oriental immigration. The general theme was that the “Chinamen” (they were rarely referred to in any other way) were filthy, stupid, insensitive, immoral heathens. “A Chinaman does not know the meaning of filial love,” the Port Moody
Gazette
wrote of a race obsessed with ancestor worship. There was, the paper said, no affinity between the white and the yellow races, “nor ever can be, in spite of all that is preached about the universal brotherhood of man.” In Winnipeg, where Chinese were all but unknown, the
Times
published a fairly typical series of opinions about “the beardless and immoral children of China,” as it called them; they possessed “no sense whatever of any principle of morality”; their brains were “vacant of all thoughts which lift up and ennoble humanity”; and “it is an established fact that dealings with the Chinese are attended with evil results.” But then other races did not fare much better in Canadian newspapers. Negroes, who were invariably referred to as “darkies” or “niggers,” were generally presented as shiftless, lazy, dirty, immoral, sexually depraved, and dangerous. Jews were caricatured unmercifully by cartoonists, referred to as “sheenies,” and depicted as grasping, cheating, and conniving.

The Prime Minister himself agreed that the Chinese were “an alien race in every sense that would not and could not be expected to assimilate with our Arian population,” but he was far too pragmatic to exclude
Orientals from Canada until the railway was built. He put it bluntly to Parliament in 1882: “It is simply a question of alternatives: either you must have this labour or you can’t have the railway.”

The vanguard of Onderdonk’s white labour force came from San Francisco, then the only real source of supply. Some of these men, sent up by employment agents, “had never done a hard day’s work before.” To quote Henry Cambie, they were for the most part clerks out of employment, “broken-down bar-keepers, or men of that class,” men who had never handled a shovel before and who often appeared on the scene attired in fashionable garments in a rather tattered state. Some of these new labourers actually went into the cuttings wearing patent leather shoes with trousers sprung over the foot. W. H. Holmes, who worked under Onderdonk in the Fraser Canyon, described the early labour force as “roughnecks from San Francisco and the Barbary Coast as well as good men.” The bad, however, tended to drive out the good. “The few good men declined to associate, or herd at bed and board, with ‘Sand-lot hoodlums’ from San Francisco,” the
Globe
reported. “The residue also sought their former haunts across the line, so that even to keep up a modicum of white labour was a work of no little difficulty.…”

In the early days of the contract there were wild scenes at Emory and Yale. The streets of both communities were jammed with men, some arriving for work, some idling about, some departing. The saloons did a roaring business; fights were a daily occurrence. Steamboats arriving daily with freight found there was no place to stack it. Every available teamster had been hired, but there were not half enough teams to haul the goods away. Boatloads of grain poured in, along with tools, lumber, and blasting powder. Men of all kinds had to be sorted out – stewards, cooks, flunkeys, drillers, carpenters, teamsters, stable men, and blacksmiths. Manpower was vital, for there was no machinery to speak of. Later on Onderdonk brought in drills that were worked by steam and compressed air, but in the first hectic months everything was done by hand.

Onderdonk was operating on a tight budget. He had been forced to accept four contracts at bids which were more than a million and a half dollars lower than his own tendered price. He had paid out an additional two hundred and fifteen thousand dollars to purchase the contracts of the successful bidders. In short, he had almost two million dollars less to work with than he had contemplated when he undertook to tender on the Fraser River section of the
CPR
.

Moreover, he was asking men to come all the way to the wilds of British Columbia for wages that were lower than those the Northern Pacific was
offering through more settled country. Onderdonk paid his labourers between $1.50 and $1.75 a day; the American railway was offering between $1.75 and $2.00 a day. For skilled labour, the gap was even greater: Onderdonk’s bridge carpenters, for example, were paid between $2.00 and $2.50 a day; the same tradesmen working on Northern Pacific bridges received a dollar a day more.

Chinese coolies, on the other hand, could be employed for one dollar a day. The contracts, furthermore, stipulated that they must buy their provisions at the company stores, where the prices were inflated; if they took their custom elsewhere they were to be paid only eighty cents. In addition, the white workers required all the paraphernalia of a first-class camp, including cooks, flunkeys, and a wide variety of supplies. The coolie was prepared to take care of himself: he could move about in the wilderness, set up his own camp, and pack all his belongings, provisions, and camp equipment on his back. Michael Haney, who went to work for Onderdonk in 1883, discovered that it was possible to move two thousand Chinese a distance of twenty-five miles and have them at work all within twenty-four hours. The same task could not be performed with a similar number of white workmen in less than a week. It is small wonder, then, that almost from the outset Andrew Onderdonk began hiring Chinese in spite of a volley of protests.

The United States transcontinental railway system had already established the efficiency of coolie labour. The first Chinese to work on any railway were imported by that colourful and gargantuan innovator Charles Crocker, the ex-peddler, ex-miner, and ex-trader who built the Central Pacific. Crocker, realizing that Irish-Americans were not in sufficient supply to complete the railroad, had first tried to arrange the mass immigration of Mexican peons. When this plan was aborted he turned, in desperation, to the Chinese, who were at the time working the old California placer claims, growing vegetables in market gardens, operating laundries, or serving as houseboys. Few believed that these small, frail people were tough enough to stand the back-breaking labour that would be required in the high Sierras, but Crocker reasoned that any race that could construct the Great Wall of China could also build a railroad. He decided to experiment with fifty coolies, whom he hauled to the end of track. To his astonishment and delight, they quickly put together a clean and efficient camp, cooked a rice supper, and dropped off to sleep as if they had lived all of their lives in the mountains. They were up with the sun, picks in hand, and by sunset Crocker was wiring Sacramento for more. By 1866 six thousand of them were at work on the Central Pacific.
Crocker paid them thirty-one dollars a month, out of which they supplied their own keep. His white labourers received thirty dollars a month and their board.

Some of these men were undoubtedly numbered among the first Chinese to go to work for Andrew Onderdonk. The first consignment came from the Northern Pacific Railroad in Oregon in 1880, the second from the Southern Pacific in California in 1881. These early arrivals – there were fifteen hundred of them – were fairly green, possibly because the nonChinese foremen were themselves inexperienced. Cambie, after walking along the right of way on June 7, 1880, confided to his diary that the work force was “so large in many places, the Chinamen seem to be in each other’s way.” At this point there were no animals on the line moving earth and rock; the Chinese were themselves employed as beasts of burden. At one point, to his horror, the thrifty Cambie found forty Chinese moving ten small wagons a distance of four miles, “a waste of money – for four mules could do the same work much more quickly.” Later arrivals, however, included “some trained gangs of rock men as good as I ever saw.” In the Report of the Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration in 1885, J. A. Chapleau wrote that “as a railway navvy, the Chinaman has no superior.”

Almost every Chinese who immigrated to North America came from South China, a fact that explains why almost all of the so-called Chinese cuisine eaten by westerners is a corruption of Cantonese cooking. Specifically, the coolies came from eight districts of Kwang Tung province whose capital, Canton, was the only port in the country through which foreign trade was permitted. Kwang Tung was China’s window on the West-Hong Kong was only a few miles away – and this situation, together with the extreme poverty and crowded conditions of the coolies (who were hived together, 241 to the square mile), made the prospect of emigration attractive. Each Chinese farmer yearned for financial independence, and all it took to buy financial independence in Kwang Tung (where the average wage was seven cents a day) was three hundred American dollars. It was the ambition of almost every immigrant to save that much money and then return to his homeland after perhaps five years of work on the railroad or in the mining camps, a situation which helps explain the British Columbians’ continuing complaints about money leaving the province.