The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881-1885 (37 page)

The Chinese were not hired individually but in large groups of as many as a thousand through agents representing the Six Companies of Kwang Tung. These companies were rather like commercial guilds. Colonel F. A. Bee, who acted as Chinese consul in San Francisco, described them as
benevolent associations, comparable to the Masons or Oddfellows; indeed, it was said that they had patterned themselves after similar western institutions when they were first formed in the early days of the California gold-rush. The companies handled the shipment of Chinese to North America as well as their contracts with their employers and their eventual return to China. Each Chinese paid a fee of
2½
per cent of his wages to the company, together with his passage money – about forty dollars. The company, in its turn, was pledged to look after each man’s welfare in North America, protecting him, for instance, if he got into legal difficulties.

This was certainly not “slave” labour, as many British Columbia politicians and newspapers called it, or even indentured labour. Undoubtedly the companies were a good deal more than mere benevolent associations: those who operated them made a good profit and, through an arrangement with the steamship companies, made it impossible for any Chinese to return home before he had paid his debts. On the other hand, from the point of view of the individual coolie, who could speak no word of English and who was totally uninformed about North American customs and society, the Six Companies represented the only real method of getting to the promised land.

In the winter of 1881–82, Onderdonk, having employed all the labour he could get at his prices – white, Chinese, and Indian – chartered two sailing ships to bring one thousand coolies each from Hong Kong. They arrived after a long, rough winter passage – “the men below decks slept in closed hatches with bad ventilation,” Cambie recalled-but in good physical condition. In New Westminster they were “penned in the wharf overnight like so many cattle” and then packed aboard the little stern-wheeler
William Irving
– as many as 642 to a boatload – transferred to flat cars at Emory, and sent directly out along the line.

Altogether in 1882, Onderdonk brought in ten shiploads of Chinese, a total of about six thousand. The figures were greatly exaggerated by the press. The
Globe
of Toronto and the
British Colonist
of Victoria announced that Onderdonk intended to import twenty-four thousand, almost enough to outnumber the whites. The New Westminster
British Columbian
found this too much to swallow: “We yield to none in a sincere desire to see this yellow wave swept back,” the paper said, “but surely success is not to be obtained by indulging in such palpable misrepresentation.” The new arrivals, according to the
Globe’s
British Columbia correspondent “Senex,” were “not free from the direful and contagious disease, leprosy.” Senex added a doleful coda to his dispatch: “We are now fully in the grip,” he said, “of Americans and Chinamen.”

Michael Haney declared that in his entire experience of dealing with the Chinese companies and with the individual coolies, he could not recall one case of dishonesty. They lived up to their contracts, and if there was a dispute with a sub-contractor, “it only needed the presence of a representative of the contractor to assure them that their grievances would be considered, to send them cheerfully to work again.” Nor did Haney know of a single instance of disagreement between the individual worker and the Chinese company that paid the wages. The experience of the contractors with the Chinese on the job was in marked contrast to the general feeling against them in Victoria. Everybody who dealt with them as labourers, from Andrew Onderdonk down, praised them. George Munro, who had charge of a construction gang from Yale east to Sicamous, echoed the general attitude when he said they “were easy to handle if they were properly dealt with.” But woe to any white boss who dealt with them improperly! If they thought their rights were being trampled on, they ceased to be docile. After all, in the days of Imperial China, Kwang Tung had a persistent reputation for disaffection; most of the active leaders of the subsequent revolution, including Sun Yat-sen himself, were Cantonese. Munro ruefully recalled his first payday when, through an error in the payroll department, the Chinese workers received one cent less per hour than had been agreed upon. “…  there was a little war declared right there. They stormed the Company’s stores like madmen, and it didn’t take the men at fault long to discover their mistake. The Chinamen were paid their cent and peace reigned once more.”

Such incidents were not uncommon. The coolies were divided by the company that provided them into gangs of thirty labourers plus a cook, an assistant cook, and a bookman, whose task it was to keep count of the payments to be made to each individual. In charge of each work gang was a white boss or “herder,” who dealt directly with the bookman. Any foreman who did not get along well with his Oriental labourers could expect trouble. Once when a white boss refused to allow his coolies to build a fire along the grade to heat their big teapots, they quit en masse and headed for Yale. On several occasions, white foremen were physically assaulted. One foreman who tried to fire two Chinese over the head of the gang’s bookkeeper precipitated a riot near Lytton. He and the white bridge superintendent, the timekeeper, and a teamster were attacked by the entire gang, which seriously mangled one man with a shovel. The following night a party of armed whites attacked the Chinese camp, burned their bunkhouses, and beat several coolies so severely that one died.

In such instances feeling ran high against the coolies. The Chief Justice of the province, Matthew Baillie Begbie, was horrified by “the terrible outrages against Chinamen” in the neighbourhood of Lytton. One case, he said, “in its wholesale unconcealed atrocity equalled anything which I have read of agrarian outrage in Ireland.” Begbie was aghast that in all cases “the perpetrators have escaped scot free.” In one instance the ringleaders were positively identified by four of the surviving victims but were acquitted by the jury “upon evidence of an
alibi
which the prosecutors might well deem perjured.”

The Chinese could also escape detection; since all coolies looked alike to whites, it was difficult and sometimes impossible to swear out warrants for their arrests. The
Sentinel
reported in August, 1882, that “the Chinese workers below Emory went this week for another boss and he had to make tracks for Yale. An effort has been made to get out 8 warrants in the names of the Chinamen, but they could not be had, consequently the effort failed.”

Two Chinese who attacked a foreman near Maple Ridge in February, 1883, were summonsed but later released “by a howling mob of Chinamen holding in their hands … axes, picks, shovels … [who] declared that unless the prisoners were released they would tear the houses to pieces and rescue them.” The prisoners were let go but were later recaptured, fined sixteen dollars each, and returned to camp without further trouble.

Many of these incidents occurred because of accidents along the line, for which the Chinese blamed the white foremen. On one such occasion, at Hammond, after a big slide killed several coolies, the foreman had to hold their angry co-workers at bay with a levelled revolver. Another time, about ten miles below Hope, a foreman named Miller failed to give his gang proper warning of a coming explosion; a piece of rock thrown up by the subsequent blast blew one coolie’s head right off. His comrades took off after Miller, who plunged into the river to save himself. Several Chinese dived in after him while others on the bank pelted him with stones. Miller was saved by one of the tunnel contractors who rowed a boat through the hail of missiles and hauled him in, but not before one of the Chinese had got off two shots from a pistol. Miller and his rescuer rowed desperately upstream, followed for two miles by an angry mob, before they made good their escape. Commented the
Sentinel
: “Not even Chinamen should be unnecessarily exposed to injury or loss of life.”

Deaths appeared to be more frequent among the Chinese labourers than in the white group. A single month in the late summer of Onderdonk’s first season, culled from Henry Cambie’s diary, gives an idea of their frequency:

August 13 [1880]
– A Chinese drilling on the ledge of a bluff near Alexandra Bar is killed when a stone falls from above and knocks him off.

August 19 –
A log rolls over an embankment and crushes a Chinese to death at the foot of a slope.

September 4
– A Chinese killed by a rock slide.

September
7 – A boat upsets in the Fraser and a Chinese is drowned.

September 11 –
A Chinese is smothered to death in an earth cave-in.

Yet, in that last week – on September 9 – the
Sentinel
proudly announced that “there have been no deaths since the 15th of June.” Clearly, it did not count Chinese.

The coolies were generally fatalistic about death. Haney, calling one day at a tent where a sick Chinese lay, asked the bookman: “Will he die to-day?” The bookman shook his head. “No, to-morrow, thlee o’clock.” Haney claimed that at three, to the minute, the man expired.

Several memoirs of the era suggest that when one of their fellows sickened the Chinese lost interest in him. Cambie recounted that “as soon as a man was stricken with scurvy the others would not wait upon him or even give him a drink, and the government agent at Yale had great difficulty in getting them buried when they died.” He added that many of the corpses were so lightly covered – often with little more than a few rocks – that “one became unpleasantly aware of the fact while walking along the line.” Haney believed that when it became obvious that a coolie could not get better he was actually helped into the next world by his friends. W. H. Holmes remembered streams of Chinese pouring up the Cariboo Road all day long, each with so much rice and his belongings on the end of a stick. Those who took sick, he said, or fell back from fatigue, were given a bowl of rice by their companions, who appropriated the victims’ packs and moved on. “We picked up some who would have died if they had not been helped.” Mrs. George Keefer, wife of one of the divisional engineers, had a curious experience as a result of tending to one of these deserted coolies, whom she picked up by the side of the road and nursed back to health in her own home. When she took him back to camp, his former comrades thought he was a ghost and fled from the scene. It was some time before they came to believe that he was actually alive.

The Chinese would not work in the presence of death, which they considered bad luck. When a man died on the job, the gang that worked with him usually had to be moved to another section of the line. Haney once
came upon two thousand Chinese all sitting idle; one of their number had fallen off the bank and his corpse lay far below, spread-eagled on the rocks. In vain the walking boss argued and swore. He pointed out that it was impossible to reach the body. The bank was a sheer precipice, and no boat could approach it through the boiling waters.

“Well,” said Haney, “what do you propose to do? Can’t have these Chinamen standing around until that Chinaboy disintegrates.”

The walking boss scratched his head. “There’s an Indian who promises to move that body for ten dollars. I’ve tried to make a deal with him but he won’t budge on that price and it’s too much.”

“Never mind how much it is,” Haney retorted. “Pay it and get those men back to work.”

He moved off down the line. During the evening a sharp explosion was heard in the canyon. When Haney returned, the Chinese were back at work and the body had vanished. The Indian had stolen some dynamite and caps, lowered them with a smouldering fuse down the canyon wall, and blown the cadaver to bits.

The Chinese subsisted mainly on a diet of rice and stale ground salmon, scorning the white man’s fresh meat and vegetables. As a result they died by the score from scurvy, and no real attempt was made to succour them. Two hundred who came over from China died during their first year in Canada, causing a panic among the citizens of Yale, who believed the newcomers were suffering from smallpox. The deaths continued into 1883. “Here in British Columbia along the line of the railway, the China workmen are fast disappearing under the ground,” the
Sentinel
reported in February of that year. “Within a week no less than 6 have died out of a gang of 28 employed a few miles below Emory.” Two more died suddenly the following week and a fortnight later the paper reported further deaths. As in other deaths of Chinese from accident or illness, there was no coroner’s inquest and no medical attention supplied by either the government or the contractor, a fact that aroused the
Sentinel
, which was far more solicitous of the welfare of the Chinese than any other British Columbia newspaper.

“Why no more interest is felt for the semi-slaves of China is somewhat surprising,” it wrote; and again, “No medical attention is furnished nor apparently much interest felt for these poor creatures. We understand Mr. Onderdonk declines interfering, while the Lee Chuck Co, that brought the Chinamen from their native land, refuses, through their agent Lee Soon, who is running the Chinese gang at Emory, to become responsible for doctors and medicine.… Surely some action should be taken by the
locals,” the paper urged, “… if not for the sake of the unfortunate Chinamen themselves but for the protection of the white population.…”

The cold winters caused the Chinese great hardship. Most found it impossible to work after mid-November. Cambie, on November 22, noted: “Chinamen who are still at work (only a few gangs) appear to suffer dreadfully from cold. They work in overcoats and wrap their heads up in mufflers.” In the winter of 1883–84, when Onderdonk’s work force was diminished, the suffering was very great. When the contractors had no more need of them, the Chinese were discharged and left to scrabble for pickings in the worked-out bars of the Fraser or to exist in near destitution in the dying towns along the completed track.