Collision Course - Frank McNally on the transcontinental railroad’s Irish-Chinese ‘feud’

One of the great, unifying moments in American history was the day, May 10th,1869, when the two ends of the transcontinental railway converged.

It was a triumph of immigrants: the Chinese of the Central Pacific Company working their way east and the Irish, for Union Pacific, working west. And when they finally came together in the middle of the Utah desert, they marked the historic event by killing each other.

Or so a persistent tradition says. Much repeated in shorter accounts of the project, it is there, for example, in one of Alistair Cooke’s famous Letters from America for the BBC.

Reporting from San Francisco in 2002, he first recalled the moment, romanticised in many pictures, when two locomotives “timidly nosed together” and a man on a telegraph pole “tapped out for the wonder of the world the message: ‘The last rail is laid. The last spike is driven. The Pacific railroad is finished.’”

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Then: “A more prosaic, not to say brutal, memory has stayed green in the recollections of the railroad crews and their descendants. Several days before the historic moment, the two grades had run side by side for a stretch, and the Irishmen took such an instant aversion to the little, slant-eyed Chinese that they blasted them with dynamite.

“The Chinese swiftly buried their dead and returned the gesture with pickaxes. The massacre was brief and bloody but the racial feud it brewed simmered throughout the 19th century.”

Cooke did not get into details of the “massacre”, the casual violence of which might have been too much even for Sergio Leone, whose epic Once Upon a Time in West mythologises a similar meeting of railroads.

But later in the same piece, lending general credence to the story, Cooke quotes Mark Twain on a smaller incident from that period. Twain had just landed a job with a newspaper in San Francisco and, on his first day, witnessed “a bunch of Irish toughs” beating up an old Chinese laundryman.

“I went back to the office in a state of high indignation and wrote my fill of this miserable incident. But the editor refused to print it. Our paper was printed for the poor, he said, and in San Francisco, the Irish were the poor.”

The alleged railway massacre seems to have been similarly under-reported at the time, although the convergence of the lines attracted intense media coverage.

There were “newsmen crawling all over the place”.

And there was plenty of trouble within the CP and UP construction camps, which was well documented. But there are no reports of violence between the two. Despite which, the feud has since somehow taken on the status of fact.

The Chinese certainly suffered ill treatment in those and later years, when their willingness to work for low wages attracted hostility from rival ethnic groups, Irish included. Under the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, their labourers were banned from the US for 10 years.

But the railway feud story seems to have originated, decades after the supposed fact, in the 1911 memoir of a soldier-turned-railway-investor Grenville M Dodge.

As an army intelligence officer in the Indian wars, Dodge found a pass in Nebraska ideal for the UP railroad. He then resigned his commission and became chief engineer for the climactic phase of that line’s construction.

In the 1911 book, he recalled the coming together of the UP and CP in Utah, where for a time – east of Promontory Point – the rails ran in parallel, dangerously:

“Our Irishmen were in the habit of firing their [dynamite] blasts in the cuts without giving warning to the Chinamen on the Central Pacific working right above them. From this cause several Chinamen were severely hurt . . . One day the Chinamen . . . put in what is called a ‘grave’ on their work, and when the Irishmen [were] right under them . . . let go their blast and buried several of our men. This brought a truce at once. From that time on, the Irish labourers showed due respect for the Chinamen and there was no further trouble.”

Even this is a more restrained account than Cooke’s “massacre”. But railroad historians insist it couldn’t have happened, because – for one thing – the Chinese never worked east of Promontory Point.

It was Mormon contractors who built the parallel line there. Nor is there any evidence that the Chinese and Irish every worked side by side anywhere on the railway.

Dodge was in Washington, not Utah, then. He had no first-hand knowledge of the events. And in general, his account has been described as “self-serving”, “highly selective of facts”, and “to be approached with caution”.

One rail historian has concluded: “The stories about the Chinese crews and the Irish blowing each other up is all made up and repeated over and over again each time another writer decides to write about the Pacific Railroad. There is no evidence that it ever occurred.”