Western Railroad Discussion > Chinese RR Heritage Represented in Dutch Flat 4th

A few years ago, on the 150th Anniversary of the Golden Spike, a Chinese Heritage group from San Francisco came to visit our little museum here in Dutch Flat.  Dutch Flat had a sizable Chinese community in the years following the completion of the Transcontinental RR, a fact well represented in our museum.  Dutch Flat also has a fair sized Chinese Cemetery.
Anyway, I guess the Heritage group took a liking to DF and keeps coming back..   they've come to march in out 4th of July Parade every year since the 150th-  and their visiting group seems to grow in numbers every year.  This year was the biggest yet- close to 100 participants!   (Plus 3 Lion dancers and 2 Dragons)
SR



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/05/26 09:17 by BoilingMan.

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Are there Chinese in any of the Sierra Nevada towns that you know of?  Google says Chinese workers were 25% of Truckee in the 1870s, but now less than 2%.

mapboy

Thanks for posting.  Good to celebrate this contribution to the transcontinental railroad story.

This is very cool to see - thank you for the post!

Not in any remarkable numbers, no.
Dutch Flat once had the largest Chinese community in the county. I can’t think of any Chinese in DF today.
SR

Posted from iPhone

Great posting!
Hope some of the railroad group are aware of detailed Chinese contributions to construction over Donner Pass.
Regards, Jim Evans

I think they’re very aware. I was talking to one of the group’s leaders a few years ago and mentioned my explorations of the CPRR ROW with my drone. He was very curious if I had LINAR (sp?) capabilities with my drone. It doesn’t, but if it did he was interested in collaborating with me to search for Chinese Labor Camp Sites. He went on to say that IF I helped them find sites, I would be sworn to secrecy and only share my discoveries w the Chinese Cultural Center- they are VERY concerned with camp robbers!

In other words- they’re very knowledgeable!
SR

Thanks for the photos!

As for the Chinese population, while some stayed on with the CPRR after construction completed, a good many more did go into other lines of work along the route.  For example, out in this part of Nevada a lot of the discharged Chinese laborers went into wood cutting and gold mining.  However, they faced a lot of racism, discrimination, and general hostility, especially during the economic recession of the 1870s, and then Congress started passing a list of Chinese exclusionary laws.  The Page Law enacted in 1875 restricted immigration of Chinese women, then the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 severely restricted all immigration from China for a ten year period.  The Exclusion Act got extended in 1892 and then was made part of permanent Federal law in 1902, it did not get rescinded until 1943 which was the first time Chinese immigrants could get U.S. citizenship.  Taken together, the Acts and general racism and discrimination significantly reduced the Chinese population in much of the United States, and nativist fears about non-white immigrant labor largely forced them- often quite literally at gunpoint- out of most rural areas and communities.  This goes a long ways towards explaining why there are so few Chinese today in places that once had large populations. 

Jeff Moore
Elko, NV    

I haven’t come across any overt anti-Chinese history here in Dutch Flat, but there are some fairly horrific stories from nearby communities. Caucasian Societies in the area harassed the Chinese and threatened anyone sympathetic to them. A particularly
ugly example took place in Little York, CA, just across the Bear River from Dutch Flat.
Never heard of Little York?
No surprise.
It was a small placer mining town where the Chinese workers were welcomed. The Caucasian Society warned the town there would be trouble if the Chinese were allowed to stay. The town refused to comply.

One night a fire broke out in town. They were helpless to fight it- the pipe supplying city water had been sabotaged!
Little York burned to the ground and was never rebuilt. Today there are a few cellar pits and a small marker.
SR

Not to mention what was going on in China:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiping_Rebellion

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boxer_Rebellion

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rebellions_in_China

There's stories on the web of the North West Company and the Hudson Bay Company in the old Oregon Country hiring Chinese workers when the Pacific Islander workers decided to pack up and go home. 

The work crews from the Central Pacific worked on the Siskiyou Line and also the Candian Pacific Railroad construction.

There's a nice Chinese Restauraunt n the French area of South America who's owners claimed to be left over from the Chinese Fleet circumnavigation of the world in the 1400's:

https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/catalog/2224389

The next year a new family bought the Restauraunt and the previous owners flew back to China.

That man holding the photo of the Secret Town trestle is pretty amazing--I've driven into Secret Town, directly below that huge fill the Chinese did--one litte wagon at a time.  It's hard to imagine that huge trestle is still there, buried under all that dirt!!

Very interesting about the Chinese work camp "research" offer....

Yeah, he kind of surprised me with that photo. The burying of the Secretown Trestle is explained in a diorama in the museum- an N Gauge 4’ section of the trestle (the entire trestle would require about 7’) is divided in 3 parts: As built, half buried, and as-is today.
SR

BTW: I built the trestle diorama. Most of the trestle bents I did aboard our boat- quite a few while anchored off Santa Cruz Island. Surely I can claim it to be the only model RRing done at the island, right?
Well, N Gauge anyway. I doubt the Chumash had N Gauge.

Great thread.

Chinese construction workers also played a major role in the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway in the mountains.  Andrew Onderdonk had a major program importing workers for the CPR.  



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/06/26 13:30 by Lackawanna484.

Importing, aka Shanghaing I think it was called.

masterphots Wrote:
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> Importing, aka Shanghaing I think it was called.

Shanghaiing was more of an "export".  Many sailors jumped ship on arrival in San Francisco to seek their fortune in the gold fields.  The under-manned outbound ships often got men drunk in bars and they would wake up on their way to Shanghai and other ports.  The main character in Jack London's The Sea-Wolf is in a ferry collision in the SFO area and wakes up on a seal-hunting schooner.

mapboy

More info:

https://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=Shanghaiing

https://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=Shanghaiing_and_its_Abolition

Very surprised to find out how long those buildings were standing.

BoilingMan Wrote:
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> I think they’re very aware. I was talking to
> one of the group’s leaders a few years ago and
> mentioned my explorations of the CPRR ROW with my
> drone. He was very curious if I had LINAR (sp?)
> capabilities with my drone. It doesn’t, but if
> it did he was interested in collaborating with me
> to search for Chinese Labor Camp Sites. 

SR,

I suspect what you heard was LiDAR, which uses a laser to measure precise distances, and can be used to create very accurate toographic profiles.

Elizabeth
 

That sounds right.
Apparently it can detect earth that has been disturbed- even 100’s of years ago. I think infrared light is involved? I never got far enough into the subject to get an informed knowledge of it.
It is a perfect tool for finding places where construction camps had been, just off from the RoW, in the desert.
SR

Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) is often used to detect disturbed soil under the surface, like a grave or a body. It's the next gen of the metal detectors folks use to find belt buckles, coins, etc. 

Florida law officers used GPR to discover and help mark the precise locations of likely graves in a long abandoned cemetery in Martin County. The area was over grown, but the pre-1925  graves registered very clearly.

GPR has been used at Dutch Flat’s Chinese cemetery. It’s always been thought all remains had long ago been removed and returned to China.
GPR revealed that is not entirely true..

It’s one of the reasons the Chinese Cultural groups keep returning to DF
SR