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The Chinese Railroad Workers and the Donner Pass Tunnels

For those wanting to learn about the thousands whose backbreaking work in California’s High Sierras changed America

Peter Paccone
22 min readJul 17, 2021

The story of the Donner Pass Tunnels is one of the great stories of American history. It’s also one of the least known. Even less well known is the story of the Chinese railroad workers who dug those tunnels.

For those wanting to learn about either of these two topics — the tunnels or the tunnel-digging Chinese — I have produced this blog post, though I didn’t know much about either topic before this writing despite having taught US History for years.

To learn what I needed to know to produce this blog post, I first turned to the students enrolled in my summer school, six-week, four-hour-per-day US History course.

Search the internet, I told the kids. Let’s see what you can find, with the better websites they discovered appearing below:

I then asked my students to reach out to various experts with questions they could not find answers to on the internet. Experts who responded included Phil Sexton, Jerry Blackwill, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, and Roland Hsu, to name a few.)

Then, to learn more, I went to see the tunnels for myself.

  • On day one of my trip, and in the car from Los Angeles to Sacramento, I listened to Gordon Chang’s highly informative and well-written audiobook Ghosts of Gold Mountain. I live in Los Angeles, with the six-hour drive to Sacramento giving me enough time to work through the entire book. Great ‘read!’
  • On day two, I toured Sacramento’s California State Railroad Museum and its Chinese Railroad Workers Exhibit. That took care of the basics.
  • On day three, I hiked through several of the Donner Pass Tunnels with Jerry Blackwill (the president of the Truckee Donner Railroad Society and a board member of the Museum of Truckee History.) After this five-mile hike, Jerry and I lunched in Truckee. Jerry then gave me a tour of the Truckee Railroad Museum and the new Museum of Truckee History. What a wonderful day that was! I learned much.
  • On day four, I spent time with Phil Sexton at his ranch in Auburn just west of the tunnels, a visit that included a chance to see something called Bloomer Cut and Cape Horn. Phil is a former Deputy Director and Director of Public Programs for the CA State Railroad Museum. Currently, he serves as the Executive Director of the North Lake Tahoe Historical Society. I so enjoyed learning from Phil. He’s very knowledgeable. I also very much enjoyed seeing the cut and the horn (with a description of how to do both in my follow-up later in this read)

I then turned to various artists known for “wanting to draw the story of the Chinese workers back into history,” with this outreach resulting in artist Linglei Lu providing me with permission to include six of his wonderful paintings in this post (though each of his paintings relates more directly to the Chinese who helped build Canada’s first transcontinental railroad.)

Then I produced an introductory post — The Donner Pass Tunnels: For those wanting to see the tunnels up close and learn their history.

Next, I asked the students to find the answers to 15 questions relating to the 15,000–20,000 hardworking, brave, and to this day still relatively unknown and not well understood Chinese who ‘dug” the tunnels.

  1. Where did the Chinese who dug the Donner Pass Tunnels come from?
  2. When and how did these ‘Railroad Chinese” get to California?
  3. Were the Railroad Chinese paid for their work, or were they enslaved?
  4. When and where did these Chinese first start working for the Central Pacific?
  5. Did the Chinese, in the run from Bloomer Cut to the Summit Tunnel (aka Tunnel 6), produce any notable work?
  6. Did the Chinese, in the run from the Summit Tunnel to Promontory Point, Utah, produce any notable work?
  7. What, where, and how did the Chinese eat?
  8. Where and how did the Chinese sleep?
  9. What did the Chinese workers do for fun?
  10. How did the Chinese mourn the loss of their own?
  11. To what extent did the Chinese know the story of the Donner Party when working on Tunnel 6 during the fierce winter of 1869?
  12. To what extent did the Chinese leave behind any written record?
  13. Did any of the Chinese appear in the famous Promontory Point photograph?
  14. Where did the Chinese go, and what did they do after completing the transcontinental railroad?
  15. How did the work of the Chinese change America?

Below, the answers to each of these 15 questions.

Question 1:
Where did the Central Pacific Railroads, Donner Pass tunnel-digging Chinese workers come from?
Most of these Chinese workers came from what (in the 1860s) was called Canton (now called Guangzhou) and the area of the Pearl River Delta.

Question 2:
When and how did these workers get to California?
The Chinese who worked on the Donner Pass Tunnels mostly came to the United States aboard wooden-hulled, sidewheel steamships.

A boat arriving in Singapore with Chinese, circa 1900.
A boat arriving in San Francisco with Chinese in the 1870s. Engraving from Harper’s Weekly, May 20, 1876

The steamships would typically arrive in San Francisco carrying somewhere between 200–800 Chinese. The Chinese workers would then need to find a way to travel the approximately 100 miles from San Fransico to the Donner Pass Tunnels, with this journey often done by a combination of train, foot, and horse-drawn wagon.

Question 3:
Were the Chinese paid for their work, or were they enslaved?
The Chinese were paid for their work, receiving wages of $27 and then $30 a month, minus the cost of food and board. In contrast, Irishmen were paid $35 per month, with board provided.

“The Chinese workers were paid 30% to 50% less than their white counterparts and were given the most dangerous work.” Remember the Chinese Immigrants who Built America’s First Transcontinental Railroad

An interesting sidenote — on June 25, 1867, thousands of Chinese railroad workers staged a strike to demand equal pay to the Irish, shorter workdays, and better conditions, with the Central Pacific ultimately “breaking the strike” when they withheld food supplies to the Chinese, isolated as they were in the high mountains of the Sierras.

Question 4:
When and where did the Chinese first start working for the Central Pacific?
The Chinese first started working for the Central Pacific at Bloomer’s Ranch in early 1864.

Bloomer’s Ranch is located 38 miles northeast of Sacramento, near the city of Auburn.

There the Chinese workers were called upon to blast and dig through steep terrain to create Bloomers Cut” (a level grade for tracks 800 feet long and 63 feet high, with the Chinese having to dig the through naturally cemented gravel and hard clay with picks, shovels, and black powder.)

Here’s how Bloomer Cut looked when Phil Sexton took me there in the summer of 2021.

Not me

This was the first major engineering challenge for the railroad, and it was dangerous work, but when completed in 1864, it was hailed as the “Eighth Wonder of the World.”

It has remained virtually unchanged since, with many trains still traveling westbound through the cut daily.

Freight training going through Bloomer Cut (1:58)
Amtrak train going through Bloomer Cut (1:04)

If you wish to see Bloomer Cut for yourself, it’s tucked away in a suburban neighborhood that’s easy to reach.

  • From Highway 80 east, take the Maple Road exit and keep straight. Maple will turn into Auburn Folsom Road. Follow it for 1 ¼ mile until you reach Herdal Drive on your right. Travel a short distance down Herdal until it dead ends. Park and locate the historical marker on the other side of the fence. Then, follow the path to your left just two-tenths of a mile. It will lead you to the edge of the pass with the track visible below. Then follow the path another 50 yards down to the railbed. The path is rocky, so wear sturdy shoes and exercise caution.
  • From westbound I-80, take the Hwy 49 Grass Valley/Placerville exit in Auburn and turn right onto Highway 49. Turn right onto Lincoln Way, left at the next stoplight onto Auburn Folsom Road, and then follow the directions above.

If you ever plan to visit the Donner Pass Tunnels, be sure to see the cut. I can’t emphasize this enough. I was in total awe when I first saw it. Photographs and a written description don’t do it justice. This is one of those “you have to see it for yourself to believe it,” with the cut best viewed in the mid-to-late afternoon light.

Ribbons of rails stretching across the landscape are a riveting sight. Tracks traversing a narrow pass flanked by 63-foot high walls are even more captivating. Such is the inspiring sight that will greet you at Bloomer Cut in Auburn. A hidden historic gem.

Question 5:
Did the Chinese, in the run from Bloomer Cut to the Summit Tunnel (aka Tunnel 6), produce any notable work?
In the run from Bloomer Cut to Tunnel 6, the Chinese workers produced several other notable works. Topping the list, the building of a “ledge” into something called Cape Horn.

Cape Horn is a steep peninsula located in Colfax, 20 minutes east of Bloomer Cut, with the ledge that the Chinese built cut into the wall of this steep peninsula 1200 feet above the American River.

Construction took a year. More than 300 Chinese workers fell to their deaths in the process.

Train Rounding Cape Horn from a Drone (0:59)

There are conflicting accounts of how the Chinese carried out this work.

Some say that the Chinese lowered themselves in woven baskets, placing explosives to blast out rock they couldn’t chip away by hand.

Others have dismissed those accounts as myths, saying that “a Southern Pacific Railroad public relations agent concocted the story in 1927 to entertain travelers as they went around Cape Horn.” 150 Years ago, Chinese Railroad Workers Risked their Lives in Pursuit of the American dream

“The Railroad Chinese working at Cape Horn did not hang over cliffs supported by ropes, bosun’s chairs, or hand-woven wicker baskets. These well-known stories . . . are incorrect and . . . not supported by primary historical sources.” Laborers Did Not Use Bosun’s Chairs and Hanging Wicker Baskets in the Railroad Construction at Cape Horn — The Colfax Area Historical Society.

In any event, the plague appearing below and found in the parking lot of the Red Frog, an old-fashioned funky bar and grill located at 1001 CA-174, Colfax, suggests that the Chinese “were (indeed) lowered over the face of Cape Horn Prmonotry in wicker bosun’s chairs to the point of 1332 feet above the canyon floor.”

When standing in front of the plaque, one need only look up and across a thickly forested valley to get a great view of Cape Horn. One can also get a great view of Cape Horn from the back patio of the Red Frog.

The Red Frog
Cape Horn as viewed from the back patio of the Red Frog when I was there

This past summer, while enjoying a burger and some fries on the back patio of the Red Frog, Phil Sexton and I not only enjoyed watching various trains rounding Cape Horn, we enjoyed even more debating the question of whether the Railroad Chinese made use of bosun chairs and/or woven baskets at Cape Horn.

Question 6:
Did the Chinese workers, in the run from the Donner Pass Tunnels to Promontory Point, produce any notable works?
As construction neared Promontory Summit, workers laid ten miles and fifty-six feet of track in one day on April 28, 1869, working between 5 am and 7 pm.

The accomplishment was in response to a $10,000 wager Charles Crocker made with Thomas Durant of the Union Pacific that his Central Pacific workers were capable of doing what seemed impossible. A squad of eight Irish rail-handlers and an army of several thousand Chinese accomplished the feat. In the end 25,800 ties, 3,520 rails (averaging 560 lbs. each), 55,080 spikes, 14,050 bolts, and other materials, totaling in weight 4,462,000 pounds, were laid down. The track was not a simple straight line but curved so the workers had to bend the rails for all the curves. “Rails were placed on two blocks and forced into the desired curve by blows of a heavy hammer — a time-consuming process,” according to one account.1 Crocker related that an Army officer witnessed the advance and said, “I never saw such organization as that. It was just like an army marching over the ground and leaving the track behind them.”2 The San Francisco Bulletin described the effort as “the greatest work in tracklaying ever accomplished or conceived by railroad men.”3

The names of the eight Irish workers were recorded by the railroad; they were taken to Sacramento to be cheered in a parade, their wagon filled with flowers thrown by women and children. None of the Chinese workers’ names were recorded. “With the eight sons of Erin and the sons of ‘John Chinaman’ rest the palms of a great track-laying victory.”

The above from the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project

For a description of some other examples of notable work that the Chinese produced in the run from the Donner Pass Tunnels to Promontory, click here. This read describes the work related to names such as Winnemucca, Battle Mountain, Carlin Canyon, and Humbolt Wells.

Question 7:
What, where, and how did the Chinese eat?
Nearly all the food the Chinese ate came from China, except for American chickens. Like so many exiles and expatriates throughout history, the Chinese wanted to eat their own food.

According to The Chinese Workers in North America Project website, “the Chinese workers ate, dried oysters, dried cuttle-fish, dried fish, sweet rice crackers, dried bamboo sprouts, salted cabbage, Chinese sugar (which tasted to me very much like sorghum sugar), four kinds of dried fruits, five kinds of desiccated vegetables, vermicelli, dried sea-weed, Chinese bacon cut up into salt cutlets, the dried meat of the abalone shell, peanut oil, dried mushrooms, tea, and rice. They buy also pork from the butcher, and on holidays they eat poultry. Compare this bill of fare with the beef, beans, bread-and-butter, and potatoes of the white laborers, and you will see that (the Chinese) have a much greater variety of food.”

The website goes on to state that “many of these foodstuffs came from California sources, such as fresh vegetables, but others had to be imported. They also drank tea and hot water . . . with the Chinese diet and especially the use of boiled water reducing the outbreak of dysentery and other diseases. “Tea boys” would wander through the construction sites pouring out boiled tea from small kegs slung over their shoulders.

As for the question of how did the Chinese cook their food, “the cooks built their own type outdoor ovens in the dirt banks alongside the sidetrack and their stake pots spit alongside their bunk cars where they did most of their cooking when the weather permitted. Each cook would have the use of a very big iron kettle hanging over an open fire and into it they would dump a couple of measures of Chinese unhulled brown rice, Chinese noodles, bamboo sprouts and dried seaweed, different Chinese seasonings and American chickens cut up into small pieces including, heads, legs, and all plus more water than what would seem necessary and still the kettle would be only half full. When the cook stirred up the fire the concoction began to boil then the rice would begin to swell until finally, the kettle would be nearly full of steaming nearly dry brown rice with the cut-up chickens all through it.”

And as for the question of how did the Chinese eat their food, “when it was time to eat each Chinaman would take his big blue bowl and ladle it full of this mixture and deftly entwine his chopsticks between his fingers and string the mixture into his mouth in one continuous operation, while in the meantime he would be drinking his cup of tea and still more tea.”

Question 8:
Where and how did the Chinese workers sleep?
The two photographs appearing below essentially answer the question.

Question 9:
What did the Chinese workers do for fun?
This is a tough question to answer because, as Stanford University History professor Gordon H. Chang explains, “we don’t have anything from the workers themselves and only from the artifacts they left behind.”

Yet, from those artifacts, we know, Chang says, that “they engaged in gaming activities that were probably pretty popular. Certainly, they drank rice wine and whiskey. They smoked opium. In the towns, there were Chinese prostitutes. So, it was a rough and tumble existence for these men. And they were all young men. So, you can only imagine what kind of mischief they would get into.

When Chang says, “we don’t have anything from the workers,” what he means is that to date, no one has yet discovered a letter or diary written by one of the workers. Therefore, to answer questions like this, researchers needed to turn to archaeologists who scoured the Chinese work camps.

“Chinese work camps had high frequencies of opium and alcohol paraphernalia, including bottles of alcohol and opium tins and pipes, according to the article Remembering the Chinese Railroad Workers that Built Stanford’s Fortune . . . with these artifacts usually interpreted as having been for recreational purposes, although evidence suggests that the substances may have often been used as remedies for work-related injuries, infections and the physical and psychological pains of the workers’ taxing manual labor.”

Question 10:
How did the Chinese workers mourn the loss of their own?
Some historians estimate that from the time of Bloomer Cut until the Promontory Point photograph between 50 to 150 Chinese railroad workers died as a result of snow slides, landslides, explosions, falls, and other accidents, as well as sickness. Other historians estimate 2000 or more Chinese dead.

I’m guessing at least one Chinese worker died for every mile of track laid, and hence I’m guessing nearly 700 Chinese lost their lives working on the railroad.

In any event, my students, except for the below, couldn’t find a good answer to the question, “how did the Chinese workers mourn the loss of their own?”

Question 11:
To what extent did the Chinese know the story of the Donner Party when working on the Summit Tunnel (Tunnel 6) during the fierce winter of 1866–1867.
Below, a description of the fierce winter of 1866–1867 from “Tunneling in the Sierra Nevada.” PBS/American Experience

The fierce winter in 1866–1867 brought forty-four separate storms. The snow pack averaged eighteen feet at the summit. “No one can face these storms when they are in earnest,” Engineer John Gilliss recalled. The heaviest of them began on February 18, 1867 and continued until February 22, when harsh winds kept powder astir in the air until the snow started again days later. The storm continued unabated until March 2. Drifts clogged the entrance to every tunnel, turning many workers into full-time shovelers. (The Chinese) worked, ate, and slept in this inhospitable environment, creating a network of tunnels under the snow to link their camp sites with the work sites. The bad weather held up provisions, diverted workers from railroad-building to snow-management, and created a volatile, freezing world of additional dangers. The railroad lost uncounted men to snow. Avalanches could cut down dozens at a time. And when snow wasn’t killing men, the work was.”

The Donner Party, as described in an article entitled Donner Party, “was a group of families that set off overland for California in ox-drawn covered wagons in 1846. They planned a two-thousand-mile, five-month walk across the continent to new opportunities but were trapped in the Sierra Nevada Mountains by the terrible winter of 1846–47. About half died, and some of the survivors resorted to cannibalism to stay alive.” Donner Party.

The Donner Party cannibalism took place exactly 20 years before the fierce winter of 1866–1867. Yet, my students and I could find no evidence suggesting that the Donner Pass tunnel-digging Chinese railroad workers knew of the Donner Party cannibalism.

Yet, we’re guessing they had to.

Regardless, we spent much time imagining what the Chinese must have thought about that Donner Party cannibalism had they known the story when trying to survive the fierce winter of 1866–1877. “That must have been so challenging,” said one of my students.

Question 12:
To what extent did the Chinese workers carve poetry into the trees of the Donner Pass?
To answer this question, I have first to mention something called the Angel Island Immigration Station.

Located in San Francisco Bay, this is where hundreds of thousands of immigrants from 1910 to 1940 were detained and interrogated, with most of these immigrants coming from China and with many of these Chinese having carved poetry into the wooden walls of the Angel Island men’s barracks.

The Story Behind the Poems (12:10)

There is no evidence to suggest that the Donner Pass tunnel-digging Chinese railroad worker did anything similar.

To find out why not, I reached out to the historians at the Angel Island Immigration Museum.

Their response — the Chinese at Angel Island carved poetry into the barracks in large part because they felt trapped, held at the immigration station against their will, whereas the Chinese who dug the Donner Pass Tunnels were doing this work on their own volition; hence they did not feel the need to carve poetry into the trees or anything else made of wood.

Question 13:
Did any of the Chinese workers appear in the famous Promontory Point photograph?

According to the Standford University Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project website:

“In Alfred Joseph Russell’s iconic photo of the event at Promontory, “East and West Shaking Hands at Laying Last Rail” (see above), it seems that Chinese do not appear in the crowd.

With locomotives from each railroad facing each other, their pilots (cowcatchers) almost touching, men are lined up on each side to mark the moment, two chief engineers Greenville Dodge of the Union Pacific Railroad on the left and Samuel Montague of the CPRR on the right lean together with bottles between the smokestacks for a toast.

There may be one or two Chinese in baggy and patched work clothes, such as those worn by the workers laying the last track in the scene; yet, oddly, one worker has his back turned to the camera, although no one else stands with his back turned. Next to him there may be another man, similarly dressed, facing the camera, but a white man next to him has his armed extended and holding up his hat. People had to hold their pose a long time to take photos in those days — so it’s odd that this man holds his hat very deliberately to hide the face of the person standing next to him. No one else is the target of a similar gesture or prank.

Another, less famous but most informative, photograph by Russell taken minutes before his iconic one shows Chinese workers completing the final work to link the two lines.

Eyewitness accounts confirm that it was the Chinese who laid the last rail of the transcontinental.

During the festivities around the country, there was little mention of the Chinese labor that played such a major role in the railroad’s construction. There were a few exceptions: At Promontory, a reporter for the San Francisco Newsletter describes one part of the celebration at Promontory ignored by other reporters:

“J.H. Strobridge, when the work was all over, did invite the Chinese who had been brought over from Victory [nearby work camp] for that purpose, to dine at his boarding car. When they entered, all the guests and officers present cheered them as the chosen representatives of the race which have greatly helped to build the road … a tribute they well deserved and which evidently gave them much pleasure . . .”

During the celebration in Sacramento, E. B. Crocker (Charles’s brother) praised the Chinese in his speech: “I wish to call to your minds that the early completion of this railroad we have built has been in large measure due to that poor, despised class of laborers called the Chinese, to the fidelity and industry they have shown.”

Question 14:
Where did the Chinese workers go, and what did they do after completing the transcontinental railroad?
According to the Standford University Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project website:

Some of the Chinese workers returned to China where they helped in the development of their villages and regions, including building the first railroads.

Others remained in the U.S. and went to work in agriculture, mining, and building levees along the rivers; or they entered domestic service or worked in manufacturing to produce cigars and other products.

A few even continued to work for the Central Pacific to upgrade the hasty often makeshift construction, such as replacing the long but rickety wooden trestle at Secret Town Gap (Mile 62.5/Kilometer 100.5) with a fill, and later to work on maintaining the line.

Others went to work on the Union Pacific.

Chinese also went on to build the railroad from Sacramento down San Joaquin Valley to Los Angeles.

Chinese veterans of the Central Pacific, along with additional compatriots newly arrived from China, also helped to build scores of other railroads throughout the United States and Canada during this period, a time in which the rail mileage of the country more than tripled.

Although many praised the Chinese for their hard work and contributions to building the country, others attacked them as racial inferiors and competition to white working people.

After violent campaigns to expel them, 1882 saw the first of many Congressional acts to exclude Chinese. They were denied the possibility of citizenship and could not even enter the country. Deemed social and political pariahs, Chinese faced extreme racist violence, and they were pushed to the margins of society, and to the margins of public memory and historical scholarship.

The Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project along with other initiatives aims to bring to light their actual contributions and lasting legacy.

The dark history of the Chinese Exclusion Act (1:30)

Question 15:
What were some important long-terms effects of the tunnels dug by the Chinese?
“While the construction of the Donner Pass Tunnels and the transcontinental railroad was a mammoth undertaking, its effects on the country were equally profound.” This is according to the article 10 Ways the Transcontinental Railroad Changed America.

  1. It made the Western U.S. more important.
  2. It made commerce possible on a vast scale.
  3. It made travel more affordable.
  4. It changed where Americans lived.
  5. It altered Americans’ concept of reality.
  6. It helped create the Victorian version of Amazon.
  7. It took a heavy toll on the environment.
  8. It increased racial conflicts.
  9. It pioneered government-financed capitalism.
  10. It instilled national confidence.
Buffalo and the Railroads (4:03)

For those wanting to learn more about how the railroad changed America, see below

In Closing
Two of my students have found themselves, after learning the above, to “want to do something other than research the topic.”

To this end, one is producing a public service announcement; the other is producing a videogram. The script to the videogram currently reads as follows.

Hello everybody.

My name is Joe Titan and I am a senior at San Marino High School, a small, nationally acclaimed public school located 30 miles northeast of downtown Los Angeles and a short bike ride from the entrance to the world acclaimed Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.

I’m reaching out to you today to ask you a question related to the story of the Chinese transcontinental railroad workers and something called the Donner Pass Tunnels, but first some information about the street that runs in front of my school.

It’s named after Henry E. Huntington, the nephew of Collis P. Huntington . . . one of the Big Four . . . with the Big Four being the famous and influential businessmen, philanthropists and railroad tycoons who, in the 1860s, funded the Central Pacific Railroad in its attempt to build the western portion of America’s first transcontinental railroad.

Now to my question.

Will you please contact the person who represents the district in which you live and ask that member of the U.S. Congress to do everything in their power to get the federal government to purchase the land on which sit nine no-longer-in-use, Donner Pass transcontinental railroad tunnels and then once the feds have purchased that land, declare that land, and the nine tunnels sitting on that land, a National Park?

These nine tunnels, 6 through 12, 14 and 15, were essentially hand-dug, under the most challenging circumstances, by approximately 20,000 hardworking, brave, and to this day still relatively unknown Chinese Central Pacific railroad workers.

Yet today this backbreaking and at times life-ending, historically mportant work is not only being neglected it’s also being covered in graffiti, with this graffiti often expressing anti-Chinese sentiment, as well as other kinds of inappropriate language.

This anti-Asian hate must stop.

It’s time for the historically important, transcontinental railroad-related work of the Donner Pass Chinese to be federally remembered, respected, and protected.

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Peter Paccone
Peter Paccone

Written by Peter Paccone

568 Followers
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San Marino High School social studies teacher. Also the Community Outreach Manager for Class Companion and a member of the CB's AI in AP Advisory Committee.

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