Many reports describe Chinese railroad workers lowering themselves in woven baskets, placing explosives to blast out rock they couldn’t chip away by hand. Those who didn’t ascend fast enough after lighting the fuse would die.
But he does know that he was recruited from the Kaiping area of China’s southern Guangdong province, a region embroiled in social turmoil at the time. He made passage to San Francisco by way of steamship, just like many other Chinese railroad laborers, and arrived without knowing English.
In the summer of 1865, the Chinese were put to the test in the Sierra Nevada, having been called upon to build a three-mile curved roadbed along a spot named Cape Horn. Toiling for about a year, they blasted out a ledge roughly 1,200 feet above the American River east of Colfax, California.How this was accomplished is not without controversy, according to “,” a forthcoming book written by Gordon H. Chang, a Stanford history professor and co-director of the Chinese Railroad Workers Project.
Chang asserts that firm evidence exists in overlooked accounts before 1927 of the Chinese using rope, chairs and baskets during their work in the Sierra Nevada.
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