The Chinese Railroad Workers

By Editor

Montana Territory, 1880-1883

The land through which they drove the Northern Pacific did not belong to the railroad. It did not belong to the men who built it. The Blackfeet, the Crow, the Salish, and the Pend d'Oreilles had lived along these river valleys for generations before the surveyors arrived, and the Chinese men who came after the surveyors to lay the track were themselves newcomers to a country that was being remade by people who had not asked permission of anyone.

The Northern Pacific Railroad was completed in 1883. The ceremony at Gold Creek was attended by dignitaries from Europe and from the eastern United States, and speeches were made, and the last spike was driven, and the photographs were taken. The thousands of Chinese workers who had graded the roadbed and laid the ties and driven the spikes across Montana Territory were not in the photographs. They were not invited to the ceremony. They had been paid approximately half to two-thirds of what white workers received for the same labor, and they had been housed in separate camps, and when the construction was finished, they were no longer needed.

They had come from the southern provinces of China, most of them from Guangdong. They came because there was no work at home and because the Burlingame Treaty of 1868 had opened the door, and because the railroads needed men who would work for wages that white workers refused. The Central Pacific had employed nearly 20,000 Chinese workers on the first transcontinental railroad. The Northern Pacific followed the same model. In Montana Territory, Chinese crews graded the difficult sections along the Clark Fork River, through the canyon country west of Missoula, and across the broad valleys of the territory. They worked with picks and shovels and blasting powder in country that was cold in winter and hot in summer and indifferent to the men who were reshaping it.

The Chinese Exclusion Act was passed in 1882, one year before the Northern Pacific was completed. It suspended the immigration of Chinese laborers and barred Chinese immigrants from becoming naturalized citizens. The men who had built the railroad could not become citizens of the country they had helped to connect. They could not own mining claims. From 1909 to 1953, they could not marry outside their race in Montana. There were forty Chinese men for every one Chinese woman in the state by 1900, because the 1875 Page Act had made it nearly impossible for Chinese women to immigrate.

In the towns along the railroad, Chinese men found work in laundries and restaurants and gardens, the service industries that required little capital and did not require mastery of English. In Butte in the 1890s, there were more than thirty Chinese laundries. In Helena, in Miles City, in Missoula, Chinese men ran the establishments that washed the clothes and cooked the meals of the people who had arrived on the railroad they had built. The labor unions in these towns organized boycotts against Chinese businesses, standing outside the laundries and restaurants to intimidate customers from entering.

In 1896 and 1897, the boycott in Butte was organized and sustained by the Silver Bow Trade and Labor Assembly and the Butte Miners' Union. The leaders of Butte's Chinese community, including a man named Hum Fay, took their case to the mayor, the chief of police, and the city attorney. None of them helped. Hum Fay and his associates then hired Wilbur Fisk Sanders, a former United States Senator and one of the founders of the Montana Vigilantes, to represent them in federal court. They won. The Ninth Circuit Court issued an injunction against the boycotters. It was a legal victory in a country that did not allow the men who won it to become citizens.

The Chinese population of Montana reached its peak of more than 2,500 in 1890. By 1940, fewer than 300 remained. The Magnuson Act of 1943 ended the Chinese Exclusion Act and allowed Chinese immigrants to become naturalized citizens for the first time in sixty years. By then, most of the men who had built the Northern Pacific were dead.

There is a photograph in the Montana Historical Society archives of five Chinese men on a handcar along the Clark Fork River, taken in August 1890. The rocky cliffs are visible in the background. The men are wearing straw hats. Only one of them faces the camera. Their names are not recorded.

See also

• Chinese Exclusion Act, 1882
• Northern Pacific Railway, construction history
• Hum Fay v. Baldwin, the Butte Chinese boycott case, 1898