How 4,000 Chinese Laborers Hand-Cut the Sierra Nevada Tunnels in 1867

Added: 2026-05-27

[00:00:00]4,000 Chinese laborers hand cut 15 railroad tunnels through the Sierra Nevada granite between 1865 and 1869.

[00:00:08]The workers were primarily Cantones-speaking immigrants from Guangdong province in southern China.

[00:00:14]They were recruited through the Ceay Yup, Sam Yup, and Yong Wo labor agencies in San Francisco. The Summit Tunnel at Donner Pass was the largest single boar at 1,659 ft through solid granite. It took 17 months. The 1866 to 1867 winter brought 44 ft of snowfall and killed approximately 200 Chinese workers in avalanches. The tunnels are still in the granite. Last month, this channel published a video about the transcontinental railroad. The video focused on the engineering achievements of the Central Pacific Railroad and the Union Pacific Railroad as they raced to meet at Promontory Summit, Utah in May 1869. Within 24 hours of publication, viewers in the comments flagged a specific concern. The video had not given adequate weight to the Chinese laborers who did the actual physical work of cutting the Central Pacific route through the Sierra Nevada. One viewer wrote, "The Chinese were the workforce. Please do a better job of research." The viewer was correct.

[00:01:12]Today, we walk through the specific labor story of those Chinese workers and the 15 tunnels they cut through Sierra Nevada granite. The Central Pacific Railroad was the western half of the transcontinental railroad. It was chartered in 1861 to build a rail line from Sacramento, California east across the Sierra Nevada and the Great Basin to meet the Union Pacific Railroad coming west from Omaha, Nebraska. Construction began in Sacramento in January 1863. The first 60 mi of the route running east from Sacramento across the flat central valley were completed by 1864. Then the railroad reached the foothills of the Sierra Nevada and the engineering challenges became extreme. The Sierra Nevada is a granite mountain range 600 m long, rising to elevations over 14,000 ft with the Donner Pass route over the mountains at approximately 7,000 ft of elevation. To cross the Sierra Nevada by rail required boring 15 separate tunnels through solid granite ridges, building extensive snow sheds to protect the tracks from winter avalanches, and grading the rail bed across slopes that approached the maximum allowable rail grade of 2%. Charles Crocker was the construction superintendent of the Central Pacific. Crocker was one of the four major investors who funded the Central Pacific along with Leland Stanford, Collis P. Huntington, and Mark Hopkins. Crocker had personally taken responsibility for managing the construction labor force. By 1864, the Central Pacific was struggling to find adequate labor. American-born workers preferred the higherpaying gold mining work in the Sierra foothills to the difficult railroad labor at the high elevations. European immigrant workers were available in limited numbers, but commanded relatively high wages. Crocker proposed to his fellow investors that the railroad recruit Chinese laborers from the existing Chinese-American community in San Francisco. The proposal was initially controversial.

[00:03:06]Stanford and the other investors had reservations about whether Chinese workers could handle the heavy physical labor of railroad construction. Crocker argued that the Chinese workers had built the Great Wall of China, which was a sufficient engineering proof of their capability. The investors approved the experiment. If you appreciate the depth of these American industrial heritage stories and want to support more of them, join at the boss tier for early access and membersonly polls or final boss for member shoutouts and membersonly videos. The link is in the description below. Now we walk through the recruitment system that brought 4,000 Chinese workers to the Sierra Nevada construction sites. The Chinese American community in San Francisco in the 1860s was organized through what were called the six companies. The six companies were Chinese fraternal organizations that served the immigrant community in San Francisco providing housing assistance, employment placement, legal advocacy, and social welfare. The major six companies were the Sam Yup Company, the Sey Company, the Yayong Wo company, the Hop Wo Company, the Yan Wo Company, and the Ningyong Company. Each company drew membership from a specific region of Guangdong province in southern China with the Seup primarily from the CE or four counties region around Taishon. the Sam Yup primarily from the three counties region around Guangha and so on. The Central Pacific Railroad contracted with the six companies to recruit Chinese workers for the railroad construction. The labor contracts paid the railroad a fixed price per worker per month. The six companies handled the recruitment in Guangdong, the transportation of workers from China to San Francisco, the housing and feeding of workers in San Francisco between assignments, and the placement of workers in specific railroad construction crews. The Chinese workers traveled from Guangdong province to San Francisco by sailing ship across the Pacific Ocean, a voyage that typically took 6 to 10 weeks. The workers were primarily young men in their late teens and 20s, with most having some agricultural labor experience, but limited heavy construction experience.

[00:05:07]The contracts paid the workers approximately $30 per month in 1865, equivalent to about $600 per month today. The wage was substantially lower than the wages paid to white American workers doing equivalent labor on the same railroad. The wage differential was justified by the Central Pacific and the six companies on the grounds that the Chinese workers received housing, food, and equipment provided by the railroad, while the white workers were paid higher wages but had to provide their own housing and food. The actual economics favored the railroad significantly. The Central Pacific paid roughly $40 per Chinese worker per month, including housing and food, versus $60 to $70 per white worker per month for wages alone.

[00:05:50]The recruitment process in GuangDong province had its own particular characteristics that shaped which Chinese workers ended up on the railroad. The labor brokers operating in Guangha and Hong Kong primarily recruited from the Pearl River Delta region, which had been suffering through severe economic disruption from the Typing Rebellion of 1850 through 1864 and from the subsequent Red Turban Rebellion of 1854 through 1864. Both rebellions had devastated rural agriculture in Guangdong province, leaving large numbers of young men without economic prospects in their home villages. The labor recruitment for American railroad work offered these displaced workers a way to earn cash income that could support family in China during the agricultural recovery period. The standard recruitment contract paid a portion of the workers monthly wages directly to family in GuangDong through a remittance system operated by the labor agencies in San Francisco. The remittance system that sent worker earnings back to China was a particularly important institution for the Chinese American railroad workforce.

[00:06:54]The six companies in San Francisco operated a banking and remittance network that allowed Chinese workers in the United States to send money back to their home villages in Guangdong province. The remittance system worked through a network of Chinese American merchants in San Francisco who maintained correspondent banking relationships with merchant houses in Hong Kong, Guanjo, and the Pearl River Delta region. A worker on the Sierra Nevada Railroad construction could deposit money with the Sey Yup Company in San Francisco and within 60 to 90 days the equivalent amount in Chinese currency would be available to the workers family in Guangdong. The total remittance volume from American Chinese American workers to China during the 1860s through the 1870s probably exceeded $10 million in 19th century currency, equivalent to approximately $300 million today. I have written the full story of this down. The Eerie Canal Volume 1, the men Nobody wrote a book about. Every worker in it came from the real payroll records. If you want it, the link is in the description or scan the code on screen. Now, back to the work. The food provisioning system in the Chinese railroad construction camps was substantially better than the food provisioning in the white worker camps.

[00:08:06]And this difference contributed to the higher productivity of the Chinese workers. The Chinese camps maintained their own cookous with Chinese cooks preparing traditional Chinese food including rice, vegetables, dried fish, tea, and occasional meat. The food was supplied by a network of Chinese merchants in Sacramento and San Francisco who shipped Chinese ingredients to the railroad camps by mule train. The traditional Chinese diet was nutritionally more balanced than the typical American railroad worker diet of beans, salt pork, sourdough bread, and coffee. The Chinese workers had lower rates of scurvy, dysentery, and general malnutrition than the white workers on the same project. The dietary advantage translated directly to higher work productivity and lower sickness absence rates. The Chinese workers proved to be exceptional railroad construction laborers. They worked steadily, consistently, and with minimal labor disputes. They organized their own crews under their own foremen with the foremen serving as translators between the Central Pacific construction supervisors and the workers. They lived in railroad provided tent camps that they organized themselves with separate cooking and eating facilities that prepared traditional Chinese food rather than the Americanstyle food provided to the white workers. They drank tea boiled from camp supplied tea leaves which incidentally meant the Chinese workers had safer drinking water than the white workers who drank from streams without boiling.

[00:09:30]The combination of better water hygiene, traditional Chinese diet, and steady work habits made the Chinese workers more productive and less prone to illness than the white workers on the same project. By 1866, the Central Pacific was actively recruiting more Chinese workers and using fewer white workers across all construction phases.

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[00:09:57]Now we walk through the specific tunneling work at the Summit Tunnel. The Summit Tunnel, also called tunnel number six, was the longest single boar on the Central Pacific Railroad route through the Sierra Nevada. The summit tunnel ran 1,659 feet through the granite ridge at the top of Donner Pass at an elevation of approximately 7,040 ft. Construction began in October 1865 and continued through August 1867, a span of approximately 17 months. The boar was advanced from both ends simultaneously with crews working from the eastern portal and from the western portal. A central shaft was also sunk vertically from the surface of the ridge down to the tunnel grade, allowing a third tunneling face from the middle of the boar. Triple front construction reduced the total schedule from a projected 3 years to 17 months. The Chinese tunneling crews worked the rock face using star drilling methods. The crews were organized in teams of three workers per drill with one worker holding the star drill, two workers swinging sledgehammers in alternation, and the team rotating positions throughout the shift to manage fatigue. The drilling crews worked 12-hour shifts with three shifts per day so that the tunnel face was being worked continuously 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. The boar advanced approximately 0.85 85 ft per shift in granite with three shifts producing about 2.5 ft per day. Total bore advancement across both portals and the central shaft averaged approximately 7 to 10 ft per day during the 17 months of construction. Daily progress was the slowest of any major American railroad tunnel up to that date. The granite of the Sierra Nevada was exceptionally hard, harder than the granite of the Husach tunnel or the limestone of the European Monttosinis tunnel that were being bored simultaneously with comparable methods. The 1866 to 1867 winter was the worst winter in recorded Sierra Nevada history up to that date.

[00:11:53]Snowfall began heavily in October 1866 and continued through May 1867. Total cumulative snowfall at the Donner summit during the winter reached 44 feet, measured by Central Pacific Construction Surveyors. The snow drifts at the tunnel portals reached over 60 ft deep. The construction camps were buried under snow with workers tunneling between buildings through snow passages.

[00:12:17]Avalanches off the surrounding slopes were a constant hazard with major avalanche events occurring throughout the winter. The exact death count from avalanches during the winter is disputed in the historical record. The Central Pacific Railroad Construction records list approximately 15 worker deaths from avalanche causes during the winter. The Chinese American community oral history preserved through the six company's records in San Francisco and later researched by 20th century historians puts the total avalanche death count closer to 200 Chinese workers. The discrepancy reflects the broader pattern of Central Pacific Railroad records under reportporting Chinese worker fatalities compared to white worker fatalities. The six company's records are probably the more accurate count.

[00:13:01]Despite the catastrophic winter, the summit tunnel construction did not stop.

[00:13:06]The Chinese workers continued boring the tunnel from the central shaft and from the portals throughout the worst weather of the winter. Workers descended through the snow tunnels from the surface camps to the tunnel face where they were sheltered from the surface weather by being deep inside the mountain. The triplefront construction strategy meant that as long as one of the three faces remained accessible, the boar could continue advancing. The eastern portal was buried in snow for several weeks during the worst storms, but was kept accessible by continuous excavation. The central shaft was accessed through a snow tunnel from the surface. The western portal was the most exposed and was periodically inaccessible, but the cumulative boar advancement continued throughout the winter with the eastern boar and the western boar meeting at the hauling through point in late summer 1867. The summit tunnel hauling through occurred on August 30th, 1867. The eastern boar and the western boar met at a point approximately 750 ft from the eastern portal. The survey alignment was within several inches across the full 1,659 ft of boar. Charles Crocker personally inspected the hauling through. The Chinese workers who had cut the boar were given a 1-day work bonus and additional food allowances for the achievement. The tunnel was finished with castinplace concrete lining over the following months. The first scheduled train passed through the summit tunnel in November 1867, 2 months after the hauling through. The other 14 Sierra Nevada tunnels on the Central Pacific route were smaller than the Summit Tunnel with lengths ranging from approximately 100 ft to 800 ft. The cumulative board mileage across all 15 Sierra Nevada tunnels was approximately 12,000 linear feet or just under 2 and a/4 miles. The total Chinese labor force on the tunneling works specifically was approximately 4,000 workers at peak with the broader central Pacific construction labor force across all phases reaching 12,000 to 20,000 Chinese workers between 1865 and 1869. The Chinese workers ultimately built about 90% of the central Pacific Railroad route from Sacramento to Promontory Summit including the tunnels, the grading work, the bridge construction and the snowshed building. The labor protest that Chinese workers organized in 1867 deserves separate historical treatment because it was one of the largest organized labor actions in 19th century American history. In June 1867, approximately 3,000 Chinese workers on the Central Pacific Railroad walked off their far jobs in a coordinated work stoppage that lasted approximately one week. The workers were protesting their lower wages compared to white workers doing similar labor, their longer working hours, and their inferior working conditions in dangerous tunnel work. The strike was organized through the six companies network in San Francisco with strike communications coordinated by Chinese American merchants who served as intermediaries between the workers and the central Pacific management. The strike was extraordinarily disciplined and orderly with workers remaining at their construction camps but refusing to work and with no violence or property damage during the entire week. The Central Pacific Railroad management response to the strike was severe. Charles Crocker, the construction superintendent, cut off food supplies to the strike camps in an attempt to starve the workers back to work. The six companies in San Francisco maintained alternate food supply chains during the strike with Chinese-American merchants shipping food from Sacramento and San Francisco to support the striking workers. The strike eventually ended after a week without the workers achieving any of their stated demands.

[00:16:46]The Central Pacific did not raise the Chinese wages or improve working conditions. The strike did however demonstrate to the management that the Chinese workforce was capable of coordinated labor action and the management adjusted its labor practices subtly in the months that followed to reduce the most extreme grievances. The strike is documented in the Central Pacific Railroad records and in the six companies historical archives. The Chinese workers who survived the railroad construction faced increasingly difficult conditions in the years that followed. The Chinese exclusion movement that swept California politics in the 1870s and 1880s targeted the same Chinese American workforce that had built the railroad. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 essentially halted further Chinese immigration to the United States and made the existing Chinese-American population legally vulnerable to deportation and discrimination. Many of the former railroad workers who had settled in California faced violent persecution with several major anti-Chinese riots occurring in California and across the western United States between 1871 and 1885. The cruelty of this political turn was not lost on contemporary observers.

[00:17:58]The men who had cut the Sierra Nevada tunnels for the Central Pacific Railroad were the same men whose right to remain in the United States was being challenged in the political arena two decades later. The Central Pacific Railroad completed its portion of the transcontinental railroad on May 10th, 1869 when the Central Pacific and Union Pacific construction crews met at Promontory Summit, Utah. The Golden Spike ceremony at Promontory commemorated the meeting. The ceremony was attended by hundreds of dignitaries, including Leland Stanford, who personally drove the ceremonial Golden Spike. The ceremony photograph shows approximately 30 people standing around the locomotive at the meeting point.

[00:18:37]There are no Chinese workers visible in the official photograph. The Chinese workers who had built 90% of the western half of the railroad were not included in the official ceremony or the commemorative documentation. This exclusion was a deliberate decision by the central Pacific management and was widely criticized at the time by some observers including the chief engineer Samuel Scary Montigue who privately complained about the omission. The summit tunnel construction operations during the catastrophic 1866-67 winter included specific incidents that have been preserved in oral history and partial written records. The Donner Pass area is named for the Donner Party, the group of California bound immigrants who became stranded in the Sierra Nevada in 1846 and 47 and resorted to cannibalism to survive. The historical resonance was not lost on the 1867 workers who were building a railroad through the same mountain pass where the Donner Party had perished 20 years earlier. The Chinese workers in the tunnel construction camps were exposed to weather conditions similar to those that had killed the Donner party. The difference was that the railroad workers had supply chains supporting them through the winter, including supply trains that delivered food, fuel, and additional workers to the construction camps. Even during the worst storm periods, the Central Pacific Railroad's snow removal operations during the 1866-67 winter were unprecedented in American railroad history. The railroad operated dedicated snow plowing trains specifically to keep the construction supply lines open through the winter.

[00:20:10]The snow plows were heavy wooden wedges mounted on locomotive frames designed to push snow off the tracks at speeds up to 20 mph. The snow plowing operations ran continuously throughout the worst storm periods with multiple locomotives pushing snow off the tracks in relay teams. The cumulative cost of the snow removal operations during the catastrophic winter exceeded $800,000 in $1866, equivalent to roughly $25 million today.

[00:20:38]The investment was justified because the alternative was suspending construction for 6 months and missing the contractual deadline for completing the transcontinental railroad. The snow sheds that were built along the Sierra Nevada route in 1867 and 1868 deserve separate description because they were one of the largest single timber engineering projects of 19th century America. The snow sheds were continuous timberframed enclosures that covered approximately 40 mi of railroad track through the highest elevation sections of the Sierra Nevada. The sheds were designed to keep snow off the track and to prevent winter avalanches from blocking train operations. The total timber used in the snow sheds exceeded 100 million board feet of lumber, primarily Douglas fur and western red cedar shipped from Pacific Northwest forests. Construction took approximately 2 years using crews of about a thousand workers at peak. The original snowsheds operated continuously from 1869 through the 1920s when most of them were gradually replaced with concrete snow tunnels or rerouted track alignments. A few sections of original timber snowshed survive today as historical preservation sites. The Chinese workers continued working on the Central Pacific Railroad and its various branch lines through the 1870s. Many of them eventually settled in California, founding Chinese-American communities across the state. Many returned to GuangDong Province after several years of railroad work, taking their earnings home to support family in China. A substantial minority died on the railroad work, either from accidents during stern construction or from disease in the construction camps. The Chinese Exclusion Movement that swept California politics in the 1870s and culminated in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 targeted the same Chinese American workforce that had built the railroad. The cruelty of that political turn was not lost on contemporary observers. The men who had cut the Sierra Nevada tunnels were the same men whose right to immigrate to the United States was being legislated away two decades later. Anyone who has seen the masonry on a 150-year-old tunnel portal knows this. The Sierra Nevada tunnels are not just engineering. They are a memorial to 4,000 Chinese workers who came to California from GuangDong Province between 1865 and 1869, cut the railroad through the mountains by hand, and were largely written out of the official historical record. The tunnels they cut are still in the granite. The Summit Tunnel is preserved as a historic civil engineering landmark. The names of most of the Chinese workers are lost.

[00:23:11]The six company's records preserve some of the names. The Catholic and Christian mission records of the Chinese American community in San Francisco preserve others. Many remain anonymous. The Stanford University Chinese railroad workers in North America project established in 2012 under the direction of historian Gordon Chang has been compiling the surviving historical records of the Chinese railroad workforce since its founding. The project has identified approximately 10,000 individual Chinese workers by name from a combination of Central Pacific payroll records, six company's membership roles, Catholic mission registers, and Chinese American community oral histories preserved by descendants. The project continues to identify additional workers as new sources are located. The work is essentially archaeological, recovering identities that were never properly recorded in the original central Pacific records and that have been largely lost to subsequent historical writing. If this is the kind of history you want kept, the book is the place it lives.

[00:24:11]The Eerie Canal Volume 1, link in the description or scan the code. Thank you for sitting with these men. Before we close, if this kind of preodern engineering story is what you came for, the final Boss tier at $9.99 gets you membersonly videos plus your name in upcoming uploads. Boss tier at $4.99 for early access. Link in the description.

[00:24:31]Thanks for watching to the end. The 15 Sierra Nevada tunnels cut by Chinese crews between 1865 and 1869 remained in active rail service for 124 years. Union Pacific Railroad finally rerouted traffic through a new alignment in 1993.

[00:24:48]The American Society of Civil Engineers designates the tunnels as a historic civil engineering landmark. The original Summit tunnel still exists in the granite at Donner Pass and can be accessed by hikers during the summer months. The Chinese workers who cut it are mostly buried in unmarked graves near the portal. The Seyup, Samyup, and Yong Wo 6 companies in San Francisco preserve the labor agency rosters where some of the names can still be recovered. The Stanford University Chinese Railroad workers in North America project continues to identify additional workers from surviving historical sources. The audience itself asked us to tell this story in the comment thread on last month's transcontinental railroad video. The audience was right. The story should have been told sooner. The records prove it. The tunnels remain.