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Before you do anything, please click here to print out your answer sheet. It is this answer sheet
that you will be sharing with your teammates.Your first job is find out what life was like for the Chinese immigrants
who came to California.Oakland Museum's"California's Untold Stories-Gold Rush!" site
More from the Oakland Museum
Lee Chew's account of his life as a Chinese Immigrant in California from The American Nation
Gold Rush Sesquicentennial site from the Sacramento Bee Hint: click first on "Part 3," then click on
"Chinese Left Their Mark"
Next, you will need to find out what it was like creating the Transcontinental
Railroad.Some background information for you:
After profits from gold mining became more difficult to attain, and because of the hardships imposed by the Foreign Miner's Tax, Chinese immigrants began to move towards railroad construction.
In 1865, the first Chinese workers were hired by the Central Pacific Railroad (with Leland Stanford, who would later create Stanford University, as the president of the company). The Central Pacific Railroad was trying to lay down railroad tracks to connect Sacramento with the rest of the United States. By 1867, the Central Pacific Railroad had 12,000 Chinese employed. They represented 90 percent of its entire work force. The Central Pacific Railroad was able to saved quite a bit by hiring Chinese workers over white workers. Chinese workers earned $31.00 a month. White workers earned $31.00 a month as well, but they were also provided with meals and a place to stay.
Working conditions were very harsh. During the winter of 1866, the railroad managers forced the Chinese workers to work when snowdrifts over sixty feet in height covered the construction site. The Chinese workers had to live and work in tunnels under the snow, and sometimes snowslides buried the workers.
"The snow slides carried away our camps and we lost a good many men in those slides," reported a company official; "many of them we did not find until the next season when the snow melted." Bibliography
PBS' site about The Iron Road. Hint: The information that will be most helpful for you starts with the paragraph that begins, "The real heroes of the railroad..."
back to "And They Came to the Streets That Were Paved With Gold"