THE ASIAN IMMIGRATION: Chinese, by Kent V. Lott

TheAsian

immigration

by Kent V. Lott

chinese began immigrating to Utah with the construction of the Central Pacific from Sacramento to Promontory Summit. At one point more than twelve thousand Chinese were employed in the building of the Central Pacific. At first, some in the Central Pacific were reluctant to use them, but labor became scarce so the railroad owners consented to experiment with 50 Chinese. These 50 did so well that no limit was placed on employing the Chinese.

The Chinese not only laid track with consistent precision but became legendary in their blasting of tunnels and ridges with nitroglycerin while lowered in baskets over cliffs fourteen hundred feet above the American River Canyon. Their Chinese food was more conducive to good health than the meat and starch diet of American workers and their tea drinking protected them from diseases transmitted through polluted water.

Between 1870 and 1880 the greatest population of Chinese in the state lived within the boundaries of Box Elder County, employed almost entirely as section hands on the railroad.

Corinne, the once-booming railroad center, had a Chinese community in its heyday. The artifacts of an old Chinese laundry are among the memorabilia housed in the railroad museum there. An editorial from the Utah Reporter provides a vivid impression of Corinne’s international atmosphere: “We have in and around the city some five hundred Indians, two or three hundred Chinese, and quite a number of citizens of African descent. Our streets are [decorated] with all the varieties of costume affected by hunters, miners, merchants, ranchmen and freighters of the ‘superior race.’”

The same newspaper recorded the first-reported Chinese wedding in Utah: “On the evening of Saturday, the twenty-third, by Justice Sewell, Mr. John Tip [‘John’

Plum Alley