The Chinese Laborers Building Seattle’s Railroad
A reporter visits the line of the Northern Pacific railroad to find the massive, hidden workforce extending the tracks into the city.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Citizens of Seattle who are in the habit of visiting the railroad wharf may have wondered what use could possibly be made of the enormous quantities of wheelbarrows, scrapers and tools of every description which are constantly being received by the railroad company and forwarded to the front. The array of Chinese laborers who night after night came in on the Haywood and were sent away during the hours of darkness may also have been a puzzle to the thoughtful citizen. In order to find out where the Oriental army that has been passing through our midst was bound, a Post-Intelligencer reporter took a trip over the line of the railroad as far as the second crossing of Cedar River. From the first camp to beyond Renton, the line of the road presents a scene of busy activity. The laborers swarm through the fields like bees, and the grading and leveling gives one the impression that the whole face of nature is being torn up. The contract for building the line from Black River Junction to Seattle is in the hands of Mr. Joseph F. Nounan, who is carrying on the work with energy. On this branch, 1,400 Chinese laborers and sixty teams are at present employed. The work is being pushed with an enormous force of these men, and the air constantly resounds with the sounds of labor and of voices conversing in the peculiarly soft and mellifluous murmur of the Chinese tongue.
“The laborers swarm through the fields like bees, and the grading and leveling going on gives one the impression that the whole face of nature is being torn up.”
This article documents the reliance on Chinese labor for the critical infrastructure that connected Seattle to the rest of the country in 1883. Just two years later, in 1885-1886, the city would be engulfed in the anti-Chinese expulsion riots, a dark period in Seattle's history where the same labor force that built the city's foundations was violently targeted by the very citizens who had benefited from their work.
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