Variety of cultures helped build railroad

PROMONTORY, Box Elder County — Taisei Yu was doing what all 2-year-olds do on railroad tracks at the Golden Spike National Historic Site: He was walking the ties.

He'd step up on a tie, step over it, step down on the rocks, then up on the next tie, and down. Over and over and over, tiny legs carefully reaching up and stepping down.

Taisei, who was wearing a "Li'l Slugger" T-shirt, didn't know it, but he was playing in the footsteps of thousands of Chinese who may not have been his direct ancestors but who share a common cultural background and who built the railroad, on which he was walking.

He and his parents, Jerin and Wami Yu of Salt Lake City, were among more than 100 Chinese-Americans at Golden Spike National Historic Site who came to watch and take part in the annual re-enactment of the driving of the golden spike on May 10. The Salt Lake Chinese Choir took part, as well.

They were there, in part, to correct a historic wrong. Chinese laborers built the railroad from California to Promontory, including the hardest stretches over the Sierra Nevada Mountains. But, until recently, the Chinese never got the recognition they were due.

A crew of Cantonese workers laid the final tie for the ceremony, for example, but were excluded from the famous final picture taken of the event.

There are differing versions of why that was.

David Howard Bain, in his book "Empire Express," about the building of the transcontinental railroad, wrote one version: That someone yelled at one photographer there that day, Charles Savage, to "take a shot!" and the Cantonese, thinking it was a reference to dynamite being set off, ran for cover "to the great hilarity of the crowd."

How authentic that report is, is hard to say. Bain's book says that story "is said," and notes that he got the incident out of a 1939 story in the Ogden Standard-Examiner.

Ron Wong, a docent in the Sacramento Railroad Museum, doesn't buy the "shot" story.

An estimated 10,000 to 14,000 Chinese built the railroad from Sacramento, Calif., to Promontory, he said, and more than 1,000 died. Such experienced workmen wouldn't bolt.

The role of the Chinese is one a lot of people don't know about, he said.

"One of the things my mission is, I'd like to tell our side of the story," he said. Being a docent, and studying books and records is one thing, but being at the site is another, "and now I can tell people I was here."

Norm Nelson of Brigham City, one of the organizers and performers of the annual event, had a more prosaic reason that no Chinese are in the final picture.