They didn’t like Chinese. So they tried another flavor.
May 10, 1869: The first Transcontinental Railroad was completed, largely thanks to Chinese laborers, who were soon replaced with the Japanese.
The golden spike was driven on May 10, 1869.
A historic moment. A photograph was taken. A nation celebrated. But the workers who had made it all possible — thousands of Chinese immigrants — were nowhere in that photo.
They had done the blasting. The tunneling. The lifting. The laying.
They had worked through avalanches, heatwaves, and deadly accidents to help unite the coasts.
And when it came time to commemorate the achievement, they were pushed out of the frame.
Instead of being honored, they were excluded. And in 1882, they were banned, when the Chinese Exclusion Act became federal law.
But the demand for cheap railroad labor didn’t disappear.
So America found another Asian group to take their place: the Japanese. By the late 1800s, Japanese immigrants were recruited to work on rail lines across the American West — Oregon, Utah, Colorado, Arizona. Many came directly from Hawaii after working on sugar plantations.
The pattern repeated: Backbreaking labor. Lower wages. Dangerous conditions. Racism on and off the tracks. They were seen as strong, silent, and “less troublesome” than the Chinese. Until they weren’t.
Many early Japanese American communities in the West were shaped by railroad labor. Towns formed around work camps. Families settled. Children were born.
Ironically, some of those same families were later forced onto trains, to be incarcerated on the very rail lines they helped build. In Wyoming, Japanese railroad workers once laid the tracks. Years later, they rode those same tracks as prisoners to Heart Mountain Relocation Center.
We sometimes hear about the Chinese railroad workers. We rarely hear about the Japanese railroad workers who followed them. Or how about the cycle of labor, resentment, and removal keeps repeating itself?
Wonder where this train is going?
