The unsung heroes who built nations

In the winter of 2004, I took a train ride from Syracuse in upstate New York all the way to San Francisco. The view was breathtaking, to say the least, when the train passed through the snow-covered Rockies in Colorado. While the train was still trundling through the Rockies, the train conductor started explaining how Chinese workers built the railroad through the tough terrain, with many of them losing their lives.

It is hard even to visualize how the railroad was built through the Rockies back then, just like it is hard to imagine how train tracks were laid through the Sierra Nevada, an endless mountain range through Central California, in the 1860s. Most of the tracks were laid by the 12,000 Chinese Americans hired by the Central Pacific Railroad to build the western part of the Transcontinental Railroad. They accounted for 85 percent of the laborers of the Central Pacific, the largest workforce in the United States at the time.

Many of the workers risked their lives and fell victim to the harsh winters and dangerous conditions. They laid tracks on a terrain that rose 7,000 feet over 100 miles (160 kilometers), chipped away at granite and planted the explosives used to blast tunnels through the treacherous Sierra Nevada Mountains.