These Chinese immigrants opened the doors to the American West

Chris Merritt showed me the ruins of Kelton, the last of the railroad ghost towns he wanted me to see that day, a storm whipped up on the horizon. I stood there watching the landscape, these clouds, the winds blowing up the dust, and I thought about what life was like more than 150 years ago for the Chinese workers who lived here then, laying rail and inhabiting this thrown-together desert settlement thousands of miles from home.

Barbara Pence from the Institute of Canine Forensics searches with a dog named Asha for the remains of Chinese laborers who died during construction and operation of the Central Pacific Railroad in Terrace, Utah. Chinese workers were excluded from the official cemetery. The flags indicate where human remains were found.Snowsheds shielded railroad tracks from storms and avalanches in the Sierra Nevada, but they were not built until after many Chinese workers had been swept away to their death.

Arabella Hong Young’s grandfather Hung Lai Woh came to the U.S. as a teenager in the 1860s and helped blast the path for the railroad. A Juilliard-trained singer, Young performed in the original Broadway cast of the 1958 musicalYale University student Naima Liang Blanco-Norberg, here in her San Francisco bedroom, is a sixth-generation descendant of Lum Ah Chew, who worked as a railroad cook and waiter at the summit tunnels near Lake Tahoe that bored through the Sierra Nevada.

This golden spike is the ceremonial railroad spike that Leland Stanford, first president of the Central Pacific Railroad, hammered to connect the Central Pacific and Union Pacific Railroads on May 10, 1869.

Source: Education Headlines (educationheadlines.net)

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