What was done with the bodies of the Chinese who died?
From: "Chen-Johnson, Mary" mchenjohnson@tacomacc.edu
... Do you have any information about what was done with the bodies of the Chinese who died during the building of the Transcontinental Railroad? Were they buried where they died or were the corpses sent back to China? Any help would be appreciated.
—Mary Chen-Johnson
posted from CPRR Discussion Group at 4:47 PM
6 Comments:
The information that we have been able to locate about the Chinese CPRR workers who died can be found in a FAQ.
A short newspaper article "Bones in Transit" that appeared in the Sacramento Reporter of June 30, 1870, reports "about 20,000 pounds" of bones shipped by rail for return to China.
The Elko Independent, Jan. 5, 1870 wrote that:
"Six cars are strung along the road between here and Toano, and are being loaded with dead Celestials for transportation to the Flowery Kingdom. We understand the Chinese Companies pay the Railroad Company $10 for carrying to San Francisco each dead Chinaman. The remains of the females are left to rot in shallow graves while every defunct male is carefully preserved for shipment to the Occident."
This is a difficult question, as the primary sources are fragmentary, and the secondary sources discussing the Chinese CPRR workers are often unreliable. The Chinese railroad workers who died were probably either buried along the track or put in charnel rail cars and later many of the bones were returned to China, as agreed between the CPRR and the Six Companies. One issue that makes this quite confusing is that the reported deaths relating to construction are quite small in number compared with a single report, which leads us to a likely conclusion that there were few construction fatalities, but likely a significant death toll due to a smallpox epidemic in Nevada.
Our pages about the Chinese railroad workers include:
Chinese Railroad Workers
Previous discussion
Another discussion
If you find any information that supplements or contradicts what we have online at the CPRR Museum, we would be most grateful if you could let us know.
From: "James Mark French" fireside31298@sbcglobal.net
I'm of the understanding that most were placed in coffins and shipped back to their homes in China for burial.
—Mark
The "Bones in Transit" article that appeared in the June 30, 1870 Sacramento Reporter does not mention coffins or explain what was measured (weighing vs. counting number of individuals), what was calculated, or if the figures may have been guesses; if the weight was measured and includes coffins, and what was weighed was more than the dry weight of bones, then the corresponding number of individuals may have been greatly overestimated.
There is a detailed description in "The History Of Winnemucca" by J. P. Marden which refers to "deposited in small size boxes" instead of coffins. Hopefully someone will be able to find a copy of the article cited in the "Humboldt Register in 1870."
From: "Chris Graves" caliron@cwnet.com
The January 5, 1870 ELKO INDEPENDENT reads as follows:
"Dateline ... January 5, 1870
Six cars are strung along the road between here and Toano, and are being loaded with dead Celestials for transportation to the Flowery Kingdom. We understand the Chinese Companies pay the Railroad Company $10 for carrying to San Francisco each dead Chinaman. The remains of the females are left to rot in shallow graves while every defunct male is carefully preserved for shipment to the Occident."
That is the FULL extent of what was written. While I am a tad shy of the verbage used by the writer, if one excludes that which is offensive by today's standard, one can readily see that SIX CARS were picking up corpses. The distance between Elko and Toano is under 150 miles. The terrain is NOT STONEY nor ROCKY, rather it is sandy, rolling plain. The question remains, did smallpox kill those workers? How many died? We know that the wife of James Harvey Strobridge attended the "pest cars," and she caught smallpox during her labors.
As to "females," I have seen a very nice gold wedding ring for a lady found in Eastern Nevada alongside the old CPRR grade, as well as festive jars that were used in wedding parties.
A few years ago, a backhoe unearthed a mass grave just West of Wells, Nev. (Wells is between Elko and Toano) that contained Chinese artifacts, that grave was NOT shallow; so apparently the folks that were entrusted to pick up remains didn't get them all.
And for those that care about such things, that grave was immediately resealed and the backhoe operator left intact all items that were accidently unearthed.
—gjg
See the additional discussion.
A newly discovered newspaper report shows that the notion of large numbers of Chinese casualties in building the Central Pacific Railroad is almost certainly a myth based on a single erroneous newspaper article. (On June 30, 1870, the bodies of 50, not 1,200 Chinese dead were reported to have arrived in Sacramento by train for reburial, and not all of this much smaller number had died of construction accidents.)
Consequently, any claims of more than 150 Chinese killed building the first transcontinental railroad now seem extremely dubious.
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