They Found the Workers Still Standing — Frozen Upright With Shovels in Their Hands
The Giants Who Built the Railroads — Then Vanished From Every Photo After 1890 Eight men lifted one hundred and twenty five tons of iron each. They did it in a single twelve hour shift. On April 28, 1869, every one of those men was named. Michael Shay, Patrick Joyce, Thomas Dailey, and Michael Kennedy.
Frederick McNamara, Edward Killeen, Michael Sullivan, and George Wyatt. They lifted five hundred and sixty pound rails all day long. They dropped one into position every thirty seconds without stopping. They laid ten miles of railroad track before sunset that evening. That record has never been equaled in the century since. But those eight men were not working alone out there.
Alongside them that day labored thousands of unnamed workers. This was the largest industrial workforce in American history. Stanford University has spent over forty years searching for something specific. A single document written by any one of those workers. One letter home, one diary entry, one sentence in their own hand.
They describe finding that single document as their holy grail. After all those decades of searching, they have not found it. Twelve thousand workers built the western railroad and left zero words behind. The hands that stitched a continent together left no written trace of their own existence. Before the first rail was spiked, before the Pacific Railway Act even passed Congress, a man who understood mountains looked at the Sierra Nevada and made a prediction.
William Tecumseh Sherman was no romantic. He was an engineer, a surveyor, a San Francisco banker who had walked those granite ridges himself in the 1850s. He wrote five words to his brother about the proposed railroad that would need to cross them. “If it is ever built, it will be the work of giants.” Historians have always treated that as metaphor.
A colorful way of saying the project was ambitious. But in 1865, the Central Pacific Railroad began assembling the workforce that would prove Sherman literally correct. Not giants in the fairy tale sense. Giants in the engineering sense. People who accomplished feats that qualified professionals still struggle to explain with the documented tools and crew sizes available. Consider what that workforce actually did.
They blasted fifteen tunnels through solid Sierra granite using black powder and, eventually, nitroglycerin manufactured on site because shipping it was too dangerous. At the summit, they carved one thousand six hundred and fifty four feet of tunnel by hand. Progress was measured in inches per day.
Chinese workers were lowered on ropes down sheer cliff faces to drill holes for explosive charges. They lit the fuses. They scrambled back up the ropes before the mountain exploded beneath them. Not every man made it back up in time. More than one thousand workers are estimated to have perished during construction, though the actual number is unknown because few records of Chinese deaths were kept.
During the winter of 1866 to 1867, forty four storms buried the Sierra under forty five feet of snow. Avalanches swept workers off the mountainside without warning. When spring came, some were found still standing, frozen upright, shovels in their hands. The railroad’s own superintendent, James Harvey Strobridge, had initially refused to hire Chinese workers.
He believed they were too small and too fragile for hard labor. Within months, those same workers were setting construction records that his preferred Irish laborers could not match. Eighty eight miles of track over the Sierra took twelve thousand men thirty eight months. Five hundred and seventy one miles of flat desert track from Truckee to Promontory took five thousand men just over a year.
The mountain section required more than twice the workforce for a fraction of the distance. Sherman had understood what that granite would demand. And then came the day that defied everything. April 28, 1869. Charles Crocker bet ten thousand dollars his men could lay ten miles in a single shift.
He had waited strategically, making the wager when the Union Pacific had fewer than ten miles left to build, ensuring they could not attempt to break whatever record he set. A San Francisco Bulletin reporter stood there with a watch. He timed the rail teams twice. Two hundred and forty feet of iron placed in one minute and fifteen seconds. The pace of a leisurely walk, the reporter wrote.
Except the people walking were carrying rails that weighed five hundred and sixty pounds apiece. Each spike was tapped into position, then driven home with three heavy strokes of a ten pound maul. Ten spikes per rail. Four hundred rails per mile. The math is relentless.
By day’s end, they had moved over four million four hundred thousand pounds of material. Twenty five thousand eight hundred ties. Three thousand five hundred and twenty rails. Fifty five thousand spikes. Fourteen thousand and eighty bolts. When it was over, the eight Irish rail handlers rode in a wagon through Sacramento’s railroad celebration. The crowds threw flowers until the wagon overflowed.
That evening, a locomotive ran the freshly laid track at full speed. Forty minutes for ten miles. The rails held. They held for decades. Now the mainstream historical establishment will tell you, correctly, that this workforce was primarily Chinese immigrants. Roughly ten thousand to fifteen thousand at any given time.
Ninety percent of Central Pacific’s labor force by 1867. And to the credit of modern historians, this story is no longer completely buried. Stanford launched the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project in 2012. The Smithsonian has published major features. The National Park Service maintains exhibits at Golden Spike. The broad outline of erasure has been acknowledged.
But the acknowledgment has a strange ceiling. We know approximately how many workers there were. We know they were paid thirty to thirty five dollars in gold per month, roughly half what white workers received for identical labor. We know they went on strike in 1867 and that Central Pacific broke it by cutting off food supplies to their camps.
We know they ate dried vegetables and drank boiled water, which made them healthier than their counterparts. We have their archaeological remnants. Ceramic soy sauce jugs. Qing dynasty coins. Fragments of teacups unearthed from the Utah desert. What we do not have is them. Not as individuals. Not as people with specific histories, families, and inner lives.
Twelve thousand human beings compressed into a demographic statistic and a handful of broken pottery. This is where the records themselves become the story. The California State Railroad Museum states plainly that it does not have complete employee records for any railroad. Not one. The Minnesota Historical Society notes that Great Northern Railway personnel files from the 1890s are “selected,” with many missing, particularly from earlier years.
Family historians are warned that railroad employment records are scattered across hundreds of repositories and that many have been destroyed or simply lost. Before 1937, there was no centralized system. Every record lived with an individual company. And companies did not stay individual for long. The Louisville and Nashville Railroad alone acquired, leased, or constructed fifty six different railroads during the 1880s and 1890s.
Each merger was an opportunity for older records to be consolidated, which meant standardized, which meant simplified, which meant thinned. The granular employment documentation from the construction era is exactly what vanished first.
The records that would tell you who swung a hammer on which section of track, those are the first pages to go when filing cabinets get reorganized. The 1870 census was the first to even include a code for Chinese residents that could be cross-referenced with occupation. Before 1870, these workers simply do not exist in American government records. After 1882 and the Chinese Exclusion Act, the paper trail becomes actively dangerous to maintain.
Documents linking Chinese families to American labor were sometimes destroyed on purpose. In China, during the twentieth century Cultural Revolution, anything connecting a family to Western employment could mark them for persecution. The records are not just incomplete. They were attacked from both ends and corroded in the middle.
Something else was happening during these exact same decades that nobody in railroad history talks about. Between 1863 and 1890, the circus sideshow industry reached its absolute peak. P.T. Barnum had been exhibiting individuals of extraordinary height since the early 1860s. Anna Swan of Nova Scotia stood seven feet eleven inches tall and joined Barnum’s American Museum in 1862, the same year President Lincoln signed the Pacific Railway Act. She nearly burned to death when the museum caught fire in 1865, the same year Chinese labor
gangs started blasting through the Sierra. By the 1870s, exhibitions of unusual bodies were standard features at every major circus. By 1880, the industry had professionalized into a significant entertainment sector. And here is what matters for the photographic record. PBS documented that sideshow photographers of this exact era deliberately manipulated scale in their images.
Tall men were photographed beside miniature furniture to exaggerate their height. Short performers were placed next to oversized chairs. The images were products, not documents. They were designed to distort proportion for commercial purposes. These manipulated photographs used the same formats as every other photograph of the period. Cartes de visite. Cabinet cards. Tintypes. The same formats used to document railroad construction crews.
Two industries running on parallel tracks during the same narrow window. One building the physical infrastructure of the nation. The other absorbing unusual human bodies into the entertainment infrastructure. Both producing photographs in identical formats. And the overlap in their timelines has never been seriously examined.
I need to say something here that cost me a week of hesitation. When I laid out the engineering numbers, the workforce gaps, the photographic parallels, I could feel the argument pulling toward a conclusion I was not sure I could defend. I almost set the entire project aside. What stopped me was not finding more evidence for the extraordinary claim. What stopped me was the ordinary claim.
The verified, documented, academically confirmed erasure of twelve thousand real people is already extraordinary enough. Stanford spent forty five years and still cannot find a single first-person document. That is not a conspiracy theory. That is a confession. When the factual record is already this broken, asking what else might be missing is not paranoia. It is due diligence.
Anna Swan married Captain Martin Van Buren Bates in 1871. He stood seven feet nine inches. She stood seven feet eleven. Queen Victoria sent the wedding gown. They were real people. After the circus, they settled in Seville, Ohio and built a house with fourteen foot ceilings and eight foot doors. Not a curiosity. Not a museum exhibit. A home.
Functional architecture scaled for two people whose bodies required it. Their doorways measured the same proportions as the government buildings and courthouses going up across America in that same decade. Not because of a conspiracy. Because when you build for someone approaching eight feet tall, the architecture converges on the same dimensions regardless of purpose. Bates was a Confederate Captain.
A military man experienced in organized labor under brutal conditions. He lived through the most intensive construction era in American history. I have found no evidence that he personally worked on the railroads. But I keep circling a simpler question. How many people of unusual physical capability were alive during those years? And would the incomplete, consolidated, partially destroyed employment records capture any of them if they had been on those crews? After approximately 1890, the pattern shifts. Everything shifts at once, as if someone turned a
dial. Sideshow attendance begins its long decline as motion pictures and amusement parks emerge as competing entertainment. Railroad photography moves from candid crew documentation to controlled corporate compositions.
The Chinese Exclusion Act has already severed the immigrant labor pipeline that built the western half of the nation’s rail network. Railroad companies undergo a wave of mergers and record consolidation that swallows individual employment files by the thousands. The kind of photograph where a crew stands together at end of track, tools in hand, faces visible, that format vanishes from the archive. It is replaced by promotional images.
Locomotives gleaming. Stations freshly painted. People carefully arranged. The granular, human record of who actually did the work narrows exactly when it would become most useful to answer these questions. Stanford’s researchers have used census cross-referencing, descendant oral histories, archaeological excavation, and international archival collaboration to reconstruct what they can. They can name some workers now. They can trace some family lines.
But the complete picture, their own word for it, remains a holy grail. An object of faith as much as scholarship. There is something about the 1969 centennial ceremony at Promontory Summit that crystallizes everything. One hundred years after the golden spike, the Chinese Historical Society of America sent a delegation to the anniversary celebration.
They were unexpectedly excluded from the official program. The one Chinese speaker who had been invited was bumped from the stage. The reason, preserved in multiple historical accounts, is that John Wayne showed up. A movie star replaced the descendants of the actual builders at a ceremony honoring what their ancestors built. One hundred years of erasure, and the centennial itself became another act of erasure.
The names on the stage did not match the names on the rails. Your town has a railroad. Or it has the scar where one used to run, a corridor of gravel and wildflowers cutting through the grid of streets. You have driven over crossings without thinking about who graded the earth beneath those rails. If your family came to America between 1863 and 1890, the infrastructure that carried them was built by people the records chose not to see. Not hidden by a shadowy conspiracy.
Just never written down. Assigned a number instead of a name. Photographed but not captioned. Present in every image and absent from every ledger. There are more than one thousand three hundred photographs from the construction era held across American archives and museums. Many have never been fully digitized.
Some require academic credentials to access. The originals sit on glass plate negatives in climate controlled storage, holding a level of detail that no reproduction has captured. Every face in those images belongs to a person who lifted iron, drove spikes, and risked death for thirty five dollars a month. Most of them will never be identified.
The question I cannot stop asking is not whether giants built the railroads. The question is what the complete story would look like if every photograph were digitized, every archive fully opened, every name recovered from every fragment of surviving paperwork. Because right now we are trusting a version of this history that even the institutions preserving it admit is incomplete. The rails still run.
The tunnels still hold. The engineering still functions after more than a century and a half. But the full accounting of who laid those rails, what they looked like, what they were physically capable of, that remains locked away. Locked in collections that are only partially accessible. Preserved in records that are only partially intact.
Captured in photographs that are only partially digitized. We counted every spike. Twenty one million hammer strokes between Sacramento and Omaha. We mapped every mile. We calculated every dollar of profit the railroad barons extracted. What we cannot do, after one hundred and fifty six years, is name the people who carried it all on their backs. The iron remembers their weight. The granite remembers their blasting.
The records forgot their names. Whether we choose to keep forgetting is the only question that remains.