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is a historic engineering achievement, every mile paid for in<br />
blood of the Chinese who died from exposure and avalanches.<br />
The reputation earned by Chinese workers led them<br />
to be hired to build rail lines not only in the West, but in<br />
the Midwest and South as well. This Transcontinental rail<br />
link enabled the minerals and farm produce of the West to<br />
be swiftly shipped back East, while giving Eastern industry<br />
ready access to Pacific markets, not only of the West Coast<br />
but all df Asia via the port of San Francisco.<br />
The time-distance across the continent was now<br />
cut to two weeks, and cheap railroad tickets brought a<br />
flood of European workers to the West. There was, of<br />
course, an established settler traditon of terrorism towards<br />
Chinese. The Shasta Republican complained in its Dec. 12,<br />
1856 issue that: "Hundreds of Chinamen have beer,<br />
slaughtered in cold blood in the last 5years ... the murder of<br />
Chinamen was of almost daily occurrence. " Now the new<br />
legions of immigrant European workers demanded a<br />
qualitative increase in the terroristic assaults, and the<br />
1870's and 1880's were decades of mass bloodshed.<br />
The issue was very clear-cut-jobs. By 1870, some<br />
42% of the whites in California were European immigrants.<br />
With their dreams of finding gold boulders lying<br />
in the streams having faded before reality, these new<br />
crowds of Europeans demanded the jobs that Chinese<br />
labor had created.(34) More than demanded, they were<br />
determined to "annex", to seize by force of conquest, all<br />
that Chinese workers had in the West. In imitation of the<br />
bourgeoisie they went aboilt plundering with bullets and<br />
fire. In mining camps and towns from Colorado to<br />
Washington, Chinese communities came under attack.<br />
Many Chinese were shot down, beaten, their homes and<br />
stores set afire and gutted. In Los Angeles Chinese were<br />
burned alive by the European vigilantes, who also shot and<br />
tortured many others.<br />
In perverse fashion, the traditional weapons of<br />
trade unionism were turned against the Chinese workers in<br />
this struggle. Many manufacturers who employed Chinese<br />
were warned that henceforth all desirable jobs must be filled<br />
by European immigrants. Boycotts were threatened,<br />
and in some industries (such as wineries and cigar factories)<br />
the new white unions invented the now-famous<br />
"union label 9 '-printed tags which guaranteed that the<br />
specific product was produced solely by European unions.<br />
In 1884, when one San Francisco cigar manufacturer<br />
began replacing Chinese workers (who then made up<br />
80-85% of the industry there) with European immigrants,<br />
the Chinese cigarmakers went on strike. Swiftly, the San<br />
Francisco white labor movement united to help the<br />
capitalists break the strike. Scabbing was praised, and the<br />
Knights of Labor and other European workers' organizations<br />
led a successful boycott of all cigar companies that<br />
employed Chinese workers. Boycotts were widely used in<br />
industry after industry to seize Chinese jobs.(35)<br />
In the political arena a multitude of<br />
"Anti-Coolie" laws were passed on all levels of settler<br />
government. Special taxes and "license fees" on Chinese<br />
workers and tradesmen were used both to discourage them<br />
and to support settler government at their expense.<br />
Chinese who carried laundry deliveries on their backs in<br />
San Francisco had to pay the city a sixty-dollar "license