Chinese Railroad Work Company Payroll Document, circa 1878

Printable guide [HTML]
Request items

Summary

Creators:
Virginia & Truckee Railroad
Abstract:
Payroll document for a Chinese work company on the Virginia and Truckee Railroad, signed in Chinese characters.
Extent:
1 item
Language:
English
Preferred citation:

[Identification of item], Chinese Railroad Work Company Payroll Document, MC311, Archives and Special Collections, UC Davis Library, University of California, Davis.

Background

Scope and content:

Documentation of Chinese labor on the Virginia and Truckee Railroad, comprising a large payroll receipt for work completed by workers of a Chinese camp in January. The upper portion of the document, signed by the foreman George Uttley, states that, "Chinese Camp No. 8, The men belonging to this camp, and known as the Ah Kee Company, have worked 101 days in the month of January 1878." The lower portion acknowledges the receipt of $108.77 by the camp leader in payment for the labor, "at the rate of $28.00 per month of 26 days," and is signed in Chinese by the camp leader, for whom the camp was likely named by the railroad. The numbers suggest a camp that likely consisted of four or five Chinese laborers. The area around Truckee, California, and Virginia City, Nevada, during this period maintained a high population of Chinese who had remained after the construction of the Central Pacific:

"Truckee became the center of life for many Railroad Chinese during the construction of the High Sierra line and then for years after the line was completed. From the mid-1860s until the 1880s, when hostile whites drove almost all of them out of town in what became the infamous 'Truckee method' of expulsion, Truckee had one of the largest Chinese populations in the country.... In 1870, Chinese constituted at least 30 percent of the town's total resident population of 1,580, and 45 percent of its workforce. Other sources estimated the Chinese population as exceeding one thousand" - Gordon Chang, "Ghosts of Gold Mountain" (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2019), p.168.

[Description provided by McBride Rare Books]

Acquisition information:
Purchased from McBride Rare Books, 2020.
Processing information:

Liz Phillips created this finding aid with information supplied by McBride Rare Books.

Physical location:
Researchers should contact Archives and Special Collections to request collections, as many are stored offsite.
Physical facet:
Broadside, folded. Completed in manuscript.
Dimensions:
14 x 8.5 inches
Rules or conventions:
Describing Archives: A Content Standard

Access and use

Restrictions:

Collection is open for research.

Terms of access:

All applicable copyrights for the collection are protected under chapter 17 of the U.S. Copyright Code. Requests for permission to publish or quote from manuscripts must be submitted in writing to the Head of Special Collections. Permission for publication is given on behalf of the Regents of the University of California as the owner of the physical items. It is not intended to include or imply permission of the copyright holder, which must also be obtained by the researcher.

Preferred citation:

[Identification of item], Chinese Railroad Work Company Payroll Document, MC311, Archives and Special Collections, UC Davis Library, University of California, Davis.

Location of this collection:
University of California, Davis, Special Collections, UC Davis Library
100 NW Quad
Davis, CA 95616-5292, US
Contact:
(530) 752-1621
speccoll@ucdavis.edu
Website