Japanese Men Brought to Work on Railroad in 1900

Even among amateur historians it's well-known that many Chinese and Irish immigrants labored to build the railroad lines in the United States. It was hard and hazardous work. This week's Historic Pinole column comes from a May 12, 1900 article in the San Francisco Call newspaper. It announced the hiring of dozens of Japanese men to work on the Santa Fe railroad between Pinole and Point Richmond. It is posted without changes to punctuation or spelling.

EMPLOYMENT OF JAPANESE

Gang of Them Put to Work on the Santa Fe Road

Special Dispatch to The Call

PINOLE. May 11 — To-morrow morning forty-five Japanese who arrived in San Francisco from Japan in the early part of the week will commence working for the Santa Fe railroad as section hands between this section and Point Richmond. Fifty-five more are expected to arrive tomorrow, and they will be put to work east of here. The men were brought here in charge of George Wakimoto. Net one of them can speak a word of English. The men are under contract to work for $1.25 per day. A gang of forty-five white laborers were removed from here yesterday, and the Japanese will be put in their places.

This article comes from the California Digital Newspaper Collection, Center for Bibliographic Studies and Research, University of California, Riverside https://cdnc.ucr.edu/cdnc. The collection has digitzed more than 400,000 images from newspapers in the 19th and 20th centuries. Images dated between 1846 and 1922 are in the public domain and not subject to copyright.