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By Root 795 0

something that piqued my interest. As one of the stops on the Chicago–Los Angeles railroad line, Williams’s history had been shaped by its position on the great east–west railway that transformed a transcontinental journey from six months by covered wagon to six days by train. The railway companies recruited thousands of people for this massive construction project. Some were Civil War veterans, others were Irish immigrants, but most famously the companies also imported ten thousand Chinese labourers, fifteen hundred of whom were killed on the job. Nitroglycerine had just been invented and it was incredibly unstable – it could hardly be moved without blowing up. So the company foremen assigned the task of blowing tunnels and cuttings through the bedrock and mountains to the Chinese labourers, whom they reckoned were used to handling gunpowder and fireworks. But, of course, they had no experience with nitroglycerine. On some of the lines, one Chinese labourer died for every mile of track laid. Not that this bothered the rail companies or the government, who had a very dismissive attitude to recent immigrants.

When the railway companies reached a town like Williams that was at the end of a line, the Chinese labourers, the Irish immigrants, freed slaves, low-lifes and the poorest of the poor often wanted to settle there. However, they would only ever be offered the worst land, on the other side of the railway from the locals. Hence the phrase ‘on the wrong side of the tracks’. When I was a boy, the tramlines in Glasgow divided the city in exactly the same way: they separated the poor from the rich.

Of all the immigrants, the Chinese were often treated worst. There was no good reason for this, as they were hard and loyal workers. It was just racial prejudice and suspicion of people who were different. But the Chinese workers came up with an ingenious way to duck out of bad treatment. In the part of Williams that was very much on the wrong side of the tracks was a brothel called the Red Garter (although I had a funny feeling that it would have been on the right side of the tracks for me). Next to it were a series of other fun palaces – mainly bars. Whenever the boozed-up locals stumbled out into the street, looking for trouble, they would usually target the Chinese workers who lived near by. But the Chinese were too smart for them. They excavated a network of tunnels underneath that part of Williams so they could slip down trapdoors, scarper down their escape routes and reappear somewhere else entirely.

Eventually, though, the constant attacks got too much for them and they moved away. Thinking about the effort that must have gone into digging all those tunnels, I was struck by how threatened they must have felt. They had done the most incredible job of building the railway, blasting paths through mountains and losing their friends, only to be attacked and vilified when the job ended. It was a rotten, shameful thing. To me, it seemed to be yet another example of the tendency among immigrant communities to seek out and persecute anyone who is socially beneath them and make their life a misery. I’ve seen this around the world and I wish we could get rid of it. It must have been terrifying to run like hell through those tunnels, chased by those bastards, shooting left and right to lose them.

A large fire in the 1970s destroyed much of the tunnel network, but it was still extraordinary to see the remnants. I was shown to one of the entrances by a local bar manager called Jackie. Convinced that the ghosts of two Chinese guys guarded the tunnels under her bar, she had never ventured down there herself. As you know, I’m very sceptical about that type of thing, but she was welcome to her beliefs, and she was a great sport for letting me peer through the tunnels before continuing my journey west.

After another fifty miles of sun-baked Arizona desert, I arrived in Seligman, which was immortalised as a Route 66 town in a fabulous photograph taken in 1947 by Andreas Feininger that appeared on the cover of Life magazine. As so often