The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [42]
All these contributions paled, however, compared to the Chinese reclamation of the Sacramento-San Joaquin delta. Every spring, the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers, the two major rivers in California, flooded their common delta for hundreds of square miles. The rotting tules, or bulrushes, decayed into a rich, fertile layer called peat, but to exploit this nutrient-rich soil, farmers had to drain, clear, and plow the delta as well as construct numerous levees and dikes to protect crops from future floods. Because horse hooves sank straight into the slushy bottom, humans were needed to complete these tasks, but few white men wanted to wade knee- or sometimes waist-deep in these mosquito-infested swamps. Only the Chinese were willing to do what was needed—to work in the muck, slashing their knives through miles of rotten tules, and build by hand a series of gates, ditches, and levees to create a giant labyrinthine network of irrigation channels.
The exact number of Chinese who died from disease, infection, or overwork as they restored five million acres of boggy delta swamp-land was not recorded. Some landowners valued Chinese life less than that of their animals; in the flood of 1878, as Chinese workers, covered with mud and weighted down with sandbags, struggled to shore up levees, some farm owners dispatched boats upriver to rescue their stock but left the Chinese behind to scream at passing ships for help. But we do know what the Chinese did for the landowners: they not only reclaimed the land, an achievement that would have been impossible without their stubborn dedication to the task assigned them, but they also invented the “tule shoe” during the project, so that horses could be used in this environment. And after their work was done, a surveyor estimated that the land, which the owners had purchased from the federal government for as little as two or three dollars an acre, the land on which the Chinese had worked for about ten cents per cubic yard of soil moved, was now worth seventy-five dollars an acre. The combined value of Chinese labor on the railroads and tule swamps, two projects essential to California’s growth, ran in the hundreds of millions.
The sea also provided work opportunities for the Chinese, though its dangers rivaled or even surpassed the brutality of the delta reclamation. Some Chinese labor contractors cut a new kind of deal with the salmon-canning factories of the Pacific Northwest, in which the canneries paid contractors for the volume of work produced, while the contractor paid the laborers a fixed wage. The incentives of such an arrangement ensured a negative outcome. The Chinese labor contractors became harsh taskmasters, and conditions in the canning industry grew notoriously bad. The horror of the job began even before arrival at the work site. On board vessels sailing to Alaska, the Chinese received no water for washing, so their living quarters swarmed with lice and fleas; when inspecting the “Chinatown” section of his vessel one shipmaster wore rubber boots as protection against parasites. By the early 1880s, canneries in the region employed more than three thousand Chinese, who labored under such shocking conditions that Rudyard Kipling, visiting one such cannery, wrote, “Only Chinese men were employed in the work, and they looked like blood-besmeared yellow devils, as they crossed the rifts of sunlight that lay upon the floor.” One observer remarked that the scene in a cannery was “not so much like men struggling with innumerable fish as like human maggots wiggling and squirming among the swarms of salmon.”
There were two ways the middleman could increase his profit—pay the workers a minimal sum, and force them to work faster. A Bureau of Fisheries investigator reported that the contractors drove workers “as with the whip,” noting that “the work of canning exceeds in rapidity anything I have ever seen, outside the brush-making establishment in the East.”
Their speed was indeed stunning. One Chinese Columbia River butcher