Of Course Racism Rode the Rails to Promontory

The Transcontinental Railroad was a massive disruption  to many populations in the American West: self-sufficient communities discovered the wonders and costs of cheap imports, crime soared as rough railroad workers roamed and plundered, and folks who "don't look like us" were suddenly everywhere.

And racism, let's be blunt here, was the norm. Newspaper accounts almost identified race except for northern Europeans. Black, Greeks, Italians and others all got their "race" mentioned. A railroad gang supervisor will describe his workers as "three Greeks, two Italians, and five whites," and not think anything is amiss at all.

Especially the Chinese.

"Celestials," as they were commonly referred to, had three strikes against them right from the get-go: They looked different, they worked harder and better, and they were willing to work cheap.

Well, I hear you saying, "no wonder they were hated. Better work and cheaper? Can't have any of that!"

Mural showing Chinese workers building Transcontinental Railroad in Ogden's Union Station

And hated they were.

Race was part of it, but so was the economic disruption they caused. Sure, they built the Central Pacific's part of the Transcontinental Railroad, but what -- you can hear the nation asking -- have you done for us lately?

In 1885 a camp of Chinese workers hired by the Union Pacific to mine coal and maintain the rails was attacked by residents of Rock Springs, Wyoming. The resulting riot left 28 Chinese dead, more injured, and the survivors fleeing into the wilderness for their lives.

Folks were asking this in May of 1869, just weeks after the railroad was finished.

On May 26, 1869, the dust had barely settled when the Deseret News ran what looks like an editorial, but that is unsigned, raising the question of what to do with all those folks from China. The arguments, pro and con, sounds surprisingly similar to debates going on in 2019.

"The completion of the great continental highway ... is likely to force the question of Chinese labor upon the attention of the country," it says. California is already dealing with it, where "many see little to hope but much to fear from the influx of the Chinese. If their views be correct, it is a peril which not only menaces California, but the whole country."

Indeed, the road of iron put every part of the nation within days' reach of the peril.

What is the danger? "They have come by thousands to California, and though driven from the mines that Americans and Europeans deem valuable, they contrive to live and save money by working in the streams and placers which the dominant race has deserted."

Unlikely to be satisfied with gold mine leavings, this article says, the Chinese "will set eastward. The force of circumstances will push it in this direction."

Statue honoring Chinese workers, Utah Railroad Museum.

And where the Chinese go, others will suffer. "The European laborer in the East will not work for less than two or three dollars a day; but the Chinaman will work for less than a dollar."

Not only that, but the Chinaman "is frugal and patient, and as industrious as a beaver. He will live where one of the so-called superior race would starve. His food is a little rice, and he eats meat but seldom. He indulges in no dissipation; but is simple, abstinent and very economical."

One would think employers would value such people. The CPRR sure did.

"The San Francisco Times says there are Chinamen who have been on that work who are better at aligning roads than many white men who have been educated in the business, and they will strike a truer line with the unassisted eye than most white men can with the use of instruments."

And so on. In a tunnel-drilling competition between gangs of Chinese and Irishmen "bets were freely made that the white men would come out winners, but at the end of the day, when the work of each party was measured, it was found that the Chinamen had burrowed further into the rock that the others and were, moreover, less fatigued."

The presence of such workers "will inevitably work a great revolution in labor," the article notes."Works will be accomplished which, without their aid, and as labor now costs, would be left unattempted. They are adept for almost any species of labor."

And yet, the article says, politicians and governments everywhere torment and discriminate against them. "Their popularity depends upon refusing them every privilite and right which other races, however profligate and worthless members of them may be, enjoy to the fullest extent."

In California, it says, "they are chased, abused, robbed and abominably maltreated by men and boys, their terror affording only amusement, and even the dogs are set upon and taught to bite them."

The article then takes an interesting turn, also paralleling debate today.

"And yet those who thus torture this race call themselves Christian," it says, "and mock and denounce them as idolators and heathens."

Deed, not example, is the key, it says, to those who wonder why the Chinese resent the way they are treated.

"Men may prate to them about American civilization, free and enlightened institutions, the spirit of progress and advanced Christianity until doomsday, but they will fail to respect or attach any value to these high-sounding phrases and professions while they are treated like wild beasts."

The article urges this course, although it does stop short of calling for actual equality.

"These Asiatics are willing to work, and work cheap at any kind of drudgery," he says. "If the Anglo-Saxon is the superior being which he affects to be, he can with safety assume the direction of this class of laborers. He can employ them to goo advantage and, instead of living a life of drudgery himself, he can cultivate his brain and direct and manage their labor to his own and their advantage."

So it's still racially-charged, but it's being nice, not mean, and that ought to count for something.

"If he treat them kindly, and pay them honestly, he will do more to convert them to his religion and ways than years of preaching with a contrary practice would do, and he need not be afraid that their degradation, vices or barbarism will hurt him."

Folks stayed afraid.  The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 suspended immigration for decades. The Rock Springs massacre was, sadly, typical.

The Standard-Examiner's Morgue Lives On At WSU

I know it's not nice to speak ill of the dead, but I'd really like a chance to smack Randy Hatch, and whoever else is responsible for this mess, upside the head.

And I really liked Randy. Still do.

A microfilm cassette

I doubt Randy, who died not long ago, made the decision by himself, and no doubt money was involved. Plus everyone shared an unfounded faith in technology that too many of us still suffer from.

Because when Randy, the then-publisher and editor of the Standard-Examiner, decided, in the mid-1980s, to do away with the company's "antiquated" clip file system of old news stories, he unwittingly condemned several decades of my town's news history to death.

Or, to be more accurate, inaccessibility, which may be worse.

I mean, the stories are sitting right there, in glittering black and white. On 16mm microfilm, in a special weird square proprietary cassette nobody else makes, the special reader for which is probably gracing the shelf of some thrift store, somewhere. Maybe. Landfill, more likely.

And those stories are indexed, of course, on computer files created in long-dead software, migrated from three or four different types of storage disc and finally stored on a single computer at the S-E newsroom which, I am betting, got tossed out years ago.

We've got scores of these things

Which sucks. The microfilm was used from the mid-1980s until the early 2000s, when a computer database was created. About three years ago the S-E changed computers databases again, tried to migrate the archive, failed, so that disappeared as well.  Reporters I talk to, now, grumble a lot about this, but the computer gods are evil and implacable gods, and here we are. I suppose someone can scan the film in, and make it searchable, but that takes money and who has that?

Meanwhile, that old system lives on. Good as ever.

At this point, may I say: God Bless Donna Bingham.

Donna was the S-E's librarian from about 1945  until 2000 when she retired. Every day on the job Donna would take half a dozen copies of the days paper, carefully snip out each of the local stories (being careful to match jumps), as well as any national stories with local import, and stick them all in equally carefully indexed file folders, stamping each story with that day's date.

She was building what newspaper folk used to fondly called the morgue. Thousands of dead stories,

A photo of Donna in the 1950s.

all preserved.

Stories about what? Everything that was in the paper, which means everything. Crime, illness, politics, businesses, the odd and the mundane. Over the years, Donna filed away hundreds of thousands of stories about thousands of subjects in a LOT of file folders.

I did some back-of-the-napkin math today. One banker's box of those file folders contains, roughly 175 file folders.

Just the news stories from 1933, when the S-E apparently started collecting these files, until 1980, fill 36 banker's storage boxes. That means 6,300 file folders. If you guess each one contains 40 clipped stories, that's a quarter million stories, each one clipped, read, dated, indexed and attached to a little paper glued tab.

They don't make people like Donna any more. She was always quiet, always dedicated. She married a fly-boy during World War II, he got shot down, and she spent the rest of her life building that library at the S-E.

She knew those files, too. If you asked for one she'd get a thoughtful look, go dig, and produce it. It might take her five minutes, it might take her two days, but she'd find it.

Time marches on. While I worked at the paper the management decided, first, to do away with Donna's tedious clip work and replace it, instead, with a slick new microfilm system keyed to a computer. This was in the 1980s when computers were hot stuff, the wave of the future.

The pages of the newspaper were filmed, then Donna and a helper would go through the film and type the story information into a computer file, which created a database of index numbers. Clap the film cassette into a special reader, type in the index
number, push the button, and your story magically appeared on the screen.

Very slick, for the 1980s. Donna's clip files, filling huge racks, were pushed aside. As the years passed, they fell into disuse. When the newspaper moved to BDO they were boxed up haphazardly, re-racked haphazardly, re-boxed haphazardly and finally stored in a dungeon-like room.

You know, of course, what happened to the 1980s computers and their software. As I said above, the indexes were migrated, but that only goes so far. Did anyone have time to re-enter all the data to new software?

Of course not. The reader for all that microfilm got old, then got replaced with something simpler that needed an adaptor, and God only knows where even that is now.

The S-E is hardly alone. NASA has had to dig through junk yards for machines that can read stored magnetic tape from early Voyager satellites. Even original tapes of moon landings are hard to read.

Time marches on, as they say, but those clip files Donna created had one good quality: They didn't go away. As any museum curator will tell you, paper lasts. Good paper lasts longer, and these are just newsprint, but they were still there, still readable. Whenever a new editor or publisher came to the S-E I'd be first in line at the reception, talking about those files' value for research, their place in history.

I also talked with Sarah Singh, curator of the Weber State University Special Collections, who started talking to S-E executives about donating those files, now moldering away, to WSU.

It took a bunch of time -- corporations never move quickly -- but last December the S-E finally found a way to donate all the files, now stored safely in WSU's archive.

Sarah took everything: clip files, negative files, picture files. All of it.

The clip files start about 1933 and go until about 1987. This is treasure beyond worth, but of course there are problems. As I said above, the files were moved several times, boxed and unboxed, then boxed again, by people who didn't pay close attention to the alphabet. Sometimes if feels as if the files have been shuffled, no rhyme or reason.

So the first job is just to get them in order, but this, in a way, is fun. I'm spending a day a week just sorting the boxes, then sorting the files, getting them in order again so researches can access Donna's handiwork. Donna's system was simple -- pre-1980, then post-1980, and there was some overlap during the microfilm period.

Why do these files matter, when it is possible to create a computer database? After all, some sites -- the Utah Digital Newspapers site run by the University of Utah is one -- scan whole pages and make them word-searchable. Who needs paper files?

Because it costs a lot of money to create that database. Plus, when you search that database for, let's say, Ogden Mayor Harm Peery, you will get a whole list of links to the stories. Each link must be clicked on, loaded, then looked at to see if it is the item you want.

Over. And over. And over. From 1933 until he died in the early 1960s, The S-E ran more than 900 stories on Ogden's cowboy mayor. Yes, I counted them.

That's a lot of clicking, and reading, and saying "no, not that one," and doing it again.

Or you can open one of Donna's folders on Harm, of which there are about 15.  You can scan dozens of headlines at once.

And you have dozens of subject headings in front of you at once. If you can't find the one you want,  you find one you like.

Today I was working on the "T" section and found "Tabernacle," which covers the LDS Church's

tabernacle in Ogden.

Stories I had never seen before included four about the history, and demolition, of the "Pioneer" tabernacle, built in the 19th Century and torn down in 1971. Interestingly, in May of that year, the S-E ran a story about the building's history and construction. Then, in September, are three images showing its demolition.

Sad, but that's history in Ogden, and it's all preserved in rows and rows of boxes containing rows and rows of musty news clips.

Thank you, Donna. And thank you Randy, and your successors, for at least having the good sense to preserve these. In an era when other papers are dumping their legacies in the shredder, that was a gift worth noting.

For me, it means hours buried in many, many stories of Ogden's past, all of them fascinating, if disorganized. But that will take only time to repair.

I like to think of it as job security. Plus plenty of material for this blog, eh?

"Boring" history? Not when you dig in.

Quincy Koons does some research

My niece, Quincy Koons, spent a day recently with me in the Union Station archive, and we had fun digging through old city directories, old maps, old newspapers and so on.

"We'll hunt treasure," was how I put it, and we did, and had a great time.

One thing she said surprised me. "History is boring," she said, but she meant the history classes she takes at school.

She's right, though. I remember my history classes. We studied kings and Roman emperors, explorers and soldiers, inventors and warriors. I know who invented the cotton gin (Eli Whitney), the date of the battle of Hastings (1066) and the Roman emperor who converted his entire country to Christianity (Constantine.)

And I also remember, too, being bored.

Bored by the Crusades?  Well, yeah. I went to Catholic school where, amid the usual flurry of dates and names droned out by nuns, the Crusades were presented as some sort of grand noble march to "free" the Holy Land.

The nuns forgot to mention all the pillage and rape, the endless looting, the intrigue and double dealing, the conquest and defeat and suffering that is the part of any huge cultural clash.

Heck, did you know that the real-life model for Dracula was involved in the clash between Islam and Christianity that we still see today?  Talk to me about a guy who impales whole towns full of people, lengthwise, on wooden stakes just to prove he's bad, you will have my interest.

A 1942 map of the war teaches real-life geography

And that's the point. History has all the cool stories, but you have to get away from leaders, from politics and famous people to tell them. Sadly, far too many history books today don't do that. But it is the stories of the ordinary people, the people who did the suffering and fighting and bleeding and dying, where the real fun is.

Here at Union Station we have piles of boxes of stuff that was donated by ordinary people. When I told Quincy we'd spend the day treasure hunting, even I didn't know what we'd find in some random box.

A scary news story

First I showed her a Polk City Directory of Ogden in 1942. I explained how those directories showed not just names and addresses, but who was employed where, the names of people's spouses, where they lived and even a bit about how well they were doing economically.

It can also show who lived at every address in that year, I said, and Quincy immediately wanted to know who lived where she lives now. Easy to do -- just look up the street number, there was the name. We found out that the guy worked as a gardener at the old Dee Hospital, which used to be at Harrison and 24th, right down the street from her house.

Quincy was fascinated -- a connection to the past living right where she does!

Cover of the scrapbook

We pulled down a storage box I've never looked at labeled "World War II scrapbook." Inside was a treasure indeed, and one that Quincy, who is 12, could certainly relate to.

When World War II started in 1941, Reed LeRoy Roberts was a 13-year-old student in Grant Ward, Idaho. He was learning geography in the one-room school house, so the teacher told him to clip out stories about the war from the Ogden Standard-Examiner, following the war as it progressed.

Grant Roberts --  Reed's son? -- donated the scrapbook to us for safe keeping and it is a treasure. Reed clipped out stories, maps, cartoons and pictures. He wrote commentary on what he was learning.

Sure, you could find exactly the same stuff by going through microfilm of the paper, but the scrapbook personalizes it. You see what a 13-year-old Idaho kid saw, through his eyes. You learn what he learned. You are inside his head.

Quincy loved it. She paged through, picking out headlines, pictures, cartoons. She shot about 100 pictures with my digital camera. She compiled enough stuff to do a special report on her visit to her history teacher.

But she left still thinking history is boring. Which -- the way it is too often taught and written -- it is. But not when you dig in and find the fun stuff.

The allies rally against Japan

Nothing Simple About Tuning Up A '26 Lincoln

Back in the day I had a 1975 VW Rabbit.

Real lemon. Among it's many, many problems was a worn shaft in the distributor that made the rotor wobble as it spun. It would have cost a grundle of money to replace the shaft, money I didn't have.

So the thing wobbled, which meant the ignition points didn't stay gapped properly, which meant they tended to wear out often.

I got very good at replacing ingnition points. Fortunately they only cost a couple dollars a set. Popping the top off the distributor, taking the old points out and putting new ones in, got to be automatic. Points that should have lasted 15,000 miles, easy, rarely went more than 2,000 or 3,000, but who cared?

Distributor of the '26 Lincoln showing
one set of points.

I could gap them by sight. In an all mechanical engine, no computers, no electronics, there was enough play in the system that precision didn't matter, especially since the shaft's wobble meant precision was impossible in the first place.

Rotor of the '26 Lincoln

I thought of this as I came into the Browning-Kimball Car Museum at Union Station this morning and found Steve Sherwood standing by our 1926 Lincoln, spare tire off, hood flaps up, table full of wrenches and other tools nearby.

This Lincoln is a gem. Silent film actor Ernest Torrence was its original owner, the Browning family bought it in its original unrestored condition and it has stayed that way ever since. It's got fewer than 50,000 actual miles on the odometer, and Steve didn't think it had ever been tuned up since the Brownings bought it.

It was backfiring a bit the last time he started it, he said, so he figured it was time.

The 1926 Lincoln is a far cry from my old Rabbit. It's a V-8 with a dual carb and dual distributor. That means there's two sets of points, one on each side of the distributor, and two electrical contacts that the spinning distributor hits. You could say the car really has two engines, sitting side-by-side, taking turns firing their cylinders.

Steve has to polish the points, "and the manual says you can't use sandpaper, you have to use an oiled stone," he said, just like honing a knife blade. That means he had to take each set of points completely apart, polish the point faces, and reassemble them.


Turning over the engine so you can set the gap is no simple matter. On my old rabbit I just pushed the belt on the shaft around until the point was on top of the distributor shaft's cam. On the Lincoln, Steve had to turn the engine crank below the radiator, first opening up priming cups on each cylinder to reduce the compression. The cups are there to allow extra fuel to be added to the cylinders manually in cold weather, but also make turning over the engine a lot easier.

Once he gets the distributor all put back together he's got to set the timing, pulling up floorboards in the passenger area so he can see the mark on the flywheel. The whole thing has to be set precisely, with both sides of the engine coordinated exactly, or the engine won't work.

It's a real pain, to be honest, but Steve loves it because he loves the car and all it means for history. He will spend hours pondering the thing.

Me, I'm glad my current car doesn't need any of that. I was never much of a backyard mechanic. My old Rabbit made me one, but I was not sorry to see it go.

The current run of computer-run engines, which barely need a glance from me every 10,000 miles or so, suit me just fine.