Empire's Tracks

Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad

Manu Karuka

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780520969056
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Empire's Tracks boldly reframes the history of the transcontinentalrailroad from the perspectives of the Cheyenne, Lakota, and Pawnee Native American tribes, and the Chinese migrants whotoiled on its path. In this meticulously researched book, ManuKaruka situates the railroad within the violent global histories ofcolonialism and capitalism. Through an examination of legislative, military, and business records, Karuka deftly explains theimperialfoundations of U.S. political economy. Tracing the shared paths of Indigenous and Asian American histories, this multisitedinterdisciplinary study connects military occupation to exclusionaryborder policies, a linked chain spanning the heart of U.S. imperialism.This highly original and beautifully wrought book unveils how thetranscontinental railroad laid the tracks of the U.S. Empire.

ONE

The Prose of Countersovereignty

IN AUGUST OF 1877, AS Central Pacific Railroad construction moved into Paiute territory a month after Chinese workers went on strike, Central Pacific employment of Chinese labor dropped precipitously, never to reach the same giddy heights as those required during the slog through the Sierra Nevada summit wall. According to Charles Crocker, director of construction for the Central Pacific, Chinese workers heeded fantastical stories spread by Paiutes. He wrote to his associate:

The most tremendous yarns have been circulated among them and we have lost about 1000 through fear of moving out on the desert. They have been told there are Snakes fifty feet long that swallow Chinamen whole and Indians 25 feet high that eat men and women and five of them will eat a Chinaman for breakfast and hundreds of other equally as ridiculous stories.¹

It was their irrational fear, stoked by the stories told by Native people, Crocker suggested, that limited the employment of Chinese workers for the railroad. The ultimate controlling factor for employment rates was, in his telling, neither the needs of capital nor the demands of labor, but rather the imperial interaction: the encounter of Paiutes with the agents of colonialism in the form of railroad workers and managers. To explain the unfolding of negotiations over production between Central Pacific directors and Chinese workers, Crocker resorted to a third party, the people whose territory the railroad was built over and through. There is an anxiety that shows its face here, about the ongoing, unfinished nature of a colonial process that must confront the simple fact of Paiute survival and continuity, and about the incomplete sanctity and integrity of the capital that emerges from continental imperialism, which grounds its claim in an assertion of countersovereignty.

My invocation of “countersovereignty” proceeds, first, from a sense that settler invocations of sovereignty require recognition of Indigenous modes of relationship, however muted or displaced, in order to maintain any semblance of stability or coherence. This can be seen in the land grants that fueled Central Pacific Railroad production. Underlying any stability and coherence of Central Pacific claims of exclusive land ownership was recognition of the prior Paiute, and other Indigenous, claims on that same land. Barring any such recognition, however displaced or muted, Central Pacific claims to land would themselves be vulnerable to the same relations of conquest, whether through market terms or through force, that established and sustained a colonial order over Paiute territory. Countersovereignty, as visible in Central Pacific land grants and elsewhere, was a project of balancing the chaos and violence of colonialism on one side of the ledger—that of the (implicitly recognized) Indigenous sovereign—in order to establish political and economic space for the settler sovereign.

Colonial sovereignty is always necessarily a reactive claim: it is accurately considered a claim of countersovereignty. Recognition of Indigenous sovereignty takes form through fact and empiricism, capital and value. While prior sovereignties of Paiutes haunted Central Pacific colonialism, the railroad also relied on an imported labor force managed under conditions of racial violence. Chinese workers were integral to the Central Pacific’s construction process, and decidedly not as enfranchised members of Nevada settler society. The possibility of Chinese claims to full participation in countersovereignty threatened the colonial economy. Chinese labor (disciplined by Chinese merchant capital) sustained and expanded the production of capital in the colonial political economy, and by doing so, sustained and expanded colonialism over Paiute lives and territory. The possibility of Chinese workers engaging of their own accord with Paiutes threatened the political economy of countersovereignty. Claiming a status of fact for that countersovereignty, such possibilities of alien and Native interactions were cast as rumors. Was Central Pacific Railroad capital, which derived from federal land grants and the surplus produced by railroad laborers, vulnerable to being slowed by a rumor? The location of Crocker’s story was, itself, set in place at a crossroads of federal Indian and railroad policy. The secretaries of the interior and treasury communicated over the path of the railroad, and of land grants, “fixing a point at the Western base of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, through which the main line of the Pacific Rail Road shall pass.”²

For a historian working in the Central Pacific Railroad archives, Crocker’s story raises questions rather than answering them, and begins a line of inquiry rather than providing an exotic sidebar. This, after all, may be the only mention of Chinese and Paiute interactions in the archive of Central Pacific Railroad production. To find more, we must turn elsewhere. Lalla Scott, for example, recorded a story of a Chinese railroad work gang who shared food with a group of Paiutes living near their work camps during one segment of railroad construction near Humboldt Lake, in Nevada Territory.³ Interactions between Chinese and Paiutes are recorded as rumors in the archives of Nevada settlement and colonization. These interactions open possibilities of a history in which colonial claims to legitimacy and authority are seen as properly peripheral, coercive, and reliant, ultimately, on violence.

Following the strategies of railroad capitalists, attempts to write a history of Chinese and Paiute interactions in the nineteenth century rely on speculation as a method. While capitalists speculate on ways to maximize future profits, historical speculation looks to the past to mine objects, rumors, and tangles of contracts in order to map a field of possible interactions between Chinese migrants and Paiutes. Casting shadows back onto the behemoth of expanding capital, these histories underscore the speculative enterprise of a history of U.S. expansion under the banner of abstract universal Capital, moving from a Newtonian universe of colonial justification to a quantum field of historical and political probability. The history of countersovereignty is part of the rumor community of continental imperialism, constantly repeated in the present, a testament of faith in colonialism.⁴ Speculation, grounded only in the power to end the prospect of life and its reproduction—this is the limit of history.

Historians often seek access to the voice of the colonized, the voice of the people, through rumors. Dim echoes sounding through the caverns of colonial archives, these rumors appear at a remove from their community of meaning and interpretation. This remove, a gulf between a living, supple rumor and its cold reduction into fact, is one of those chasms productively shaping the historiography of colonialism, reaching across the social and subjective constraints of the colonial historian’s institutional location.⁵ To dismiss rumors as problematic sources misses the point that rumors indelibly shape the historiography of colonialism.

In the analysis of rumors, questions of their origins and causes are often irrelevant. Rumors veer away from the metaphysics of colonial knowledge and justification, which carry neatly ordered sequences that flatter colonizers’ or elites’ pretensions to power. Instead they focus historians’ attention on the social reproduction of meaning, the repetition and transformation of “local knowledge,” and on the social effects of those processes.⁶ The community of a living rumor—its authors and audience—outlines its boundaries as it echoes through times. To speak, hear, and repeat such messages is to participate in a rumor’s community: the rumor of the colonized is an inclusive, democratic form of communication.

A rumor does more, though, than create a community of shared knowledge. It also breathes life into a community of interpretation, a particular vantage point on a colonial situation.⁷ Implicit within rumor is a distrust of colonizers and local elites. Instead, the community of interpretation called into motion by rumor grounds itself within shared experiences, interpreted through a common repertoire, maintained and nurtured as a basis for navigating the collisions, collusions, and traumas of colonialism. In this way, rumors can provide historians access to an anticolonial politics, whose organizational forms emerge from the daily life of colonized people.⁸

Rumors as they appear in colonial archives often share more than a critique of colonial power; they also outline a field of possible responses. Here, again, the boundaries of a rumor’s community become significant.⁹ Shared knowledge and planned response must be guarded and policed, lest they fall into the hands of those who collude with the agents of colonial coercion. Hence, the repeated appearances of rumors in the archives of colonialism, in which colonial bureaucrats and corporate and military authorities see their work as rooting out rumors and preempting assaults on their power and reason. Rumors appear in the colonial archive laden with fear and anxiety, with the awareness that the antiseptic face of colonial authority is only maintained through a constant escalation of violence, an overtly aggressive and nervous stance.¹⁰

Rumors in settler colonial situations are distinct from the sweeping outline rendered above. Rumor is usually taken to provide access to the voices of the colonized, the people, or the masses; in settler colonial situations, rumors may have played an important function in delineating and substantiating the claims and contours of a colonialist identity, speaking to the historian of settler nationalism with a sort of ancestral voice.¹¹ In nineteenth-century Nevada Territory, rumors played just such a role. These were communities that took their founding impulse in rumors of precious metals, information shared through informal networks alongside government reports and mass media. Until the development and expansion of a continental telegraph network, information about Indians, in particular, passed through newspaper exchanges that reprinted information without attribution, often contradictory, and couched in speculation and rumor.¹² Terry Knopf described functional interpretations of rumors: “Rumors . . . explain what is not clear, provide details, answer questions, aid in decision-making and, above all, relieve collective tension.”¹³ These rumors were, at the same time, important circuits for the reproduction of paranoid fantasies of racial supplantation, whether by Indigenous nations, racial aliens, or others.¹⁴ Rumor was the flame that heated the melting pot.¹⁵

To claim membership in the nascent community of late nineteenth-century Nevada was to claim participation as audience and co-author of the constitutive rumors of the community. Across language, cultures, and histories of migration and settlement, rumors forged a community of interpretation among those who came to call themselves “Nevadans” and “Americans.” The rumors that spread within this community, preserved in its archives, record the perspectives shared in the community, and its interpretation of a common situation. We might follow Tamotsu Shibutani’s analysis of rumor as a collective transaction, one involving a division of labor that works to settle on a shared interpretation of events, “a collective formation that arises in the collaboration of many.”¹⁶ This community of interpretation has an afterlife in the historiography of continental imperialism that covers rumor’s ideological birthmarks in the costume of dispassionate fact.¹⁷ Gary Fine and Patricia Turner remind us: “What people believe is true reflects how they perceive themselves, their associates, and the conditions under which they live.”¹⁸ With no particular point of origin, spreading through official and informal means, elaborated upon and improvised through repetition and reinterpretation, the rumors that grounded Nevadan settlers in place lent themselves to a sort of democratic possibility, a shared claim to ownership that could simultaneously allow for and preserve hierarchy and social difference within the community, while delineating boundaries and borders for who was included. Ralph Rosnow and Gary Fine argued that rumors are most often fueled by “a desire for meaning, a quest for clarification and closure.”¹⁹

To participate in the political trappings of Nevadan society—to vote, to claim rights in property or in court—is, then, to participate in the rumor of countersovereignty, the absurd claim that has to be continually repeated in order to enfold itself in a shroud of legitimacy, beyond the threat of violence which lingers in the silence following its utterance. Rumor manifests here as a form of collective problem-solving, the problems being: the prior occupancy and ongoing existence of Indigenous communities, and the social reproduction of imported labor.²⁰ In Paiute histories, this threat was often realized in catastrophic violence inflicted by whites upon Paiute communities, and settlers’ rumors of countersovereignty played a part in this.²¹ This repetition, moreover, is about much more than an interpretation or a story. It is the foundation of a set of policies, of a way of acting, couched in invasion and occupation.²² Rumor thrives in situations of war and politics, those constitutive elements of countersovereignty.²³ What Knopf described, of rumor’s function in another context, is applicable here: “rumors are not only a refinement and crystallization of hostile beliefs, but a realization of them as well—a confirmation by ‘reality’—reality as perceived by the group of people involved.”²⁴

A critical historiography of continental imperialism would necessarily participate in rumor co...

Table of contents

• Subvention
• Abbreviated Series List
• Title
• Copyright
• Epigraph
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• 1 • The Prose of Countersovereignty
• 2 • Modes of Relationship
• 3 • Railroad Colonialism
• 4 • Lakota
• 5 • Chinese
• 6 • Pawnee
• 7 • Cheyenne
• 8 • Shareholder Whiteness
• 9 • Continental Imperialism
• Epilogue: The Significance of Decolonization in North America
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Full Series List