Colorado's Japanese Americans: From 1886 to the Present

4: Workin' on the Railroad

W O R K I N ’ O N T H E R A I L R O A D P A G E 30 By 1900 the vast reaches of Colorado were stitched together by hundreds of miles of railroad crossing the prairies; taking supplies into the mountains and bringing out the ore; linking ranches with meat packers in Omaha, Kansas City, and Chicago; and coming back with manufactured goods. The rails had to be maintained and new lines constructed as the frontier advanced. At first the Irish, and later the Chinese and immigrants from southern Europe and Mexico, provided the labor. In 1882 Congress, under pressure from West Coast labor leaders who felt threatened by Asian workers, passed the Chinese Exclusion Act sealing off that source of labor. But southern European workers were often inclined to be difficult to manage and the railroads turned to Japanese immigrants for help. They worked hard and worked for less than whites. Equally important, they had a “boss” system under which T H E R A I L R O A D c h a p t e r f o u r W O R K I N ’ O N W O R K I N ’ O N T H E R A I L R O A D P A G E 31 contractors took the responsibility of hiring and maintaining crews of laborers for the railroads. The most enterprising among the Japanese immigrants became labor contractors. Japanese author Hisashi Tsurutani in his book America Bound reports that Kyutaro Abiko, who founded the Japanese American News in San Francisco in 1899, established the Japanese -American Labor Contract Company in 1903 to supply Japanese laborers to railroads, mines, and farms in several states including Utah. To recruit young Japanese farm boys to work on the Great Northern Railroad and the Northern Pacific in Montana, Ototaka Yamaoka, Tetsuo Takahashi, and Matajiro Tsukuno established the Oriental Trading Company in Seattle. Tsutomu Wakimoto and Ryuun Nishimura formed the Wakimoto-Nishimura Company in 1902, The first job for Japanese immigrants in Colorado was with railroad section crews who rode handcars from bunkhouses to work sites. W O R K I N ’ O N T H E R A I L R O A D P A G E 32 which supplied the Union Pacific with hundreds of Japanese laborers in Wyoming. In one document Wakimoto claimed in 1906 that he was supplying Union Pacific with two thousand workers, although this number has been disputed. Terasaburo Kuranaga recruited workers for the Union Pacific in the central mountain areas. Shinzaburo Ban started a general merchandise store in Portland, Oregon, in 1902 and soon expanded into railroad labor contracting. Four years later he set up branch offices in Sheridan, Wyoming, and in Denver through which he operated a dry goods store, distributed Japanese provisions throughout the state, and also provided labor for the Burlington Railroad in Colorado and Wyoming. But the big man in Colorado was Naoichi (Harry) Hokasono. Born in Oita Province, he came to the United States in 1893 at age twenty. Five years later he opened a restaurant in Denver and by 1903 he was a general labor contractor—building roads and dams, stringing power lines, as well as maintaining railroads—with Japanese workers in Colorado and Wyoming. Because of his contributions, he is commemorated, as mentioned earlier, in the Colorado state capitol. The railroad laborers, called section hands, were hired to keep up the tracks as well as construct new lines. And later a few Japanese were employed in the roundhouses where locomotives received routine maintenance. For most of this era the railroads paid the contractors $1.10 to $1.25 a day for each workman, and the contractors paid the men $0.95 to a dollar with the contractors providing food and housing. Usually the section hands were housed in remodeled old freight cars that were parked on some isolated siding. The nearest water, aside from a limited supply delivered for drinking and cooking , was likely to be a stream or pond. The food the contractors supplied was mostly flour, which the designated cook managed to convert into an inexpensive stew called dango-jiru in Japanese (dango W O R K I N ’ O N T H E R A I L R O A D P A G E 33 meaning “dumpling” and jiru meaning “soup”) and flavored with a few...