Colorado's Japanese Americans: From 1886 to the Present

5: Coal and Steel

C O A L A N D S T E E L P A G E 37 Not iron ore but gold and silver were the minerals that first attracted settlers to the Colorado mountains in the second half of the eighteenth century, and the Chinese began to arrive toward the end of the precious metals boom. Many of them were former employees of the Central Pacific Railroad and had lost their jobs when it joined rails with the Union Pacific at Promontory, Utah, on May 10, 1869, completing the first transcontinental line. In Colorado their first jobs usually were in labor gangs shoveling gravel into the sluice boxes of placer mines in the rarified air of Gilpin and Park Counties. This was an unattractive labor-intensive occupation avoided by other workers. William Wei, professor of history at the University of Colorado, has written that these Chinese worked six or seven days a week for about $35 a month without board. If they wished to mine independently, about the only way the Chinese c h a p t e r f i v e C O A L A N D S T E E L C O A L A N D S T E E L P A G E 38 could expect to share the wealth was as scavengers picking over abandoned tailings. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 halted Chinese immigration and by the time the Japanese began to arrive, there were only a handful of Chinese in Denver. Like the Chinese, many Japanese entered the U.S. labor market through railroad jobs and other occupations demanding men who— because they were unskilled and did not know English—would work hard for little pay. An important entry point into the labor market in the nation’s interior was coal mining, an industry not well known in Japan and one that required little more than a strong back and a willingness to work underground. Hisashi Tsurutani in his book America Bound reports that starting around 1900 West Coast labor contractors began sending Japanese to work in the mines around Rock Springs and Kemmerer, Wyoming. One report says that around 1910 about 2,000 Japanese were working in the Kemmerer area, but this number might have included Japanese workers in all of western Wyoming. Inevitably some of these men drifted down into Colorado where they found work not only on the railroads but in coal mines south of Walsenberg and north of Denver, steel mills of Pueblo, and farms Japanese immigrants were developing in the valleys of the South Platte and Arkansas Rivers. The direct reason for Japanese entry into Colorado mines was the growing strength of the United Mine Workers Union. Work in the mines was punishing; the pay, marginal. The miners, mostly immigrants from southern Europe, were willing to listen to union organizers ’ promises of more pay and better conditions, and the prospect of higher operating costs worried mine owners. To put it bluntly, the Japanese were sought as potential strikebreakers. Ozawa writes in his thesis, “Whatever the truthful reason may have been for the importation of the Japanese miners, the fact re- C O A L A N D S T E E L P A G E 39 mains that the Japanese remained in the coal fields of Southern Colorado , despite the opposition of the labor unions, because the coal mines in these districts were under the control of the big mine companies such as the Colorado Fuel and Iron Co., the Victor Fuel Co., and the Union Pacific Fuel Co., and effective labor union organizations did not exist.” Many Japanese preferred the mining jobs in northern Colorado, where the union was less well organized because of the proximity to Denver’s attractions. The late Dr. Thomas Kobayashi recalled that his parents made a living operating rooming houses for northern Colorado miners. In the north, coal was relatively close to the surface so these mines played out fairly quickly; therefore, the coal companies would move from one location to the next, followed by the miners and the Kobayashi family. These were rough and violent times. One source reports that two Japanese were among the twenty fatalities in the Ludlow Massacre south of Pueblo in which Colorado troops fired into an encampment of strikers and their families. Nothing has been found to confirm this story; however, while researching his book America Bound, Hisashi...