"Against a vast washof sagebrush and volcanic rock in Utah's West Desert, Chris Merritt, an archaeologist with the State Historic Preservation Office, took me on a tour of the old Transcontinental Railroad's route through Promontory Summit, from Corinne to Umbria Junction. The line was replaced during World War II by the Lucin Cutoff, which now runs straight through the Great Salt Lake, shearing off some of the original line's distance and allowing its iron tracks to be recycled for war munitions."
"I was visiting those sites throughout 2018 and 2019 as research for a poem commissioned by The Spike 150 committee to commemorate the sesquicentennial of the Transcontinental's completion in 1869. At the time, I was Utah's poet laureate - the first person of Asian descent to hold the role. I wanted to write a poem based on the letters and diaries of the Central Pacific Railroad's Chinese workers, which, I thought, were surely somewhere in the company's archive."
"As we walked the ghost town of Terrace, the era's rigid racial segregation was still apparent: All the Chinese artifacts, the buried remnants of its Chinatown, were found near the town's dump. Merritt pointed out fragments of broken opium pipes and dishes ground down in the sand. I dug up buttons and bits of glass. Some rice bowl shards were decorated with the Four Seasons or Bamboo patterns popular on Chinese dishware in the late 19th century."
An archaeologist guided field visits across the old Transcontinental Railroad route near Promontory Summit and ghost towns formed after the Lucin Cutoff replaced the line during World War II. The railroad's archival records contain no letters or diaries from Chinese Central Pacific workers, so research relied on material culture. Excavations in Terrace located Chinatown remnants concentrated near the town dump, with artifacts including broken opium pipes, dishes, buttons, glass, and rice-bowl shards decorated with Four Seasons or Bamboo patterns. The distribution of artifacts indicates rigid racial segregation and reveals daily life details absent from written records.
Read at High Country News
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