Without the hard work of Chinese workers, the transcontinental railway would not have been built.

Who but the Americans can drill ten tunnels in a snowy mountain 30 feet deep? In 1969, U.S. Transportation Secretary John A. Volpe spoke to a crowd in Promontory, Utah, praising his ingenuity and excellence in work for revolutionizing the way young Americans travel. "Who else but an American could drill through miles of solid granite?" he asked. Related content is Sleeping in a Train Car

to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Transcontinental Railroad. In fact, 10,000 to 20,000 Chinese immigrant laborers helped forge the Central Pacific's path through the Sierra Nevada and led to the historic conference with the Union Pacific in 1869. The "Silent Peak," as scholars call the nameless Chinese, who were the largest workforce in American industry in the mid-19th century, have been erased in retellings of their feats.

Beginning on May 10, during the Transcontinental Sesquicentennial, the Smithsonian National Museum of History salutes the courage of those Chinese laborers. The new installation "Hidden Workers, Forgotten Lives" features artifacts from the era - a Chinese worker's hat, a soy sauce jar - documenting the adaptability of immigrants and their impact on the culture at large. Panion shows how railroads transformed the American West while also bisecting Native American lands and destroying wildlife habitat. "If one thinks of history as a prism, you only have to look to the past to understand the present and the future, and not just the transcontinental railroad," said Peter Liebold, director of the Smithsonian Museums, which will feature a show by a performance of the new musical "Golden Mountain" starring an Asian-American cast, and the world premiere of an orchestral work by Chinese-American singer Tian Zhou.

It may also mark the publication of Stanford scholar Gordon H. Chang's "Ghosts of Gold Mountain," a groundbreaking history of China's railroad workers. Given that Leland Stanford, the founder of Stanford University, was both a critic of Chinese immigration as governor of California and a beneficiary of Chinese labor as president of the Mid-Pacific Region, Professor Chang sees the 150th anniversary as an opportunity to rethink the central role that immigration has played in the nation's history. Perfect timing for all of this, he asked, "What's more American than building a railroad?"

Forgotten Workers: Chinese Immigration and the Construction of the Transcontinental Railroad" is on display at the National Museum of American History from May 10, 2019 through spring 2020.

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This article is from the May issue of Smithsonian Magazine