Chinese in the woods
Subtitle: logging and lumbering in the American West
By: Sue Fawn Chung
Series: The Asian American experience; Asian American experience
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2015
Language: eng
Number of pages: 246
ISBN-13: 9780252039447
Subjects: Loggers; Chinese Foreign workers; Chinese; Immigrants; Ethnic relations; Economic conditions; Lumber trade; Working class; Lumbermen; History
Description: "Building on her path-breaking work on Chinese in mining areas of the American West, Sue Fawn Chung takes up the topic of Chinese in the nineteenth century lumber industry in this new book. Chinese immigrants were key participants in logging and lumbering, in some cases constituting as much as 90 percent of the lumbering workforce. Chung sets out the background of interest in logging in China and examines the Chinese and American labor contractors, the community organizations and networks that supported them, and some of the reasons Chinese were attracted to logging in the west. She explicates their work, lifestyle, and wages, the lumber companies that employed them, their relationship with other ethnic groups, and the reasons for their departure from this occupation, including tightening immigration restrictions. Among other findings, Chung shows that Chinese performed most of the tasks that Euro-American lumbermen did, that their salaries for the same type of work in some places were not necessarily lower than the prevailing wage for non-Asian workers and in some cases even higher, that although some were separated in their work from other ethnic groups, some developed close relationships with their fellow workers and employers, and that Chinese camp cooks were valued and paid equal or better wages than their Euro-American counterparts. When they were treated unfairly, Chinese often brought their cases before the American courts and through the legal system won the right to buy and sell timberland and to obtain equal wages in logging. Based on exhaustive archival work, this project will expand understandings of the Chinese in the West and in working class history"--Provided by publisher.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Early contact and migration; title: Work and workers; title: Carson City and Truckee : anti-Chinese activities; title: Of wood and mines; title: Of wood and trains.