The Ghosts of Nisene Marks
Driving back home on Highway 17, the vermiculate and somewhat dangerous road that links Santa Cruz to the rest of the Bay Area, I lamented to Maddy that the San Jose light-rail system would probably never extend as far south as Santa Cruz.
A lot of people commute over that mountainous stretch of highway on a daily basis. San Jose has lots of good jobs -- in fact it's one of the few cities in the nation right now that doesn't seem to be losing them -- but Santa Cruz is a nicer place to live by all accounts. Santa Cruz used to be a fairly isolated city, but once it's larger neighbor across the mountains to the north became Silicon Valley, Santa Cruz became a bedroom community. Now people who can afford to live in Santa Cruz generally work in Silicon Valley, and people who work in Santa Cruz generally live somewhere else. So there's a lot of commuting. The addition of a high speed light-rail system would certainly relieve congestion on the roads, but it will probably never happen.
For one thing, as Maddy points out, you can't really get away with hiring thousands of Chinese laborers to build your railroads for you and then killing them instead of paying them when the job is done the way you used to.
She was referring to a story I'd heard as a kid, probably from my mom, that there were mass graves somewhere in Nisene Marks Forest where the Chinese workers who built the railroads for the logging companies had been slaughtered by their penny-pinching employers. It's a great story, as stories go, especially since Nisene Marks Forest, a State Park just South of Santa Cruz, can be a spooky place sometimes.
It's not just Nisene Marks that's spooky. Henry Cowell State Park, another stand of redwoods closer in to Santa Cruz, and Big Basin, the largest continuous stand of old growth redwoods south of San Francisco, are both a bit spooky as well. There's a perfectly logical reason for this: redwood forests are spooky, and the Santa Cruz Mountains have some creepiness of their own. Redwoods are tall, which makes you feel really small when you're around them, and they like to grow in foggy areas. The Santa Cruz Mountains are full of disorganized lumps of land which are very good at disorienting you. Even without the thought of thousands of betrayed Chinese beneath your feet, being lost in the fog among towering silent trees will put most people a bit on edge. Add to that perfectly legitimate, if not a bit sensationalistic news stories about young women being raped or murdered when they were out hiking, and the woods start to get a bit of a reputation.
Still, a few murdered campers is one thing, but mass graves is another. And as we were driving over "the hill," I started to wonder if it was really true.
I started with a simple google search. And then progressed on to a lot of more specific google searches. But I never found anything linking Nisene Marks to anything even remotely underhanded. But I did come across one article which confirmed that Nisene Marks was once heavily logged (so it's not old-growth) and that the logging companies did use railroads, and that they did employ Chinese.
According to the article "hundreds" of Chinese were brought over to work on the railroad between 1883 and 1890. The article alludes to the "blood and sweat" of the workers but mentions nothing more concrete than that. It does mention, however, that the Molino Timber Company hauled 15 million board feet of lumber out of that area in an era that relied on manual labor, and that the company was known for cutting every possible corner on costs.
Another article from the Los Angeles Times describes a mass grave of Chinese immigrants that was unearthed, apparently by accident, a couple of years ago. Though the grave had nothing to do with any railroads, at least not directly, it did make pretty clear the amount of racism the Chinese faced in America in the late 19th century. They were treated like animals, and I don't mean like pets.
There is also the Duffy's Cut Mass Grave. This grave is filled with Irish immigrants, though, not Chinese. And they all died of cholera, or at least that's the official story. However, Duffy's Cut is in Pennsylvania, not California. In fact, if you look outside of Santa Cruz county, you find mass graves all over the place (particularly in Equador and Panama, apparently). But none are filled with Chinese workers who got a shove into a big pit rather than a paycheck.
And yet, all lack of evidence (well, google evidence, but still) notwithstanding, it's not hard to imagine that such a grave is in there, somewhere, as of yet undiscovered. That the Chinese workers were mistreated, at times brutally so, is certain. And they were certainly working in the kind of field (think large scale landscaping) that tends to yield large pits.
There was once a railroad that went through the Santa Cruz Mountains, on north to San Jose, and ultimately to San Francisco, but the tracks and tunnels are now all but gone. Santa Cruz has been a tourist destination of the South Bay for a very long time; even after all the logging was ended, tourists came by train to Santa Cruz. Most of the remaining track can still be ridden but it won't get you far -- the rails are now used by Roaring Camp Railroads, which runs tourist trains from an old logging camp (Roaring Camp) in the hills down to the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. It's known that there were many fatalities during the construction of that line, but I've never even heard so much as a rumor of mass graves along that line.
Though I doubt a transit line will ever be built over those mountains, trains do seem to be gaining steam these days, if you'll pardon the joke. But Santa Cruz is physically too small to support a population large enough to justify that many miles of mountainous track, even in these days of expensive fuel. Why is Santa Cruz so small? Well for one thing, they're very adamant about not letting the city expand into the now protected, creepy, haunted redwoods.
A lot of people commute over that mountainous stretch of highway on a daily basis. San Jose has lots of good jobs -- in fact it's one of the few cities in the nation right now that doesn't seem to be losing them -- but Santa Cruz is a nicer place to live by all accounts. Santa Cruz used to be a fairly isolated city, but once it's larger neighbor across the mountains to the north became Silicon Valley, Santa Cruz became a bedroom community. Now people who can afford to live in Santa Cruz generally work in Silicon Valley, and people who work in Santa Cruz generally live somewhere else. So there's a lot of commuting. The addition of a high speed light-rail system would certainly relieve congestion on the roads, but it will probably never happen.
For one thing, as Maddy points out, you can't really get away with hiring thousands of Chinese laborers to build your railroads for you and then killing them instead of paying them when the job is done the way you used to.
She was referring to a story I'd heard as a kid, probably from my mom, that there were mass graves somewhere in Nisene Marks Forest where the Chinese workers who built the railroads for the logging companies had been slaughtered by their penny-pinching employers. It's a great story, as stories go, especially since Nisene Marks Forest, a State Park just South of Santa Cruz, can be a spooky place sometimes.
It's not just Nisene Marks that's spooky. Henry Cowell State Park, another stand of redwoods closer in to Santa Cruz, and Big Basin, the largest continuous stand of old growth redwoods south of San Francisco, are both a bit spooky as well. There's a perfectly logical reason for this: redwood forests are spooky, and the Santa Cruz Mountains have some creepiness of their own. Redwoods are tall, which makes you feel really small when you're around them, and they like to grow in foggy areas. The Santa Cruz Mountains are full of disorganized lumps of land which are very good at disorienting you. Even without the thought of thousands of betrayed Chinese beneath your feet, being lost in the fog among towering silent trees will put most people a bit on edge. Add to that perfectly legitimate, if not a bit sensationalistic news stories about young women being raped or murdered when they were out hiking, and the woods start to get a bit of a reputation.
Still, a few murdered campers is one thing, but mass graves is another. And as we were driving over "the hill," I started to wonder if it was really true.
I started with a simple google search. And then progressed on to a lot of more specific google searches. But I never found anything linking Nisene Marks to anything even remotely underhanded. But I did come across one article which confirmed that Nisene Marks was once heavily logged (so it's not old-growth) and that the logging companies did use railroads, and that they did employ Chinese.
According to the article "hundreds" of Chinese were brought over to work on the railroad between 1883 and 1890. The article alludes to the "blood and sweat" of the workers but mentions nothing more concrete than that. It does mention, however, that the Molino Timber Company hauled 15 million board feet of lumber out of that area in an era that relied on manual labor, and that the company was known for cutting every possible corner on costs.
Another article from the Los Angeles Times describes a mass grave of Chinese immigrants that was unearthed, apparently by accident, a couple of years ago. Though the grave had nothing to do with any railroads, at least not directly, it did make pretty clear the amount of racism the Chinese faced in America in the late 19th century. They were treated like animals, and I don't mean like pets.
There is also the Duffy's Cut Mass Grave. This grave is filled with Irish immigrants, though, not Chinese. And they all died of cholera, or at least that's the official story. However, Duffy's Cut is in Pennsylvania, not California. In fact, if you look outside of Santa Cruz county, you find mass graves all over the place (particularly in Equador and Panama, apparently). But none are filled with Chinese workers who got a shove into a big pit rather than a paycheck.
And yet, all lack of evidence (well, google evidence, but still) notwithstanding, it's not hard to imagine that such a grave is in there, somewhere, as of yet undiscovered. That the Chinese workers were mistreated, at times brutally so, is certain. And they were certainly working in the kind of field (think large scale landscaping) that tends to yield large pits.
There was once a railroad that went through the Santa Cruz Mountains, on north to San Jose, and ultimately to San Francisco, but the tracks and tunnels are now all but gone. Santa Cruz has been a tourist destination of the South Bay for a very long time; even after all the logging was ended, tourists came by train to Santa Cruz. Most of the remaining track can still be ridden but it won't get you far -- the rails are now used by Roaring Camp Railroads, which runs tourist trains from an old logging camp (Roaring Camp) in the hills down to the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. It's known that there were many fatalities during the construction of that line, but I've never even heard so much as a rumor of mass graves along that line.
Though I doubt a transit line will ever be built over those mountains, trains do seem to be gaining steam these days, if you'll pardon the joke. But Santa Cruz is physically too small to support a population large enough to justify that many miles of mountainous track, even in these days of expensive fuel. Why is Santa Cruz so small? Well for one thing, they're very adamant about not letting the city expand into the now protected, creepy, haunted redwoods.