Dedicated to the brave men who completed the greatest engineering feat of the 19th Century, the conference will tell the history of Irish, Chinese and Mormon workers who united a nation by linking the country “from sea to shining sea”. The contributions of the Chinese to the building of America have been largely untold. Conference attendees will learn of two separate civil wars with millions of casualties that created at once a need for labor and the ready supply of workers eager to be able to feed their families. They will hear of cooperation between two nations separated by an ocean, but united in industry and in a strong work ethic. By the tens of thousands, Chinese men answered the pleas of the Central Pacific Railroad for laborers. Performing some of the most dangerous work, the Chinese were integral to the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad. In little more than a decade the Chinese went from building a railroad to being railroaded. The Chinese Exclusion Act, was designed to eradicate all Chinese from the country, legally, but unjustly targeted a race of people as wholly undesirable.

The historic celebratory photo from May 10, 1869, where the Central Pacific and Union Pacific came together doesn’t include a single Chinese worker. “History — at least photographically — says that the Chinese were not present,” says photographer Corky Lee.

As a junior high school student, he pored over the photo with a magnifying glass. But he couldn’t spot a single Chinese laborer in the picture, even though more than 12,000 workers from southern China were hired by the Central Pacific Railroad. They made up the overwhelming majority of its workforce.

So, in 2002, Lee gathered a group of Chinese Americans at that same location in northern Utah to re-create the historic shot, and he did it again in 2014, the 145th anniversary of the Golden Spike, with some descendants of those Chinese laborers.

“They’re standing in the same spot where, 145 years ago, there were no Chinese,” he says.

CRWDA was officially founded in 2017 and since then has attended the Golden Spike Reenactment celebration on May 10 and 11th at Golden Spike National Historic Site in Promontory, Utah annually. We understand and appreciate the sacrifices, struggles, hardships, and contributions made by generations of Chinese Immigrants and Chinese Americans to the United States. A memorial ceremony honoring the Chinese workers at one of the actual camps used by the Chinese railroad workers – Chinese Arch.

In 2005, one of the CRWDA founders and our past president, Michael Kwan along with current CRWDA president, Karen Kwan organized with The Utah Organization of Chinese Americans and submitted an application to the U.S. Board on Geographic Names seeking to change the arch’s name to Chinese Arch from its derogatory name “Chinaman’s Arch”. The campaign to change the arch’s name began in 2001

“It’s a way for us to pay homage to those who sacrificed a great deal,” says Michael Kwan, Karen’s brother and a justice court judge in Taylorsville.

Karen Kwan says she first became aware of the arch’s name during the 130th celebration of the completion of the transcontinental railroad. The arch is marked with an interpretive sign on the east motor route through the historic site.