By 1890, that number had increased to 9,540, the second largest Chinese population in the United States. The 1860 census reported that 425 Chinese lived in Oregon. Many Chinese immigrants were drawn to the United States by the prospect of prosperity, as well as by the desire to leave the poverty and political instability in their homes in southern China. The discovery of gold in the Powder and John Day river basins drew hundreds of Chinese to southern and eastern Oregon in the 1850s. Many of the Chinese who worked on the Central Pacific line moved north after 1869 to take construction jobs for the O&C.
Even before the completion of the Northern Pacific, the O&C imported large numbers of Chinese laborers to build its line from Portland to Roseburg in the early 1870s. The completion of a northern transcontinental railroad brought new people, new ideas, and new groups to the Northwest.
Ray Stannard Baker, a journalist who visited Portland in 1903, liked what he saw: “not a crude western town Portland really is a fine old city, a bit, as it might be, of central New York-a square with a post office in the center, tree-shaded streets, comfortable homes and plenty of churches and clubs, the signs of conservatism and respectability.” Portland also continued to be a major power broker in Oregon politics, and the influence of its banks extended to the interior Columbia Basin and beyond the Willamette Valley to the south. Although Portland’s population more than doubled to 46,385 by 1890, Seattle burgeoned to 42,837 during the same period and by 1900 had 90,426 compared to Portland’s 80,871.ĭespite Seattle’s growth spurt, Portland remained the leading metropolis in the Northwest, a position it enjoyed at least through World War I. During the next decade, however, transcontinental railroads began to reverse those urban dynamics. In 1880, Portland was the region’s metropolitan center, with a population of 17,500, while Seattle had only 3,500 residents. Railroad construction also challenged engineers, who found ways to tunnel through mountains and to build bridges and trestles across deep ravines. In both a physical and a psychological sense, railroads helped alleviate regional isolation, freeing passengers and freight from the constraints of geography and shortening both time and space with buyers and sellers in the Midwest and California. Perhaps most importantly, however, railroads made raw materials more accessible to investors.Įven when railroads did not bring economic benefits to communities directly, the mere idea of their potential spurred business activity and excited the imaginations of developers, dreamers, and boosters. Railroads also represented outside capital, with distant investors buying up mineral rights, timberland, and town lots and investing in new rail lines. Railroads, Race, and the Transformation of OregonĪs symbols of the Industrial Revolution, railroads were powerful centralizing and dispersing mediums, concentrating populations in urban areas while also scattering people and communities across Oregon.
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