Savor the adventure of Polish-born Julius Brooks. In 1847, the 22-year-old gathered his meager savings, packed his carpetbag, black bread, kosher sausage and cheese, collected his rifle (a departing gift from his uncle), bid goodbye to 22 siblings and, tossing a straw bed and blanket over his shoulder, joined the growing ranks of sojourners sailing to the New World.
After five weeks at sea Ð his moldy food long since tossed overboard Ð Brooks landed in New York. Paying $1.50 for weekly residence in a sailor's home, his money spent, he reluctantly sold his rifle for $100 and went into the mercantile business.
Five years later, he revisited his hometown, convinced everyone the streets of America were paved with gold, and returned with a wife. Saying, "Fannie, let us take our few dollars and go west," they joined a wagon train heading toward Utah to become the territory's first Jewish family.
Brooks pursued his entrepreneurial bent wherever business could be had, selling goods and supplies in small towns and mining camps along the rail line. Fannie opened a boarding house and restaurant
in Salt Lake City. Her millinery and bakery shop was noted in the Mormon publication, Millennial Star.
In 1868, troubled by the influx of non-Mormon (gentile) businesses, Utah's founding fathers called for a boycott of their stores. Without Mormon patronage, good citizens like the Brookses suffered great losses but, determined to stay the course, waited it out.
In 1883, Brooks built the Romanesque-styled Brooks Arcade. By 1930, 100 gentile-owned shops lined the busy downtown streets.
Add to the stew the paradox of the gold rush days and the Chinese "forty-niners" who left behind civil unrest for the American West in search of "Gold Mountain." When discriminatory legislation squeezed
them out of the gold fields, they filled this country's need for cheap labor.
In the 1860s, 12,000 Chinese immigrants, employed by Central Pacific Railroad, constructed the transcontinental rail line from Sacramento to Promontory Summit.
Skilled in handling explosives for boring tunnels through stone mountains, these men comprised 90 percent of the railroad's labor force. They were proficient with power tools, cleared miles of trees and laid miles of tracks.
Nevertheless, they were overworked and underpaid. In the winter of 1866, they labored in snow drifts, some more than 60 feet high. The spring thaw revealed corpses.
"Their monumental achievements, which required them to pour sweat and blood into Utah, have endured long after their names have been all but forgotten," writes historian Anand A. Yang in Missing Stories.
In a remarkable feat at Promontory Summit, the Chinese laborers constructed 10 miles and 56 feet of rail line in one day.
Class tensions, unemployment crises and white society's fear of losing jobs to "strangers" led to the Chinese Exclusionary Act of 1882. Enacted by Congress, this law "singled out the Chinese on a racial basis." It barred immigration of Chinese laborers other than those "already citizens of the United States by virtue of having a father who was a citizen."
"It was a very, very restrictive law," said Utah restaurateur and community leader Ed Kim in a 1984 interview for Missing Stories. To get around it, Chinese immigrants would travel to China and return with "paper sons" or "paper daughters" carrying fictitious certificates of eligibility.
"Many, many Chinese of my father's generation came here with these false papers," Kim said.
To pass the rigid immigration process, they would have to know the "adopted" family's history forward and backward, memorizing names, dates, descriptions of villages, streets and buildings.
"They were quite thorough in detail," Kim said. "If it were not for a brother-in-law who helped make the arrangements for my father to come here, I would probably not be sitting here today."
In 1943, the United States and China declared war on Japan. The exclusionary act was repealed, but with quotas. Not until the 1960s did Chinese immigrants taste equity.
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Eileen Hallet Stone is author of A Homeland in the West: Utah Jews Remember, and co-author with Leslie Kelen of Missing Stories: An Oral History of Ethnic and Minority Groups in Utah.
