Cost of Expanding Frontier:
Chinese Laborers in the Construction of the Transcontinental Railroads

From the fall of 1865, Chinese workers conquered the Sierra Nevadas, constructing a total of 15 tunnels. The total distance of the tunnels was 6,213 feet, originally considered impossible to finish. The workers began by blasting many tons of black powder every day, but the progress was slow. Then, the team used a newly-developed but highly dangerous dynamite, nitroglycerine. This unstable dynamite created huge explosions, killing six Chinese workers in April 1866. 

Wishing to accelerate the construction progress, Crocker hired Cornish workers from Nevada silver mines to dig the tunnels. Cornish miners, coming from southwest England, were recognized as the fastest miners worldwide. Crocker then led a competition between the Cornish miners and the Chinese, hoping to accelerate the work. He commanded Cornish and Chinese workers to chip from the middle of a rock and work in opposite directions, concluding:  

"We measured the work every Sunday morning; and the Chinamen without fail always outmeasured the Cornish miners; that is to say, they would cut more rock in a week than the Cornish miners did, and there it was hard work, steady pounding on the rock, bone-labor."
~ Charles Crocker describing the competition between the Chinese and the Cornish.