The beginning of the most popular version of "The Rock Island Line" tells the story of a train operator who smuggles pig iron through a toll gate by claiming all he had on board was livestock. The song's chorus includes:
The Rock Island Line is a mighty good road
The Rock Island Line is the road to ride
The Rock Island Line is a mighty good road
If you want to ride you gotta ride it like you find it
Get your ticket at the station for the Rock Island Line
Interestingly, in a promotional brochure to attract riders, the Rock Island Railroad featured the 1870 Bret Harte poem, Plain Language from Truthful James, published in the Overland Monthly, a San Francisco–based literary magazine with humor, pathos, and romantic nostalgia for a lost frontier in the West that helped attract settlers from the East.
This most widely known poem of Harte depicted a card game of euchre in which two white miners plan to cheat a Chinaman, Ah Sin, who they regard as "child-like" and easily taken advantage of. However, Ah Sin outsmarts them and wins with cards he had hidden up his sleeves. When the miners discover the trickery of the "heathen Chinee" one exclaims, "we are ruined by cheap Chinese labor," an allusion to the nationwide fear that Chinese immigrant laborers were taking jobs from white workers, they proceed to give the hapless Chinaman a pummeling. Actually"heathen" means non-Christian and was not accurate but "heathen Chinee" caught on as a popular term of derision. A more appropriate epithet for the Chinese might have been "savage" to contrast it with whites as "civilized." Ironically, Harte had composed the poem to point out the hypocrisy of white racists, but it backfired and created greater rather than less animosity toward "heathen Chinee."
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