The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers

by Simon Winchester

  THE ANNIHILATION OF THE IN-BETWEEN

  The first working freight train shuddered out of its station in northeast England in late September 1825. In the same year, an elderly and very wealthy New Yorker named John Stevens made and ran America’s first steam locomotive. However, because it was never given a name,* never carried cargo, certainly never carried people, and never went anywhere except around and around a small circular railway track in Hoboken, New Jersey, it has somewhat faded into history.

  But all technologies must these days have a parent, and the fact that this doughty little engine performed its task before anyone else in America had accomplished anything similar, and in only the fifth decade of the nation’s existence, has caused John Stevens to be reckoned the father of the American railway.

  Stevens was seized with the idea after hearing the melancholy story of John Fitch and his 1787 experiment with his sad little steamboat chugging around on the Delaware. According to the American National Biography entry for Stevens, “From that moment until his death he devoted himself and his fortune to the advancement of steam-propelled transportation both on water and on land. Immersing himself in the science of steam, he designed boilers and engines on paper. His influence with Congress helped pass the first U.S. patent law in 1790, and he received one of the first patents. He improved the design of the vertical steam boiler and invented an enhanced version of Thomas Savery’s early steam engine, both conceived with steamboats in mind. He also applied steam to the working of bellows.” Steam, in other words, became John Stevens’s religion, in which he had unwavering faith.

  Initially he was not much more of a success than Fitch. He had a special dedication to the Hudson River, as it passed beside Manhattan. He experimented with the idea of running a ferry across it, between New Jersey and New York City, and when that plan went nowhere, he drew up schemes for building both a bridge and a tunnel to cross the Hudson. All exist today: Stevens was a century and a half ahead of his time.

  But as he aged, he grew more vexed and bored with boats, steam or otherwise. Innumerable disputes among his various rivals frankly wearied him. Instead, in his dotage, he turned his attention to the less contentious field—since they had not been fully invented—of railroads. He imagined—rightly, as it turned out—that, rather than excavate the Erie Canal, it made more economic sense to build a railway between New York and Lake Erie along the Hudson-Mohawk Gap. And around 1815 he dreamed up plans for a line made of timber rails bearing carriages and wagons having flanged wheels, “the moving power to be a steam engine.” He had sufficient faith in his idea to obtain from the state a license to run a railway. A skeptical legislature, however, declined to advance any money.

  Unsurprisingly the rejection frustrated Stevens—who by now was seventy-six years old, a man as crotchety as he was impassioned. That is why, in a last-ditch effort to convince the lawmakers of the wisdom of building steam-powered railroads, he created a working model of a proposed engine and had it run around a circular track that he had his men build on Castle Point, his great Hoboken estate overlooking the fast-amassing buildings of lower Manhattan. But the legislators to whom he showed his invention, whom he saw as conservative and blinkered, never bit.

  However, his demonstration and his idea did win admiring comments, and in short order they also sparked imitators by the score. John Stevens may have failed to impress, but his idea most certainly did not fail at all. Within just two years of his showing his toy train, a number of proper full-size railways, all of them powered by steam, were starting to spring up throughout the American East. A mania, one that would develop on a far greater scale than that which accompanied the building of canals, was soon to grip the nation. The annihilation of distance, the erasure of the in-between, became a new calling among the country’s premier engineers and the more visionary tycoons.

  The old man himself lived on for a further thirteen years, dying in 1838 at a time when all of his railway dreams were fast starting to be realized. On July 4, 1828, Charles Carroll, the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence, was invited by the directors of the newly formed Baltimore and Ohio Railroad to turn the first sod for a steam railway. He said, “I consider this among the most important acts of my life, second only to my signing the Declaration of Independence, if even it be second to that.”

  John Stevens’s two sons* eventually went on to become directors of a railroad that won the monopoly for the phenomenally busy route between New York and Philadelphia, amply swelling the family’s riches. These days their great house in Hoboken memorializes the patriarch in a manner of which he would have approved: he, after all, had once famously declared that “good morals and good government in a republic are only attainable and maintainable by knowledge and information pervading the whole mass of society.” Thanks to provisions in the will of one of his sons, the estate was bequeathed to found and develop the Stevens Institute of Technology, a place where young men and women learning the niceties of new kinds of machine making now stroll on campus lawns, the very lawns where in 1825 the first American steam train performed its practice runs and changed the face of the nation.

  The speed of that change was dizzying. It began in 1828 and roared through the country for the next forty years, until briefly stopped by the Civil War and then again by the Long Depression of 1873–79, which was itself triggered in part by the frantic post–Civil War boom in railroading. Afterward, the rail-borne changes resumed in a fury. One telling illustration symbolizes the early days. When Tennessee’s Andrew Jackson was elected president in 1828, he traveled to the White House in a horse-drawn carriage; when he stepped down from his second term, just eight years later, he left for home aboard a steam train. Less than twenty miles of track had existed in the country when he took office; there were nearly three thousand when he left.

  There was some throat clearing. When the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad formally opened in late 1828, the locomotives had not been built, and the wagons and carriages had to be pulled along by horses. Most early engines were imported from Britain, which had already embarked on its own railway-building mania. Within a decade, though, American factories had gotten the idea, and by 1839 they had turned out more than three hundred locomotives of varying designs and sizes. There were six different gauges; the current classic gauge of four feet, eight and a half inches was not fully and formally adopted until 1886.

  This popularity of railroads prompted a swift and sudden upheaval in the economy. By 1870, the railroad industry had become the country’s second-biggest employer, after agriculture. Soon the dominant railroad companies became the country’s biggest corporations, some of them almost the size of governments. Most of them were started with enormous government loans or vast government land grants.

  Almost half of the money behind the early American railroads came from the public purse—an exceptionally wise investment in a myriad of unanticipated ways. American railroads helped move metal ores and wagonloads of grain around the nation, benefiting the miners and growers. Once the trains began burning coal rather than wood, new mines opened and flourished from Maryland to Tennessee. With the construction of new factories supplying everything from rail lines to signals to carriages and wagons and engines, it can fairly be said that the railway spawned and underpinned the industrial revolution in the American East and started the country on its way toward global economic supremacy.

  Railroads brought about lasting social effects, as well. The companies’ ruthless attention to keeping time impelled passengers to carry pocket watches,* and led to the eventual establishment of time zones. A rail traveler initially had to contend with whatever time was chosen by the railway. The Penn Central kept to Altoona time; five other railroad times were shown on the many-faced, many-handed clocks at Pittsburgh station. The American East had fifty different railroad times posted on its various lines. The railroads also prompted the learning of entirely new skills—those of the mechanics, boilermakers, foundry workers, and civil engineers who
built the bridges and cut the canyons across and through which the lines ran. Whole new business management ideas and models were tried, tested, and inaugurated. The creation of railways also led to the idea of vacations, for it had all of a sudden become easy and cheap to get away, then perhaps to build a holiday home. Resorts started to be built, along with spas and hidden-away country lodges with stations close by.

  On the grander scale the placement and prosperity of whole cities—Chicago not the least—were hugely affected by the building of railways and all the junctions, switching centers, and classification yards, where wagons were sorted and sent on to their final destinations. Besides all of these constructions, people themselves had to live and be serviced and fed, housed and watered.

  On the other hand, those regions where the railways did not go inevitably suffered. This suffering was felt most painfully in the early days in the American South.

  Amid the whirlwind of construction in the North and East came a swift realization: it was much more attractive and economically prudent for a manufacturer in the Midwest to send his goods to New York or Boston or Baltimore on nonstop freight trains rather than to continue to use the locks and slow waters of the southbound rivers. The South’s early railways were small, local affairs, largely unconnected to the great new lines of the East. This helped exacerbate the feelings of separation and otherness that led to the Confederacy and the Civil War. The existence of an extensive and technically sophisticated Northern railroad network also became a factor in the outcome of that war, giving the Union generals a major advantage for rapidly moving their troops. So while it is indisputable that railroads played a key role in the uniting of America generally, they also played a not insignificant part in the profound spasm of disunity of the 1860s, when America was riven apart, brother from brother, in the shameful horrors of the War between the States.

  In the decades thereafter, railways were frantically built from Maine to Charleston, from Chicago to Cincinnati, from New Jersey to Nebraska. Within only thirty years, the American East and Midwest had been knit together by twenty-seven thousand miles of iron rails (later made of steel, seventeen times more durable). On these, an enthusiastic poet, R. C. Waterston, told his audience in Boston, “gliding cars, like shooting meteors run, / The mighty shuttle binding States in one.”

  But what was bound here into one was really just the East and the northern Midwest—the America that lay between the Atlantic Ocean and the Missouri River. To forge a real link and bring the entire continental nation together needed a concerted act of will, a practicable route, a formidable design, a great deal of money, and more hard work than the nation had ever witnessed. The transcontinental railroad, which would allow and encourage travel from ocean to ocean—with a promised journey time of days, not months—was the prize above all others.

  The first plans for a cross-country railway were offered in 1838, a mere decade after the first trains began running on the B&O. The first serious surveys were commissioned by Congress in 1853, though politics prevented the selection of any one of the five projected routes. Much of the political argument revolved around the issue of slavery, a scourge not then visited upon the states of the “New West,” and because most Southern senators demanded that half of all new states allow slavery and wished to use the railroad to export the practice, matters were confounded and complicated beyond endurance. The final accomplishment and the start of actual construction of a three-thousand-mile ribbon of steel from coast to coast is largely to the credit of another remarkable figure: Ted Judah, a Connecticut visionary who was first seen, as many visionaries are, as deranged and even unutterably mad.

  THE IMMORTAL LEGACY OF CRAZY JUDAH

  Theodore Dehone Judah, a preacher’s son from Connecticut, had surveyed the terrible majesty of the Sierra Nevada in 1860, and after much time and thought and whole seasons of climbing and mapmaking, he decided that the Donner Pass, the notorious site where almost half of a party of westbound pioneers had died in 1846, trapped by an early-season snowstorm, was the ideal route to take a transcontinental railroad over the most difficult mountain barrier of them all.

  I first crossed the Donner Pass late in the 1980s. It was early spring, and I was in a hurry. I had been in Montana and was driving fast to San Francisco to catch a plane back to Hong Kong, where I then lived. I was on Interstate 80 westbound.

  After coming down south through the mountains of Idaho on Route 93, I had joined the freeway near Wells and then sped across the desert as fast as was prudent. I got to Winnemucca at dusk, Reno at ten. Though it was cold and starting to rain lightly, slicking the roadway, problems seemed unlikely: the Nevada Highway Patrol’s radio station was reporting that the Donner Pass was dry and clear.

  Except that flashing lights beside the road soon said quite otherwise. “Chains Required, Donner Pass” they said, with increasing frequency and urgency. As I climbed slowly up the darkening range the rain turned to sleet, then to driving snow. Then there was a barricade of flashing blue lights ahead: a Highway Patrol roadblock, and a sign: ONLY CARS WITH CHAINS PERMITTED BEYOND. A small group of men waited at the roadside: for $75 they’d sell and attach the necessary chains, cash only. Bills were handed over; a police officer shone a flashlight at my wheels, squinted through the blowing snow, waved me through. “Better you than me!” he shouted into the gathering gale.

  As I climbed up through the thousands of feet—Donner Pass is a mile and a half up—the snow fell more and more heavily, blowing directly at me in a frenzy of white needles. The road was now covered with thick powder, and it became ever more difficult to steer. Huge cliffs of snow, cut sharp and sheer by a plow, rose beside me, giving me the feeling I was trapped in darkness inside some infernal white-walled canyon. There was almost no traffic—except that once a plow went past in a blaze of whirling lights, and racing in its wake was a huge truck, flying past at eighty, careless of the weather, New Riders of the Purple Sage on the radio, no doubt, setting me rocking dangerously in his slipstream.

  Ten miles on and a mile up, the weather worsened, the wind now howling like a hurricane and setting boils of spindrift dancing on the highway ahead, blinding me. I would grip the wheel and pray that the road didn’t twist until I emerged from the maelstrom. But then I was on a straight section. I could see the sign showing I was at seven thousand feet. Then there was a huge roar to my right, and through the blizzard I could see, comfortingly, a train—a pair of yellow-and-orange locomotives hurtling alongside me, heading west, imperturbably shoveling the snow over their shoulders and plunging into the darkness, sleek and unstoppable and magnificent.

  That moment has lingered in the mind for years. For of course I survived the journey. I breasted the summit and headed down onto the Pacific side, and in time the snow thinned and turned to splashes of sleet in the windshield, and then it became rain, and a thin watery dawn came up, and there were the lights of Sacramento and, in time, the bridges and the skyscrapers and the sea. And somewhere that great train I had seen was also threading its way over switches and beneath gantries of signal lights and would soon slow and squeal to an easy stop in some mighty freight yard beside the container terminal. And the engineers would climb down from the roasting diesels, and someone would ask them how the night had been, and they would say it had been routine, a nasty storm on the mountains, the Donner Pass quite chilly and with a lot of snow, but nothing that the railroad couldn’t handle. It was a reminder that the railroad across the Donner Pass is an essential part of what connects Americans, always open, always there.

  Ted Judah’s life had been entirely wrapped up in railways. He studied engineering in Troy, New York, at a school next door to the Troy and Schenectady Railroad yards. One of his first jobs was to build a railroad bridge in Vermont. He then performed surveys for the Hartford and New Haven Railroad, joined the Niagara Falls & Lake Ontario Railroad, surveyed and built the line down the Niagara River gorge,* was appointed chief engineer of the Buffalo and New York City Railroad, and then, crucially
, was invited out west. His task there was to lay out a route and then oversee the building of the line for a new railway up to the high goldfields of California, along the valley of the Sacramento River. The railway—the first to be built west of the Missouri—was for the mundane business of supplying the gold miners with picks and shovels and pit props, all of which would be brought by paddle steamer from San Francisco to the head of navigation.

  It was the first time that this callow, twenty-four-year-old New Englander had seen the might of the Sierra Nevada frontier. It took him only a short while to become convinced that this formidable geological barrier to trade, travel, and the railway, behind which the magic and wealth of California were shielded from the rest of America, could and should be breached, and that he was indisputably the man to accomplish it. He became seized with the conviction, to a degree some saw as close to lunacy, that a transcontinental line was essential for securing the future greatness of America.

  To Judah, all was obvious. San Francisco and Sacramento were the key cities in the West. The Platte River valley through Nebraska provided the obvious route for the rails to follow. South Pass in Wyoming, where the wagon trains had rattled their way west, was clearly where the Rockies could be most easily breached and the divide crossed. Salt Lake City was where food, fuel, and locomotive crews might be found and cached. Then it remained only to find a route across the Sierra and so to get from the deserts of Nevada down onto the coastal plains of California. He planned the route carefully, considered it as possible as it was desirable, and advanced his thesis near-endlessly in long screeds that were published time and again by a tolerant editor-friend at his local newspaper, the Sacramento Union.

  Crazy Judah, as he became known, fast developed into a familiar figure on California’s fledgling society scene. Crazy, maybe, but seldom thought of as a wastrel or dilettante, of which San Francisco had many. He was taken seriously enough to be elected in 1859 as a delegate to the Pacific Railroad Convention held in a city that, though less than twenty years old, was flush with the wealth of the goldfields and longed to be connected to New York by a route more convenient than by way of a ship to Panama, a mosquito-infested train across the isthmus, and then another long sea journey up to the East River landings of lower Manhattan.