The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers

by Simon Winchester

  The convention was a success. There was near-universal acceptance that San Francisco was indeed the natural terminal city for a transcontinental line, and Judah—so eloquent! so impassioned! so knowing! so delightfully mad!—was made official agent for the cause. Dispatched back east, he pressed it endlessly and with enthusiastic conviction to the lawmakers on Capitol Hill. He visited the aging and sickly President Buchanan at the White House, and to all he transmitted the same message, the same demand, but with one condition that would keep the idea in limbo for the next several years—that California and the states to be crossed by the new railroad line would not permit the wickedness of slavery. Those in Congress who desired otherwise—and with the Civil War looming there were many, most but not all of whom were Southerners—argued their case bitterly, and for years that delayed matters.

  Lobbying and canvassing and lecturing were all well and good. But going out into the field with a team of burros, a chain, and a theodolite and surveying just where the line might go—that’s what Theodore Judah did to clinch the deal. The vital moment came one summer day in 1860 when, at his office in Sacramento, Judah received a letter from a man named Daniel Strong, who ran a drugstore in a mountain settlement sixty miles away to the northeast, the so-called Athens of the Foothills, the gold-mining town of Dutch Flat. Strong had something for him to see.

  Dutch Flat was a wild mining town, just nine years old. It had a post office; the usual range of bars, brothels, and convenience stores; a doctor to attend to the miners’ frequent injuries and ailments, as well as Strong’s Druggists next door; and a daily stage line down the front range to Sacramento.*

  All the town’s miners were involved in the brutal practice of hydraulic mining—the sluicing of flakes of the precious metal from the diggings by the use of fantastically high-powered water jets, which tore the cliffs apart and ran the particle-rich water down through mesh gold sluices. Millions of dollars in gold flowed across the assayers’ counters here, until the mines played out. During its heyday, this technique was a quick and dirty approach to gold mining, now generally outlawed, which left an indelible environmental stain on the California countryside, from which the region has still not wholly recovered a century and a half later.

  But Doc Strong had no wish to show any of this to his visitor. What he had in mind was quite simply to show Theodore Judah what he considered a stunningly beautiful and very important view. Strong knew the young engineer was positively aching to build a railway across to Chicago and New York; how could he not know, with articles about Judah in the local paper almost every other day? He lived in the mountains and knew full well the problems of finding a way through them. Maybe he had at last found the answer, and he would take Judah up into the hills and have him gaze at a vista he had seen himself some days before, then let him draw what Doc Strong suspected were the inevitable conclusions.

  The two men went to the local livery stable and secured a pair of strong horses. They then started up the trail—unmarked, except for some relic scars of the Donner party and their rescuers of fourteen years before. It took some hours as they hacked their way through the sweet-smelling pines and over small creeks, gaining altitude steadily, the air cooling, the breeze rising. Finally they reached a summit, at eight thousand feet or so, and Doc Strong gestured to Judah to look before him, eastward, and to prepare to be amazed.

  As indeed he was. There was no mistaking what he was seeing. The tall serrated ridges of the High Sierra marched to the north and the south of him. But directly in front was a low pass, with steep cliffs running down to the American River on his right side and to the Yuba and Bear Rivers on his left. Between the cliffs was a low, flat plain, a wide notch in the mountains that sloped down as far as the eye could see, terminated not by another crest or ridge but by the sparkling blue waters of a lake. That lake, said Strong, emptied by way of a small creek into the Truckee River, which led down the far side of the mountains, down onto the Humboldt Plains and into Nevada Territory. Surely, said Strong, that could be the way that the railroad could go.

  Theodore Judah was first shown the Donner Pass in 1860, fourteen years after the tragic fate of a party of would-be pioneers who were trapped by its ferocious winter weather. Judah saw the pass as providing the obvious route for the transcontinental railroad, nonetheless; it remains today the key Union Pacific main line between Nevada and California.

  Theodore Judah saw it in a split second. The pair duly camped overnight in a shepherd’s abandoned house, and Judah woke early to make sure his eyes had not deceived him. It was raining, but as he stood on the precipitous ridgeline and gazed eastward into what, symbolically, was a new American morning, the visibility was good enough for him to be certain. He felt sure that this could, should, and indeed would be the route of the railway to the East. By completing this, he would be welding the missing link into a skein of steel that would now bind the nation firmly and permanently together.

  Once back in the state capital, he did the necessary calculations. For the benefit of the congressmen to whom he would have to give evidence, he drew a colossal map of the critical segment. It was a chart ninety feet long, showing every proposed cutting, embankment, grade, and tunnel. It was 102 miles from Sacramento to Donner Summit, a total of 140 miles to the flatlands of Nevada. The route he designed would require that locomotives climb the hills to Donner Summit, 6,960 feet up, smoothly and serenely, and in doing so never facing a gradient of more than 100 feet for every mile. The Baldwin locomotives being manufactured at the company’s huge factory in Philadelphia could manage such a climb with ease; some of the passes across the Alleghenies were quite as bad. And the thirteen-mile run down the Truckee Valley on the far side would be no more severe. Building the line might be difficult but was far from impossible. It would be simplicity itself for a good-size train to cross the passes once the line had been built.

  The saga of the subsequent construction of America’s first transcontinental railroad is now painted in the nation’s most hallowed self-portraits. In essence, it involves two giant railway companies—the privately financed Central Pacific, based in San Francisco; and the publicly chartered Union Pacific, based in the newly settled town of Council Bluffs, on the east bank of the Missouri River in Iowa. It also involved an act of Congress, signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln on July 1, 1862, at a time when Confederate troops were massing on the very outskirts of Washington, DC, and the president was preoccupied with defending the capital and writing a draft of the Emancipation Proclamation, which he would discuss in a Cabinet meeting just three weeks later.

  The Pacific Railroad Act was as long and complex as might be expected, larded with detailed plans for the financing of the railway and peppered with timetables and provisions for rewards and penalties for those who would be involved “in the Construction of a Railroad and Telegraph Line from the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean.” Three crucial paragraphs, sections one, nine and ten, remain in the memory, and even in précis remain sonorous for all time:

  Sec. 1. The Union Pacific Railroad Company . . . is hereby authorized and empowered to lay out, locate, construct, furnish, maintain and enjoy a continuous railroad and telegraph . . . from a point on the one hundredth meridian of longitude west from Greenwich, between the south margin of the valley of the Republican River and the north margin of the valley of the Platte River, to the western boundary of Nevada Territory. . . .

  Sec. 9. The Central Pacific Railroad Company of California . . . are hereby authorized to construct a railroad and telegraph line from the Pacific coast . . . to the eastern boundaries of California. . . .

  Sec. 10. And the Central Pacific Railroad Company of California after completing its road across said State, is authorized to continue the construction of said railroad and telegraph through the Territories of the United States to the Missouri River . . . until said roads shall meet and connect.

  Work on the Central Pacific line was started first because, though shorter, Judah’s route was obvio
usly going to be a construction nightmare. Optimism ruled when ceremonial sods were cut in Sacramento on a miserable day in January 1863, and the first few miles east of town were easily made along the flat alluvial plains by the river. But as soon as the loggers and excavators and rock splitters and bridge builders and plate layers arrived at the sierra foothills, matters started to become phenomenally difficult.

  The challenges were myriad and mixed. For a start, all the equipment had to come by sea, around Cape Horn. The five thousand tons of iron rail, the eight locomotives, and the eight passenger carriages, four baggage cars, and sixty freight wagons that Judah ordered all had to be loaded onto ships in New York and brought through perilous seas thousands of miles to San Francisco, then driven up-country to the construction sites, where the real problems began.

  The terrain, the geology, and the weather presented an unholy trinity of nonstop nightmare. The cliffs were well-nigh insurmountable, the tunnels had to go through volcanic rocks of drill-blunting hardness—it took eighteen months for two thousand men to finish the half-mile Summit Tunnel—and the snows fell fifteen feet and more with drifts that could bury campsites ten times over. Special snowplows had to be built for the trains as the line advanced eastward day by slow and painful day. In places where even digging out the track by hand proved impossible, the builders made huge iron sheds on top of the line and hoped the all-too-frequent avalanches would sweep over the roofs.

  The available workforce proved to be severely limited. Despite the good pay on offer, even the toughest Irishmen and Slavs from the San Francisco docks were reluctant to work so dangerously hard for so long in such appalling conditions. It was much easier to forage for gold or build houses for the newcomers to the city than to go up into the mountains and endure privation and danger for months on end.

  Eventually someone reminded the foremen that Chinese workers, despite being supposedly limited in stature and musculature, had once managed to build the Great Wall. Soon twenty thousand immigrants from the fishing villages of southern China were pouring off the boats and into the Bay Area, tempted by the promise of pay in gold coins and stoically undaunted by the rigors of the work demanded. Few will forget their triumphs: the ferociously difficult Summit Tunnel, where they first employed nitroglycerine explosives when the drills proved useless; and perhaps most notably the nearby Cape Horn Cliffs,* where volunteers from among them agreed to be suspended by ropes in small baskets over vertiginous drops, to chisel a passageway into the thousand-foot sheer face and then clamber into the passage and enlarge it until it was wide and deep enough to carry a train. They were eventually helped by ample supplies of black powder and nitroglycerine, but their unfamiliarity with these high explosives caused casualties by the score, and today there is still a scattering of sad little grave sites marking where they fell. The Chinese were inestimably brave to work as they did: it beggars belief that for so many years they were then excluded from immigrating to America, largely because their working practices were believed to depress the wages of less energetic white workers.*

  Matters on the Central Pacific eased dramatically once the crews had pushed their way to the Truckee River and then down onto the hot and waterless plains of Nevada. Before long, the workers were laying track at phenomenal rates, many miles each day. The effort required to do so strains credulity today. Teams would place scores of rough-hewn and well-dried cottonwood ties onto the flattened gravel roadbed. Men who would later be called gandy dancers would next swing and heave down fifteen-foot, five-hundred-pound lengths of rail, two at a time, into position lengthwise across the ties. Swarms of workers behind would hammer in the spikes and screw in the bolts and secure the fishplates. The target was often as many as ten miles in a single day, and to achieve this, men had to lay and secure two new lengths of rail, separated by the standard gauge of four feet, eight and a half inches,* every twelve seconds.

  Back east, the Union Pacific’s work had started nearly a year later, on December 2. The groundbreaking ceremony in Omaha—the city across the river in Nebraska Territory, reached by ferry from Council Bluffs and the railway’s theoretical zero-mile marker—was a somewhat more elaborate affair than the one back in Sacramento: soldiers fired fusillades; brass bands sounded fanfares; a thousand of the Omaha elite were on hand for a mighty banquet.

  But the practicalities were just as irksome as those the Central Pacific faced. The construction team was beginning a railway from Omaha that was designed to reach the West Coast, yet at the time there was no physical connection between Omaha and the East Coast, let alone the West: there was no bridge across the Missouri River. All of the building supplies—hundreds of tons of rail, ties, spikes, tools, shovels, wagons, and locomotives—had to be brought, along with many of the workers, across the great stream by boat. And worse, no rail link to the east side of the river existed either—and none would exist until the Chicago and North Western Transportation Company extended its line down from Chicago to Council Bluffs.

  Once work started, progress was reasonably swift, sweeping prairies being much easier to cross than jagged mountain ranges. But there were many places where federal troops had to protect the railroad crews from Indians, who were not unreasonably angered by the white man’s continual treaty breaking, violence, and duplicity.

  Many Irish were employed on the Union Pacific rails—immigrant ships brought thousands across the Atlantic from Cork to New York, just as such ships also brought Chinese “Celestials” (from a traditional name for China, the Celestial Empire) across the Pacific from Hong Kong to San Francisco. There was much whiskey, too, and once the Civil War was over and the Irish, who had fought for both sides, were demobilized, they came west to the Union Pacific bosses for work, and usually found it—together with the low-level villainy and alcohol-fueled fighting that seemed to go with it.

  But there was organization to the process, too. Special construction trains were made, with accommodations and commissary cars and with hunters like Buffalo Bill supplying fresh meat to the cooks. And then, as if this wasn’t enough, portable cities of sorts followed the tail end of the last construction trains—each a tented, movable Hell on Wheels, as all were called, with casinos and brothels and dance halls and anything else the workers needed when they came back exhausted each night from the front of the line.

  Thus did the workers of the Union Pacific cross the prairies and pass through the tallgrass counties and the High Plains; they managed to hoist their rails at as comfortable a gradient as possible through the famous South Pass of migrant days, then over the Divide in Wyoming. They headed steadily west as the Chinese workers on the Central Pacific were heading east—until that momentous day in the early summer of 1869, when the two oncoming teams glimpsed each other in the distance. They stopped, waved, shouted, sent scouting parties and greeting parties, prepared their celebration parties, and then continued to build their respective lines steadily toward each other.

  Finally came the day—weather delayed; it was initially scheduled to be two days earlier—that will always live prominently in American history: May 10, 1869, the day the two lines converged, intersected, encountered one another, met, were connected. From that moment on, an unbroken line of metal has connected the Atlantic to the Pacific, by way of continental America.

  It was a Monday. The two railheads had been halted within feet of each other. The world appeared flat and dry here, nearly five thousand feet up in the basin-and-range province between the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada, at a place that has since been called, for the range of mountains nearby, Promontory. This was Utah Territory, run largely by Mormons from Salt Lake City. Suspicious of the encroachments of the outside world, they paid little attention to the ceremonies that day. Brigham Young had been invited to the celebration but declined.

  And what ceremonies then unfolded! The Easterners had worked through the night to make a small terminal station where the event would be staged; the Californians had slept through it all. Various trains arrived, carrying onlookers
, dignitaries, workers, celebrators. The Union Pacific’s gleaming black-and-brass train No. 119 drew up to the most westerly end of the eastern line; the Central Pacific’s great workhorse, the Jupiter, drew up, decorated with flags and bunting, to the easterly end of its line from the Pacific. Thousands waited in the sunshine, millions more around the country, promised the news by telegraph the instant that it happened.

  The construction boss from California then ordered a gang of Chinese workers to get down into the short patch of dirt between the two sets of rails to scribe and level it for the placing of the ties. Someone noted a difference in the ties’ quality: those used by the Central Pacific had been neatly sawed, chamfered, and finished; those made by the Irish lumbermen employed by the Union Pacific were more primitively cut, still much resembling the branches of the trees from which they had been hewn. The tie that would be used as the last actually came from the Californian stock: cut from a laurel tree, it was eight feet long and eight inches by eight square in section—the number eight is the most valued in Chinese numerology—and it had been polished to a high gleam by a San Francisco billiard-table maker.

  A number of ceremonial spikes had been prepared to secure the rails to the final tie. One, presented by a wealthy San Francisco contractor, was made with eighteen ounces of pure gold and was inscribed “May God continue the Unity of our Country as this Railroad unites the two great Oceans of the World.” This, another made of pure silver, and a third made of an alloy of precious metals were to be dropped into predrilled holes and then tapped down into place. But only an iron spike would stand up to actual hammering; spikes made of soft alloy, silver, and most certainly of gold would all crumple under the impact of even the featherlight touch promised by the man who would perform the ceremony, the former California governor and senator and founder of the university that today still bears his name, Leland Stanford. So the last spike was iron—even though the event was to be called the Ceremony of the Golden Spike.