The Great Railroad Revolution

by Christian Wolmar

In contrast to the Union Pacific, the Central adopted a much more conciliatory approach to the Native Americans. There were, admittedly, fewer of them on their territory, but they could have been equally troublesome had the same aggressive attitude prevailed. Instead, the Central made deals with them, offering the chiefs passes to ride on the trains and allowing the rest to ride free on the freight cars whenever they wanted. The Central even employed both male and female Native Americans along side the Chinese and noted that “the women usually outdid the men in handling crowbars and sledgehammers.”24

  By the end of 1868, it was clear that the transcontinental would be completed the following year, far earlier than originally envisaged. The only doubt remained about precisely where the two railroads would meet. By the beginning of 1869, the Central Pacific had reached Carlin, Nevada, nearly 450 miles from Sacramento, whereas the Union Pacific’s rails stretched nearly 1,000 miles west of Omaha to Evanston, Wyoming.

  This remarkably rapid progress had not gone unnoticed. The story of the transcontinental was already becoming the stuff of legends, which it remains today. All America was watching, excited and eager for a conclusion. In the autumn of 1868, swarms of newspaper reporters began arriving from the East, dispatching daily bulletins from the front, as if it were a war zone, with details of every mile of track laid and tales of the derring-do of the army of laborers. Never before had the construction of a railroad line become an issue of such moment. The corruption that underlay its building would be exposed later, but for the time being, nothing was allowed to get in the way of this epic achievement.

  The great race, which had been launched a year previously, was now being fought in earnest. At the start of the year, the gap between the two railroads was just 400 miles, and, thanks to the crazy contest across the desert between the two railroads, much of the intervening section had been graded in parallel lines by the Mormon contractors, who now departed the scene as the main railheads reached Utah. Although the location of the obvious meeting point was pretty clear to the engineers of both railroads, their acquisitive employers continued to work on their separate routes in an attempt to maximize their mileage. The ultimate absurdity was in the Promontory Range, where the Central Pacific line crossed a deep valley on a large embankment, only for the Union Pacific to ford it with a trestle bridge just fifty yards away. The proximity of the two parties inevitably led to hostility. At one point the Irish of the Union blasted away rocks without warning their Chinese rivals above, several of whom were hurt by flying debris. The Chinese promptly retaliated by deliberately cascading rocks down the slope, burying several Irish workers. Fortunately, the defiance of the Chinese, whom the Irish, like Strobridge before them, had underestimated, prompted a truce before these antics cost any lives.

  The precise location of the meeting point was sorted out not in the desert of Utah but half a continent away, in Congress. There, another type of war was being fought by representatives of the railroads lobbying their respective friends. Whereas Huntington of the Central had the ear of the incumbent president, Andrew Johnson, Dodge and Durant were close to president-elect Ulysses S. Grant, the former Civil War general, who as the Republican candidate had visited the Union’s work site shortly before his victory in the 1868 election. The decision he made soon after he took office in March 1869 was a fair compromise: he decreed that the railroads should be joined six miles west of Ogden, at Promontory Point in Utah. For all its lofty place in American folklore, Promontory was just a temporary town, a street of tents and false-fronted wooden shacks stretching a few yards from the railroad line, set in a bleak, waterless basin surrounded on three sides by mountains. It was just over 1,000 miles from Omaha and just under 750 miles from Sacramento, which showed that the Union Pacific had won the race, building a third more track than the Central.

  If the ceremony was all about PR, so was a stunt organized a few days before the ceremony by Crocker, who had taunted Durant by suggesting that 10 miles of track could be laid in a day. Durant responded by wagering $10,000 that it could not be done, and Crocker and Strobridge made elaborate preparations to ensure all the equipment was in place. A crew of eight men, whose names—which betrayed their Irish origins—have been immortalized in the history books, was handpicked to carry and spike the rails. In twelve hours, a full working day, they had passed the 10-mile point by 50 feet, and Crocker could claim the money, though Dodge, who viewed the proceedings, complained it was a con because so much preparation had been undertaken beforehand.

  The eventual meeting of the two railroads took place on May 10, 1869, a couple of days later than originally planned. The reason for the delay, according to Durant, was that a section of the Union Pacific’s track had been washed out in a rainstorm, but Dee Brown, the chronicler of the railroads of the West, says this was a cover story for a rather better tale that almost prevented the ceremony from taking place: “On May 6, when the Union Pacific special [carrying VIPs from the East for the ceremony] pulled into Piedmont, Wyoming, an armed mob of several hundred railroad workmen surrounded Durant’s private car, switched it onto a side-track and chained the wheels to the rails.”25 The workers were protesting about their overdue wages, and their action is thought to have been supported by Brigham Young, who was also owed considerable sums for his grading contract. The involvement of Young, a powerful local man, would explain why the military failed to respond to Durant’s pleas to be released, and eventually he had to wire to New York for the money to be paid. The amount Durant’s kidnappers managed to extract from him remains unknown, though some estimates suggest as much as $235,000. Meanwhile, the Casements were forced to entertain Stanford and the other Central dignitaries with a trip along the line to Ogden, Utah, on a train stocked with “a beautiful collation and oceans of champagne,” an expense that would not have pleased the hapless Durant, either.

  On the big day, Stanford and Durant shared the duties of the traditional ceremony of knocking in the last two spikes. Even this historic demonstration of the Central and the Union finally cooperating with one another was marred by the collective incompetence of the two company heads, who together missed the spikes with their first attempt at wielding the sledgehammer. The ceremony, in truth, was a pretty confused affair. Few witnesses were able to hear the speeches, and, with no cordon around the main players, it was impossible for onlookers to see what was happening. Nevertheless, “oratory and whisky flowed in almost equal measure,” and not just in Utah.26 Across America, a large proportion of the 40 million population, alerted by telegraph, celebrated. In Chicago, a seven-mile-long parade jammed the city streets, while in New York a hundred-gun salute was fired in City Hall Park and Wall Street business was suspended for the day. Across the newly connected continent in San Francisco, the party carried on well into the night. In Sacramento, birthplace of the Central, thirty locomotives that had been specially brought together were steamed up to whistle out a celebratory but tuneless concert.

  After the golden spikes had been hammered in and the champagne drunk, there remained a rather thorny question: What, precisely, had all this effort been for? Certainly not to allow people to travel from one coast to another, the province of the affluent, of immigrants seeking a better life and occasional adventurous travelers like Robert Louis Stevenson (see Chapter 7), a traffic that was by no means able to justify the expense or even pay for the operating costs.

  There are two ways of viewing such grand schemes of transportation infrastructure. Some are built to meet an existing need, filling an acknowledged gap, such as the world’s first major railroad line, which connected the already busy towns of Liverpool and Manchester. Or they are constructed to connect undeveloped regions as a way of attracting settlers and stimulating economic development. Almost all major railroad lines designed for passengers fall into one of these categories, and there is no doubt that it was the latter description that befitted the transcontinental. This type of project, however, invariably requires government support and usually a lot of it. There was no poten
tial for immediate profit from the transcontinental, given the enormous distances it covered and the lack of local traffic. Without government subsidies, it would never have been possible to build the line, but, of course, that is no excuse for so much taxpayers’ money ending up in the promoters’ pockets.

  In fact, the various supporters of the project had been divided over what the railroad was actually for. There was no shortage of proffered reasons. Asa Whitney had harbored the fanciful dream of exploiting the vast markets of Asia;27 the Wisconsin settlers wanted military protection from the “Indian menace,” despite the fact that it was the railroad that provoked the worst attacks from Native Americans; then there was the vague notion that the line would open up the West for European settlers, but there was no certainty that they would come. The truth is that there was no clear purpose: “For all the fanfare that accompanied the building of the first Transcontinental, and for all the romantic nonsense that has been written about it since, the importance of this accomplishment for many years was mainly psychological.”28

  There was no cunning plan. The building of the transcontinental was like such feats of exploration and endurance as the conquest of Everest or the journey to the poles, often undertaken simply because “it’s there.” The most coherent of the various motives, but still a vague one, was the notion of conquering the West, and that was what was celebrated at Promontory Point on the day the last spike was hammered in. The West was a movable feast drummed up by the early railroad promoters for whom it meant west of wherever they happened to be or even just anywhere sparsely populated, such as, oddly, in one example of rail promotion, northern Vermont. The West was seen as a land of plenty, a biblical vision that was America’s manifest destiny. The first editor of the American Railroad Journal, D. Kimball Minor, had repeatedly used precisely that description in his journal, calling the land between the Great Lakes and the Rockies “the garden of the world.” The West was to be America’s empire, “a metaphor that emphasized fertility, the potential richness that lay locked in the untapped western regions.”29 By midcentury “the West” had come to mean the lands west of the Mississippi, but that was still a pretty imprecise concept. Before the railroads, there had been some sparse settlement in the West, mostly by newly arrived Spanish-speaking immigrants, but the lack of transportation meant that they could only eke out a life of subsistence. The prairies were not blessed with great forests out of which homes and fences could be built, game was sparse once the vast herds of buffalo had been wiped out by settlers with guns, the climate was harsh, and much of the land was not particularly fertile. The stagecoaches, wagon trains, and mail companies like the Pony Express had all struggled to provide any kind of regular connection with the East for these sparsely populated areas.

  The railroad, therefore, made all the difference, enabling a journey that would have taken six months to be completed in just a few days. But settlement remained a slow process and did not really intensify until a couple of decades after Stanford and Durant’s brief moment of collaboration. It was not until other railroads followed the first transcontinental, blessed with land grants that helped them attract investors who now felt a little more confident about the potential for making money out of western railroads, that the population of the West began to expand rapidly. As a result, it would be many years before the first transcontinental and its various successors were intensively used. And, oddly, they would hardly ever be used to carry passengers from ocean to ocean. Technically, the coast-to-coast journey by railroad was not possible until the bridge over the Missouri was completed in 1872, finally relieving passengers of the need to transfer to a rickety old ferry. But even then Chicago would remain a break for most travelers, for which they were grateful, given the primitive conditions on the trains. The very name transcontinental, therefore, is a misnomer—despite its widespread use and the celebration its construction engendered—as there has never been a single railroad company stretching from East Coast to West.30 Richard White brilliantly encapsulates the contradictions within the transcontinental project: “The very term ‘transcontinental’ communicated the hubris and power of a new technology that wrapped the continent in iron and steel bands . . . for the transcontinentals did not really span the continent.”31

  None of this is to deny the amazing achievement of the construction of the first transcontinental. Sure, there was corruption, cheating, purloining of government funds, reckless building practices, and astonishing greed— in short, a total lack of principles and scruples shown by the majority of the key players. The result, however, was to enable America to be governable as a single nation and to realize the dream of a single country stretching from coast to coast, unlike in South America, where history and geography were so different and resulted in a patchwork of nation-states that were weaker both politically and economically than their northern counterpart. The United States would not have become a united nation without the railroad in general and the transcontinental in particular. That is why the story of the building of the transcontinental and the ceremony at Promontory Point have assumed such a prominent place in American history, spawning countless books and articles and, in a way, skewing the history of American railroads by placing too much emphasis on the building of this one line.

  The initial legacy of the first transcontinental, however, was a rather less happy one. Long before the last spike had been hammered in, the allegations of corrupt practices began to emerge, but their extent only really came to the fore after the euphoria of the celebrations had abated. Mostly, attention focused on the Union Pacific, probably because its greater proximity to the East gave journalists easier access as well as making it more newsworthy. Not that the business practices of the owners of the Central Pacific were any less scandalous. According to a government commission, the four Associates on the Central were reckoned to have pocketed $63 million and obtained 9 million acres of land between them, hardly trivial sums. Maybe it was the sheer nakedness of the Crédit Mobilier scam that led to its arrangements with the Union Pacific being the prime focus of public scrutiny. Perhaps, too, it was the fact that a none too mysterious fire destroyed the Central’s financial records soon after the completion of the railroad, making it difficult to work out precisely how the money had been purloined. More likely, it was because the shares in the Central’s construction company were held by a very small group consisting of the four Associates and a few colleagues, whereas Crédit Mobilier shares had been distributed widely to politicians and to prominent businessmen as bribes. The anger felt by many Americans at the extent of the corruption of the railroad magnates was mitigated by a feeling that however scurrilous these rascals were, they had completed a Herculean enterprise that was to have a tremendously beneficial impact on the nation. Stanford, Durant, and their cronies may have been in it for the money, but they did get the railroad built when it would, at numerous points, have been all too easy to have abandoned the enterprise. Giving up, though, would not have been an attractive option. Not only would there no longer have been the prospect of fortunes to be made, but it would, too, have attracted the wrath of politicians and most likely the attentions of the justice system, with the distinct possibility of jail sentences for the miscreants. Their motives, therefore, were hardly altruistic. Indeed, most historians concur with George H. Douglas, who wrote in his account of the American railroads that after the Civil War, “Men of the better sort were crowded from the stage, while crude, unprincipled robber barons came into the ascendancy. If such men had also been men of vision or men of superlative technical skill, there might have been sufficient justification for them, but with few exceptions, although bold and audacious, they were inept and unsuited to the task that lay before them.”32

  If the four Associates of the Central really did cream off $63 million from their enterprise, on the face of it they seemed to have done better than the good Doctor Durant. However, Crédit Mobilier was not his only scam. Reputedly, Durant took 10 percent of every contract and received kickback
s from subcontractors who undertook excess work on his instructions in order to earn extra and then paid him a percentage. As far as Crédit Mobilier was concerned, it would have taken no great investigative skill to spot that something was amiss when, in December 1867, the company paid out the equivalent of 100 percent dividends to its small coterie of investors, as the Union Pacific was stumbling from crisis to crisis. Yet despite the occasional story in the newspapers, the plundering continued unabated. During 1868, Crédit Mobilier paid out no fewer than five sets of dividends, by which time it had disbursed a total of three times the amount investors had contributed, whereas the Union Pacific struggled to pay its bills and was $6 million in debt. Indeed, the Union Pacific was in such a bad state during the final year before completion of the railroad that a notorious financial speculator, Jim Fisk, tried repeatedly but unsuccessfully to wrest control of the company from Durant, probably in the hope that he would be able to get his hands on some of the ill-gotten gains. Had Fisk enjoyed a more honest reputation, his efforts might have led to more attention being paid to the financial irregularities at the heart of the relationship between Crédit Mobilier and the Union Pacific, but the affair evaporated in the heady atmosphere of the run-up to the Promontory Point ceremony. It was not until 1872, an election year, that the Crédit Mobilier scandal hit the headlines, starting with a story in the New York Sun under the bold headline “The King of Frauds: How the Crédit Mobilier Bought Its Way Through Congress.” The six months of congressional hearings that ensued focused more on the involvement of politicians than on the likes of Durant and Dodge. Their principal target was the shovel manufacturer Congressman Oakes Ames, who had distributed shares to some of his fellow members of Congress. Even Vice President Schuyler Colfax and future president James A. Garfield were caught up in the scandal. Colfax was replaced on the Republican ticket for the 1872 election by another, cleaner, candidate, but Garfield denied the charges and went on to be elected president in 1880. The Crédit Mobilier scandal would rumble on for many years and was one of the main catalysts for the antipathy toward the railroads that grew in the postwar period and would do them so much damage. In the words of Keith L. Bryant Jr., “The financing of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads produced scandals that rocked the industry for 50 years.”33