Nothing Like It in the World The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  May 18, Huntington and his companions escaped via the Dutch bark Alexander von Humboldt, with 365 passengers plus crew. Once away from the coast, the Humboldt was becalmed. Day after day the bored passengers went through beans, weevily biscuits, tough beef, and vile-tasting water. After a week, all provisions had to be rationed. Finally, on June 26, five weeks since setting off, wind finally stirred the sails. Still, not until August 30, after 104 days at sea, did the Humboldt enter San Francisco Bay. Huntington gazed at one of the world’s most magnificent harbors, but what he most noticed was the deserted ships. On inquiry, he discovered that, when ships tied up at the wharves, all the crew—from wherever—immediately deserted and headed for the gold.

  He had made it, and in the process he earned more money in Panama than he had had with him when he started. And he had avoided tropical fever. But it had been a trip of nearly half a year, dangerous and arduous beyond description, something he never wanted to do again.

  ONLY those who were young, physically fit, and full of ambition would dare try to cross Panama, or go overland, from the eastern United States to the Pacific. There was a third way, by boat around Cape Horn, but that took at least six months and was eighteen thousand miles long, not to mention dangerous and expensive.

  Lieutenant William T. Sherman went via that route in the first year of the Mexican War, 1846. A West Point graduate in 1840, he had been on recruiting duty in Zanesville, Ohio, when the war began. For Sherman it was “intolerable” that he was missing the hostilities. He left his sergeant in charge and made his way east, traveling by stagecoach (there were no trains west of the mountains). At Pittsburgh he found orders relieving him from recruiting and putting him in Company F, Third Artillery, which was gathering at Governors Island to take a naval transport to California. He took trains from Pittsburgh to Baltimore, then Philadelphia, and finally New York, “in a great hurry” for fear he might miss the boat. He made it, along with 113 enlisted men and four other officers from the company, plus Lieutenant Henry W. Halleck of the Engineers.

  The Lexington was at Brooklyn, at the Naval Yard, making preparation, which meant taking on the stores sufficient for so many men for such a long voyage. The War Department authorized the officers to draw six months’ pay in advance, so they could invest in surplus clothing and other necessaries. When the ship was ready, on July 14, 1846, a steam tug towed her to sea.

  Off the Lexington sailed, for the tip of the continent. On fair days the officers drilled the men in the manual of arms, or put them to work on the cleanliness of their dress and bunks, with some success. They played games, never gambling, “and chiefly engaged in eating our meals regularly,” according to Sherman. “At last,” he added, “after sixty days of absolute monotony, the island of Raza, off Rio Janeiro, was descried.” After a week in port, taking on supplies, the ship was off again. In October, the Lexington approached Cape Horn. “Here we experienced very rough weather, buffeting about under storm stay-sails, and spending nearly a month before the wind favored our passage and enabled the course of the ship to be changed for Valparaiso,” At last the swelling sea at Cape Horn was left behind, and two months after leaving Rio, the Lexington reached Valparaiso.

  There the officers replenished their supplies and the voyage was resumed. Now they were in luck: for the next forty days, they had uninterrupted favorable trade winds. Once they had settled down to sailor habits, time passed quickly. Sherman had brought along all the books he could find in New York about California, and he the other officers read them over and over. About the middle of January, the ship approached the California coast, but when land was made, there “occurred one of those accidents so provoking after a long and tedious voyage.” The navigator misread the position of the North Star, and the ship was far north of its destination, Monterey, the capital of Upper California. The captain put about, but a southeast storm came on and buffeted the ship for several days. Eventually it got into the harbor.18

  It was January 26, 1847. The Lexington had left New York 202 days earlier. She was a United States Navy vessel, with a crew of fifty. Her passengers were all young men, fit and eager. The ship of no nation tried to stop her or impede her progress. Yet it took her over half a year to get from New York to Monterey. Her route was the only way to get any goods too large to be handled by horses and a stagecoach from the East Coast to the West Coast.

  Besides Sherman’s Company F, Third Artillery, there were other American military units, navy and army, either in or making their way via land or sea to California, which the United States was taking over by right of conquest. Sherman traveled up and down the coast, finding the country very lightly populated. San Francisco, then called Yerba Buena, had some four hundred people, most of them Kanakas (natives of the Sandwich Islands). There was a war on; gold had not yet been discovered.19 But the conclusion of the war, the taking of full legal possession by the United States, and the discovery of gold, all in the next year, led to the rush to California.

  The problem of getting there remained. Crossing the Great Plains on one of the emigrant roads meant more than half a year and included crossing the Rocky Mountains, then the Great American Desert, then the Sierra Nevada range. Taking a ship to Panama meant the extreme dangers of catching a mortal fever while crossing the Isthmus and hoping to catch another ship headed north at Panama City. Going all the way around South America by ship was expensive, boring much of the time, and often dangerous. California became a magnet for the argonauts from around the world, especially from the United States, but it must be doubted that ever before had such a desirable place been so isolated.

  STILL they came on. One was Mark Hopkins, born on the eastern shore of Lake Ontario on September 3, 1814, who worked as a storekeeper and then a bookkeeper in New York City. About five feet eleven inches tall and weighing 160 pounds, with a straight nose and a neatly cropped beard and dark hair, he cut a handsome figure, and by age thirty-five was making a good salary. He could have been thought of as a man settled in his ways, but it wasn’t so. When news of the discovery of gold reached him, he joined with twenty-five others to form a mining company, the New England Trading and Mining Company. The partners invested $500 each. With the money they bought supplies and mining equipment that none of them knew how to use.

  In January 1849, they set sail for Cape Horn. It was the beginning of a 196-day trip plagued by storms, bad food, not enough drinking water, and a tyrannical captain. They finally arrived in San Francisco on August 5, 1849. The partners quarreled and soon broke up.20 After some fruitless wandering around San Francisco and up in the mountains, looking for a spot to start a store, Hopkins in February 1850 went to Sacramento to set up shopkeeping. It was, as it happened, at 52 K Street, next door to a store Huntington had opened. Both men lost their investments in the terrible fire of 1852. Both immediately rebuilt. Out of shared interests and mutual troubles, they developed an abiding affection for each other, different though they were in ages and personalities. They became partners and switched from general-store merchants to dealing in heavy hardware for farms and mines.21

  CROCKER, Huntington, Sherman, and Hopkins were part of a wave of immigration into California. The forty-niners, who came before statistics keepers from the government appeared to count them, were followed by more fortune seekers some years, less in others. In 1850, a record 55,000 emigrants, nearly all male, headed west from the Missouri bound for California. About 5,000 died from a cholera epidemic, so the next year the emigration count was down to 10,000. But by 1852, it was back up to 50,000. By 1860, more than 300,000 argonauts had made the overland journey.

  They came whatever the cost and danger, the boredom or the time lost, the misery of the journey. In 1850, the year the territory became a state, there were in California, according to the U.S. Census, 93,000 white residents and 1,000 Negroes. Some 86,000 of the white population were males, 7,000 females. They were young, more than half under age twenty-four. A decade later, by 1860, the population had jumped more than four times, to 380
,000 whites. It included 53,000 “other races,” mainly Chinese, but those under twenty-four years of age still predominated. As Lieutenant Sherman put it, “During our time, California was, as now, full of a bold, enterprising, and speculative set of men, who were engaged in every sort of game to make money.”22

  Although they came from different ports and different continents and by different routes, the bulk of the Californians were young Americans who had families back east. They were accustomed to a civilized life—cities, towns, newspapers, roads and wagons, mail, industries. A bit of this was available in California, but there were no industries to serve the population’s needs. There was no foundry to make iron products, especially railroad tracks, no plant to make carriages, either horse-drawn or for a train, or one to make a locomotive, or a gun, or powder. It took months to receive a letter, more months to deliver a reply.

  At the beginning of the twenty-first century, California led the world in technology and transportation. America and the remainder of the world followed the trend set in California. But in the middle of the nineteenth century, California had made no progress at all. Whatever folks wanted, they had to import, which was terribly expensive and took what seemed like forever.

  Most of the young Americans in California were there to pan for or, later, to mine gold, or to make money, wherever and however. “Not only did soldiers and sailors desert,” William Sherman noted, “but captains and masters of ships actually abandoned their vessels and cargoes to try their luck at the mines. Preachers and professors forgot their creeds and took to trade, and even to keeping gambling-houses.”23

  There were exceptions. Crocker, Huntington, and Hopkins were storekeepers. Sherman was in the army. But what the state needed was men to plow, to harvest, to sail ships, to engage in manufacturing, to build houses, roads, bridges, and railroads.

  There were few among the argonauts who had such skills. In November 1849, Sherman was ordered to instruct Lieutenants Warner and Williamson of the Engineers to survey the Sierra Nevada, to look for a way for a railroad to pass through that range, “a subject that then elicited universal interest,” But Lieutenant Warner was killed by Indians, and that cast a pall over the whole enterprise.24 In any event, there were no rails or spikes or locomotives of any kind in California.

  Nor any railroad, come to that, but one was wanted. In 1852, a group of optimistic Californians formulated plans for a railroad to run north and east from Sacramento to tap the rich placer-mining regions of the lower Sierra slopes. Captain William T Sherman was one of the group. The name of the line was “Sacramento Valley Railroad,” and stock was sold at 10 percent down. The next year, after a trip east, Sherman resigned from the army and became a banker in San Francisco and vice-president of the Sacramento Valley Railroad. But the need for an experienced railroad engineer became obvious, and in late 1853 the president of the corporation sailed to New York to find such a man. He conferred with Governor Horatio Seymour of New York State (elected 1852) and his brother Colonel Silas Seymour, who knew and recommended a twenty-eight-year-old engineer, Theodore D. Judah.

  Ted Judah was born on March 4, 1826, in Bridgeport, Connecticut. His father, an Episcopal clergyman, moved to Troy, New York, while Ted was still a boy. Ted passed up a naval career to go to the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, where he graduated with an engineering degree. It was an age and a place of great railroad-building. Young Judah threw himself into it with gusto, imagination, and energy. From 1844 on, he was continuously engaged in planning and construction, mainly of railroads. He worked on the Troy and Schenectady Railroad; the New Haven, Hartford and Springfield Railroad; the Connecticut River Railway; the Erie Canal; and several other projects.

  At age twenty-one, he married Miss Anna Ferona Pierce, daughter of a Greenfield, Massachusetts, merchant. She was an artist, a lively writer, a splendid personality, and the perfect choice as someone to help his career. She moved with her husband twenty times in a half-dozen years. They went to Niagara Falls, where he planned and built the Niagara Gorge Railroad, one of the great feats of engineering of the 1840s. In an 1889 letter, Anna Judah wrote, “Our cottage on the banks of the river, between the falls and the suspension bridge, is still there, with the beautiful view of both falls and whirlpool rapids below the bridge. He selected the site, built the cottage, there had his railroad office and did his work for that wonderful piece of engineering,”25 Obviously he was a man of many talents, most of all for the America of his day, where everything was booming, and where engineers who knew what they were doing were in great demand.

  In 1854, Judah was in Buffalo, building part of what would later become the Erie Railroad system. An urgent telegram from the Seymour brothers summoned him to New York City. He went, had a meeting, and three days later sent Anna a telegram: “Be home tonight; we sail for California April second.”

  He got back to Buffalo that evening. “You can imagine my consternation on his arrival,” Anna wrote. He burst through the door and blurted out, “Anna, I am going to California to be the pioneer railroad engineer of the Pacific coast. It is my opportunity, although I have so much here.”

  She was not about to stand in his way. He had read and studied for years the problem of building a continental railway, and talked about it. “It will be built,” he used to say, “and I am going to have something to do with it.”26

  Big talk for a young man still in his twenties. But he was a quick study, hard worker, inventive, sure of himself, not much on humor, and supremely competent—which is why nearly every railroad then being built in the East wanted Judah to be its engineer. Besides being fully employed, Judah had reason to be suspicious of California—everything had to be imported, and his brother Charles, already there, had told him in correspondence something of the harshness of life there. He went anyway, not so much to build the little Sacramento Valley Railroad as to find the route, and the money, and the construction gangs, to build the first transcontinental railroad.27

  He could hardly wait to get going. In April 1854, three weeks after meeting with the Seymours and the president of the Sacramento Valley Railroad, he had swept up Anna, returned to New York, and was off by steamer for Nicaragua. The ship was crowded, mainly men searching for wealth. But Judah found a number of men returning to California, and he sat at the dining table with them, soaking up all he could about the new land. At Nicaragua he and Anna proceeded by the Nicaragua River and Lake for the Pacific Ocean, where they boarded a crowded Pacific Mail steamer bound for San Francisco. In the middle of May, they arrived in San Francisco. Judah proceeded at once to Sacramento, where he immediately got to work for the Sacramento Valley Railroad.

  Until that time, no train whistle had ever been heard west of the Missouri River. Nevertheless, the Californians wanted, needed, had to have a railroad connection with the East. The state legislature passed resolutions demanding that the federal government make it possible. This wasn’t calling for the impossible, for by 1854 train technology had advanced far enough to make a transcontinental railroad feasible.

  The track structure of a railroad is a thing on which everything else depends. By 1850, Robert L. Stevens’s development of all-iron rails in place of wooden rails with a strap-iron surface had been adopted everywhere—and in form and proportion it is still in use today. Stevens also developed the hook-headed spike for fastening the rail to the wooden ties, and connected the rails together at the ends by a rail chair, a device in the rough shape of a “u” that was spiked to the joint tie. Another development: wooden ties surrounded by ballast had replaced the stone blocks (which gave a too-rigid support). Locomotives, developed mainly in the United States, had by 1850 increased in weight and power (by 1860, they were up to forty to fifty tons, with four lead wheels and four driving wheels, thus designated a 4-4-0). New devices were constantly being added, including the reversing gear, the cab for engine driver and fireman, the steam whistle, the headlight, the bell, the equalizing levers and springs, engine brakes, and more, even the cowcat
cher on the front of the locomotive. New passenger and freight cars had evolved. Bridges were built to carry trains across rivers and gorges.

  It had been thought originally that human beings could not travel at sixty miles per hour, that trains could not climb an incline or go around a curve. But soon engineers discovered that they could climb a grade of 2 percent, or 106 feet per mile, and that a train could manage a curve of ten degrees (radius 574 feet). And sixty miles per hour did not harm the passengers.28

  ON May 30, 1854, Judah reported to the owners of the Sacramento Valley Railroad that the line from Sacramento to Folsom, on the western edge of the Sierra, was more favorable than any he had ever known. There were no deep cuts to make, no high embankments to be built, and the grade was nearly as regular and uniform as an inclined plane. A railroad could be built at a cost of $33,000 per mile, including everything. He had counted the potential freight-and-passenger traffic on the route and calculated probable earnings for the corporation. They would be huge. “With such a Road and such a business,” he concluded, “it is difficult to conceive of a more profitable undertaking.”29 He was too low on his cost estimate and too high on the earning potential, but not by much.

  In June, the Sacramento Union, one of the leading newspapers in the state and one where Judah had friends, reported, “Mr. Judah is pushing the survey and location with as much rapidity and energy as is consistent with correctness.”30 By June 20, his surveys had reached Folsom. On November 30, the Sacramento Valley Railroad, financed by stock on which investors had put 10 percent down, signed a contract with a well-known firm of Eastern contractors, Robinson, Seymour & Company, for a total of $1.8 million, of which $800,000 was paid in capital stock at par and $700,000 in 10 percent twenty-year bonds ($45,000 per mile).

  On February 12, 1855, actual grading commenced with a one-hundred-man workforce. Robinson, Seymour started sending rails and rolling stock on the clipper ship Winged Racer. It arrived in June. On August 9, the first rail west of the Missouri, and the first in California, was laid. Two days later, Judah, assisted by three officials of the company, carried a handcar to the tracks and took the first ever railroad ride in California, for a distance of four hundred feet.