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

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  Luck. Had Judah lived, the history of the country might have been different. Speculation can go in all directions. There might have been no Big Four, or any of their legacies. The railroad from Sacramento over the Sierra Nevada out to the Salt Lake would have been built, but by whom, when, where, and with what name is pure guesswork.

  It is impossible to say what Judah might have become, what he might have done. What we do know is that he had a fierce determination; that he could dream the biggest dreams; that he was a superb engineer with the keenest eye for terrain; that he knew his profession as well as anyone; that he could pick able assistants (Montague and Clement stand out); that he had married exceedingly well; that he could be amazingly convincing with his wife, with businessmen like the Big Four, with politicians either in California or in Congress, with the President of the United States, with other engineers, and with the public; that he was honest and trustworthy; and more.

  But we also know that, although he could convince the Big Four and others to put their money and talent into the building of the Pacific railroad, he could not manage them. With those four he could never achieve harmony. Judah knew how stresses and strains worked on bridges, curved tracks, anything mechanical, but not how they worked on human beings. The Big Four wanted to build the railroad fast, at the greatest possible profit to themselves. He wanted to build it well. They got it done their way and he was squeezed out.

  ON October 26, 1863, Charlie Crocker’s men spiked the first rails to their ties. There was no ceremony, because of Huntington’s telegram: “If you want to jubilate over driving the first spike,” he wrote, “go ahead and do it. I don’t. Those mountains over there look too ugly. We may fail, and if we do, I want to have as few people know it as we can…. Anybody can drive the first spike, but there are many months of labor and unrest between the first and last spike.”34 Nevertheless, the Sacramento Union noted the occasion and commented, “Nothing looks to the public as much like making a railroad as the work of laying down the iron on the road bed.”35

  By November 10, the first CP locomotive to arrive in California, named the Governor Stanford, made the first run ever for the Central Pacific.36 The engine cost $13,688. It was more than ten feet tall and fifty feet long, with four driving wheels of four and a half feet in diameter. The driving rods and pistons were of wrought iron. The bell, made of brass, was painted maroon, green, red, orange, and yellow. Gold initials, “C.P.R.R.,” were on the red tender. Locomotive and tender, with a full load of wood and water, weighed forty-six tons, making the Governor Stanford the biggest man-made thing in California. A twelve-pound cannon fired to mark the occasion.

  It wasn’t much of an occasion. The crowd was there—hangers-on mainly—to participate by climbing aboard the freight cars or cheering the train, but it went only as far as Twenty-first Street, where the tracks ended.37 At least the war was going better for the Union: on November 25, General Grant’s army won the Battle of Chattanooga and drove the Confederates back into Georgia.

  The CP’s acting chief engineer, meanwhile, appointed by the directors, was Samuel S. Montague. His first job was to survey the route as far as the Big Bend of the Truckee River, more than forty miles east of the California-Nevada line. Montague and a small team of surveyors completed this job in December 1863. Despite this achievement, Montague remained “acting” until March 1868. (He then stayed with the CP as chief engineer until 1883.)38

  ROLLING stock arrived in Sacramento on a haphazard basis. Ships that brought the cut lumber for the car bodies did not have the iron frames and wheels for the cars. Tools were not delivered. Platform cars, used to deliver rails and ties to the end of track, came in ahead of passenger cars. By February 1864, however, enough had arrived for Stanford and Hopkins to show off Crocker’s achievement. They took a party of thirty prominent men, including politicians, to see what had been accomplished. The rails by then reached to Junction (today’s Roseville), sixteen miles out from Sacramento. There the passengers took horse-drawn carriages to seven miles beyond Newcastle.

  They saw the graders at work and were filled with admiration for men who could perform such a demanding task. Engineers might do the surveys while Crocker oversaw the whole and bossed it, but it was the men who did the work—bending, digging, shoveling, throwing the dirt up on the embankment, bringing in the ballast by the cartload, and dumping it—who impressed people. Back behind Newcastle, where the track was being laid, it was the men who picked up the ties from the horse-drawn wagons, dropped them on the grade, lined them up. Others dropped the rails and made certain they were the requisite spread apart (four feet eight and a half inches), spiked them in with their heavy sledgehammers—three blows to a spike—and connected the ends with a fishplate. This was work fit to break a man’s back, and they did it for $3 or so per day, plus board.

  Many of the men were Irish immigrants who had just arrived in America. Crocker signed them up through agents in New York and Boston and had them shipped west at a terrific expense, plus time. There was some drunkenness, strikes, and slowdowns. Crocker petitioned the War Department for five thousand Confederate prisoners of war, without luck. He tried for newly freed African Americans, again with no luck. He tried for immigrants from Mexico. Same result. Some nineteen hundred out of a two-thousand-man crew he hired that summer fled for the Nevada mines almost as soon as they arrived at the end of track and had been fed a warm meal. They drove Acting Chief Engineer Samuel Montague nearly mad.39

  GRADING work, as Lynn Farrar, a Southern Pacific historian described it, uses pick-and-shovel work most efficiently when low cuts or fills—one and a half to two feet—are required. Fills are made by what is called “casting”—i.e., shoveling. If there are over three feet of material, it can be double-casted—that is, it requires two “throws” to get the material into place for the grade. In most cases earth was plowed by heavy steel plows drawn by up to twelve oxen (it is more efficient to use an earth scraper, but the CP never used one). For distances greater than five hundred feet it was economical to “waste and borrow”—that is, dispose of cut material by “wasting” it and then “borrow” material for an adjacent fill. The location surveyors always tried to find a line that would “balance” the grading between cuts and fills so that there would be a minimal amount of moving of material.40

  For seven miles beyond Newcastle, the cuts and fills were said by the Sacramento Union to be as great as any found in the nation. In the thirty-one miles from Sacramento to Newcastle, the grade of the roadbed rose steadily until, after Rocklin, it reached 105 feet to the mile, then grew to nearly 116 feet per mile (the steepest allowed by the Congress, and steeper than any other ascent in the Sierra Nevada). As the Union put it, “The labor of ascending the mountains is fairly begun.”41

  Bloomer Cut, just beyond Newcastle, would take months to complete. It was a sixty-three-foot-deep cut that ran eight hundred feet long, composed of naturally cemented gravel that had to be moved out one wheelbarrow at a time. The workingmen used black powder to loosen up the gravel at Bloomer. As much as five hundred kegs of blasting power a day in early 1864—more than most major battles in the ongoing Civil War—at a cost of $5 to $6 per keg.42 Every foot of the way through this cut had to be blasted with gunpowder, with the rock so hard that it was some-times impossible to drill into it for a sufficient depth for blasting purposes. Shot after shot would blow out as if fired from a cannon.

  After the blast the men used picks and shovels to fill their wheelbarrows or one-horse carts and to move the gravel out. The wedge they cut had almost vertical walls. This was the first of the obstacles to be overcome by the CP’s workforce before it would meet with the UP’s rails coming west, wherever that might be. How many sore, blistered, bleeding hands the Bloomer Cut required was not recorded, or how many damaged backs or crushed knees.

  The men’s boss on the spot was James Harvey Strobridge. He was thirty-seven years old, out of Ireland, over six feet in height, agile, energetic. He could curse with the men and lose
his temper at any moment. He had worked on railroads in the East, then come to California, where he had worked for Crocker before being promoted. Crocker later recalled, “I used to quarrel with Strobridge when I first went in. Said I, ‘Don’t talk so to the men. They are human creatures. Don’t talk so roughly to them.’ Said he, ‘You have got to do it, and you will come to it. You cannot talk to them as though you were talking to gentlemen, because they are not gentlemen. They are about as near brutes as they can get.’ I found out that it was true.”43 More bad news. Strobridge lost the sight of his right eye at Bloomer Cut, when black powder was delayed and ended up exploding in his face.44

  The Sacramento Union didn’t write about such things. It was always upbeat. This was because it wanted the railroad built. Furthermore, the Big Four had decided on a policy that would later be widely adopted by twentieth-century corporations, which was to do everything possible to attract favorable mention from the media. In this case little or no money changed hands. But the editor of the Union did accept $2,000 worth of CP stock in 1863 and another $1,600 worth in 1864. His reporter in Washington got another ten shares. These bribes, called “gifts,” were charged to the CP’s construction account. Given the CP’s many enemies and the terrible things being said about it, the directors judged that the favorable publicity was worth it.

  Excursions were a way to generate excitement. On March 19, 1864, the CP provided an excursion to the end of track—then twenty-two miles out—for nearly two-thirds of the California state legislature, plus their families and friends. Two brand-new passenger cars, painted yellow on the outside and quite plush within, plus seven platform cars (a freight car with seats nailed down crosswise, but without a roof or sides), provided the transportation. Governor Stanford led the way, along with a brass band. The weather was fine. The legislators voted a month later to guarantee the CP’s bond interest.

  DESPITE the forward-looking publicity, however, the CP was going broke. The state had not paid what it had pledged, and the bonds from the U.S. government could not be collected until forty miles of the road had been completed and approved. Charlie Crocker later said about this time, “We could not borrow a dollar of money. We [the Big Four] had to give our personal obligations for the money necessary to carry us from month to month. There was not a bank that would lend the company a cent.” For seventeen consecutive days there was nothing in the treasury—yet California law required that the men be paid in gold. Crocker, Hopkins, Stanford, and Huntington had to give their personal obligations for money to pay workers and to buy rails and other materials, putting up the bonds of the company besides as security. Crocker was not paid for the first eighteen miles until he took company bonds at 50 cents on the dollar. Meanwhile, his labor force continued to disappear into the mines. “I had become thoroughly warmed up to the building of this road,” he later told an interviewer for H. H. Bancroft. “My whole heart was in it. I was willing to do anything to push it forward and I took great risks in doing it.”45

  The state legislature finally had agreed to guarantee the interest on $1.5 million of CP 7 percent bonds, but Hopkins managed to sell only a few before a suit was brought against the bill on the grounds of unconstitutionality. Though the company eventually won the suit, its bond sales were blocked until January 1865.46

  On March 25, 1864, the locomotive Governor Stanford pulled into Sacramento with a load of granite from a quarry twenty-two miles to the east. This was the Central Pacific’s first freight train. Exactly one month later, the company began regular passenger service to Roseville, three trains per day in each direction. On inaugural day, the train made eighteen miles in a bit less than forty minutes. Later, it averaged twenty-two miles per hour. In its first week, the CP carried 298 passengers and earned $354.25. A pittance, but a heartening reversal of constantly paying out money without ever taking any in.47

  The lack of money was an embarrassment, but the Big Four managed to overcome at least some of it with their own money. One employee who was worth his salary and more was Alfred A. Hart, a photographer hired by Stanford in 1864 to make a record in film of the construction of the road. He did a superb job, beyond anything any of the Big Four could have imagined, at the very least the equal of what a modern photographer could do with modern cameras. He got started right, making several memorable photographs of the locomotive C. P. Huntington as it crossed the American River Bridge.48

  By the end of the first week of June, Crocker’s men had laid track to Newcastle. Passenger trains began the run from Sacramento to Newcastle. There horse-and ox-drawn stages met the train and carried customers to Auburn; Dutch Flat; Steamboat Springs, Colorado; Virginia City, Nevada; and intermediate towns.

  Huntington came back to California in June, to straighten things out. He persuaded the others that each man could do a little more. “Huntington and Hopkins,” he said, “can, out of their own means, pay five hundred men for a year. How many can each of you keep on the line?” They said 150 men each. The result was an agreement to keep eight hundred men working for a year.49

  ON June 14, the Dutch Flat and Donner Lake Wagon Road opened. It belonged to the Big Four, who had paid $350,000 for it out of their own funds. It would soon be doing a million-dollar-a-year business. The owners of the Sacramento Valley Railroad, much put out, published a pamphlet entitled The Great Dutch Flat Swindle!! It claimed once again that the CP had no intention of going beyond Dutch Flat, that its only plan was to build to that point, stop, and make money through the wagon road. The pamphlet ignored the surveys by Montague beyond the California-Nevada border, but it did cause some consternation among the stockholders of the CP.

  CHARGES from L. L. Robinson and others who owned the never-built San Francisco & Washoe railroad had to be met. They were accusing the Big Four of personal corruption. So effective were their charges that the Placer County Board of Supervisors, which held some $250,000 in CP stock, appointed two of its members, A. B. Scott and D. W. Madden, to investigate the Central Pacific’s books. They worked their way through the books and concluded that the charges against the company were “evidently a machination of the brain of some individual who has no regard for the true interests of Placer County.”50

  IN March 1864, Lincoln appointed Grant as commander-in-chief of all Union forces. At the beginning of May, Grant sent the Union Army of the Potomac into the Battle of the Wilderness, which was indecisive despite horrendous casualties. But he still continued the offensive in northern Virginia, fighting a five-day battle at Spotsylvania in which he lost about ten thousand men, and he still continued after Lee. On June 1-3, he fought the Battle of Cold Harbor, losing about seven thousand men in one hour. But he continued to attack, and by June 18 he was besieging Petersburg, south of Richmond. General Sherman, meanwhile, started from Chattanooga into Georgia and by July was besieging Atlanta. On September 1, he captured and later burned the city. This victory raised Northern morale, as did the Union Navy’s capture of Mobile, Alabama, on August 23. So did the early-October victory over Confederate cavalry at Winchester, Virginia. On October 31, Nevada became the thirty-sixth state. And on November 8, Lincoln was re-elected. It now appeared certain that the Union would be saved, North and South. It was up to the railroads to bring it together East and West.

  THE CP may have been broke, but as Huntington liked to brag, at any one time it had an average of about $1 million worth of equipment in transit. At the beginning of July 1864, the Big Four got some rare good news. Huntington had returned east and he sent a telegram from Washington informing his partners that the Pacific Railroad Bill had been redrawn and they could begin collecting their government bonds for every twenty instead of forty miles of track laid and approved by the government inspectors. There were many other favorable provisions in the bill. They were not home free, but things were looking up. Collecting what was their due from the government, however, proved to be difficult.

  In November, the company put out a report on the condition of the line. The CP had some earnings, about $
110,000 from passengers, the mail, and freight. Stock sales, however, were a scrawny $723,800 (not counting the subscriptions from Placer and Sacramento Counties). There was no cash on hand. A month later, Sam Montague published his annual report. Bloomer Cut had been finished but not yet tracked. He said that the 396,800 acres of land grants due from the government (but not yet granted) would bring in far more than $1.25 per acre, because it was mainly superb agricultural land. Further good news: his own survey had revealed that he could cut back on Judah’s original route and eliminate several tunnels, thus saving time and money.

  The bad news was that the cost of building the first thirty-six miles in 1863 and 1864 was nearly $3 million, or what Judah had anticipated spending for the first fifty miles. And not a single tunnel had yet been started. But as for the gaps, Montague had decided to bridge them with trestling, which, if made properly of pine, would last from eight to ten years. They could then be replaced with embankments, transporting the material on the cars at much less expense. Montague went on to report that the CP now had five locomotives, six first-class passenger cars, two baggage cars, and fifty freight cars.51

  CP stock was then selling, if it sold, for 19 cents on the dollar. Its bonds went for half of par. Crocker, who admitted that he was suffering from severe insomnia, later recalled of the last part of 1864, “I would have been glad, when we had 30 miles of road built, to have got a clean shirt and absolution from my debts; I would have been willing to give up everything I had in the world, in order to cancel my debts.”52 The day after Christmas 1864, he lamented, “If we only had the Gov. Bonds in hand, that would help our credit amazingly, and crush out our enemies.” But it would be five months before the company got those bonds.53

  The Big Four were now fully aware of the prophecy of Judah’s remark to Anna: “I cannot make these men appreciate the ‘elephant’ they have on their shoulders.”54 What they would do about it remained to be seen.