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

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  Reed’s telegrams to Durant are remarkable, partly because of the detail Durant insisted on holding in his own hands, even after Dodge signed on, also for all the details Reed had to handle, and most of all for the scope of the enterprise. And by mid-April, Reed was reporting on the speed of the construction. On April 17, he took government commissioners over the completed track: “We left Omaha at 9:20 am and arrived at the 40 miles post at 10:40 then run slow over the road to end of track, 63½ miles from initial point. The Commissioners appear to be well pleased with the work and expressed themselves accordingly. I intend to have the track laid to the 65 mile stake before six o’clock tonight. We are laying ¾ of a mile each day. The boarding cars will be completed Saturday and sent to end of the track after that we can lay one mile per day.”

  May 28: “Track laid to west end of station at Columbus [across the Loup River, at 86.5 miles from Omaha]. No track laid Saturday on account of storm.” May 31: “Eight thousand feet track laid today. Ninety-seven and quarter miles laid [from Omaha, counting sidings]. Columbus hard place men had big drunk two days lost.” Despite Reed’s disapproval, one should hope so for the sake of these young lions, Columbus being the first village they had come to since leaving Fremont, at the beginning of the season, that had beer or whiskey for sale.

  IN August, a correspondent of the New York Times wrote that one of the new railroad towns, Kearney, was “small, but vigorous and promising.” He predicted that “she will be a rich and busy city someday” and commented on “these numerous towns which spring up so suddenly on the Plains. They remain in constant and fierce rivalry, each eagerly clutching at every straw of trade to keep itself afloat and to swim ahead of its neighbors.” He found that, with the track completed to Kearney less than a week ago, the first train came in from Omaha yesterday, “and tomorrow shall see the first eastward bound train! Yet already the road has been built two miles further on. This in one day!” He considered it “extraordinary” to see in how short a time “the smooth, grass-covered prairie, unworn by wagon-tracks and undented even by hoof-prints, has been converted into a grand iron highway.” Occasionally a dip in the surface had to be filled with a few shovels of dirt, “but beyond this, it needs only that the ties be laid, the rails spiked on them and the spaces filled in with earth.”

  Summing up, the reporter said that what he was witnessing “is the genuine American genius—the genius of the West especially, which welcomes obstacles and looks on impossibilities as incentives to greater exertion.”18

  There were thousands of the young lions, five hundred or more working on the grades, then a thousand, then three thousand by 1868, in order to keep well ahead of the track layers, who eventually numbered more than seven thousand. The men came to Omaha on their own, or in response to a UP advertisement that promised good pay, good food, lots of work, and a free ride. Many were Irish and so the whole gang was labeled, but in fact they came from all over Europe and the United States, including a few newly freed African Americans. Jack Casement had a former slave with him as a servant. His name was Jack Ellis and he had been with Casement during the last year of the Civil War. Some three hundred freed slaves worked on the UP all together.

  What the workingmen had most in common was their age, most of them teenagers or just into their twenties, and their status as veterans. One diarist noted, “Nearly everybody wearing a long blue overcoat with brass buttons, the regular U.S. soldier uniform left over from the Civil War, with one or two revolvers strapped to their sides.”19 Others wore gray coats. This is perfectly clear in group photographs taken in 1867-69. “It was the best organized, best equipped, and best disciplined work force I have ever seen,” Dodge wrote of these men. “I used it several times as a fighting force and it took no longer to put it into fighting line than it did to form it for daily work.”20

  Their food was served on long tables in a dining car. They sat on benches, as at a picnic table. The meals consisted of coffee, potatoes, and boiled meat (usually beef; Jack Casement kept a herd of five hundred cattle marching along with the advance of the rails). It took about nine bushels of potatoes per meal to feed the men on a dining car. Good butter was kept at hand, when possible, and occasionally even ice water. Sometimes there was variety: a diarist wrote that at one dinnertime “a Negro mammy appeared with a huge basket full of fried chicken, bread and butter, doughnuts, bottles of milk and other food. We bought her out at once, basket and all.”21

  The men got their board and room at a cost of $5 per week. The “room” consisted of a space in one of the flatcars, or on top of it after the summer heat began. The cars were eighty-five feet long, ten feet wide, and eight feet high. They contained seventy-eight bunks, three tiers high and capable of sleeping two hundred men. The graders’ beds were in dugouts half beneath the ground, perhaps roofed with sheet iron—the same kind of hut used in the Wilderness and at Vicksburg. The men bathed only when they were near enough to the Platte to make it possible, and that wasn’t often. They almost never washed their pants, shirts, and jackets. About a quarter of them had mustaches, another quarter had beards, a quarter had full facial hair, and the rest were clean shaven (at least when the photographer showed up). The hair on their heads was generally long, down to the shoulders. About half seem to have smoked, mainly pipes.

  They were paid from $2.50 to $4.00 per day, depending on what they did. Only one in four was a track layer. Some put in the ties or filled around them or handled the rails or spiked them down or attached the fishplates to them. Others were graders, teamsters, herdsmen, cooks, bakers, blacksmiths, bridge builders, carpenters, masons, and clerks or telegraph operators. Most had to be taught their jobs, but they were quick learners, and the work was so specialized they seldom if ever made a mistake.

  How hard they worked is an astonishment to us in the twenty-first century. Except for some of the cooks and bakers, there was not a fat man among them. Their hands were tough enough for any job—one never sees gloves in the photographs—which included pickax handling, shoveling, wielding sledgehammers, picking up iron rails, and using other equipment that required hands like iron. Their waists were generally thin, but oh those shoulders! Those arms! Those legs! They were men who could move things, hammer things in, swing things, whatever was required, in rain or snow or high winds or burning sun and scorching temperature, all day, every day. Nebraska can be hotter than hell, colder than the South Pole. They kept on working. They didn’t whine, they didn’t complain, they didn’t quit, they just kept working.

  They had taken on a job that is accurately described as backbreaking. It was in addition a job that experts said could not be done in the time allotted (ten years), if ever. But they were building a railroad that would tie the country together, a railroad that almost every American wanted built as fast as possible, a railroad that required much of the skill and ingenuity and organizational ability and manufacturing capacity and stick-to-it determination of all Americans, a railroad that every American—most of all those men who were working on it at the cutting edge—was damned proud of.

  A day’s routine was something like this: In the morning the men were up at first light. After their toilet they went to wash faces and hands in a tin basin, had a hearty breakfast, and went to the job, whether plowing, shoveling, placing ties or rails, spiking them in, or putting on the fishplates at the junction of two rails. At noon, “Time” was called and they had an hour for a heavy dinner that included pitchers of steaming coffee, pans of soup, platters heaped with fried meat, roast meat, potatoes, condensed milk diluted with water, sometimes canned fruit and pies or cakes. There was little conversation: the men were there to eat, and they made a business of it.

  Afterward, they sat around their bunks smoking, sewing on buttons, or taking a little nap. Then back to work, with the bosses cursing and excoriating to overcome the noontime lassitude. “Time” was called again an hour before supper, to allow some rest. The evening meal was more leisurely. Then to the bunkhouses, for card games, a smoke, lots o
f talk (“railroad talk” was said to consist entirely of “whiskey and women and higher wages and shorter hours”), perhaps a song, such as “Poor Paddy he works on the railroad” or “The great Pacific railway for California hail.” Then to bed, the whole to be repeated the next day and the next and the next.

  During the spring of 1866, Jack Casement offered each man a pound of fresh tobacco for every day he laid a mile or more of track. Bissell, who was there, noted, “This was done.” Dan Casement went out in the early summer to offer time-and-a-half pay to ensure that the UP reached the hundredth meridian before any other line. He also offered double wages for two-mile workdays. Henry Morton Stanley, the reporter who found Livingston in Africa and who was reporting for two American papers, was impressed by the results: the workers, he said, “display an astonishing amount of enthusiasm” for their jobs.22

  THE snakily undulating double row of glistening rails stretched on to the west. Side tracks were filled with supply trains bearing hundreds of tons of iron and thousands of ties, fishplates, and more. The end of track, the last terminal base, was brimming with riotous life. There the Casement brothers had a huge takedown and then put-up-again warehouse. There were the boarding cars, the dining cars, the combined kitchen, stores, and office car. There were dusty lines of wagons bearing ties, hay, rails. A construction train would run up, men quickly unloaded its material, and the train started back, to bring on another load.

  The wagons, drawn by horses, plied between the track layers and their supplies. Here was where all the work paid off. One wagon took about forty rails, along with the proper proportion of spikes and chairs, along the rails already laid. The horse started off at a full gallop for the end of track, running between the rails. A couple of feet from the end of the rails already down, metal checks were placed under the wheels, stopping the wagon at once. On each side of the wagon there were rollers to facilitate running off the iron rails. Parties of five men stood on either side. Two men seized the end of a rail with their tongs and started forward with it, while the other men took hold with their tongs until it was clear of the car. They all came forward at a run. The chairs had, meantime, been set under the last rails placed. At the command “Down!” they dropped the rail in its place.

  Every thirty seconds there came that brave “Down,” “Down,” from either side of the track. The chief spiker was ready; the gauger stooped and measured; the sledges rang. Two rails every thirty seconds, one on each side. Four rails to a minute. These were the pendulum beats.23

  As the rails went down, they were gauged by a measuring rod exactly four feet eight and a half inches, as Lincoln had designated in 1863. Ere the rail’s clang in falling had ceased to reverberate, the wagon moved forward on the new track and another pair of rails was drawn out. When the wagon was empty, it was tipped over on the side of the track to allow the next loaded wagon to pass it. Then it was tipped back again and sent down the track for another load, the horse straining at a full gallop.

  The lead horse, always, was Blind Tom, a noble, venerable, full-blooded horse who pulled the front wagon. His name came from his condition—he couldn’t see. The workers pronounced him “perfect” in his role. No one claimed less sagacity for Blind Tom than that for any of the humans around him. When his wagon slipped and got stuck in a gap between the joints, he tugged with herculean force to drag it through. He became something of a celebrity from being mentioned in so many newspaper accounts of the construction.

  Behind the wagon there was a man dropping spikes, while another settled the ties well under the ends of the rails. There was no ballast for the ties other than sand, which was added later. For now, they were simply put on the grade. The attitude was, as with the cottonwood ties, that it could be fixed later, when trains would be going down grade from the mountains where the material—gravel or hardwood ties—could be sent, to where it could replace the sand or cottonwood. It would be much cheaper, and would get the road built all the faster.

  There were thirty men driving in the spikes, on the outside and on the inside, with three strokes of the sledgehammer per spike, ten spikes to a rail, four hundred rails to a mile, eighteen hundred miles to San Francisco.* Twenty-one million times those sledgehammers had to be swung. This was the beginning of what would be called assembly-line work. The pace was as rapid as a man could walk. Such a pace was attained because each man had a certain thing to do, and that only. He was accustomed to doing it and had not to wait on the action of anyone else.

  In 1866, there were some one thousand men working at or near the end of track, out of a total force of eight thousand. There were four locomotives with ten cars each running between the track head and the last siding. It took forty cars to bring on the rails, ties, bridging, fastening, fuel, and supplies for the men and animals. Everything had to be transported from the Missouri River.

  Ahead of the four construction trains came a locomotive pulling a general-repair car that held a blacksmith shop, cables, rope, winches, barrels, boxes, switch stands, iron rods, and more. Then the feed store and saddler’s shop, then a carpenter shop, then a sleeping car or two, then a sitting and dining room for foremen, then a long dining room, then a car that contained a kitchen in front and a counting room and telegraph office in the rear, then a store car, then six cars that were all sleepers.

  Two locomotives powered the work train. The crew included two foremen, two engineers, two conductors, a financial manager, a storekeeper, a physician, a civil engineer and seven assistants, a draftsman, a telegrapher, the chief steward and sixteen assistants, and the workers. The physician had broken bones and mashed fingers to repair, and sometimes Indian arrows to extract.24

  All the cars were hauling material. There were tie layers, who needed seventy-five teams of horses and wagons to haul the ties forward along the side of the track. Then the track layers, the gaugers, the spikers. Keeping up with everything were the herd of cattle, along with a butcher and helper to kill daily for consumption, and herders to care for the cat-tie. There was a baker and helper to bake the bread, and more.

  It was the very embodiment of system. Henry Morton Stanley was in Nebraska to write about the Indian uprisings and massacres for a St. Louis and a New York newspaper. After a breakfast with Casement, Stanley watched the men laying track. He noted: “All this work is executed with great rapidity and with mechanical regularity. Captain D. B. Clayton, superintendent of laying the track, showed your reporter a specimen of what could be done. He gave his men the order, and in the space of exactly five minutes, as timed by the watch, they laid down the rails and spiked them, for the distance of seven hundred feet. There were fifty rails laid down, one on each side of the track. At that rate sixteen miles and a half of track could be laid down in one day.”25

  THEIR slang was expressive. An engineer was a “hogger.” The fireman was the “tallow-pot.” When the engineer wanted the brakes set, he whistled a signal called the “whistle down brakes.” Setting the handbrakes was a “tie-down.” A drifting railroad worker was a “boomer.” A “bumper” was a retaining post at the end of a spur track. A “car toad” was a car repairer. “Cushions” were passenger coaches, of which the workers saw few to none. To “dance the carpet” was to appear before an official for discipline. A “fly light” was a man at work who had missed a meal. A “drone cage” was a private car, also seldom seen by the workers. A man asleep on the job was a “hay.” And so on. A phrase universally known was “gandy dancer,” for a track laborer.

  It took an immense force to support the end of track, just as it took an immense force to support the front line in a battle. Twenty miles back of the end of track stood construction trains, loaded with ties and rails and all other things needed for the work. It was like the grand reserve of an army. Ten to twelve miles ahead of it were other trains of like character—the second line.26 One reporter wrote, “Sherman, with his victorious legions, sweeping from Atlanta to Savanah, was a spectacle less glorious than this army of men, marching on foot from Omaha t
o Sacramento.”27

  On May 11, as the Casement-led force was getting under way, the Omaha Weekly Herald put it exactly. “The question of time is of such moment that minutes and seconds even are estimated when interruptions occur in the work of track-laying. The great machine must move in every part; every wheel must be in constant motion; so many rails must be put down and so much done every minute of every working hour of every working day, or loss accrues.”28 No minutes, or even seconds, were wasted on the UP. On August 2, the Omaha Weekly Herald reported that the previous day the government commissioners had accepted thirty-five miles of the track after being “surprised almost beyond measure at the rapidity with which the work is being pushed forward—thirty-eight miles having been built in twenty-eight days and in one instance 2 miles in one day.”

  On their ride, the commissioners uttered expressions of wonder “at the extent and amazing fertility of this Valley of the Platte.” One called it “the finest Valley in the world.” Their train, meanwhile, sped forward at a speed of thirty-five miles per hour, “not spilling a drop of water from the well-filled goblets, so smooth is the track.” The commissioners arrived at the end of track toward the end of the day, when the men were seated in the dining car having their meal. Together with the kitchen and sleeping cars, and the construction supplies and cars, the total constituted “almost a city in itself.” On the return trip to Omaha, the train made the last thirty-two miles in thirty-seven minutes.29

  At this time Dodge and Reed made a trip over the road, then continued on to see how the graders were doing. Their biggest worry was crossing the North Platte at the Nebraska city (now named North Platte) at the junction of the North and South Platte Rivers. Reed sent a telegraph to Durant on August 4: “General Dodge was with me at crossing of North Platte and decides that pile bridges will be suitable for crossing that stream. Can reach there before January with track. Shall I close contract or wait until I can send you plan.” Why he had to have Durant’s approval for something Dodge had already decided on doing isn’t clear.