On September 17, Reed wired that he had on hand two hundred thousand ties, which had reduced the price to 60 cents per tie. “If the grading can be done and iron delivered we can lay the track to Julesburgh before spring. Did you send spikes? Fish joints? Or is all the iron to be laid with chairs! The above has been written on the supposition that the men employed on the work are not molested by the Indians. We lost 98 mules 50 miles west of end of track. The men are very timid and on the first appearance of Indians would all leave the work. Sherman promised protection if there were troops in the country to be spared.”30
At the end of August, the commissioners wired President Johnson that they had inspected an additional forty-five miles of the UP and accepted them. Their telegram concluded, “The cars now run two hundred and five miles west of Omaha; or fifteen miles beyond Kearney.”31
THE men were really hopping for the Casement brothers. On September 21, the Omaha Weekly Herald was able to announce that the UP had printed a timetable. It was now running twice a day from Omaha to Kearney, a distance of two hundred miles. The passenger train, with first-class coaches and newly completed freight cars, left Omaha at 1 P.M. and 7 P.M. and arrived at Kearney at 5:10 A.M. and 11:10 A.M. Turned around, the trains got back to Omaha at 2 P.M. and 8 P.M. At Kearney, coaches met the train and moved passengers and freight to Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and California.32 The Rocky Mountain News had reported a few months earlier that all horse-drawn coaches had been withdrawn from Omaha.33
General Sherman went for the ride. He was impressed beyond measure. He wrote to Grant that he hoped the line would be complete to Julesburg, Colorado, by April 1867. “This will be a great achievement,” he ventured, “but perfectly possible when we see what has been done.” He confessed that he was puzzled about what to do with Fort Kearney: because of the railroad, it was of no further military use.34
Sherman’s puzzlement illustrated one of the main purposes of building the UP. The army was spending millions of dollars in building forts on the Plains and across the Rocky Mountains, and in getting the soldiers to them and supplying them. But it was critical that it be able to do so, because, with the end of the war and the rapidly increased immigration to the United States, families were moving out onto the Plains at a fast pace. The hostility of the Plains Indians required the army to get out there to protect the immigrants. But stationing companies and even regiments at frontier posts did little good, since the troops could never mount up and go out to catch marauding Indians in time—the Indians would have long since departed the scene of their outrage. With the railroad, and its ability to move troops faster and safer from one place to another, the army needed fewer men and fewer forts, which made it much cheaper to maintain. Thus did the government get an immediate payoff from its investment in the UP. Sherman had anticipated this, which was one of the reasons he and Grant were great friends of the railroad.
Early in 1866, Sherman wrote to the editor of the Omaha Weekly Herald. “You know how outspoken I have been in the matter of befriending the Great Pacific Railroad,” he opened, “as also on all subjects calculated to develop the vast natural resources of the Northwest.” Then he pointed out, “You can hardly create a more lively interest than already prevails in the whole civilized world on the subject of a Pacific Railroad.”35
How right the general was can be seen in the coverage given the railroads, from newspapers in Sacramento, San Francisco, Omaha, Chicago, Denver, Salt Lake, New York, and elsewhere. The public was fascinated by the construction of the transcontinental railroad. In part this was due to the magnitude of the undertaking, in part to its usefulness, not only to the military and the settlers but to all Americans. Everywhere people agreed that the coming of the railroad meant a new day was at hand.
Another factor: the Civil War was over, and the great corps of reporters and editors that had come of age during the conflict suddenly had little of national significance to write about, except for national politics. This meant that sophisticated reporters and editors, who were savvy about what people wanted to read, were at loose ends. Many of them decided that the railroad was the news to cover. As each month went by, more and more of them started doing so. In a short time it became the big story.
AS of October 6, 1866, the end of track had reached the hundredth meridian, 247 miles west of Omaha. Doc Durant decided that this was the big story of 1866. He invited scads of people for his grand excursion, to ride west on the “sumptuous Directors’ car” which he had purchased from the Pullman Palace Sleeping Car Company, built to his exacting and extravagant specifications. There were other Pullman cars in the train, called by one newspaper “the most sumptuous and resplendent, not only in America but all over the world.” Then there was the “Lincoln Car,” which had been built for President Lincoln but used only for his funeral, which Durant had purchased with the UP’s money, along with five coaches and a freight train bearing food, liquor, tents, and other articles.
The guests included Senators Benjamin Wade, J. W. Patterson, J. M. Thayer, E W. Tipton, and John Sherman, twelve representatives, and others, along with Robert Todd Lincoln, son of Abraham Lincoln, Mr. and Mrs. George Francis Train, Mr. and Mrs. Silas Seymour, George Pull-man, John Duff, and many others. Reporters from every daily in the United States were invited, and many came.
In Omaha they got to see a part of what the UP had constructed, including a roundhouse capable of sheltering twenty locomotives at once (there were already twenty-three locomotives on the line; one hundred were expected in 1867), a blacksmith shop with twelve forges, a two-story machine shop, extensive car shops turning out nine cars per week, and more.
The first night was spent at Columbus, where some went to see Casement’s men laying track on a siding while others visited a prairie-dog colony or went hunting for buffalo and antelope. In the evening, Dodge had a huge bonfire lit in the center of a great circle of tents. A grand feast of game was accompanied by champagne (the breakfast and lunch on the dining cars had been meals to write home about too). A party of Pawnees, recruited by the same Dodge who had expressed his belief that there were no friendly Indians, gave the party a scare that night when they raced through the camp, wearing war paint. After Dodge had reassured the shrieking ladies and the timid gentlemen that these were friendly Pawnees, the crowd gathered to watch a few war dances and a mock battle complete with fake scalping. It all lasted until 2 A.M.
While on this trip, Dodge was elected to Congress by the people of Council Bluffs and its district. Later he figured himself to be the only man “elected to Congress who forgot the day of election.” He never campaigned for the office and hardly ever went to Washington to serve.
At 132 miles west of Omaha was the last farm to be found until Salt Lake City. At the one hundredth meridian, the train turned around and started back toward Omaha. Durant was ecstatic and resolved to have excursions whenever the UP had something to celebrate. Dodge, at first wary, began to get into the spirit of the thing as he slowly realized how much good it was doing for the company. On the last night, he treated the guests to the spectacle of a staged prairie fire set at a safe distance. He also conducted what amounted to a continuous press conference. He answered all reporters’ questions. He later confessed that he had sprinkled his remarks with “a great deal of romance” of the sort reporters dote on. Despite the cost, which was huge, he decided that, “from a sight-seeing point of view, it may be considered as very successful.”36
As Maury Klein puts it, “The selling of the West had begun in earnest,” even though, at what is today Cozad, Nebraska, the tourists were not very far west. But as Klein says, “Even at this early stage the market value of self-parody had been discovered.”37
SHORTLY after the excursion, the UP announced that it would convert one of its construction trains to a passenger car so that the line could run out to Lone Tree Station, forty-one miles west of Columbus. Soon after that, the line ran daily service to Grand Island. By late August, it was “Open to Kearney,” near the mili
tary post of Fort Kearney. The service was sometimes irregular and the passage sometimes problematical, but it was a start.
The fuel was cottonwood poles, which were green. The firemen insisted they sprouted when placed in the firebox. Still, they generated enough steam to haul a small train of cars across the countryside at twenty miles per hour. In historian Robert Athearn’s words, “It was such an improvement over travel by jolting, wearying prairie schooners that to the postwar traveler it must have seemed he was moving through another world, in another age.”38
Exaggeration is endemic to railroad historians. Athearn later quotes a young Danish girl whose father, in 1867, paid the UP $10 each to carry his family to North Platte. They sat on benches without backs and were jolted by the movement of a springless car over new track. It was a tiring experience, she wrote, one that she remembered years later as quite unpleasant.39
DODGE spent far more time working than entertaining. He arranged for military escorts when and where he could, dealt with the government commissioners who came west to examine the track laid by the UP, ordered supplies of all kinds, and handled land matters for the company. He was in ultimate charge of the bridge building. It was Dodge who decided, as Reed telegraphed Durant, that the North Platte was tame enough for a twenty-three-hundred-foot-long trestle built on cedar piles. He was in charge of the Loup Fork Bridge, completed in 1866, fifteen hundred feet long.
Dodge was also in command of the company’s land and mineral interests. He arranged for the first lands received from the government along the completed road. He founded twelve depots and made a town around each one of them, where he had lots recorded and the best ones taken up by the company. At such critical points as Kearney and North Platte, he reserved a large acreage for railroad shops, sidings, and other needs. His working theory was that it was best to “take all the property needed or that ever would be needed while the land was vacant.” He sold lots to settlers at anywhere from $25 to $250, one-third in cash and the balance over the next two years. The purchaser had to plant shade trees. In addition, Dodge kept a sharp lookout for coal, iron, and other minerals.40 He had Jacob H. House doing a hydrographic survey of the Missouri River to find the best place for a railroad bridge. If in the process Nebraska didn’t become an appendage of the UP, it was close.
Also in 1866, Dodge sent out his surveyors to find the best route over the Black Hills, through Wyoming, to Salt Lake, and beyond, to the California state line. In a May 1866 letter to surveyor James A. Evans (with more or less similar copies to the other surveyors), Dodge said, “You know that a railroad can be built where a mule or man can hardly travel.” He told Evans what to survey—how to get over the Black Hills, for the company was “anxious to determine beyond a doubt where we shall pass them.” To that end he wanted all lines examined, not excluding the one Dodge had found out of Cheyenne. Dodge said he wanted Evans to write him “as often as possible.” Further, he wanted from Evans a report on “the geology, mineralogy, and the mineral and agricultural resources of the country.” He concluded, “Time is everything with us. Use economy in all expenses.”41
To Dodge’s delight, Evans pronounced the line headed west out of Cheyenne as the best. To the south, the route west from Denver was impossible, just as Dodge had thought. To go north on the North Platte to the Laramie River was also impossible. Evans “pushed through, taking three weeks to run 25 miles—a narrow, wild, precipitous gorge, and never before passed by man,” according to Dodge. It was therefore “impracticable.” So were the other three routes Evans ran, except for the Lone Tree line Dodge had discovered. It was shorter, had gentler grades, less curvature, no canyons, was relatively free of snowfall, and required fewer bridges.
Indeed, the surveys westward from North Platte, Nebraska, all the way to the probable meeting with the CP pleased Dodge no end. As he put it in his 1866 report, “The surveys this year have connected our lines, settled the location over the Rocky Mountains and from that point westward. We have demonstrated that a line can be built from the Missouri river to the California state line without meeting any mountain barriers, impassable snows, or great deserts that it is not practicable to overcome; that we have a line for directness, distance, alignment, grades and work, that is not equaled by any other road of the same length in the world. That we have, in fact, the best general route across the continent.”
There were mountain ranges, to be sure, but Dodge said the UP could overcome the Black Hills, Medicine Bow, and the Wasatch Range “without extraordinary expenses, with comparatively light grades, with but a few miles of maximum grades, and with an alignment that is extraordinary.” In those mountains there was “plenty of timber—cedar, mountain pine, and hemlock—rock in cuts, and the whole country is underlaid with valuable mines of silver, iron, copper, and gold.” Between the Black Hills and the Wasatch Range, “coal begins to crop out, and it extends west to Salt Lake, along with sandstone and limestone.” Dodge did admit that on the western slope of the Rocky Mountains it was “desolate, dreary, not susceptible of cultivation or grazing. The country has no inviting qualities.” Still, there was produce for road building “and labor to build this portion of the road exists there to-day [by which he meant Mormons from Salt Lake City] without importing a single man or mechanic.”
Dodge’s 1866 report constituted the first clear description of the country from the western part of Nebraska all the way through to the Sierra Nevada, along with the first description of the best route for a railroad over that country. He was quick to praise his surveyors for all that they did, nor did he neglect to add that they had “all the time been in a hostile Indian country, unceasingly dependent upon military escorts, every mile having been located under guard, the party perpetually apprehensive of attack. The engineers performed their work much better than could have been expected.”42
What pathbreaking work the surveyors were doing was illustrated by the information they got. One of them, L. L. Hills, talked to the “oldest inhabitant” on the Platte River. “Oldest” is relative here, for he could not have been there more than a couple of years. Anyway, the old-timer said the Platte “never flooded over at the Loup Fork.” Hills’s own observations were more accurate: “I have no doubt that this valley will make one of the finest stock-raising countries in the world.”43
While Dodge worked on his report, the graders and track layers and other workers were busy. Reed wired Durant on November 13 that he had iron to lay track as far as North Platte, but the next day he had to tell the Doctor that there had been a “severe snow storm at end of track.” When the Casements were shut down by weather—the ground froze—Jack stayed in North Platte, building a blacksmith shop, icehouse, slaughterhouse, wash house, and stock pens.
Meanwhile, Reed was out front with the graders. On November 29, he wired Durant that he hoped to keep the grading going through December. “The grading on the 4th hundred is not as well advanced as it should be,” he admitted. Then he explained, “The Indian scare and severe storms has drove most of the men off of the line, [but] I have used every effort to get as much grading done as possible.” Meanwhile, “the Truss bridge over Loup Fork, is completed.”44
BACK in New York, at 20 Nassau Street, the Union Pacific Railroad Company needed money. The government bonds it had received for completed sections could be sold—nothing could be easier, since the government stood behind the twice-yearly interest payments at 6 percent—but despite the fulsome favorable publicity Durant’s excursion to the hundredth meridian had brought forward, the UP bonds had no market value and could be used only for loans at ruinous rates of interest. The stock was so worthless it could be sold only “to people who would take a risk as they would at a faro-bank.”
Oakes Ames solicited subscriptions for Crédit Mobilier stock from his fellow congressmen. Two representatives bought five hundred shares each, and Senator James Grimes of Iowa took 250. But many others refused, not because of any question of ethics but because they did not consider it a good investment. Exce
pt for two, the businessmen Ames approached to buy shares also turned him down. The Ames brothers and their Boston friends now owned more than half of Crédit Mobilier’s twenty-five thousand shares (Oakes and Oliver Ames had 16 percent of the total, with 4,025 shares). Durant was the largest individual holder, with 6,041 shares, and was president of the company.
In late November, the UP directors met in New York. Their first order of business was to adopt the line Dodge had proposed in his report, which they did. No wonder, for the line from Cheyenne began at the point where the government loan jumped from $16,000 per mile to $48,000, but, as Dodge’s description made clear, it would not cost the company anywhere near that much to build. That it was also the best and shortest route made the choice easier.
At that same meeting, the directors had to deal with the position of president of the UP. General John Dix had been appointed minister to France, but he did not resign as head of the UP; instead, he took a leave of absence. The board was no longer willing to allow Durant to run things to suit himself and decided to elect a temporary president. Durant wanted the office, but to his dismay he received only one vote, against thirteen for Oliver Ames. The board then adopted a resolution denying the authority of any individual to act for the board, a blunt message to Durant: the UP was no longer his to run as he saw fit.
Doc wanted to fight but was in no condition to do so. He was exhausted, as might be expected after the year he had put in. His friend George Francis Train told him to see a specialist, warning, “Do it or you will have a stroke. You can’t strike the Almighty in the face as you do without getting a lick back.”
Nothing Like It in the World The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869 Page 22
