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

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  Oliver Ames and his friends, meanwhile, insisted that the UP change its ways. Like the men working for it in the field, it had to be reorganized. Durant’s careless way with records had to go. They insisted that proper books be kept and made available to the entire board. The office staff had to be refashioned. There had to be an audit.45

  Dodge concluded his 1866 report with praise for his surveyors and also for their assistants. He said the latter were “young men, as a general thing, and far above the average, many of them of fine education, and who not only perform the duty well, but intelligently.”

  The road itself, Dodge said, was by the end of November 1866 “built and running 305 miles, commencing at the Missouri river and extending 10 miles west of the North Platte river.” During the period between April 1 and December 1, some 254 miles of track had been laid, “more road than was ever before built in the same length of time. It challenges the attention of the world.” In its grades, alignments, superstructure, stations, water tanks, turnouts, and equipment, “the road is a first-class American road.”46

  That last phrase was at best a forgivable exaggeration. The road needed lots of work—new ties, stronger rails, gravel to ballast the rails, new bridges, fewer curves, and more—but none of that mattered at the time. All that mattered was getting the thing built, getting locomotives hauling cars from New York or Chicago all the way to San Francisco over a continuous track. In 1866, the UP had made a big stride forward to that goal. It had laid over three hundred miles of track, figured out the route for the run to the Salt Lake and beyond to California, learned through experience how to manage its affairs, how to survey, how to make grade, how to lay track, how to build towns and cities, depots and shops. Whatever the worries of the board on the East Coast—and for sure there were many—out at the working end the UP had laid more than seven times as much track in 1866 as it had in 1865. It was on its way.

  * Ten spikes to the rail provided only enough stability for moving the construction cars ahead with more materials. Following gangs had to put in the proper complement of ties, or about 2,250 per mile. Then spikes were driven for all ties, averaging between nine and ten thousand per mile.

  Chapter Nine

  THE CENTRAL PACIFIC ASSAULTS THE SIERRA 1866

  IN 1866, Collis Huntington followed up on the map he had already had approved by the attorney general, the map that showed the CP going 150 miles east of the California-Nevada border. Now he wanted an amendment to the railroad bill of 1864 that Congress initially approved, ordering that the CP build until it ran into or even past the tracks of the UP In short, he wanted a race sanctioned by the U.S. Congress.

  A race fit perfectly into the business climate of America. The businessmen spoke little and did much, while the politicians did as little as possible and spoke much. In historian Thomas Cochran’s words, the businessmen emphasized “time more insistently than anyone since the original creation.”1

  Huntington hired Richard H. Franchot, an ex-congressman and former Union Army general, to represent his interests to Congress. Franchot, probably the first paid lobbyist, set a pattern for the hordes who followed him. He received $20,000 per year, the same salary the Big Four paid themselves. They did not even ask for a receipt, although his expense account may have reached millions of dollars as he dispensed information, cash, good cheer, and favors.

  It was an ideal setup for a lobbyist, as the case made itself. All the CP wanted, it said, was the right to compete fairly. How could the Congress give the UP the right to build as far west as possible without allowing the CP to build as far east as it could? How indeed? The argument and the people making the argument were irrefutable.

  In addition, the CP was still stuck at mile 54 out of Sacramento, was still chipping away at the Summit Tunnel, while the UP was almost 250 miles west of Omaha and going strong. The UP directors thought that the CP couldn’t possibly make it to the California-Nevada border before they got there. There was no point spending time or money to forestall the CP’s getting permission to build farther to the east.

  Whatever the directors thought, they were up against their match. Huntington later recalled that the 150-mile limitation on the CP “ought not to have gone into the [original] bill, but I said to Mr. Union Pacific … I would take that out as soon as I wanted it out. In 1866 I went to Washington…. I went into the gallery for votes. I sat right there. I examined the face of every man … carefully through my glass. I didn’t see but one man I thought would sell his vote.” So he let the politicians vote as they saw fit.2 He knew he had them.

  On June 19, 1866, the Senate approved the amendment to the railroad bill by a vote of 34 to 8. A week later, the House assented by 94 to 33, and on July 3, 1866, President Johnson signed it. The amendment authorized the CP to “locate, construct and continue their road eastward, in a continuous, completed line, until they shall meet and connect with the Union Pacific Railroad.” Another provision permitted the companies to grade three hundred miles ahead of the end of track. Still another said the railroads could draw two-thirds of the government bonds upon completion of acceptable grade and before track had been laid.3 Congress reserved the right to name the exact site where the two lines would connect. That would be decided later.

  Meanwhile, the great race was on, exactly as the Congress and the President and the people they represented wanted. Or, as the Sacramento Union put it in a January 1866 article, “It is the duty of the Government to urge the construction of the road with all possible speed.”4 The Omaha Weekly Herald wrote, “American genius, American industry, American perseverance can accomplish almost anything.”5

  It was indeed such an American thing to do. A race, a competition. Build it fast. The company that won would get the largest share of the land and the biggest share of the bonds. The cost to the country would be the same if it took ten years or twenty years or five years to build. People wanted to get to California, or back east. They wanted to see the sights, to ship the goods. The road could be fixed up later. Build it. Nail it down. And there was no better way than to set up a competition.

  This was democracy at work.

  • • •

  HOPKINS and Huntington’s correspondence, handwritten, is long, even voluminous letters, full of detail. They had no other means of communicating, except by telegraph—which cost so much per word that they thought it outrageous and refused whenever possible to use it—or by a conference, nearly impossible when they were on different coasts. So they wrote, handsome letters, quite legible, well written, covering all the points. In the middle part of the nineteenth century, before the typewriter and the telephone, businessmen did so as a matter of course. So did the politicians, come to that, and the doctors, lawyers, schoolteachers, generals and enlisted men, housewives, nearly everyone.

  Hopkins to Huntington on January 23, 1866: “It will require all the means and good management that we are master of to build the road over the mountains at the rate we are going.” February 16 (in reference to getting teamsters to pick up freight at the end of track to carry on the Big Four’s wagon road from Dutch Flat): “We are powerless to get freight taken unless we pay the teamsters $1.25 a ton—and even at that it was difficult to get them from the Pacific Road, for no better reason than because there were more taverns on the Pacific Road—more waiting girls and Bar maids and from long acquaintance that road was more familiar and homelike.”

  In the same February 16 letter, after a discourse on the difficulty of building the railroad from Dutch Flat over the summit and down to the Truckee River, Hopkins wrote: “Snow prevents work about 5-6 months in the year, so we need to get it done this season if possible…. We’re pushing hard. For as we see it, it is either a six month job or an eighteen month job to reach a point where the road will earn us a heap and where in construction we can make a pile.” By that last phrase he meant that, when the track laying reached the desert in Nevada, the company could build more in a day than it could in months in the mountains, and thus receive more
government bonds.

  “This winter only pack mules can transport the stage passengers to Virginia City [Nevada]. Crocker’s camp supplies and much of his forage for his work animals are packed in at a cost of one cent per pound,” he added. February 24 (following a long discussion of water resources): “We need the right to take water for construction and operation. Without this grant from Congress we are entirely at the mercy of a set of water speculators—real water sharks—known as ditch companies. They go ahead of the RR and buy up all the water to make us, the farmers and the miners or anyone else pay them hugely for it. We have already paid $60,000 in construction costs to go over, along, and around these ditches.”

  There is a great deal about money, and when the government will turn over bonds, and what price Huntington is getting for the bonds in hand, and what he is paying for rails, locomotives, cars, and other supplies. And a great deal on various dealings of the Big Four with regard to West Coast railroads. Plus personnel problems and hopes.

  Hopkins again on May 5: “Our cuts weakened the support of the natural hillside formation, so at Tunnel hill, just above Secret Town, where the original intention was to make a tunnel, the material was too soft to tunnel without being lined by expensive masonry, so it was decided to make an open cut in the spur, which is near 100 ft thick. The cut was nearly done when in March it broke back several hundred feet and slowly continued to slide—imperceptible to the eye, yet continually moving. All the space that 500 men could make during the day with their carts and wheelbarrows would be filled the next morning.” And so on, as he recounted the perils of building a track in the mountains.

  On July 9, Hopkins said that Crocker was suffering from a powder shortage because the powder company “can’t make it fast enough.” Then, turning to the good news: “It is a great consolation to know that you whipped out the UP at Washington [by getting Congress to approve the amendment]. They thought to Lord it over us, and get well paid. They must be in a bad fix if they have mortgaged a road up to within 150 miles of our state line. Send me a copy of the UP’s first mortgage. I will perhaps get some new ideas for the next mortgage we make.”

  There were other problems. On Julyl6, 1866, Hopkins wrote to Huntington: “The ship Hornet burned at sea. Even using the invoices/schedules/and letters, it can not be determined what RR material went down with her. Our invoices show only 1182 bars of iron, 100 kegs spikes and 65 ball chains. But the bills you sent in have many other things listed, but for which we have no bill of lading.”

  On July 21, Hopkins said that he was satisfied that each of the Big Four was doing what he ought to be doing—Stanford with the politicians, Crocker running construction, Huntington making loans and buying all equipment and supplies, and he himself in charge of finance. He felt he was useful “here, while I am sure no one of us could do so well as yourself there [New York, Boston, and Washington]. Until we can hear a locomotive whistle scream on the other side of the summit, so as to feel ourselves well out of the woods, I don’t intend to ask or suggest any change.”

  Huntington agreed. “If it had not been for you and I,” he wrote back, “my opinion is that the Central Pacific would have gone to the Devil before this.” Huntington confessed, “I have gone to sleep at night in New York when I had a million and a half dollars to be paid by three o’clock on the following day, without knowing where the money was coming from, and slept soundly. I never worried.” He practiced more rigorously than man of any previous age the self-denial of conventional pleasures today in return for wealth and power tomorrow. CP lawyer Alfred Cohen later said, “I have seen Mr. Huntington trudging about from office to office trying to get people to lend him money…. They were put to terrible straits to get money to get over the mountains.”

  The correspondence wasn’t all business. “Mrs. Hopkins will probably go east this spring, as the advanced age of her father and his feeble health induces her to change her promise never to make the voyage without me.”6

  THE winter of 1865-66 was the wettest in years. On the lower slopes, below Colfax, the rains were heavy enough for the Sacramento Union to complain that the railroad’s “embankments are so miserably built that they give way under the soaking rains of this climate, and long delays are occasioned.”7 The soil was thick, spongy, a mucky trap for vehicles. Crocker got hundreds of mules to carry food, powder, tools, and their own forage to the camps beyond the end of track. A stagecoach setting out from Dutch Flat for Virginia City got so mired in mud near Gold Run that it was stuck for six weeks. Heavy landslides spread mud and boulders across the completed track, often blocking the road. The snows higher up hampered work on the tunnels. There were five feet of snow on New Year’s Day, 1866.

  From then until March, as often happens in California, the skies were clear and calm. But in March, the storms came again, bringing sleet and snow which lasted until the end of May. Indeed, from May 20 until June 1, the weather was almost one constant snowstorm. Strobridge later said, “The winter made the roads on the clay soils of the foothills nearly impassable for vehicles. The building of the railroad was prosecuted with energy but at a much greater cost than would have been the case in the dry season…. All work between Colfax and Dutch Flat was done during this winter in the mud.”8

  Crocker and Strobridge stayed with it. By the spring of 1866, they had hired and put to work the largest number of employees in America. The CP had over ten thousand men working on the railroad, eight thousand of them Chinese. Some one thousand of these labored for Arthur Brown, who had charge of the company’s trestling, timbering, and bridging. He had his men felling trees, shaping timbers, and driving piles for bridges. The track-laying foreman, Henry H. Minkler, had his men spiking in rails in early May up and around Cape Horn.9

  Charlie Crocker rode up and down the line with a leather saddlebag holding gold and silver coin to pay the men. “Why, I went up and down the road like a man bull,” he told an interviewer. He was inspecting, criticizing, or roaring with anger. Once he told Stro, “Rule them with an iron hand.” That was after he saw a group of white men talking excitedly in a group. “There is something breeding there,” he told Strobridge.

  “They’re getting up a strike,” Stro replied. After Crocker had paid off the other men, Strobridge said, “There, they are coming. Now get ready.”

  When the men got close enough to hear, Crocker said, “Strobridge, I think you had better reduce wages on this cut. We are paying a little more than we ought to. Reduce them about 25 cents a day.”

  Hearing this, the men stopped and talked. Finally, one of their leaders stepped forward and said to Crocker, “We thought, sir, that we ought to have our wages raised a little on this tunnel. The tunnel is very wet, and the cut is wet.” Crocker replied that he had just been talking to Stro about lowering their wages.

  “We thought we ought to get an advance,” said the worker, “but you ought not to reduce it, certainly.” Crocker asked Stro what he thought.

  “I wouldn’t make a fuss over it. We had better let them go on at the same figure.”

  “All right,” said Crocker, and that was that.10

  STROBRIDGE lived in a manner that all the others, even Crocker, envied. His wife, Hanna Maria Strobridge, and their six adopted children were with him, living in a standard passenger car pulled by the headquarters locomotive, which stayed right behind the end of track. Strobridge had it made over into a three-bedroom house on wheels. Mrs. Strobridge had an awning fitted to her front porch, and when the train was halted she hung houseplants and a caged canary around her entrance. People wiped their feet before entering. She was the only woman on the CP line, and Stro was the only man with a family life.11

  WORK on the Summit Tunnel went slowly at best. Montague decided it would be worth the cost to sink a shaft from the top so that the Chinese could work on four facings at once—the ones at each end, and two others going in opposite directions from the middle. The shaft would be eight by twelve feet wide, and seventy-three feet deep.

  By ha
nd, the Chinese began to cut it through, haul the debris (mainly granite chunks) up from the bottom, and lower the timbers into place to shore it up. The bosses decided some mechanical aid might speed things up. An old locomotive, the Sacramento (one of the first locomotives in California), was cannibalized and sent to the top of the digging, to serve as a hoisting engine. Minus its cab, wheels, and turning shafts, the Sacramento was loaded by a winch onto a reinforced freight car and hauled to the end of track, near Colfax. There a mule skinner named Missouri Bill took over. His job was to drag the twelve-ton engine, now called the Blue Goose, to the summit, fifty miles away as the crow flies, seventy-five miles on the mountain trails. The wagon the Blue Goose traveled on, specially designed, had wooden wheels two feet wide. Ten yokes of oxen pulled it, spurred on by Missouri Bill’s profanity and whip. When the oxen encountered a team of horses pulling wagons, the horses kicked, bucked, and otherwise created havoc. Bill sent one man ahead to blindfold approaching horses.

  Going downslope, Bill put blocks under the wide wheels; heavy logging chains were attached to the largest trees nearby and, with a few feet of slack, attached to the wagon. Bill then knocked out the blocks, and the wagon and the Blue Goose slid a yard or so. Then the process was repeated. He used the chains to climb, too. This went on for six weeks, until the summit was finally reached. After the engine was set up in a building fifty feet square that had been built for it, and placed on a bed of huge timbers at the top of the tunnel shaft, it began to haul up the granite and lower the timber. Work went faster, as much as a foot a day. But it wasn’t until December 19 that the bottom was reached and the Chinese could get started drilling and blasting.

  Crocker then decided that he wanted more experienced men for the tunneling. He sent an emissary to Virginia City, Nevada, to persuade some of the best Cornish miners to come to his site, with the lure of higher wages. They came, but instead of giving them exclusive charge of excavating the tunnel, Crocker faced them in one direction and Chinese workers in the other. “The Chinese, without fail, always outmeasured the Cornish miners,” he recalled. “That is to say, they would cut more rock in a week than the Cornish miners did. And there it was hard work, steady pounding on the rock, bone-labor.” The Cornishmen quit. “They swore they would not work with Chinamen anyhow,” said Crocker. After that, “the Chinamen had possession of the whole work.”12