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

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  In the mid-twentieth century, a Hollywood firm tried to duplicate Missouri Bill’s feat of hauling a dismantled locomotive to the summit, using a smaller engine. The engine was moved up the mountain for a total distance of five hundred yards. The firm gave up the task as impossible.13

  AT the tunnels, especially Summit Tunnel, the Chinese were using great amounts of black powder, up to five hundred kegs a day. Despite the end of the Civil War, the price had gone steadily up, from $2.50 per keg to $15 a keg. This was a seller’s market, for real. As Stanford explained, the CP spent its money with the greatest of economy “except in the matter of speed, and then we never hesitated to make a sacrifice.”14

  Crocker and Strobridge decided to experiment with nitroglycerin, which was brand-new (and spelled as two words). Said to be an extraordinary explosive, it had been invented in Italy in 1847, then refined in the 1860s by demolitions engineer Alfred Nobel in Sweden. It was five times more powerful by bulk than black powder, and thirteen times more destructive. The Railroad Record in August 1866 said that “its storing and transport involve no danger.”

  Would that it were so. There were terrible accidents, ignored for the most part by the CP but nevertheless more than enough to force most companies to swear off it. The Dutch Flat Enquirer, a booster of the explosive—“the work of blasting has been greatly facilitated,” it reported that spring—said that in one explosion in New York City “nobody is to blame, it is perfectly safe and harmless and simply blew up from maltreatment and in self-defense.”15

  The CP found that, when they got to drilling holes of fifteen to eighteen inches into the granite, poured in the liquid nitroglycerin, capped the hole with a plug, and fired it with a percussion cap, the nitroglycerin did a far better job than powder. The work progressed at nearly double the speed, and the granite was broken into far smaller pieces. But the accidents proved too much. In one, after a number of charges had been set off simultaneously, a Chinese worker hit a charge of nitro that hadn’t exploded with his pick. It exploded and killed him and the others working near that spot.

  Strobridge declared, “Bury that stuff.” Crocker said to get it out of there. And even though Nobel perfected dynamite in 1866, it was never tested or used by the CP. In 1867, the CP ignored the dangers and did make and use its own nitroglycerin, but except at Summit Tunnel did not make a practice of it.16

  According to Henry Root, Strobridge spent most of his time that fall near or at the Summit Tunnel—No. 6, as it was called. He had assistants who traveled over the work and were known as “riding bosses.” Root said, “More powder was used by the rock foremen than was economical, but time was the essential of all operations, so there was a good reason.” Thus did the CP imbue even their modest assistants with the spirit of the enterprise—nail it down! “In the vicinity of Cisco,” Root wrote, “the rock was so hard that it seemed impossible to drill into it a sufficient depth for blasting purposes. Shot after shot would blow out as if fired from a cannon.”17 Clement told Stanford, “Perseverance alone conquered.”18

  The CP would not wait for the Summit Tunnel to be cut and tracks laid through it. The company would push on beyond the Sierra Nevada by outflanking the Donner Pass. Partly this was to keep the enormous workforce employed, but mainly it was to get into Nevada and head east before the UP could get to the Salt Lake and head west. The Big Four had not set up the race in order to lose it.

  The CP sent three exploring parties prodding through Nevada to look for routes for the railroad between the Big Bend of the Truckee River, some thirty miles east of today’s Reno, and the Salt Lake Valley, five hundred miles beyond. The leaders were survey engineers Butler Ives, William Epler, and S. M. Buck. The direct route, straight east, had a series of mountain ranges, including the Clan Alpine, the Desatoya, the Shoshone, the Towabe, the Toquima, the Monitor, the White Pine, the Shell Creek, and the Snake—all in Nevada—and the Needle, the Wah Wah, the Confusion, and others in Utah. Still, it had to be explored.

  East of Reno, according to one observer, “desolation began to assume its most repulsive form. Miles on miles of black, igneous rock and volcanic detritus. Outcrops of lava, interspersed with volcanic grit,” were the main features. Another traveler said that the country was “so destitute of vegetable and animal life, as not to rise to the rank even of a howling wilderness.” There was no water. The desert was filled with the bones of thousands of animals who had not made it to California.19 The second route, to the north of the Humboldt River, was just as bad.

  Samuel Bowles, who had just crossed the continent, declared that “the Humboldt route would be more easily built” than going across central Nevada. “It goes through a naturally better country as to wood, water, and fertility of soil. It is generally conceded to be the true natural roadway across the Continent. The emigration has always taken it.”20 He had it right. Even today the Humboldt is, as it was for Charlie Crocker and his group in 1850, a narrow but wonderful oasis. The grass is green and high, the ducks, geese, herons and eagles, the grazing horses and cattle, are numerous. So are the deer. The water is clear and plentiful until the river gets to the Sinks, where the grass grows in great meadows but the river sinks into the earth.

  Butler Ives led the exploration of the Humboldt Valley for the CP. When he got to the Humboldt Wells, where the river rises in northeastern Utah out of the East Humboldt Range at the northern edge of the Ruby Mountains, he tried two approaches to Salt Lake City. One angled southeastward across the Great American Desert and around the bottom of Salt Lake to the city. No good. Then he returned to the wells and set off in a northeasterly direction, across the top edge of the desert, across the Promontory Mountains, around the north shore of the Great Salt Lake, across Bear River, and then southward along the western base of the Wasatch Range to Weber Canyon. That was the way to go.21

  IN the meantime, Crocker was having shacks for laborers and warehouses for materials constructed along the Truckee River, twenty miles east and considerably below the Donner Summit. He would send gangs of workers there when the snows fell on the Sierra, to make grade and lay track while waiting for the Summit Tunnel to be completed. He began with a thousand men; another thousand soon followed. They started to make grade back toward Donner Pass.

  The editor of the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise was delighted to learn of Crocker’s plans. “What a joyful day it will be,” he declared, “when the shrill whistle of the locomotive shall be heard as the train of cars from across the mountains shall go rattling down the Truckee. And that day is not two years distant.”22 Freight trains from Sacramento were pulled up the Sierra in a steady procession. “A 116-foot grade, with a dozen heavily loaded freight cars, is no sardine,” said the Dutch Flat Enquirer, “but they manage to do it somehow.” At Colfax, later at Dutch Flat, eventually at Cisco, the cars were unloaded and the supplies put onto wagons, to go up and over the Sierra Nevada, then down to Nevada.23

  On November 5, the CP laid its track to Emigrant Gap, eight miles west of Cisco, twenty-one miles west of the summit, and five thousand feet above sea level. It was now only two thousand feet or so below the summit. It expected to reach Cisco in ten days.

  That November, the stage-line owner Ben Holladay arrived in Alta, after riding the train from New York to Fort Kearney, Nebraska, then proceeding in a special horse-drawn coach. He brought with him the chilling news that the UP was on the march. It was coming on. In October, it had laid sixty-five miles of track. The editor of the Sacramento Union was not impressed. “The building of one mile of road anywhere between Newcastle and Cisco involves more labor and expense than the construction of 20 miles on the level prairie,” he wrote.

  Two weeks later, Montague was able to send a telegram from Alta: “Track will be laid tonight within 4,500 feet of Cisco depot. Ties will be distributed tonight and track laid tomorrow. Can run passengers to Cisco Thursday [November 29]. Snow at Crystal Lake this morning 8 inches deep and 12 inches at Cisco. Temp. 28.”24

  The tunneling went on
, up and down the line. Lewis Clement declared, “No matter what the cost, the remaining tunnels would be bored in the Winter.”25

  On November 24, 1866, the first trains arrived at Cisco Station. They were loaded with ties, rails, chairs, fishplates, and measuring rods. It took three engines to pull the freight up the mountain. Strobridge had wagons and carts to meet the train, with hundreds of Chinese aboard. All night they loaded rails and the rest onto the wagons and carts. They also pulled two locomotives off the tracks and put them atop skid sleds. (These were logs split down the middle and rounded at the ends. They were greased with fat on the bottom to help them slide.)

  At dawn, the procession toward the summit began. Carts went first, followed by the wagon train. At the rear, hundreds of Chinese tugged at ropes alongside mule teams and horse teams to skid the locomotives over the summit. And then the snow came.

  The workers on the CP, from the bosses down, believed that there was more rain and snow in the winter of 1865-66 than had ever before been seen in California, This winter of 1866-67 was much worse. The snow came early and stayed late. There were forty-four separate storms. Some deposited ten feet of snow, some deposited more. At the summit the pack averaged eighteen feet on the level.* Strobridge put hundreds of the Chinese to work doing nothing but shoveling the snow away to keep open a cart trail to the tunnel opening. If it had not been for the race with the UP, the CP would have closed down that winter, but the fear of losing all Utah and Nevada to their rival drove them on.

  The Chinese laborers dug snow tunnels from fifty to five hundred feet long to get to the granite tunnels. Some were large enough for a team of horses to walk through. Alternatively, a temporary railbed was placed on top of the snow and material was lowered from the surface by steam hoist, sometimes as much as forty feet. The waste was hauled out the same way.26 Windows were dug out of the snow walls, to dump refuse and let in a bit of light. Also chimneys and air shafts. But for the most part the Chinese worked, ate, drank their tea, gambled, smoked opium, and slept in the remarkable labyrinth they were building under the snow.

  This was cruel work, dangerous and claustrophobic. Still, they pressed on, drilling the holes in the granite, placing the black powder and then the fuse, lighting the fuse, getting out of the way, then going back in to clear out the broken granite. At four facings. They made six to twelve inches a day, at each end and toward the two ends from the middle.27

  There were accidents of all kinds, mainly from blasting powder. Sometimes the heavy explosions started avalanches, and entire camps of workmen would be buried alive. Near the Summit Tunnel an avalanche carried away some twenty Chinese, whose bodies were found after the spring thaw. The CP eventually sent their bodies to their homeland for burial. How many died we don’t know. The historian Thomas W. Chinn has written that, without doubt, the “loss of life was heavy.”28 On Christmas Day, 1866, the Dutch Flat Enquirer reported that “a gang of Chinamen were covered up by a snow slide and four or five died before they could be exhumed. The snow fell to such a depth that one whole camp of Chinamen was covered up during the night and parties were digging them out when our informant left.”29

  J. O. Wilder, a young surveyor,* wrote, “There was one large snowslide at Camp 4, where there were two gangs of Chinese for Tunnels 11 and 12, also a gang of culvert men. The slide took it all, and one of the culvert men was not found until the following spring. At our camp the snow was so deep we had to shovel it from the roof and make steps to get to the top. We were snowed in, and our provisions got down to corn meal and tea. Had it lasted one week longer we would have been compelled to eat horse meat, for there were two hundred or more men in my camp…. The cuts were filled by landslides, which had to be removed by gangs of Chinese. A Push Plow loaded with pig-iron to hold it to the rails, with three engines behind, would back up and take a run at the snow and keep going until it got stuck, and then back up and take another run.”30

  The plow was a monster—ten feet wide, eleven feet high, and thirty feet long. It was square and sheer in the rear; in the front it looked like a big wooden wedge laid on its side, with iron plates reinforcing the forward edge that slanted down almost to the rails. Just back from the forward edge, a sharp iron prow rose like a ship breasting a wave. The idea was that the wedge should scoop up drifts like a spade and the prow would part them, tossing snow up onto both sides of the track. Sometimes it worked.

  AND still it rains,” reported the Sacramento Union in late December. “The roads become sloughs, through which stage horses stagger, or in which they break down altogether…. The rain washes and the swollen streams sap the high embankments over which the locomotive has ascended to the region of snow.”31

  The editor of the Union wrote that, “within five hours ride of Sacramento, where roses still bloom and the air is balmy, snow has fallen to a depth of three feet on a level, and the sleigh-bells are making music along white highways…. The locomotive makes this concentration of the seasons—this transition from Spring flowers to Wintry delights—on the same day…. Each puffing engine is armed with a snow plow. And this suggests the beginning of that battle of the railroad men with the white storms of the Sierra.”32 The next day Cisco reported the worst storm in ten years. Strobridge’s prediction was that the railroad, now shut off, would be back in operation in ten days.

  On December 22, Charlie Crocker’s brother E.B. wrote Huntington about the “terrible storm that has given our RR a severe trial We do not know the exact extent of the damage as Charlie and Montague are up on the road and have not reported. Those deep cuts and fills are sliding in and settling.” He could not get particulars, because the telegraph above Colfax had been down for nearly a week. Still, “on the whole it has not been as bad as we expected for we had great fears about a good many of the banks and cuts standing a heavy storm.” The snow, E.B. said, “is the least of our troubles and we no longer fear it. Since the storm I have greater confidence than ever in successfully working our road in the winter.”33

  ON the last day of the year, the CP was able to announce that it was “in daily operation from Sacramento to Cisco.” That was ninety-two miles, within twelve miles of the summit and 5,911 feet above sea level—the highest altitude yet reached by a railroad in the United States, or anywhere else. Some ten thousand men had been engaged in construction on the track. Much of the masonry and heavy rock excavation had been done beyond Cisco. Twelve tunnels were being constructed, night and day, by three shifts of men, a total of eight thousand, mostly Chinese, at work. Except for the Summit Tunnel, they would be completed by the spring of 1867—and the Summit Tunnel by September.

  A large force of laborers was at work in the Truckee Canyon. The graders were almost three hundred miles beyond the end of track. Grain for the horses and food for the men, plus supplies, had to be hauled by teams pulling wagons over the desert for that great distance. Water for men and animals was hauled forty miles. A. P. Partridge, a white man working for the CP, recalled that the snows came early that year and drove as many as three thousand Chinese out of the mountains and down to Truckee, “where they filled up all the buildings and sheds. An old barn collapsed and killed four Chinese. A good many were frozen to death.”34

  Still, the CP expected that by the end of 1867 the end of track would be beyond the California-Nevada border, and that it would be building at a mile per day once it got into Nevada. The railroad was well into its assault on the Sierra Nevada and on its way east.35

  * More snow falls there than anyplace in the United States south of Alaska.

  * He worked for the CP-Southern Pacific railroads for fifty-four years, finally retiring in 1920.

  Chapter Ten

  THE UNION PACIFIC TO THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS 1867

  WEATHER dominates everything. No matter if it is D-Day at Normandy, or the launching of a rocket into space, or an outdoor wedding, or the building of a transcontinental railroad, everything depends on the weather. The winter of 1866-67 was terribly severe in California, so, even though t
here were tunnels to dig, which the Central Pacific could pretty much do whatever the conditions outside, the weather stopped the forward progress of the railroad.

  The winter from the Sierra Nevada all the way to the Atlantic was one of the worst in the whole of the nineteenth century. In the Rocky Mountains, it was severe beyond any living memory. In western Nebraska, there were “fantastic drifts” and the temperature dropped to forty degrees below zero. In New York City, the East River froze solid. In Chicago, the firemen had to give up, because the water froze in their hose lines. In Omaha, the Missouri River froze over. The weather stopped the Union Pacific in its tracks.

  The Casement brothers wanted to go to work in February, but that month and nearly all of March were far too cold with too much snow, so they sat and waited at North Platte. The Missouri was still frozen as late as March 25. Samuel Reed wrote home on March 27 that he had just received a telegram from Grand Island: “We are out of luck in this country, wind blowing and snow drifting worse than ever, half men either blind or frozen, looks bad.” Reed wrote further, “There is an immense quantity of snow on the plains and in the mountains. I expect very high water and we may lose some bridges.”1

  Reed’s telegrams to Durant are a nearly constant weather report. February 22: “Heaviest storm of the season. Road blocked.” March 21: “Severe snow storm strong wind road blocked badly.” March 23: “Six inches snow since last evening with strong north west wind road badly blocked still snowing.”